Sun's McNealy at STIRR Event

Last week's STIRR event drew in Sun's Scott McNealy. Like always, they had four participating start-ups who did one minute pitches and had small tables where they demoed their latest and greatest throughout the evening. Wednesday's line-up included Attendio and Confabb, who I both saw and talked to at DEMO 07, as well as Collaborative Drug Discovery and JobCoin, which while looked interesting, is entering a very crowded market.

Scott was pitching their Sun's new Start-up Essentials Program, which aims to make it easier for developers and start-ups to create Web applications. He enthusiastically touted their support for Open Source 'stuff,' and dramatic discounts, particularly for storage products, which are now up to as high as 70%. He emphasized -- over and over again -- FREE open source infrastructure software, such as Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, postgres, Tomcat, etc.

The turnout as always was high and the mix, an interesting blend of start-up entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, bloggers and those who move in a few circles like Rafe Needleman and Jeff Clavier, who both seem to make it to nearly every industry event, regardless of whether it is in the South Bay or the city. Kudos to Sean Ness, Sanford Barr and the STIRR team for throwing another successful event.