I was just perusing my local paper The Press Democrat and I came across an article covering a startup/venture capital meetup that took place April 29-30 in Santa Rosa, CA at the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country Hotel.

The event went by the highly descriptive title “2008 Venture Vineyard Early Stage Conference and Santa Rosa Innovation Investment Forum”.

Wow. That is a mouthful.

It was put together by the City of Santa Rosa, the SR Chamber of Commerce and the Golden Capital Network. Golden Capital has a nice overview of the event here.

I was a bit surprised to find an event like this taking place in Sonoma County Wine Country. I wish I had heard about the event because I would have definitely have tried to get in.

This Press Democrat article excerpt mentions some of the entrepreneurs who showed up at the meetup:

The startups ranged from Web 2.0 businesses to telecom equipment vendors. RotoFactory, a two-year-old Santa Rosa business that does special effects for Hollywood studios, needs $1.5 million to expand, said founder Eric Christensen.

VIDA Products, a Santa Rosa business that makes computer chips for test instruments, sensor applications and communications, was looking for $1 million.

GroceryPower is a Santa Rosa-based Internet search business that helps grocery buyers do comparison shopping. The startup is seeking $2 million to help commercialize the concept, said CEO Andrew Griffiths.

Evolve Game Studios of Rohnert Park is trying to enter the lucrative market for PC games, said CEO James Parker. It was looking for $750,000 from investors.

One of the startups the article mentions WineMap has some cool homegrown technology and a very appropriate Sonoma County name.

What do they do?

They are mashing together wine country data, local mapping technology and Google mapping into an interesting mix.

They are trying to create a site that provides wine tourists with all the information they need for an enjoyable wine country experience including mapped wineries, directories, reviews, detailed winery info, restaurants and upcoming winery events.

And, they are also equipping wine growers with interactive online maps with useful wine data overlays and tools for finding new places in your area for vineyards or finding new spots on your property for special blocks of grapes.

I really hope that we see more events like this in Sonoma County as I’d love to see a strong, vibrant startup community develop here.

If you know about any upcoming venture capital/startup meetups in Sonoma County, please give me a holler.

About a month ago, Max Ventilla the CEO over at The Mechanical Zoo sent me an email wondering if I’d be interested in a position at their stealth startup. He gave me a brief description of what they were working on and told me about all the cool people on their team.

What are they working on? Social search technology that will help you use the power of your networks to search (Think networks like Facebook, email etc).

I was salivating. It sounded so awesome. I’m pretty sure that social search is going to be one of the next big things to hit the Internet and The Mechanical Zoo has assembled an impressive team to take a stab at being a first-mover.

They have lot’s of ex-Googlers, Yahoos etc on their current 12-man team. Search Engine Land reports that they are looking for hires in the following areas:

The 12-man team is looking for a few good people. So what skills would you need? AJAXy web development; rapid prototyping and development with rails; new paradigms of data availability and access (OpenSocial); distributed systems and large datasets; statistics; algorithms; NLP and machine learning; recommendation systems; usability research; online community building; and data-driven marketing.

Sound interesting? Then drop them a line or check out their jobs page.

I felt that it would be OK to write this post since it looks like The Mechanical Zoo has leaked what they are working on to the Techmeme crowd. You can read plenty more over on Techmeme or CNET.