http://www.meetup.com/Dallas-Startup-Happy-Hour/events/46716632/

It’s time to get the happy hour rolling again! We’re happy to announce that our guest speaker will be Preetish Nijhawan, Managing Director of Cervin Ventures, an early stage VC firm focused on B2B companies.

Preetish co-founded Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) in 1998Most recently, Preetish was CFO for Neon Enterprise Software. Before that, Preetish was VP of Strategic Alliances at NeoEdge Networks, a video game advertising company. Preetish was also VP, Portfolio and Program Management for BMC Software. Prior to BMC, he was VP, Operations of iVita Corporation, an asset management software startup he helped found.

Preetish has advised senior executives in hardware, software and telecom industries for McKinsey and Company. He also worked for nearly six years in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) division at Intel in various engineering and program management roles. Preetish earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from The University of Southern California, and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

I have always appreciated the Marine Toys for Tots program each year. This afternoon I was wondering how we (i.e. ShopSavvy) might be able to leverage our platform to help collect toys in October, November and December and distribute them as Christmas gifts to needy children around the country. I had an idea.

What if anytime one of our users scanned a toy we suggested they buy a second one using ShopSavvy – one that would be shipped to their local Marine Corps Reserve Unit for distribution through the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation. I know from personal experience I have bought toys for the program, but never actually delivered them to a drop off location. Toys for Tots Foundation, hat do you think?

We could even partner with someone like Walmart who might agree to match toy donations made by ShopSavvy users by sending a SECOND toy. Walmart, what do you think?

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this idea. If you have contacts with anyone at the Marine Corps, Toys for Tots or Walmart that might be able to help please pass along this post (or send me their contact info).

Regards,
Alexander Muse, CEO ShopSavvy Inc.
8350 N Central Expressway Suite 250
Dallas, TX 75206
214.550.2003
amuse@shopsavvy.mobi

• Hurricane Party – a location-based social networking application that helps users create, manage and discover events that are relevant to them.
• RecycleMatch – an online market for waste and recyclables that helps companies make waste a resource.
• Smackages – a makeup counter in your web browser.
• Ripplefunction – a social media tool to track, manage and promote events online.
• Keepstream  – a social media curation tool for saving and repurposing the best content from Twitter, Facebook, and sites across the web.

DFW is full of some of the most innovative and creative individuals and the most amazing ideas.  Come celebrate those people and ideas as we hear from those who are making DFW more vibrant and creative for all of us.

The idea is simple, 5-6 leaders and leading entrepreneurs from one of the most vibrant communities in the nation will come together and share from their hearts- not about their individual accomplishments- but about topics that speak to all of us.  They’ll each have 5 minutes to talk and you’ll have a lifetime of connections to make. Connect with your friends- new and old- and enjoy a great atmosphere with DJ Jason Esquire and great drinks at one of the coolest venues in DFW.

Still not enough?  Ok, how about this- join us and be entered in a drawing to win a brand new iPad.  Yeah, we thought that would get your attention.  To top it off, all of the proceeds from Un-Plugged will go to benefit charities right here in DFW!

Featuring:

Gabriella Draney- Tech Wildcatters (@techwildcatters)

Mike Merrill- Social Media Club of Dallas (@smcdallas)

John Pozadzides- OpenCamp DFW (@ocdfw)

Brian Sullivan- DFW UPA (@dfwupa)

Chris Walters- Ignite Dallas (@IgniteDallas)

Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the door.

Sessions include: Silverlight, HTML 5, MVVM, TDD, MonoTouch for iPhone, ASP.NET, TypeMock, Clojure, Java, Zend Framework, PHP, API, MySQL, Flex, Degrafa, AIR and Sqlite.

Speakers include: Amir Rajan, run Gupta, Caleb Jenkins, Brian Blood, Casey Watson, Chander Dhall, Chris Cornutt, Chris Patterson, Craig Walls, Devlin Liles, Jeremy Brown, Jim Armstrong, Kenny Yates, Kevin Schroeder, Kyle Kelin, Matt Hinze, Paul Holser, Seth Bienek, Ted Neward, Todd Anglin and Tommy Falgout.

Or at least that is what the folks atSevenLayer think. SevenLayer is latest company to be incubated inArchitel Labs. Headed by Jeff Rothell, the company delivers cloud based voice applications to small and medium sized companies. Prior to co-founding Sevenlayer, Jeff built two multi-million dollar telecommunication companies. From 1999 to 2002 he served as President and CEO of Netvoice Technologies, a publicly traded (NTVT) telecommunications business operating hosted VoIP services in 52 major U.S. markets. Then in 2003 he co-founded CentricVoice, a venture-backed telecommunications company offering trunk replacement to small and medium sized businesses. Most recently Jeff served as COO of Unified360, one of the largest Cisco-powered voice vendors in the Southwest.

In the United States there are thousands of phone vendors selling hardware-based phone systems to small and medium-sized companies. Despite the advent of hosted voice options, the number of phone systems sold in the U.S. continues to increase. Business owners throughout the U.S. seem to want to own the hardware powering their phones. On the other hand they want ALL of the features that hosted solutions can offer at affordable prices. SevenLayer’s offering is designed to create a recurring revenue model for phone vendors, while offering business owners the features they demand without competing with their primary offering – selling phone systems.

Last month, SevenLayer launched what they call their Intelligent Voice Cloud, powered by their AVAS platform, and began offering live features including:

• Recording – a key application for call centers, financial services, healthcare and real estate. Formerly an expensive feature to acquire much less manage, can be offered as an add on service delivered from the cloud with no heavy upfront costs to implement, while making tracking, management and storage of recordings easy and secure.
• Conferencing – moving conferencing to the cloud may seem excessive, but in doing so an enterprise can leverage the power of our IVC conference scheduler allowing easy access to your address book. Imagine being able to schedule a meeting at a specific time and instead of having to remember to dial in, the IVC will dial each party at the appropriate time.
• Business Continuity – the greatest weakness of premises based features is the premises itself. In the event of a service disruption the cloud-based IVC can guarantee 100% uptime on inbound calls by automatically re-routing calls to alternative landlines or mobile numbers.

In the coming months SevenLayer will release a full suite of features and applications accessible to any small business through the click of a mouse.

First, we decided change the venue. The High Tech Bar has been a good home for the event, but the parking situation really annoying. The new location will be at Architel’s new facility in the North Tower of Campbell Centre (the gold building on the corner of I75 and Northwest Highway where JR Ewing used to work).

Next, we decided to change the date. The first Monday made a lot of sense when we first began (the first happy hour just happened to be on a Monday), but we eventually remembered that it fell on the same night as Monday Night Football (this is Texas BTW). The new date will be the fifth Wednesday of the month. The inaugural event will be held October 27th, 2010 (subsequent events on Nov 24, Dec 22, Jan 26, Feb 23).

Third, we decided to change the format. Cocktails and more cocktails seemed like a great idea two years ago – easy to organize and easy to host – but I think we can do better. Starting in October we will begin the event at 5PM with cocktails and light hors d’oeuvres, then at 6PM we will have a speaker/program for 30-45 minutes and then have more cocktails and networking until around 8PM. Each quarter we hope to attract a ‘significant’ speaker, but don’t worry each month we will have really interesting speakers.

Finally, we decided to change from Upcoming.org to Meetup.com to manage RSVPs, pictures and discussion about the group. Just visit: http://www.meetup.com/Dallas-Startup-Happy-Hour/ and join the group and the conversation (i.e. you need to start the conversation).

We will be announcing the first speaker in the coming weeks. But you are going to want to save the date anyway.