On Monday night I breezed into the Mars Bar in San Francisco to attend the Very Crunchy Chi.mp Happy Hour.  The Crunchy part of the name was in reference to the TechCrunch50 conference that was going on down the street.

TechCrunch50 is a conference where 50 up and coming startups can present their business ideas to an audience of VC’s and angel investors and have the opportunity to win $50,000 in funding.  Mark Cuban was one of the featured speakers and Ashton Kutcher was one of the featured startups presenting!

Okay, back to the chi.mps.

The Mars Bar was unimpressive on the outside, but much nicer inside.  The bartenders were great and the atmosphere was friendly and low key.

The chi.mp folks were distinguishable by their chi.mp logo t-shirts and were sitting in a booth.  There was no one at the door to check me in – even though I had registered – or to welcome me.  I went to the bar and ordered a glass of wine and met David Shantz, CEO and Creative Director with Graphita Live Studio, www.graphita.com.  We chatted for a bit and were both there for the happy hour.

I went over to meet the chi.mp people and talked with Anthony Eden.  I found out that chi.mp is based in Hawaii, along with I Can Haz Cheezburger.  Anthony did have the list and gave me a chi.mp t-shirt of my very own and two drink tickets.  He pointed out Tony Haile, the CSO at chi.mp and I went and met Tony and chatted for a few minutes.  Really nice guys!

Chi.mp http://chi.mp.com is still in alpha testing mode currently.  Chi.mp is a simple way to manage your online life, on a domain of your very own.  Chi.mp gives you your own site where you can keep track of your facebook, twitter, flickr, yahoo, and hotmail all on one page.  Sounds good to me!

Later I met Ben Metcalf with Seesmic.com and also his own site, http://swordfi.sh.com.  I told Ben I would see him on Wednesday night at the Seesmic party!

I talked with Robert Balousek, a software engineer at www.digg.com.  Robert also has developed a site for new twitter users called Twintro, www.twintro.org.  Twintro makes it easy for brand new twitter users to find friends and jump in and enjoy it.

I met some really nice people and enjoyed it, but kept it an early night – I did have to get up at 6 AM the next morning for work!

You can click on any of the pics above to enlarge or see my flickr photostream, which includes more pics from the event at:

http://flickr.com/photos/lauralovesart/sets/72157607299802715/