Tonight, I had the chance to hang out with a small group of entrepreneurs here in Atlanta. It was Sanjay Parekh’s Startup Dinner. The idea is to get 8 or people together (no recruiters, no service providers) and hang out over dinner. I believe this started last year by Sanjay and Coty Rosenblath. I attended one of the earlier forms of this awhile back and it was invaluable.

Tonight I got to hang out with a few different people - probably half I already knew and the other half I met tonight. And it was a good mix of crowd.

I think Sanjay is running at least one of these a month - and it’s invite only. You gotta be a cool kid to get on the long list (or so I hear as the rumor) and Sanjay has a rigourous screening program and sophisticated background checking algorithm (most borrowed from code he used when he first built digital envoy) — ok, i’m kidding (sort of) — but if you’d like me to pass along your name to get on the list, drop me a line.

What I like about Sanjay is that he’s not your prototypical local entrepreneur. He’s actually one of those guys that gets it into his head he can help the local community - and he does it. Part of it is he’s between gigs right now and that helps. But, seriously, he’s doing something to give back, to help the local startup scene and putting his own time, money and energy making things happen.

If you don’t know some of his recent endeavors, let me illuminate them for you:

- Startup Riot - Startup Riot is the idea of getting a bunch of entrepreneurs together to do quick pitches to different investors. He’s already got like 80 startups signed up and a gaggle of money guys ready to come. If you haven’t signed up yet, well, you may be out of luck. Go ahead and throw your name in and see if you can get on the list - at least as a standby.

- Atlanta Startup Drinks - OK, this sounds like a lot of fun. I haven’t had a chance to do this yet. Anytime you mix drinking with passionate people trying to do insanely crazy ideas, well, you never know what will happen.

- Open Coffee Atlanta - Coke is my vice so I’m not really into $5 bean juice these days… but if hanging out with people to shoot the crap and share wars stories is your thing, then this is your event. I’m hoping to make one of these once i get off the road soon.

Also, if you’re into shooting high powered pistols and you’re a geek, you might want to check out Geeks with Guns this Saturday at 9am. Michael Mealling is hosting it - tweet him for details. My son has a 9:30 am soccer game so I can’t make it. I’m looking forward to doing Geeks with Skeets next.

A lot of people are asking me about what’s going on with all the travel to Palo Alto and Boston. Well, as you’d expect, we’re entertaining a few different investors as you’d expect and that’s about all I can really say for now. More to come on that very soon hopefully. I appreciate everyone’s interest and I promise that as I can talk more, you’ll be the first to find out. For now, we’re staying completely heads down and focused on building Appcelerator, continuing to grow our fast-growing community and taking care of our awesome customers. Thanks for everyone’s nice comments and offers to help.

The Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) is announcing that on May 15th they’re going to be holding their annual Entrepreneurs Showcase down near Tech Square in Atlanta, GA. I usually attend this event as my previous company was the 100th graduate of ATDC a few years back and I can say that this is a fun time to congratulate the graduating companies and see the incoming companies.

This year’s theme is going to be “Seeds for Success” after the launch of the PeachSeedz blog. I know I had pressed for a while to get them blogging - although I’m sure I was one of many people asking for it. Lance Weatherby has really taking a leadership role down at ATDC and I’m glad to see things continuing to move forward there.

ATDC is saying that the event is expected to attract around 500 entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders from across the Southeast. If I remember, last year was about 1/2 that or so - or at least that small conference room where the main presentation was couldn’t have held 500. This year’s event will be at the Biltmore Hotel, presumably because of the increased size of the event. Way to go guys!

This year, six companies are graduating from ATDC:

• Vendormate, a provider of business-credentialing and compliance-monitoring solutions that help companies better manage the composition and risk of their supplier-base;

• Emcien, a demand-driven product management solution that determines an optimized product mix by recommending the fastest-moving, highest margin product configurations based on customer buying patterns;

• LCGI, a developer of Web applications that allow data collection via the Web, telephony and mobile devices;

• Neurotic Media, the leading media distribution platform and retail store solution for online and mobile content downloads through private-labeled stores;

• Oversight, a business that detects corporate fraud, misuse and errors through continuous monitoring of financial transactions; and

• Terratial Technologies, a company focused on actualizing the potential of the mobile phone experience.

I’m familiar with almost all of these companies - and I particularly think Vendormate has an interesting model. We gave Andy some temporary space at 730 Midtown over at Vocalocity for a bit while he was just getting the company off the ground.

Here’s a cool quote from Andy about ATDC:

“Being part of the ATDC has been an invaluable experience for me and our company,” said Andy Monin, CEO of Vendormate. “Any entrepreneur looking for an advantage in launching their technology startup should take a long look at what ATDC has to offer.”

In addition to ATDC, Georgia Tech also runs VentureLab which helps form startup companies from Georgia Tech intellectual property. VentureLab is run by Stephen Fleming, who is totally awesome and a great person to have on your side.

The following companies will be also graduating from Venture Labs:

• Pramana, which is developing an easy-to-deploy solution to help secure the Internet for meaningful human scale interactions;

• Qualtré, a developer of the next generation of high-performance, low-cost motion sensing technology, primarily for the consumer electronics market;

• Suniva, a company dedicated to the development, manufacture and marketing of high-value, high-efficiency silicon photovoltaic cells for clean, earth-friendly power generation;

• Verco Materials, which creates and manufactures dense, complex-shaped boron carbide for armor and wear applications; and

• Zenda Technologies, a company that delivers a novel, portable, immersive platform for rapid neuropsychological testing, allowing accurate diagnosis of concussion and early Alzheimer’s disease.

Three of them – Pramana, Qualtré and Suniva – have already been accepted as member companies of the ATDC.

It looks like registration for the event is live and the event is free.

Today, at MySQL World 2008 in Santa Clara we’re excited about an announcement between XAware, Inc. and Appcelerator and the XAware Ecosystem.

XAware has been an exciting company to work with and they are really pushing leading in the SOA integration space and are creating a compelling SOA ecosystem of best of breed technology partners and platforms.

According to Marten Mickos, previous CEO of MYSQL and new Senior VP at Sun, said:

“It’s encouraging to see innovative organizations working together to expand the open source SOA ecosystem,” said Marten Mickos, senior vice president, Database Group, Sun Microsystems. “Companies such as XAware, Appcelerator and Active Endpoints provide open source solutions that address a range of business issues, and we urge conference attendees to check out their offerings.”

So what does this all mean?

This means that you can now use the Appcelerator rich Internet Application (RIA) platform together with XAware’s open source SOA solution to give your SOA infrastructure a face. You can now leverage all the existing enterprise data to build rich, powerful and dynamic web applications and seamlessly make them work together using standards, tools and skill sets you’ve already invested in in the enterprise.

Last Friday we announced support for Appcelerator RIA + Google AppEngine. This means you can build rich Internet applications using Appcelerator and then deploy them into the google cloud using Google’s AppEngine - which was released last Monday.

Appcelerator already has native support for building rich apps using a Python backend - we were quickly able to add support for appengine by leveraging this backend codebase. We made a number of changes to the product to make it seamless to interact with appengine, like leveraging the appcelerator CLI to support deployment.

To use it, you’ll need to first download the following pre-requisites: Python 2.5, the App Engine SDK, and the Appcelerator SDK.

Here’s a short screencast with instructions:

Once you have everything installed and ready, it’s easy to create a new appengine project:

app create:project ~/tmp my_app_name appengine

Make sure that my_app_name matches the application identifier in your appengine dashboard.

This should create a project with everything you need to develop appcelerator apps using appengine. Open up your index.html, make some changes and then test the deployment into the cloud:

app deploy:project

This will deploy into the cloud and you should be able to navigate to your appengine URL to test it out.

You can also run locally:

app run:project

This will run your project locally for development and testing. Navigate to http://localhost:8080 to test it out after starting it up.

You should also check out a really cool demo that Tejus built. It’s called AppTunes. It’s a RIA application that sort of mimics Apple’s iTunes running in full-screen. It has a cool coverflow of album art and you can listen to streaming audio for each track in your browser. This app was built using the new appcelerator + appengine integration and is running in the cloud.

What’s cool about this application is that is shows how you can use Flash-based Flex components inside an Appcelerator based application. I believe this gives the best of both worlds: a standards-based, HTML/Ajax application that can leverage the power of the Flash capabilities.

And now, a message from our sponsors:

In the spirit of open source and shared learning, we’d like to acknowledge a few key pieces that we put together to make this demo application that Tejus built happen:

• Doug McCune for his super bad ass CoverFlow Flex Component. We’ve used the Appcelerator Widget API to widgetize this flex widget and allow it to be both declaratively added to markup and the power of Appcelerator’s Web Expression Language to add remoting capabilities for data binding. This also shows off the power of using Appcelerator + Adobe’s Flex bridge to get the best of both worlds.
• JS Sound Kit for the streaming audio for playing the MP3s. Again, we built this as a reusable widget.
• Jamendo and the independent artists for the awesome, DRM-free music and cool looking coverart.