Since moving to Santa Cruz, I’ve attended two meetups for Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup, which is the 8th largest meetup in the United States. The events are held on the first Wednesday of each month and feature pitches from some of the local tech entrepreneurs in the city. While Santa Cruz isn’t technically Silicon Valley (it is on the other side of the hill), it is considered a part of the San Francisco Bay Area and is host to some talented entrepreneurs. However, there aren’t (m)any startups in Santa Cruz looking into the SDN or Cloud space. In this post, I outline the companies that presented to the audience of over 200 people at the November 2014 Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup .

Eggcyte has a small handheld product called The Egg, which is basically a webserver that stores media that can then be shared selectively. It is intended to provide a level of privacy that social media outlets can’t offer, because the cloud is essentially the Egg. With 128 GB storage and 10-12 hours of battery life, the founders are intending to provide a more tangible ownership experience of media. It has a long way to go though, and needs to better address security (screen scraping, encryption, etc) in order to gain traction.

Moxtra has its roots in WebEx. One of the co-founders was the founder and CEO of WebEx before it was acquired by Cisco. Moxtra is a cloud collaboration platform that encompasses multimedia, such as text, voice and multimedia chat capabilities, visual and verbal content annotations, mobile screen sharing, and task management.

Tuul is currently arguably the hottest startup in Santa Cruz and is focused on improving the customer experience. In their words, Enhanced by our patent-pending tuulBots, Tuul’s customer support automation solution provides a platform for businesses to interact with their customers in a more direct, simple, and efficient way. tuulView dashboards enable business to handle multiple requests simul­taneously, with little integration required.

City Blooms has taken a plunge in to the Internet of Things, or as they call it, Internet of Farms. As they say, Cityblooms creates modular micro-farms that grow fresh and healthy food on rooftops, parking lots, patios, parks, and everywhere in between. They have a prototype installed on the Plantronics (another Santa Cruz company). This was a very impressive solution that I hope succeeds.

Finally, PredPol (short for Predictive Policing for law enforcement) uses analytics based on historical data to help reduce crime. It reminds you of The Minority Report, except it is less intrusive (thankfully). According to them, Law enforcement agencies deploying PredPol are experiencing marked drops in crime due to increased police presence in areas deemed to be at greatest risk.