Live from DC…it’s the Twin Tech party.

So last night was perhaps one of the greatest tech mashups of the year.

Organized by iStrategyLabs CEO, Peter Corbett and sponsored by perhaps some of the DC Metropolitan area’s best technology partners like ClearSpring, SocialTimes.com, JobMatchbox.com, Tech Cocktail, AwayFind, Livingston Communications, the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), and many others, the local tech community came together to network and simply socialize. Known as the Twin Tech Party, the party got started at Local 16 in the nation’s capital from 6pm until whenever and the main event of the night was that the Twin Tech Party became part of author Sarah Lacy’s User-Generated Book Tour to celebrate her latest book, “Once you’re lucky. Twice you’re good“.

For any marketer who doubts that they should be attending these events, I would highly encourage you to find out where your local tech community is gathering periodically and just pay them a visit. The best way to stay ahead of the game when you want to involve the Internet and any web applications into your marketing strategy is to talk to the experts. These are the guys (and girls) on the front lines of web development and will be creating the solutions that you’ll apply to help drive traffic and money to your business.

In fact, these are your best places to find more information on the latest products and releases to help you stay ahead of the curve and show your marketing prowess to your higher-ups. At last night’s Twin Tech party, demos were given by startups, networking opportunities were abundant with friends, strangers, and everyone in-between. New technology were apparent like NYC-startup Klickable.TV featuring a YouTube-style platform but with embedded hotspots to make your interactive video MUCH more…well…interactive! But if you’re more into figuring out how to create your own widgets, then why not talk to the folks at Mesa Dynamics who have developed a great concept on how to promote the viriality of widgets to the Internet using an iTunes-type model and will help you convert your creation to either a web-version or desktop-friendly widget. And best of all, Mesa Dynamics works with great widget distributors like ClearSpring and “do-it-yourself” widget creator, Sprout (or at least they hope to soon).

But let’s get social…and there was plenty of that around Local 16. The social media platform has proliferated over the past few years and you can share a lot of information across the World Wide Web, so why not your singing talents? Red Karaoke is focused on creating perhaps the first interactive karaoke social platform for people who think that their singing bests anything that is seen on American Idol, but it’s an interesting twist for music lovers. Or if you think that you want to create a custom Facebook-like platform or even a niche social site without hiring a developer to come in-house, then look no further to SocialSpring. This company can create social applications for friends, groups, messages, marketplace, job boards, extensibility, photos, wikis, microformats, and much more.

I know I’m mentioning just some of the good companies that were at Twin Tech (as there were many more). I’ll be blogging about them much later on and give it a thorough review once I happen to give it a test run (*hint hint*). However, like I said earlier, the highlight of last night’s soiree was Sarah Lacy. If you don’t know her, she’s the wonderful author of a great web 2.0 primer book called “Once you’re lucky, twice you’re good” and I’ve reviewed her book here. She’s a really great person and very knowledgeable. It was definitely a great opportunity and I’m glad I didn’t pass this up.

But overall, I must say that the Twin Tech party went off phenomenally and Peter Corbett did a great job. For some photos of the event, you can check it out on my Flickr page. Comments welcome.

Updates (7/20/2008): If you want a list of other blog posts and other photos talking about Twin Tech, be sure to go here:

• iStrategyLabs.com – Twin Tech Recap and Future Events
  
• Technosailor.com – Comments About Sarah Lacy, SXSW and the “Apology of the Centuryâ€�
• Jessie X – Two Tech
• East Coast Blogging – Event Recap: DC Twin Tech
• The Washington Post – The Twin Tech Towns Come Together
• TechBisNow – Two-Tech Rumble!