WebInno is settling into a format. Installment 6, May 9 at (again) Hotel@MIT, began with two formal demos of new products (ProxPro and Plum), and then gave over the rest of the evening to back-table (and laptop) demos of other things and random mutual interrogation.

Here is organizer David Beisel welcoming everybody and not quite heeding his own warning that Brian Del Vecchio would be wandering around taking people's pictures when they aren't expecting it.

Julian Bourne, up first, made the culturally dubious decision to show up in a suit to present the retro-80s-named ProxPro, which appears to be some sort of opt-in surveillance network to allow less-important people than you to accost you in far-flung cities demanding to meet for "coffee". It features creepy-or-cool location tracking based on cell-towers, a huge database of detailed personal information they will sell to strangers (this is a feature to them, not a problem), an interface that at least seemed to be cogently designed to be used on a cell-phone web browser, and as near as I could tell, no practical application even 5% as compelling as database-dispatched prostitution.

Margaret Olson of Plum has teased their collecting-things application at previous geek events, but this was the first full demo of it I'd seen. It lets you collect photos, web pages and random insights, and categorize and view them various different ways. Some kind of server process looks for other people's collections that resemble yours and auto-recommends them to you. Plum is another system that wants you to live in it, though, and that was always going to be a pretty hard sell, even before (two days later) Google announced Google Notebook, which sounds at least superficially like it's going to do, er, exactly the same thing except with $145 trillion extra behind it.

Let's hope they didn't print up too many of these shirts.

Plum is private, though, so Mike Katserman probably wasn't selling his stock over in the corner.

In the back of the room, Erik Fantasia was demoing Calorie Count, which I swear I am not making up, although despite having seen it firsthand I am now unable to tell which of the innumerable similarly-named things on the web it actually is. On the one hand, if nobody volunteered to show up and demo things, the rest of us would have nothing to pick on. On the other hand, the "Inno" is not supposed to stand for "Ignorable".

You take your pick, though. An earnest weight-loss site that frankly doesn't need to be innovative to be effective, or Matt McNeely's FindFreeTime, a Flash-based web application for letting you make plans with your friends without having to deal with the unpleasantness of actually talking to them? This is totally on the order of my satirical business idea to do a service for reconciling your dinner guests' food allergies, except I had the sense to a) not build it, and b) not-build it without using Flash.

The night's brilliant guerilla takeover, however, was staged by Tabblo, who showed up in gang colors to pre-announce the imminent public debut of this very service here that you are looking at right at this moment.

The almost painfully charming taller guy is founder Antonio Rodriguez, and that's Ned Batchelder with the beard, who sat in the third row demoing the thing until his battery finally ran out.

Anyone who left early missed Boston PHP Users' Group head Mark Withington's nuanced karaoke rendition of Andy Gibb's classic "Shadow Dancing".

After the Tabblo team-striptease ran out of shirts, at least, the evening's top collectibles were Josh DiMauro's index-card-fetishist business-card-substitute packs.

Here Alexis attempts to welcome a foreign maybe-moving-here entrepeneur by demonstrating his familiarity with British hand-gestures. Luckily someone had previously thought to welcome Robert with a beer.

Below Bill Ross excitedly but inexplicably asks Andy Singleton whether those are "THE" pants.

Your mean-spirited correspondent's wardrobe by Threadless, Mavi and Fluevog. Unconvincing facial hair rather obviously self-administered.

Any opinions here are, at most, personal, and more likely were made up at random just to see if anybody is reading this. All photographs (and name spellings) by Brian Del Vecchio, reused here with his explicit permission.

He'll think twice next time.