Ready? Begin.

Big fun last week at the Start conference. About 400 aspiring entrepreneurs filled the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco to hear from successful startup vets, service providers, and private investors.

Structured as a series of conversations moderated by Bryan Mason and Jeffrey Veen, the discussions included war stories, practical advice, some comedic horseplay, in an interactive web 2.0 environment.

This last element was the least successful, and the part that I most wanted to see in practice. As it happens, when you put hundreds of laptops in a small room with insufficient WiFi coverage and next to no power outlets, the utopian vision of open source brainstorming quickly becomes clouded. But the idea was cool, even if the execution was less than ideal. I'm sure next year they'll do a better job of that.

Still, some folks did manage to get their questions and comments through to the online moderator, George Oates using Twitter (I gave up on the laptop after lunch and followed the virtual deliberation on my cell phone) and Meebo.

We've been putting on events for entrepreneurs, angel investors, and venture partners for going on a decade, so I was especially curious to see this program. In part because I didn't know anything about it until about four days before it happened. I hadn't seen any conventional marketing; no email blasts, no broadsides, no partner communications, etc. I learned about it through a tweet from @missrogue, who casually told the 9000+ people paying attention to her Twitter stream that she was registering for it.

Naturally, I followed the link she thoughtfully furnished, signed up, and went down for the program. What was very interesting to me was that this was not being presented by a conference organization like GCN, IBF DEMO, etc., but rather it was dreamed up about two months ago by Mason and Veen, and cultivated virally through the various social media proliferating like mushrooms after a hard rain.

And it was a pretty good show, too. Some nice features included the interactive engagement with the audience (which could have worked better, but still cool), the peer-to-peer content, and the craft-brewed draft beer during the afternoon break.

There were also some very interesting new companies giving their venture pitch, about which more in the next installment.