This past weekend, I attended the Harvard Business School (HBS) VCPE, Venture Capital & Private Equity, conference to support my husband, Peter Wernau, Co-Founder Apricot Capital and CEO of Wernau Asset Management, who was speaking on an Angel Investors panel.  I was able to soak up a keynote and a few great panels.  My personal list of Top 5 takeaways includes:

1.  Hearing that the next great Venture Capital opportunities are actually outside of the US and being first to market is key.  In particular, Latin America or Brazil, specifically, are of interest among many.

2.  Personally meeting and chatting with Mr. Bill Draper, one of America's first venture capitalists and hearing about the opportunities that got away (Yahoo) or which were exited from too early (Zappos).

3.  Experiencing the passion, optimism and entrepreneurial spirit exude from a number of HBS students.

4.  Being surprised at the minimal discussion around the mobile industry or mobile channel on the "Media Investing in a Digital Age" panel. (In their defense, panelists did make brief mention of its influence and fact that it is going to be BIG.)

5.  Last but not least, the geography wars of East Coast vs. West Coast VC activity was palpable.  For example, William Draper mentioned in his keynote that following graduation from HBS, his early mentors told him to get out of Boston as fast as possible and go "where men are men" (side note: not sure what this phrase translates to in today's world?)...though he actually landed in Chicago prior to Silicon Valley .  The Angel panel also had some debate over east versus west coast activity.  And, how can we forget the magnetic force of Silicon Valley in The Social Network when Mark Zuckerberg is aggressively lured by Justin Timberlake, I mean, Sean Parker, to head to Silicon Valley where a million dollars isn't cool.  A billion is.

I'd like to expand on my 5th takeaway.  One can't deny that Silicon Valley is certainly the "mothership" hub for technology and VCs.  But you also can't deny that Boston has been an incubator for some very successful start-ups and successful exits (i.e. m-Qube and Quattro Wireless).  Here are just some of the notable players in the Boston-area mobile industry:

• Celtra: a self-serve rich-media mobile advertising platform that creates really nice-looking mobile experiences for the consumer without the complications or limitations of a SDK on the back-end. They announced $5 million in Series A Funding in January.


• Paydiant:  an up-and-coming mobile commerce player who just secured over $7 million in Series A Funding in February.  Mobile commerce offers a compelling value proposition but the complexities at point-of-sale can be challenging.  This is a player to keep an eye on.


• Nexage:  offers mediation for mobile advertising, which "enables site and application owners to increase mobile ad revenue and decrease the operational costs of their mobile business." They secured their first round of funding in the summer of 2009.


• Skyhook:  powers LBS solutions and delivers patented location technology to location-enable applications and mobile devices.  They've been around since 2003.


• Where: distributed as an app across a range of smartphone operating systems, WHERE offers a wide-range of location-based services to help people discover and share favorite local places.  They offer a search and display ad network to reach their 4 million users.


• mms: last but not least, I must make a plug for my company, mobile messaging solutions or mms.  We power some of the biggest mobile marketing programs in the US and are a one-stop shop ASP for the big 3 in mobile marketing and entertainment solutions across: SMS, mobile Internet and apps.  We've been in the business over 10 years.

So there you have it.  Proof that we have our own little Silicon Valley right here in Boston.  Please share your thoughts on other noteworthy Boston-based mobile companies I may have unintentionally missed.