Tuesday evening I popped into Myles Weissleder's monthly SF New Tech startup showcase -- one of the longest running and best of San Francisco's Geek events.

And it was great to see JR Johnson, CEO of Lunch.com (above) flying in from SoCal to show off some of the new community building features at his site.

I admire JR because he is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for building communities. He did very well selling Virtual Tourist to Expedia but he's not taking it easy on a boat -- he's back in the fray trying to build a new community.

Lunch.com stands out because it has a mission and it's to create a great place for conversation, debate, discourse and connection.

JR believes everyone should use their real name online and that this encourages a responsibility and a civility that leads to a better society. I like that he thinks about these things and actively involves himself in these issues.

Last year he sponsored a series of lunches in San Francisco that brought together a diverse group of people. Each lunch had a theme and each table of four or five people would collaborate on a short presentation. It was fun and very engaging.

Please take a look at Lunch.com. JR says "Lunch is your time to take time to be yourself." That's a great way to describe the site.

Also: JR's guest post on SVW: Can Facebook Unring The Privacy Bell?

And my interview: Lunch.com - A Platform For Critical Thinkers . . . And A Spiritual Mission

- - -

Also at SF New Tech:

Doochoo

Armando Biondi, CEO & Paolo Privitera, CTO

The Doochoo project is about revolutionizing the way opinions on the web carry meaning, starting with some applications, followed by a proprietary platform that will give opinions on the web tangibility and critical weight.

http://www.doochoo.com

CrispThinking

Peter Maude, CTO

CrispThinking offers real-time user profiling and management technology that detects, tracks, reports and actions on anti-social behavior including spamming, gold farming, bullying and online grooming. It manages the individual not just the resulting content allowing sites to scale their user management efforts. http://www.crispthinking.com

MotherApp

Kedar Shah, Marketing Evangelist

MotherApp has created over 400 apps for clients such as Vodafone, Standard Chartered Bank, and Financial Times. We have a Blog Engine and Application Engine that bloggers, developers, and enterprises can use to create rich, native apps for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry and have a roadmap for iPad, Silverlight (Windows Mobile), and Symbian. http://www.motherapp.com

Sococo

Paul Brody, President

Sococo - Social Communications Company - delivers personal communication services that put you together with the people that matter. http://www.sococo.com

- Crisp Thinking was an unusual company because it specializes in uncovering aberrant behavior by people in virtual worlds, from spammers to child predators.

- MotherApp allows you to write a single app in HTML and it will compile the app in native code for all the top smartphone platforms. It's a Java-like promise but they seem to be delivering and developing apps for major telcos and media companies.

- Sococo has a neat visual metaphor for collaboration within virtual companies. You can see a grid of office spaces and conference rooms. You "enter" a conference room to talk with people and use whiteboards. Others in your company can see who is in meetings but can't listen to the meetings unless "in" the room.