New York Tech Meetup - June 2007

Liveblogging (will correct later)

Robin from GoLoCo (founder of zipcar)
GoLoCo - social networks into your travel networks - drive well with others
Put in where you want to go - and checks the average cost of where to go. Community finds ride shares between each other.
Looking for Ruby on Rails engineers (email roy@goloco.com)

How are you solving chicken and the egg problem? - should make sure that it is a community within your community.

Daphne and Bill - Expo TV (brought by Jed from DFJ Gotham)
Video product reviews contributed by consumers/viewers
Demo - shows "Fisher Price Swing" - goes to most played - demonstrates the swing, storytelling review. Celebrates the creator (lisak157) - this one has 179 videos created. Major information on the product visible for all to see. Click and learn more - goes to the retailer and allows the customer to make the decision.

Attaching meta data to the video - ExpoTV already has pre-information/UPC meta data to the content. They have a relationship with Yahoo! Video and AOL Video making it easy for people to see the content.

Questions: if you get scale, how will you scale against/prevent manufacturers from astroturfing content. expoTV will offer ad space and the community will "suss out" astroturfing.
Who are the primary competitors? Most likely: Amazon, Scripts, AOL, etc. We think they are coming - and it is such a big market.
How much would I make if I make videos? Right now, $5/video. It is nothing you would quit your job over (might lose your job) - social impact.
Do you have a multilingual strategy? Yes - there is a transcribing service - they are hiring
Are you planning to selling info to the manufacturer? Yes - we find that the review are very powerful - the new focus group.

Olga - LiveLOOK
WebMeeting solution - no download
And this was not set up for any purpose
Set up from Bell Labs - visual sharing to the next level
Is there a Java download? No - it will work in HTML (you can see the
FogCreek Copilot - what is to stop me from seeing a bunch of numbers? And how easy is it to disconnect? Very easy.
Any sponsorship from Sun? We want to.
Can more than one person watch at one time? Unlimited people to connect
Olga is a former investment banker, Harvard MBA - located in NJ (spill-over from Bell Labs)
How hardware intensive both client and server? Not very - good from Powerpoint, not good for video.

David Weinberger - Everything is Miscellaneous
Book is available in the back.
Three Orders of Organizing:
First order: stuff
Second order: metadata (reduce to card) - still dealing with physical objects - everything has to go somewhere.
Front page can not reflect everybody's interest. We make the best decisions as possible. Need to use physical means to preserve knowledge. Melvil Dewey comes along (spelled his name Dui for a while). He would try to land in a city on a date that ended in zero - very much into decimals. 90% are explicitly Christian.
Librarians try to fix it - but then a whole craziness occurs (Jews for Jesus)
Now we are digitizing everything - and now we are putting all of the data on the floor and mixing in meta data. Now we include EVERYTHING! Postpone the moment for when it gets classified - give users the tools so we can categorize on the way out, not
3. No different between data and metadata - we do not anymore. Kerman Melville - metadata is what we know, data is what we are looking for.
Socialization of knowledge: upsets authority.
Publicly Negotiated Knowledge - wikipedia and tomatoes - knowledege is captured
Knowledge of groups and discussions is more valuable than knowledge of an individual.
Mailing list is smarter than any of the individuals on it. Tagging adding to the metadata. Embedded meaning.
Infrastructure of meaning - able to mine - multigenerational task. We are building it. Not imposed by other people.
Question: FreeBase Project - from metaweb - a project to develop metadata schema - for the particulars of meta data through wiki methods
Why a tag constitutes meaning? Meaning is something that is placed in a why range of meanings. Most meanings are implicit. We are building an implicit set of relationships. Explicit as in FreeBase.

Karen Teng - AdaptiveBlue
Director of Engineering - jumping into the demo: smart browser, personalization and contextualization. Making sense of the digital age. Sipposedly, the semantic web is a computer chugging on it. Our view - people just browse, more smartly. Browser knows it is an album - can do all sorts of things. Actions centric to this attribute. Find pictures of person on flickr.
Page on AOL music - uniformity across heterogenous sites. Have been building the data - limited by the fact that people need to download Firefox and the extension. Slow adoption curve - so came up with SmartLinks. Inline text SmartMenus. Everyone's smart menu is different than everyone else's SmartMenu. SmartMenu allows you to just focus on your favorite sites.

Questions: what happened to your sidebar? Still there - just short preso. As you are collecting pages, you can collect the BlueMarks.
For everything? Yes - for anything/everything. Please log into our site.
What about IE? The limitation is that we do not have the IE extension yet.
How do you make money? Affiliate revenue and allow bloggers to take share in the affiliate revenue.
What is the story of how this came to be? Funded by Union Square Ventures - she decided to do a Javascript/Firefox extension. Hiring jobs@adaptiveblue.com. Have issues about installing on blogs - karen@adaptiveblue.com

Scott: MeetUp is hiring - can compare working at MeetUp versus google. Looking for engineers and product managers.

Max - Mogulus
New York based company - let everyone launch their own live 24/7 TV channel.
Most of the time - it is a linear TV channel. All of the groups - linear television is dead.
We like video on demand and we like linear. Similar to iPod.
Demo - www.groundreport.com - Ground Report TV - CNN video blog channel.
Virtual studio - as many producers as you want.
Television blogging - unbelieveable.
Questions: what's the technology - all Flash-based, patent on real-time streaming. Also free (every 10 minutes an ad) - and there is a pro version (can pay for it). Closed beta with 200 people.
How many channels do you think you will have that will constitute success. LiveCasters, rebuild a full-TV channel.
Where can you pull video from? YouTube and other places which has an API. Syndicated search - as the sites come up, we will add it. Built on Amazon Web Services - building own CDN - incredibly inexpensive price.
Have their own portal - empowering bloggers to their own channel. It is a TV not a player.

James from Hot Or Not/Facebook App
Everyone is now obsessed with Facebook in the Valley right now. Friendster was the ultimate app. Computer, GUI, Internet, Friendster, now Facebook is now the next connection - viral marketing can now happen. Consistant pipes - next step. Facebook is doing it - everyone in th eValley is doing it.
Power of their social graph - easy to get users there to get traction.
Now Hot or Not is now FREE.
More keywords you have, the less you want to read. Now, they have visual keywords (icons) HotLists - Sharing your style
Now, the entire app is on Facebook - same features, hit 1MM pageviews per day in 4 days on Facebook, hit 1MM pageviews per day in 8 days on the web.
Myspace is trying to be the cool desitination, Facebook is trying to be the utility. Facebook is making the bet as a utility, not a destination.

Scott - it will be amazing to see how a company will decide to launch a product on FaceBook rather than the web.

Now the network will commoditize the software. The friend network is the next network that matters.