HUMOR: Twenty-five SURE Signs of Aging

Okay, so this has little to do with social engineering - but it was funny nonetheless:

1. Your house plants are alive, and you can't smoke any of them.
2. Having sex in a twin bed is out of the question.
3. You keep more food than beer in the fridge.
4. 6:00 AM is when you get up, not when you go to bed.
5. You hear your favorite song in an elevator.
6. You watch the Weather Channel.
7. Your friends marry and divorce instead of "hook up" and "break up."
8. You go from 130 days of vacation time to 14.
9. Jeans and a sweater no longer qualify as "dressed up."
10. You're the one calling the police because those %&@# kids next door won't turn down the stereo.
11. Older relatives feel comfortable telling sex jokes around you.
12. You don't know what time Taco Bell closes anymore.
13. Your car insurance goes down and your car payments go up.
14. You feed your dog Science Diet instead of McDonald's leftovers.
15. Sleeping on the couch makes your back hurt.
16. You take naps.
17. Dinner and a movie is the whole date instead of the beginning of one.
18. Eating a basket of chicken wings at 3 AM would severely upset, rather than settle, your stomach.
19. You go to the drug store for ibuprofen and antacid, not condoms and pregnancy tests.
20. A $4.00 bottle of wine is no longer "pretty good stuff."
21. You actually eat breakfast food at breakfast time.
22. "I just can't drink the way I used to" replaces "I'm never going to drink that much again."
23. 90% of the time you spend in front of a computer is for real work.
24. You drink at home to save money before going to a bar.
25. When you find out your friend is pregnant you congratulate them instead of asking "Oh, what happened?"

NY Tech Meetup - September 2007

(will add links and logos later)

Jesse from DesignMyRoom.com (Swatchbox Technologies)
Interactive products into a 3D room space. Easy design tool - share your design with friends, families and public at large. Modify the room as you choose - paint, flooring, furniture, rugs (3D)
Never need to sign up - can sign up after, if you wish to share it. Can "lift this look" from major designers.

Any channel conflict? No - they are working with.
How do you get product placement - using their tools or are you negotiating a new contract with them? Varies - some are data feeds, some are configurators that already exist.

Liz from Collectors Quest
Digital brand for the collectors community - latest and greatest in Web 2/social networking tools
Broadband collector network - growing interactive community - enduring friendships - original programming. Commerce - social networking for collectors - Antiques Roadshow meets Match.com.

Genre-themed templates for items - think ebay meets myspace/facebook meets Drupal
Built for advertisers and manufacturers. Platform for collectors, merchants, etc.

Questions: Supports user-to-user, user-to-manufacturer
Who owns the content? Can a person download the data? Mutual ownership - both own the data.
Where are you based? New York!

Brad from Animoto
Based in NYC - images plus audio (analyzed) and generates a video
Uses Amazon AWS and EC2 - use SQS and S3.
Tracking the audio to determine transitions and can create a music video - can remix and edit the remix as well.

Henry and Kevin from Silicon Alley Insider
Community twitter room - front page will always be an "open page" - voices allow or contribution. Essential that we get the "community involved". We will keep the source confidential. URL is alleyinsider.com

The market in NY and the surrounding areas are ripe for digital media and are finding a slew of experienced entrepreneurs. Additionally, Boston's VC community is experiencing increasing interests here in NYC.

Business model - advertising supported.
Henry - what is it that people most misunderstand about you? People are saying "Blodgett is back, must be a bubble" - definitely air is coming back in, but the site is trying to teach lessons from the last time. Trying to keep a light on rationality.

Yaakov from JKN.com
Homepage away from home - put your comments into the page. Makes an annotation into the webpage that is hosted on the jkn.com site. Annotation technology for webpages.

Tim from Hakia
Semantic meaning-based search engine - demonstrate the "Scoopbar" - highlighter and cursor positioning - "Scoop n' Save"
Uses the "whole context of the search" to do the search and then provide information from various sources. Captures information and has a context of information on the hard-drive.
Seems to be a rider on top of a search engine found elsewhere.
Question: what is this? Find the result on a third party page and save it to your hard drive.

Tom, CTO of Gawker Media
Loose confederation of drunkards....could not follow it all.
Introduce comments via invites only - then moved to approval of comments - high quality comments. Commenters comments. If I am undersanding this - they are offering to increase visibility of user comment feeds (something Jerry Michalski would mention as exhaust content).
Opening publishing platform to commenters - extending platform to all of our readers - especially to people who contribute with high quality content.
Question (from me): isn't this essentially the community features from Scoop?

George and Shamoon from BookSwim
Netflix for books - hundreds of readers - getting visibility - kind of
Unique partnerships (could be Urbis)

Charles from iminlikewithyou
Compete for someone's attention - stay in the top five bods - to allow others to communicate with you. Lots of photos - clean look and feel. Has a "chatter" system - private and public chatter. Primarily is about entertainment - destination for people who are bored at work.
You can have an ugly guy who keeps bidding and you can make sure he is not in your top five - "just like high school".

cooperBricolage Grand Opening Event - tomorrow (September 5th at 4pm) - check out www.coobric.com

Full screen flash app - works on Mac, PC and/or linux - browser within a browser.