Tuesday, October 12

NYTech Meetup - October 2010

Been some time since I live-blogged, so here it goes:

Andrew Raisej kicks off with an announcement of WeGovernment - things that are useful for their civic lives. Introduces the Deputy Mayor - MediaNYC2020 - series of initiatives. Establishment of business incubators, creation of a media lab for commercialization of new technologies, launch of the BigApps competition.

BigApps accomplish transparency in government, innovative ideas, improve efficiencies of city government, and provides developers and programmers the content needed for new apps. Doubling the datasets, winners will meet the mayor and get $20K in prizes. http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6301114

Brandon Kessler - ChallengePost - describing the NYC Big Apps 2.0 - use at least one dataset and make it available to the public. Submission deadline - Jan 12, 2011.

One Minute Presentations
Ari presents HowMutch - www.howmutch.com - learn about how much people would pay for various product offerings?

Shen presents UpGo - apps.facebook.com/whatsupgo - visualizer for your friends. Create a custom group and then using friends plus event makes a great experience. Some curates the experience.

Galvanize to share/hide/gifts - using some GPS/LBS service to place a gift in a physical location - using geocaching and awards points to the give giver and the finder.

Hitmaker a "new way of sharing music" - foursquare with songs. Allows someone to promote a song via twitter and Facebook. On the iTunes Apps store.

Five Minute Presentations
Songza - www.songza.com - create your own web station. Built on your friends and your music. Reminds me of Pandora. Share music - can have friends add music (ingredients) to the station. "Coolest websites are the ones which lets you broadcast yourself".

PalmWillow - www.palmwillow.com - Tal launching the site where Carla (17 year old intern) introing the site. Social networking community - share outfits with their friends and share with their friends - look at all of the brands. Demonstrates what looks like a clipart app.

Introspectr - www.introspectr.com - search engine across all of your accounts on the web. Leveraging all of the content within your accounts across the web (e.g. twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc). Search tool looks at titles and content. Indexes the full-text as well.

Catch a Fire - www.catchafire.org - allows professionals to connect with non-profits that need volunteer skills and efforts. Allows you to create your profile which helps in the matching.

Solvate - www.solvate.com - connecting freelancers.
Three rules: play the field, don't be afraid to ask for it, get a good deal (10x Solvate) - allows for one hour conversation with freelancers.

Nate discusses GroupMe and Fast Society - discussing the concerns of having competition - all that matters is how you execute on your plan.

GroupMe - www.groupme.com - group text messaging or conference calling. Can create a web-based chat and use the SMS to feed it. Introduces the iPhone app which leverages the native iPhone contacts.

Fast Society - www.fastsociety.com - looks like they create short-lived groups. "Even the projector wants to get down!" [Ed note: this guy gets the most inspirational speaker] "We combed through thousands and thousands of songs to find the BEST pause music out there."

Q/A of the Five Minute Demos:
  • Introspectr - "what are you doing next?" - Expand out to more services beyond twitter, Facebook and Gmail.
  • Catchafire - "how do you make money?" - We charge the non-profits for posting their projects ($200).
  • PlumWillow - "have you thought of creating a sister site for Halloween" - we are doing something along that line.
  • GroupMe - "you are generating a lot of phone numbers. Any problem with that?" We can address the number scarcity.
  • Catchafire - "Do you need your 501.c3 status to use Catchafire?" - No.
  • Songza - "can I go to any place in NY and choose a playlist?" - In cooperation with the venue own, yes. But right now - no.
  • Solvate/FastSociety - "what if people falsify their profile?" - We perform reference checks.
  • Nate - "what's the difference between FastSociety and GroupMe?" - GroupMe is persistent and FastSociety. FastSociety is for partying.
Per evening sponsor - David Tisch - Director of NYC techstars - applications are due November 21st.

After break - move onto additional companies:

Five Minute Presentations with Direct Q/As
Hashable - www.hashable.com - makes introductions over twitter and provides reference page for the recipients of the intro. Can also use email - hashable formats the email into Bio cards. Now creating a game to generate leaderboards. Now introducing people via #justmet - add to your twitter announcement (e.g. #justmet @first-twitter-name @second-twitter-name) and hashable will make the connections.

[Ed Note: looks like how to make connections to people you have not connected by]

Q: taxonomy of hashtags - sometimes there have been things that have been incorrectly "sucked in"
Q: what problem are you trying to solve? A: LinkedIn
Q: why wouldn't I introduce myself? A: You could - depends on your relationships.
Q: how can I use hashable in a private context? A: Don't do it over twitter. Could do a single or double opt-in
Q: can you DM to make the intros? A: Not yet. Email you can do privately. hashable tells you that the recipients have connected.
Q: have you thought about creating groups for leaderboards? A: yes - we have recently created another board for the West Coast, looking into creating cohorts

Tracelytics - www.tracelytics.com - application performance analytics tool - tells you how/why your website is performing badly.
Q: do you need any GEMS? A: you install a couple of packages and then you collect the information and then we convert it into other
Q: what languages? A: PHP, ruby, python - and they are planning on open-sourcing the instrumentation for the interfaces

Two more companies presented - Membased and twilio. Unfortunately, the laptop died in the midst of the blogpost. Sorry.

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