NY Tech Meetup - June 2009

Liveblogging from FIT:

Nate shows off a NY Tech Startup from UpNext 3D

UpNext - Danny Moon

• 3D Cityscape - launched the site 2 years ago
• Shows off the 3D interactivity
• True location search
• iPhone App
• Shows Category search, Keyword Search,
• Allows for update of your twitter and/or Facebook status
• What's UpNext feed - Just Opened, Latest Reviews and (something else)
• And it uses the GPS capability
• "Thought that was cool." - Nate

Centrl - Murat Aktihanoglu

• Runs on the iPhone and other SmartPhones - you are going to miss alot of information
• "Leave Britney alone!" - Nate
• Can add a user, vote for the user, send a gift, private chat on the Centrl world.
• Shows the deals and coupons on the site - can show the coupon and share the coupon with friends.
• Can do a keyword search for restaurants via Yelp
• Can search for info via Wikipedia
• Can set up georelated sites to help in connecting
• Can make chat only with personal friends and turn off the location functionality

"You all know our 'strict' no Powerpoint policy. But then we have some special cases." - Nate

NYSenate.gov - Andrew Hoppin / NoNeck Hidalgo

• 1965 - last time Democrats in the majority in the NY Senate
• January 2009 - wants transparency in the NY Senate
• Their email was Lotus Notes, CRM was via a VT100 interface
• Created the Office of the CIO
• Noel shows us the information from the new site - open transparency
• Platform - expose as much data as possible
• Senators are on twitter and Facebook - included a new functionality at the New Idea link
• Public Markup section - can vote on ideas
• Have their own YouTube channel - using the cloud to give access
• Go to CapitolCamp.org for a Barcamp for internal work
• Twitter: @NYSenateCIO, NYSenateCIO.org
• Q: "Where does the crowdsourced ideas go?" It is tougher to do to create a workflow internally.

Max - Livestream (formally known as mobus)

• Internet video platform. It is free - ad powered. Professional version with more than 1000 customers.
• Create additional TV stations - very good for event. As the web becomes more real time, live streaming will become mainstream.
• Livestream Procaster - livestreaming - download it for free.
• Nice livestream tool - our coworking space does this at (http://www.livestream.com/newworkcity) where people are doing their own production
• Can broadcast your desktop
• Can promote on twitter, can manage a channel chat,
• Allows you to livestream a working video feed.
• Has a 3D effect that can show both the video feed and the live video feed
• Game mode which allows you to play the game and video feed and have people see you doing the stuff as well.
• "Incredible product!" - Sanford (mumbles)
  
• Q: Pro version? A: Pro has no ads, can disable publishing on the guide, and can make the videos private.
• Q: When for Mac? Couple of months from now.

Michael Alpert - Aviary

• Edit images online (essentially Photoshop online)- create digital content in the browser - photo editing, vector editing
• Released their API to allow people to create their own cartoons
• Image Editor, Color Swatch Editor, Vector Editor or Effects Editor - uses a Firefox Add-On
• Can create an effect in a blackbox effort - help create open-source
• Sneak peek of the Aviary audio editor.
• Q: How are you enabling education? A: School can have the educators use software directly in the classroom - collaborate and edit within the classroom.
• Q: Pro version? A: Yes - file storage and other features.
• Q: Versioning? A: Yes - it is online and can track versions that are being created and can return to an older version.

Bre Pettis from Makerbot Industries

www.thingiverse.com - 3D digital design files library

• Normally costs $25K to $300K to have a 3D printer - MakerBot is only $750. Everything is open-source - made it to be hacked out of the box.
• "A thing that can make anything you want. 'Earl Grey, hot'" - Bre
• Made a coin in google SketchUp (with a hack)
• Q: How much does it cost to build something? A: Someone else - $30 to 40 per, self - pennies.
• Q: Wear out? A: Two months going strong
• Q: What is the world 20 years from now?

Jason Calacanis shows Mahalo 2.0

• Allows for the creation of crowdsource management of the pages
• Q: Love TWIS - This Week in Startups
• Q: Aren't you a serial pimp? A: People often overestimate the downside of risk. How can you sit here and watch these demos and not want to try? Failure will only help you. NYC is the greatest city in the world.

July 2007 NY Tech Meetup

Scott was nice enough to let me announce a new initiative called cooperBricolage - a coworking space in the East Village for technology and design startups. For more information, look at http://cooperbricolage.pbwiki.com.

Mike Levin - HitTail
http://www.hittail.com
Effective search engine optimization - add a snippet of code and increases the number of search hits. Extract keywords showing you the performance of keywords.
Hit Suggestions: writing suggestion - patent-pending algorithm. Gives you ideas for the content for your site to increase your performance. Positive feedback cycle. Really good for bloggers - works in real time... As a NYTechMeetup - they offered a discount key (send email for it) to get the main service for $49.95, $50 off!

Jason and Jon from Confabb
http://www.confabb.com
34000 entries for conferences, 4K per month added. Social networking tools for conferences - gives people a way to reconnect with people. Feeds from social media (YouTube, flickr, etc) and a reputation management system. Also offer conference website hosting. Great for speakers to manage their reputation - good search engine marketing/optimization. Started by Salim Ismail and Cameron Barrett.

The vision is the "hallway conversations" - Confabb provides a legacy for the previous conferences for people to find and benefit from.

Ken from DietTelevision
http://www.diettelevision.com
Founder of BlueFly - solving a real thing for real people. Americans washed down 53 gallons of soda EACH every year. Video is free, wisdom of crowds, individuals share their knowledge.

Voice recognition is not working right now - helps in the selections.

Learn It Section: Discovered is that the more restrictive the diet is , the easier it is to lose it. Allows you to select your best diet - with the wisdom (gets people's information and shares it as user-generated content). Sample menu, nutritionist ratings, etcera.

Lose It Section: friends, tracking, etcetera. You can call in your menus from where you are - then later confirm it - and help with the voice recognition - to allow you to track your food and help you lose weight. Make it very simple. Make the complicated stuff easy - long to do, finally getting there.

Inventive stuff - though it is called television.

Jon from ParkWhiz
http://www.parkwhiz.com
Gives a listing of parking spots all over a location. Can enable a reservation system and reserve your parking in the city. Can simply offer attendants the printed receipt and allow them to reserve their spaces.

Why would an owner want this? Because when the owner has empty spots - losing money. Can have a premium service as well. Removes cash liability by allowing for credit payment. eBay for Parking - you could rent out your driveway for games. API coming soon - so people can link via widget and other services. Focusing on event parking and monthly parking. Also offers a mobile app at the website.

Shout out to Wilson-Sonsini and DFJ Gotham - and welcomes Tim Draper from DFJ in the Valley.

Danny and Raj from UpNext
http://www.upnext.com
A better way of doing "local search" using three dimensional maps for various locations - specifically working on Manhattan at the moment (not available to other cities yet, but is easy to make it work). Smooth - stylistic site - textures can be changed easily. Different events based on textures of the City - built from the ground up.

Want to connect with content providers for Manhattan - can search various locations. Great aspect with the transportation medallions. Working for a community - social networking/profile tools. Can see friend's favorites and reviews - allows people to see the city. Launched the site three hours ago. (Ed Note: I met these guys back in Sept when they had their first prototype, and had very nice presentation back then at Columbia University).

Think about make it into a connection for other apps with the Java application they have made. Would like to work with someone in the mobile space.

Jinesh from Amazon Web Services
www.amazon.com
Evangelists from Amazon - some of the infrastructure as a service - Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 is a "utility service" at $0.10 per instance hour with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as the drive of the virtualized machine.

Pay-for-use - and allows for scaling of applications to allow for additional services.

Uses "sensors" and creates instances when needed (CPU utilization, Heap Size, load/TCP connections, in-memory usage, etcetera)

Couple of people using the service - PowerSet (semantic search engine in CA), PhanFare (using TB of storage through S3 for their service)

Will S3 allow for block access (for databases)? Difficult to do mySQL. Since it is a virtualized system, very difficult, but there are work-arounds (Jinesh can explain).

Grand fanale: Will from MeetUp
(who developed doublefeaturefinder.com)
Question Party www.questionparty.com
"If I have to explain QuestionParty, then you can not use QuestionParty." - Will