The most dramatic thing at tonight’s New York Tech Meetup was, far and away, Scott Heifferman, founder of Meetup.com, smashing an iPad on stage (yes, it was a real iPad). Perhaps the furor over Apple’s ubiquitous onslaught of advertising got to him, perhaps it was to be dramatic, probably both. (He was telling us about a new feature on Meetup.com called “Meetups Everywhere” which allows anyone to spark Meetups around a specific topic all over the world.) His move was dramatic, albeit lacking in much of a point (His point was that his innovation is way more cool than the iPad.). http://meetup.com/everywhere
Here’s a brief write-up of some of the other startups that presented. NYTM is at a new space today, the beautiful and spacious NYU Skirball Center. The 500+ person event is now housed in a giant space with two balconies, wonderful lighting, and clearly higher tech A/V equipment than at the FIT Center.
Snacksquare – This is a hot LBS (location-based service) start-up – a cool Web2.0 interface lets a store owner define a square radius from his location. When someone checks in on FourSquare, Lattitude (or soon Facebook when they add LBS), a coupon will be sent directly to that user. http://www.snacksquare.com/
Knowmore – This is an aggregate of all your social networks. I guess it is kind of like a web-based version of TweetDeck. What I like about it is that it shows all content inline – photos, videos, etc, right in the same screen. Looks pretty nice. http://knowmore.com
Fairshare – A mobile app to let New Yorkers share cab rides. You can set where you are, where you are going, and tell your potential ride what you’re wearing so that they will recognize you. http://www.fairshareny.org/
Tynt – Here’s an interesting little innovation that uses Javascript to add a little snippet to the bottom of something you copy out of a web page. You copy text off a web page, paste it into your email program. At the bottom of that little snippet of text a link gets inserted that directs back to the webpage where you copied it from. Of course the user can manually remove it, but you probably won’t. http://www.tynt.com/
Thumbplay – 70 person start-up here in New York. Delivers content to mobile phones – live streaming music? He’s talking a lot about how his cool the site is using HTML5, native HTML5 video, transitions & fades. Not exactly sure what the product does, but his demo is very energetic and is all about how cool HTML5 is. All streaming music down to a mobile phone. He demos 5 HTML5-only tags: auto tag, web database, drag & drop, notifications API, local storage API.http://www.thumbplay.com/
Forrst – This is a private club of developers & designers to discuss tips, hacks, tricks, etc. Was originally written in Ruby/Rails, when it got bigger, he re-wrote it in PHP (LAMP). Do you pay to join? No, it’s free, but it is invite only. http://forrst.com
Perpetually – Visual web analytics, business intelligence and enterprise archiving. There should be a way to perfectly archive web content. Creating ways to capture all the content on the web and find ways to make use of it. Like the web archive, it snapshots sites perfectly in time, allowing you to go back in time and see how a page looked in the past. Primary use is with web analytics. He says that there was a site that couldn’t figure out why their traffic dropped, until they used this tool and noticed that the traffic dropped right at the same time the moved the search box on their site. http://www.perpetually.com/