This is the 76th NY Tech meetup; September is going to be the 6th year anniversary. Nate has a little self back-patting before getting to the show.
Nate toutes his work brokering a connection for NY high school students to
get placed as interns at start-ups.
eventros.com – iPhone app to connect people at business networking events. Looks like it is
marketpulique.com – Web site specialized in selling vintage clothing. Assresses challenges unique to selling vintage clothing on line, extra large photos. Looks fantastic. Wanted to create a destination for vintage. Sellers are vetted to make sure they are selling actually vintage clothing. Incredible site – fast, beautiful, finessed. Pamela, Jon Berger
Turnto.com – online shopping with some connection for facebook of some kind.
Ben – founder of drop.io, making an argument against Clay Shirkey; intrinsic vs extrincis motifivations; free time; cognative surplus; he is questioning the distinction between intrinsic and external motivation;
he says all that is changing is compute, storage and bandwidth – I’ve heard him make this argument before.
indabamusic.com – Chris Danzig, Matt Siegel. Shift in how music was monitized. They are launching something like an artists’ social netowrk. In-browser music mixer utility like Garage Band, looks amazing. More tools to help an artist quickly launch and distribute a song. Someone from the audience gives them a really hard time asking, “Well you actually did distribute some of your artists on the major 4 record labels, didn’t you?” She seem to imply that they are not as indy-empowering as they claim to be, while at the same time implying that they don’t have big name people. Nate dismisses her by asking “Anyone else have a question.” They finish by talking about some integration with myspace platform. Something about this company I dont understand – they seem to be a collaboration platform but also changing the ability for artists to distribute without the record labels.
philo.com – Get push notifications when your friends are watching TV. Points & credits for more TV watching. (I really just can’t even comment on this idea it sort of makes me sick.)
Nate forbids the “where is your revenue model” question. “You know, you get some traffic, you make a partner, you get more traffic, and then you get bought maybe,” he says, pointing out the hallow nature of the question itself. (His attitude is, “duh guys”)
Twilio – He is writing some kind of code to set up a conference call which he is encouraged the entire audience to call into at once. Some kind of PHP output to XML, creates a conference call instantly. Looks like an interesting technology, although I’m not sure exactly what its application is over a more simpler web-based conference calling service.
They have an open source tool called “OpenVBX.” Allows you to create a menu, create a group, basically all the features of a PBX.
Remote presence – remote controller robots that allow someone to activate a robot in a remote place and go talk to people “screen-to-face.” He connects to menlo park and drives the robot around an office – the office of the robotics company that builds these things – surprising the people that they are being broadcast to 800 people at the NY Tech meetup. Willo Garage – built an operating system to support the development of robotics.
Reed Schafner – product manager in charge of Bing’s development platform. He is talking about bing extensions for Safari 5.