Last night at NYU's Skirball Center For The Performing Arts, it became clear that the NY Tech Meetup had settled in nicely to its new home when guest MC Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.tv, announced a capacity crowd of 850 people in attendance. The packed house witnessed several announcements and presentations, including a brief one from Clay Shirky, the NYU interactive telecommunications professor, author and Web pundit. His presentation focused on some of the core concepts of his most recent book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, namely about how the Internet is allowing people to express their social generosity by contributing to the connected world.
The rest of the night was packed with nine demos/presentations from the following NYC tech startups, including:
Betterfly: This is a self improvement site that presents a database of "betterists": who are available for a variety of services. Users can either search the site to hire these experts for services (i.e. singing lessons from an accomplished singer) or can sign themselves up as experts. Founder Joshua Schwadron stressed that there are no companies listed on site as betterists, just people.
Hot Potato: Returning for a second time to the stage since their demo at the Tech Meetup late last year, the company, which specializes in mobile check-in services that lets users tell people what they are doing, gave a presentation of its new version 2.0 of the platform.
LearnVest: This site was almost reminiscent of a mint.com for women, as it is a hub/community for women who want to not only learn more about personal finance, but how to better manage their finances. The site offers e-newsletters, a three week personal finance boot camp and an online financial planner that can help women customize and determine their financial action plans.
Frontal: Likely the geekiest presentation of the night, Frontal is a free, open source markup and scripting language that is built on Flash and makes it easier for Web programmers to add rich media to websites.
Foodspotting: A last minute addition to the night's agenda, this presentation was given by Soraya Darabi, who was in the news yesterday when she announced that she was leaving drop.io to become a co-founder of Foodspotting. The site is a mobile app that not only lets people check-in to restaurants like Foursquare, but lets people make and post recommendations on specific food dishes and items to order and buy. As of January 2010, the site has over 10,000 recommended "spots."
How About We: Recently featured in a large trend piece in The New York Times, this dating site received an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience after it demoed how it works, which is by letting singles propose where they would like to go/do on a first date, rather than send messages and personal essays.
StuffBuff: This e-commerce site features real-time auction bidding platform, which allow users to promote their live auction items through social media means, but also lets them post their auctions on blogs and almost any website. Described as decentralized e-commerce, founder Michael Langer proclaimed that this type of Web auctioning will be the "future of e-commerce."
Jetsetter: Born from the creators of Kayak and Gilt Groupe, this invitation only site offers travel ideas/tips and limited time deals for hotels/vacations for travelers who are seeking more refined and exotic travel experiences. The photo heavy site deploys its own staff to review locations around the world before said suggestions are made to community members of the site.
comiXology: Like Hot Potato, this company also returned to stage after demoing late last year at the Tech Meetup. Since then, the site, which brings comics books to the Web and a variety of Web enabled mobile devices, built the DC comics app for the iPhone/iPad and also launched its "guided view" option, which was demoed. This option keeps the entire page of a comic book intact and lets users personalize how they want to read the book.
Videos from last night's event can be found here.
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