Gojee's Mike LaValle (r) presents a curated recipe for Caramel Pecan Pumpkin Pie with Tian Hee. (credit: Lauren Keyson)
Despite the torrential rain last night, 10 diverse startups at the NY Tech Meetup demoed their unusual sites, platforms and apps in front of a packed house at NYU’s Skirball Center. The startups ranged from calorie counting and voice integration to drink recommendations and task matching.
Starting with a food category, Mike Lavalle co-founder and CEO talked about how Gojee curates recipes from top food bloggers around the world and allows users go through them “In a gorgeous visual interface – it’s probably one of the most beautiful sites on the Internet. We handpicked some of the best recipes out there.” His favorite recipe is corn beef and cabbage made with Guinness. In fact, there was a remarkable amount of recipes on his site made with beer.
Speaking of beer, on to Drynks, as this platform lets users journal their favorite experiences with wine, beer and liquor, and then share them on the internet and Facebook. Developer Fernando Garza has shared a few Rieslings and a couple of Shirazes with his friends. “It’s interesting to see them talk about how they might look for those the next time they go to a liquor store.”
For dieters, CalorieCount is a voice app where users can use a voice activated calorie counter. Brandon Diamond, Meetup’s associate director, talked about this Hack-of-the-Month, “It’s kind of a pain in the butt when you’re eating something to pull out your iPhone and click through the menu of foods. So these hackers made a system where you talk into your phone and it understands what you’re saying – a bagel with cream cheese and two eggs — and it will add up the calories.”
Founder Igor Lebovic explained how CalorieCount came to be eight years ago, when co-founder Eric Fantasia was overweight, and managed to lose 50 pounds by calorie counting. “Being engineers this made sense to us – calories in and calories off – it boggles my mind how many calories people can lose in a short amount of time. We have people who have lost several hundred pounds — it’s hard for me to understand that someone can lose the entire weight of my entire body.”
Leah Busque, founder and CEO of TaskRabbit said that her site is a web and mobile marketplace that safely connects people and businesses in order to get small everyday tasks done. “We create an amazing user experience that focuses on security. One hundred percent of our TaskRabbit network goes through a rigorous vetting process that includes a series of background checks.” She originally came up with the idea for her startup one night when she realized that she was out of food for Kobi, her yellow lab. “ I thought, how nice it would be to if there was a place I could go on the web and name a price I was willing to pay — I was sure that there probably was someone in my neighborhood who was willing to help her out.”
Kikin is an iPad browser that eliminates the need for multiple step process of cutting and pasting in a one touch environment. Along the way Brian Rogers, head of technology, discovered another unintended way that Kikin could be used: “It lets you around the whole Flash/HTML conversion thing – if you want to press on any movie title name, it allows you to view trailers off of YouTube.”
Also of note were two startups: Steve Schultz, co-founder and CEO described his startup, Moveable Feast, as mobile media app that empowers story tellers to tell stories about places through new technologies, such as GPS enabled smart phones. “You can create an immersive documentary film, a narrative film, a pub crawl and a walking tour.” And Framey was described by founder Chris Danzigas, “An offensively simple way to integrate video recording into you site. Basically, a web developer will embed one line of code on their site via a Flash video recorder, and when users come they hit ‘record’ and make the video available to be displayed on their websites.”
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