New York Tech Meetup October Recap

Tonight at the NY Tech Meetup, seven startups presented their services to a packed house. Here’s a brief overview of each of the companies that presented:

ChallengePost - we wrote about ChallengePost earlier today as they are the service powering the NYC Big Apps competition. ChallengePost is a market place where you can find, solve and post challenges for others to complete. From the site, “Once a challenge is created, other people can JOIN the challenge and pledge money or simply appreciation. Those incentives, which are payable only if a challenge is solved, encourage others to solve a problem and earn their rewards.”

SetJam - the service will open in private beta next week and is trying to help you get away from having to buy cable tv each month.  You can search for shows you like, create guides, find out where to watch every episode of each show, etc. You actually watch the shows on the video hosting sites — SetJam adds a frame with the social aspects. Looks like it could be a good partner for Adaptive Blue.

Postling - we posted a video with Postling CEO David Lifson last month. This might be the most awesome productivity service I’ve seen in a long time. I will do a full writeup of the service later this week. Basically you can write blog entries and post to multiple blogs at the same time. The blogs can be on Tumblr, Wordpress, etc. After you post the content, you can then send out social media messages to Twitter, Facebook, etc. all from one place. I manage 5 blogs currently and it’s a mess to have to login to each one to post, then try to share the important posts to twitter, facebook, friendfeed, etc. Postling looks like it could seriously save me time each month. The service is $9/month.

Regroup - we wrote about Regroup earlier this year when they completed their rebranding. Currently working with a variety of universities, Regroup describes their service as, “a way to enable the school to support and manage the natural communications of its constituents.”

Tagnic - this Twitter-based service allows you to tag people like you would tag terms. For example, let’s say you thought I was in need of a cupcake, you could post a message on Twitter using my username and then “+cupcake” and my profile page on Tagnic would show the cupcake icon. The founder was asked about a business model and he replied that there is none. Looks like it would work with FourSquare.

AnyClip - looks like a pretty neat video service. Basically they have indexed every movie ever made. You can do a search for a term or clip and the results page displays movies that match the query. The results seemed to be presented very quickly and the videos loaded instantly. They use a combination of user-tagging and subtitles plus I am sure a lot of other technologies that they aren’t quite ready to share. The founders noted that they see the AnyClip service as a way to get people more interested in movies and create interest in new movies the users may never have heard of. AnyClip won the Techcrunch50 audience award.