November NY Tech Meetup - Recap

I attended the NY Tech Meetup tonight. Presenting were Google, Prosper, Motionbox, an author and a couple smart rats. The Meetup was at Google's new NYC office. Really pretty damn sweet. Awesome location across from Chelsea Market.

Motionbox

Their tagline is "gets you to the goodstuff." While it is hard to show the entire product in 5 minutes, it certainly looks interesting. Basically a competitor to YouTube, they have some other elements which help you get to the good stuff. They allow you to "clip" portions of videos and send links to friends/post links taking people directly to the clipped portion.

Around for about 18 months, Motionbox's launch was in July 2006 and they are based in NYC. They are not disclosing user numbers at this point.

Allison Fine

Allison discussed her book, Momentum. Basically she discussed how social change affected this year's elections. Talked about this year's elections as the, "first YouTube elections."

RoboRat

Lee presented the RoboRat, basically a rat that they can train to do whatever they want it to do. Coming soon... rats to code HTML cheaper than India. He spoke pretty fast so I don't have many notes, but you can see the pics below.

Prosper

Jane described Prosper as:

eBay + PayPal + Match.com = Prosper

They have 100k members, 62k listings and have closed 4,400 loans totalling $21million. Appears they are similar to Zopa in the UK. Seems really interesting though I would have liked more information on how they protect my information.

Pretty simple idea: You need money, you post a request and describe the request (she said one woman wanted bigger boobs). Then people can bid on the request in some amount and at a certain interest rate. Then Prosper holds an auction and you either get it or you don't. One thing I absolutely despise (not just with Prosper) are companies who will ding your credit if you pay late, but won't report good history on your report. This should absolutely not be allowed in the credit system. Same thing with utilities.

Google Web Toolkit

Joel from Google Atlanta demo'ed the Google Web Toolkit. Looks pretty interesting though I must admit I am not really a Java programmer. From what he showed, you can create Java apps and then have them create themselves into JavaScript browser-friendly files. I am going to try to meetup with Joel to learn more about the Web Toolkit.

I really enjoyed attending this event. Very professionally run, excellent crowd, and of course Google's offices. You can check out all of my pictures on Flickr.