NYC Archive

When you ride the subway, have you ever thought, “boy I’d like to get her on my Twitter”. Or what about, “his tush belongs on my Facebook”. Perhaps, “She would be a great friend for my feed”. But the problem is that it’s hard to go up to someone and tell them about your interests and desires on a train.

There’s a new service that will help you reveal your interests in a man or a woman named SubwayCrush. The service currently serves NYC, London, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The idea is simple…find someone on the train you are interested in, write up the person’s specs on SubwayCrush and then the person might just answer. Naturally the more people who know about, and use, SubwayCrush, the better chance you have for a match.

You can view all “crushes” by city or by type (e.g m4w, m4m, w4m, w4w). You must enter the rail line you were on when you found your crush — this helps narrow down who it might be. I hear stories all the time about people finding love on the subway. I did a search for “hot male entrepreneur who also runs a tech blog” on a few of the subway lines in NYC but I came up empty.

I am guessing at some point they will add the ability to post photos – which might be a bit creepy. They should also add the ability to signup for alerts based on location and/or subway line.

The service was created by NY-based Lolz.

Last night, the nexyNY Digital crowd got a chance to converse with members of the Fourth Estate (or me, depending on their poor fortune). Charlie O’Donnell put together the “Meet the Startups” touting “100 CEOs and founders of NY Tech Startups in one room“. Since I was not representing a tech company this time around, I went as a stringer blogger to gather some info and names of new companies that deserve some visibility.

To start off with, I must thank all who spoke with me and gave me a short 30 second pitch – and will list them below. I also asked two questions, based on the recent discussion on tech companies and product managers in NYC brought up by Fred Wilson at the Clickable Cafe from a couple of weeks ago.

It was asserted that there is a dearth of “product managers” in New York City and a growth of this community (and skill set) would be a positive indicator of NY Tech growth. So, aside from meeting the founders – I asked about their tech staff and their “product management” staff.

Requisite Company Mentions
As promised, I wanted to mention the companies I met last night. All were excellent discussions – albeit incredibly fast…

• Market Publique – online market place for vintage clothing (must be at least 20 years old)
• MyItThings – online user-generated fashion magazine
• Mobile Commons – SMS/telephone advocacy tools
• UpSkil.com – a new career education site (cheaper but better than UoP)
• foursquare – mobile, location-based notification and community tool
• centrl – mobile, location- and social-network-based community tool
• boomerater – user-generated portal/magazine for baby-boomers into a number of vericals
• Funnel Scope – travel search engine with twitter API connection to converse with friends on trip decisions
• Asian in NY – a “craigslist for Asian community members” or a gumtree in the US for the Asian community
• Kidmondo – online baby journals
• cookstr – online receipes
• MeetingWave – faciliatating connecting in person with your contacts (Meetup meets LinkedIn)
• Convos – one-stop group communication and management platform
• OMGPOP – online multi-player games for teens
• Unigo – online publisher using student-generated content on universities
• Gate Guru – iPhone app for information on airports (similar to SeatGuru for airplanes)
• SquareSpace – SaaS web CMS with extensive tools
• kgb_web – an upcoming “Pandora for Content” – recommendation engine for all forms of content (with many other incarnations)
• Instinctiv – a smart-phone music player with stronger recommendation tools by tracking your on-device actions (e.g. skip, fast-forward, etc)
• Stratus Security – API access management and billing toolset

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BusinessWeek is currently holding its annual “America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs” contest.  You can view all of the finalists here and place your votes now through November 2, 2009.

Here are the NYC-based companies on the list (in alpha order):

• Drop.io (our coverage)
• GiveReal
• Hercules Networks
• Tumblr (our coverage)
• VIVO Natural Products

Most of the companies are headquartered on the East Coast! Go checkout all of the listed companies and then vote for a NYC-based company.

This weekend Yahoo is hosting the Open Hack event in NYC. The event brings together Yahoo developers and the public to learn what Yahoo has to offer developers as we all build our applications and startups. The Open Hack will run throughout the night as well – and they have provided a dop bag with toothpaste, mouthwash, etc. to stay clean.

If you read CN regularly, you know that I always do my best to grab schwag for all of you that couldn’t make it to the event. I was able to grab the following:

• sheets of stickers as seen below – there are so many stickers on each sheet that I am going to cut the sheets in half so more of you can have them
• a tshirt – I went with Women’s Medium size

If you’d like either of the above, send your address to general-at-centernetworks-d-o-t-com. I will ship anywhere in the world. The stickers are first come first serve and the tshirt winner will be randomly selected on Monday.

Boston-based online advertising firm Burst Media has announced the acquisition of NY-based Giant Realm today. Giant Realm describes their service as, “an online media company that targets the tough to reach male 18-34 year old demographic by delivering original, high-quality content from respected voices in the hottest areas of entertainment – including gaming, film, television, humor, music and gadgets”. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

I’ve used Burst Media in some capacity since the mid-90s. Today I only use them to serve some ads on InsideTransit as the other networks in my chain have performed better in both CPM and fill rate. Last year Burst Media announced several niche ad networks including a niche online gamers ad network. I assume the acquisition of Giant Realm will help to strengthen the Burst ad networks.

Giant Realm raised just over $5 million since early 2008. The company is based in midtown although no information was provided as to whether they will move in with Burst either in NYC or in Mass.

Last month Kara Swisher provided a list of companies she thought might be acquired soon and Giant Realm was one of the names on her list.

Related: check out all of our Burst Media coverage.

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.
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We’ve written about NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Media2020 plan to help boost the media industry in NYC. Part of the initiative is to strengthen the way the city shares data with the public. Earlier this year we saw the launch of NYC Big Apps Ideas which offered a way to crowdsource the ideas that might eventually be developed as part of the NYC Big Apps program which is launching today.

Bloomberg has posted a welcome message on the site and he notes, “Today, the City launched the inaugural NYC BigApps Competition to encourage talented application developers to create innovative online and mobile applications to serve New York City residents, businesses, and visitors. By developing these apps, you can help us make City government more accessible to all New Yorkers.”

There are 170 data sets that developers and entrepreneurs can work with. The data ranges from voting districts, school districts, citywide events schedules and restaurant inspections. I didn’t see anything related to the transit system listed which is a bit disappointing considering how much I think we could help people move around the city using technology.

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