NYC Archive

NY-based appointment planning and physician review service ZocDoc has announced they have traveled a bit further south and have launched in Washington, D.C. They selected Washington based on feedback they have received from potential users over the past year.

ZocDoc is very easy to use. You select your insurance provider, location and specialty (dentist, psychiatrist, derm, etc.) and ZocDoc spits back a list of available appointment times. For me it’s saved a ton of time calling around to find available appointments that match both my insurance provider and my availability. ZocDoc notes that they have over 21,000 listed appointments in the D.C. area. In NYC ZocDoc has over 300,000 available appointments and the company notes that over 90,000 people use the service each month.

It’s great to see a NY-based startup expanding to another east-coast city.

Check out all of our ZocDoc coverage including my real-world test of the service. ZocDoc team members are also looking to meet with Senator Olympia Snowe around health-care reform, something I’ve written about previously and still believe we are doing it all wrong.

The Wall Street Journal and NY-based Unigo have announced a new partnership today and have launched “WSJ on Campus”.  The new WSJ on Campus service is described as, “WSJ On Campus takes you into the dorms, classrooms and back offices to illuminate what goes on behind the scenes, with Journal reporters, current college students and noted experts providing their perspectives on every topic.”

Unigo CEO Jordan Golman told me earlier today, “Unigo’s network of students across America have been working with the Journal to create an inside look at the world of college admissions and college life.” Unigo covers 2,000+ colleges and universities from across the U.S. Content for the new WSJ on Campus site will come from current Unigo content and new exclusive content from the WSJ.

The WSJ publishes a Classroom Edition from September through May and today’s announcement will be a complement to the newspaper.

Unigo is a NY-based startup that is one to watch. Check out my video interview with Jordan from earlier this year. Jordan also provided a column offering tips on how to get your startup on television.

There’s a movement underway to install countdown timers inside of the NYC subway. Many of the other large systems in the world already have them. While I don’t believe they are necessary in NYC with the very short wait times for a train, I did notice something related that could be a new way for the MTA (the transit authority in NYC) to create a new revenue stream.

Nearly every station I’ve been to recently had very clear announcements on the platforms. This is a big change from the announcement systems of the 70s and 80s. There are announcements about security, how long until the next train arrives and a variety of other public service messages.

With all of the talk these days about local and local advertising, this could be a great opportunity for the MTA to launch “platform audio advertising”. I could see two types of ads; a general category that runs across the system and a local category with ads for companies that are within a short distance of the current station.

Now let’s come back to the countdown timers. We know how far a train is from a station and that distance tells us the precise time to play the ads. Naturally we wouldn’t want to play an ad when a train is entering the station. There is plenty of time between trains entering and departing to provide a reasonable amount of ads that don’t overwhelm riders while still providing value to the local community.

A self-service system similar to Google AdWords would work well for this transit audio advertising network. Pick your time, your station(s), etc and place your bid. Other factors would have to be taken into account as well to make sure a variety of businesses were able to get in on the action.

You already have to listen to other people’s music on the subway so why not listen to some brief ads that keep our fares low and might actually provide real local value.

In related transit news, FourSquare and BART announced a partnership today.

As a railfan, it’s so exciting to see the major transit systems across the U.S. starting to embrace technology.

Here’s the latest NYC venture capital news:

TechAviv Angels Launch

TechAviv founder Yaron Samid has announced the launch of a new angel investing group named TechAviv Angels. Several popular NYC startup founders are part of the group including Ron Yekutiel from Kaltura and Yaron Galai from Outbrain. It looks like about 15 entrepreneurs make up the TechAviv Angels group. In addition, a number of early stage VC firms are participating as well.

From the announcement, “We seek to identify, fund and mentor our next generation of big winners. Every two months in Tel Aviv 5 startups get 5 minutes to pitch in front of our members. We’re an informal Angel club with members investing individually.”

It’s free to present and the first demo night will be held on November 24. I am unsure of is if the demo event will be held in NYC or in Israel. I will update this post once I find out the answer. More details on Ouriel Ohayon’s blog.

RRE Offers Office Hours

NYC VC firm RRE Ventures has announced that they will now offer office hours beginning on November 9. Each entrepreneur can signup for a 15-minute slot and discuss any topic with the venture capital team at RRE. RRE has invested in a number of NYC-based startups including Adaptive Blue, Drop.io and GoMobo.

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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.