tech meetup Archive

Earlier tonight Aaron Price announced the launch of a new tech meetup based in Hoboken, New Jersey. For you NY’ers, that’s right across the river to the West of Manhattan and is accesible via the PATH subway system. The Hoboken Tech Meetup will take place monthly and the first meetup is scheduled for June 14th.

Five startups will demo their products and services at each Hoboken Tech Meetup. If you are interested in presenting, complete this interest form. Aaron has noted that the dates for the HTM won’t conflict with the New York Tech Meetup.

I’ve heard about a variety of startups working out of Hoboken. It’s great to see another venue for all of us to share our work!

Earlier this week the NY Tech Meetup held their January 2010 gathering. NY Convergence has a good recap from the event. Here are some of the presenting companies and other updates from NYC startups.

• Presslift is a multimedia press release service launched in beta from drop.io – initial pricing $299/release.
• Yogoer is the yelp for yoga
• SpeakerText helps you get transcription for videos
• BlazeTrack allows you to pay recording executives and celebs to listen to your sample tracks
• Udorse lets you show how excited you are for your favorite brands and products

Next week’s events include Digital Somethings and the Hatchery. Also, WNYC radio is looking to partner with developers and journalists in the NYC area.

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.
Continue reading “New York Tech Meetup October Recap” »

Tonight at 7pm Eastern the NY Tech Meetup will convene in NYC. You can watch the meetup live below. You can also checkout the over 100 videos we’ve recorded from companies who have presented at the NY Tech Meetup. The list includes demos from CoTweet, eDopter and Wirewize.

NY-based CoTweet provides an application that allows multiple people to access one Twitter account. The idea is that this works best with "brand" Twitter accounts not for individual users. They describe the service as "team workflow for Twitter".

 Before their demo, I spoke with one of the founders and asked why I wouldn’t just give my password out to anyone who needs my account. The application is actually pretty slick – it tracks which person made the reply, offers the ability to forward tweets to certain people on the team to respond to, etc.

The service is currently in private beta but they expect to open next week.

The founder of the Shorty Awards explained that the awards are similar to the emmy and oscar awards but for Twitter messages. Get this – Twitter is such a great medium to express the qualities and expertise that is within you, that we actually need an awards show to recognize those with the gifts. You can even nominate your dog’s twitter account for a Shorty Award – that’s right, people have created Twitter accounts for their pups.

The nomination period is over but final voting is going to start soon. They will fly all the winners to NYC for a special awards show in February. The Shorty Awards even got coverage in the New York Times!

Here’s their demo from last night:

(apologies for the lighting – I pushed but the lights were up as high as possible)

NY-based Botanicalls offers a service that lets your house plants talk to you. Basically your plants can tell you when they need water, sun, food, etc. The service explores the relationship between humans and their plants. They offer a DIY kit that you hook into your ethernet network. After the connections are made, that’s when the Twitter magic takes over!

The kit has to be soldered together but apparently it only takes an hour. I think they would sell more kits if they found a local electrician to do the soldering for a few dollars if the customer wants their kit completely assembled.

Here’s an example plant on Twitter. Here’s a demo of what Botanicalls does and how it works: