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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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:

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Tonight at the NY Tech Meetup, 10 candidates presented their platforms in the hope that you will vote for them on Thursday. Current organizer Scott Heiferman will have all of the details about voting and the official videos on Wednesday but I thought I’d post my videos now so you can start thinking about who you will vote for. I randomized the names so they do not appear in the order in which they presented. To learn more about the candidates, view their information on the Meetup website.

NYConvergence has a text recap with notes from the event. Jason Adler posted his thoughts from the presentations.

Couple notes: this page is huge with 10 video players so give it a minute to load. Richie Hecker presented via video and after his presentation, IAC didn’t turn the stage lights back on so a couple of the presentations are a bit dark.

Richie Hecker

Owen Brunette

Gregory Magarshak

Sanford Dickert

James Wallace

Oz Sultan

Joshua Sherman

Chip Welsh

Nate Westheimer

Joe DiPasquale

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A quick reminder that if you plan to run for the New York Tech Meetup organizer position, you must do so by midnight on December 2. Current organizer Scott Heiferman explains how the process will work, "We’ll elect a new Organizer on 12/11 after Candidates give 5-min presentations at our 12/9 Meetup (RSVP 12/3 Noon). Then, with the new Organizer, Dawn (Barber) and I will establish a Board for the NYTM made mostly of other NY tech-related group Organizers. (+ If the new Organizer wants to make it a full-time paid gig, it’s up to her and the Board to figure out how to do so. Self-organized, baby!)"

To apply, post your details on the nomination post on the Meetup forum. My suggestion is to watch the following videos if you plan to apply:

• Scott’s overview of the changes from last month’s meetup
• Video from the discussion about the future of the meetup
• Scott has setup a forum for questions about the process

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Co-op combines a quick update tool like Twitter with inline time tracking and project management. Earlier this week, Co-Op presented a demo of their application at the NY Tech Meetup. We covered the launch of Co-Op last month.

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Last night at the NY Tech Meetup, organizer Scott Heiferman and co-organizer Dawn Barber provided an update about the future of the monthly meetup.  Scott will be stepping down as organizer and there will be a public vote for a replacement.

There will also be a new board setup for the meetup which will consist of 11 people; 7 people will come from other popular NYC technology meetups, the new organizer plus 3 additional people. Scott noted that more details on the nomination process will be posted later today. Here’s his video about how the process will work:

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MixedInk is a tool which the company describes as, "allowing massive groups to brainstorm together and create a final, top rated document."  From what I can tell, you write some words in a window and then MixedInk shows you related content which you can pull into your document. After you pull in the content fragments into your document, you then edit it and post it. From there apparently people can vote on your document and help it become the top rated document for that "plank". Types of content on MixedInk are called "planks".

This is another service that isn’t live – apparently it will be live in December. I wonder why they didn’t wait until next month for their demo so the site would be live and people can use/play with it.

Update: I received some updates from Vanessa Scanfeld, MixedInk founder that I thought were worth sharing:

• We presented even though the site isn’t live because the software is already available for use. It takes us just a few minutes to set up a topic for a new group, and we’re happy to do it! Anyone who is interested can get in touch with me directly at vanessa@mixedink.com. Aside from the Netroots Platform, MixedInk has already been used by a number of groups to collaboratively write newspaper articles and letters to the editor, open letters to congress, mission statements, and by high school English teachers to engage students in a new writing exercise, etc.
• The “plank” language was unique to the Netroots platform. The organizer of a topic can choose what term they want, which then auto-populates throughout the site. So if you are writing a mission statement, for example, the word “plank” would be replaced with “mission statement.”
• Finally, using MixedInk is basically a four-part process. It was a bit difficult to show all of that in only 5 minutes, so here is a quick overview:
  Step 1: An organizer sets up a topic and invites their community to participate
  Step 2: Community members submit their own versions of the text and remix what others have written. We have a few ways to make this easy. One is the “borrow this sentence” tool, which suggests relevant text. Also, users can recycle others’ text by simply mousing-over the text they want to reuse and clicking the “add to draft” button. That moves the text they want to incorporate into their draft. All authors are tracked as different versions are combined.
  Step 3: People rate different versions of the text, and the one that best represents the community’s viewpoint rises to the top
  Step 4: At the end of the time period, the top-rated version can be used to promote the community’s goals.

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Freshman Fund provides a way to easily donate to a 529 college savings plan for a child. Freshman Fund takes care of all of the backend paperwork and making sure that you are contributing to the correct plan.

Freshman Fund connects with Facebook and they also offer a branded credit card which pays rewards into your 529 plan.

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HabitatMap provides a directory and mapping service around a variety of environmental topics. In the video below, the example used is creating maps to see where waste is handled in NYC. There’s also an example which looks at where the power plants and "dirty" power plants are located in NYC. To get the data, HabitatMap has partnered with a number of different local and municipal agencies.

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This evening NY-based Cookstr presented their recipe database. There are a million recipe databases online and Cookstr says what makes their recipe database different is that the recipes come from cookbook authors. This is different than say FoodNetwork which promotes recipes from their television chefs and the crowdsourced recipe sites.

There’s only one issue… the site isn’t live! There was no mention of when the site would be live. I assume some percentage of the crowd probably tried to access the site and were denied.

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