tech meetup Archive

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tonight AdaptiveBlue Director of Business Development Fraser Kelton presented their newest product, Glue. We reviewed Glue when it launched last month. AdaptiveBlue calls Glue a "contextual network."