Tag: Event Recap

The December 2014 NY Tech Meetup was a great sendoff to a banner year in New York’s hotshot startup scene. Key points were a presentation by New York State Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot about the state’s first website update since 1998, and a typically high-spirited cryptocurrency marketplace pitch. The city’s largest tech meetup is as inclusive, cluttered, and enthusiastic as it’s ever been—there were even lightsabers at the door, courtesy of Rackspace’s Object Rocket.

The startup pitches ran across nearly every buzzy sector: interactive video (Wirewax, which launched a shoppable episode of Cougar Town for TBS last season), social finance (Openfolio), Bitcoin (Celery, which also sells DogeCoin, in case that’s your cryptocurrency of choice), employee learnings (Showd.me), and more. A particularly interesting pitch came from Kinvolved — an attendance management system (“sort of like Tinder, but for kids,” quipped the presenter) for schools to ensure that kids are safely in school, with a built-in reminder technology.

On the content side, Bespoke is a browser that was described as “a holistic ideation workflow for creatives.” In human words, this means it’s a browser with built-in tools for sharing, gathering, and editing content. The content can be organized into books for easy collaboration. Think You is trying to pioneer a “wearable social network,” but will probably have obstacles as long as its QR-dependent programming fails to scan during live demos. Trying to pioneer revenue model for musicians was appLOUD, an Instagram-meets-Indiegogo app that syncs live video with links to tip an artist, or buy their music.

It’s not always a hit parade at the NY Tech Meetup, but that’s part of the fun — at an event featuring everyone from a New York official to a 3 day-old startup, the enthusiasm will carry us over into 2015.

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The November NY Tech Meetup featured easy college apps, interactive fiction, and of course, programming dorks. We love NY Tech Meetup not just for its technology-focused demos — though the noticeable absence of VC stress is constantly refreshing — but also for its diverse set of voices and presenters. Co-hosted by tech luminary Anil Dash, this month’s meetup hosted a slew of interesting product and technology demos:

Parcel is taking New York by storm, since it simplifies a common problem: many delivery services require signatures at the door, but the recipient is often at work, so there’s no good way to get a package. For $5, you can ship your package to Parcel’s warehouse, where they text you for an after-hours delivery window, and hand-deliver the package.

Waywire curates channels via passionate luminaries through its consumer and enterprise platforms. It remains to be seen if curation can hold its own against automated recommendation engines, but for now, Waywire has a few big names alongside it — TED, Vulture, and TimeOut have all used the service to create video channels.

Other products of note included:

• Simple Machine’s new game The Outcast presented an interesting solution to interactive fiction — Google Docs.
• Admitted.ly simplified the daunting college admission process via a social network.
• Squarespace ran a victory lap for its successful publishing platform.
• Offerpop explored engagement marketing via an interesting combination of hashtags, rewards, and mailing lists.

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