Event Recap: February 2016 NY Tech Meetup

On Tuesday, February 9th, the IPG Media Lab attended the NY Tech Meetup at the Skirball Center for Performing Arts. A handpicked selection of New York City’s most promising startups took turns demoing their products to a capacity crowd, representing a wide array of industries from event planning to manufacturing. Below are some snapshots of the exhibitors:

TradeIt is a Fintech company that allows investors to place trades on the sites where they get their news. Let’s say you are reading about Apple’s amazing quarter on The Street. TradeIt powers the button on the article page that allows you to purchase shares of Apple immediately. With a secure API that plugs into financial news sites, TradeIt prompts the user to select their broker to execute the trade. This feature is currently live with 23 partners and available on both desktop and mobile apps.

Perhaps you would like a quick, affordable way to manufacture small goods. VooDoo Manufacturing can help you achieve your goal with their 3D printing warehouse located in Brooklyn. Consumers can upload a 3D model, enter a quantity, and purchase all through their eCommerce site. If they need help with the 3D model, VooDoo’s team of designers can assist with the creation process. Low volume orders of 20 units or less ship next day, while high volume orders of over 10,000 units take up to two weeks.

If you need help planning your next party, it is time to download Funnster, the event planning app. Hosts post events with time, date, location and invite their friends. They also choose favors that they will need for the party so their guests know exactly what to bring. They also have the option to simply share the cost of the party with the host. In order to acquire new users, Funnster is offering $40 towards booze for hosting a party through their app. Keep them in mind for your next soiree!

Rather than staying in and hosting, sometimes it’s more fun to hit the town. With all of the great locations available in New York City, DIDiT NY can help you narrow down the options. Their experience discovery app curates lists based on expert columnists’ advice. For example, you want to visit Beyoncé and Jay Z’s favorite dinner spots. DIDiT crawls through web content and curates mentions of the power couple’s dining habits and surfaces options to you. You can then save the locations and mark once you’ve “DIDiT.”

Now one thing that Beyonce and Jay Z certainly have is a massive social following. Shareablee monitors social conversations to provide insights on content engagement. They pull all interactions (likes, tweets, comments, etc.) across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn to build user profiles. Marketers can use this platform to measure their social footprint and discover the makeup of their target audience.

Rounding out this month’s Tech Meetup were a career building tool, a site for monitoring the public council in NYC, an educational interactive toy, a 3D sketching platform, and an app that punishes the user for being late. Overall, the meetup showcased a very impressive lineup of innovative and useful tech.

Twitter To Reinvent Itself With “Project Lightning”

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Twitter has been undergoing some major changes recently, including a leadership change, eliminating character limit in direct messages, and officially rolling out its autoplaying video ads. And now, reports claim that Twitter has been working on a new project codenamed “Project Lightning” that could help twitter reinvent how people see and search for tweets.

This new project will bring a curated news platform to Twitter, shifting its content focus from user’s timeline to breaking news and events as they happen in real time. A group of editors at Twitter will be handpicking and sorting relevant tweets into various event-based channels, enhancing Twitter’s appeal as a go-to site for real time news and events. Although still a few months away from launching, we could already foresee brands getting on board with timely tweets to get a piece of the amplified attention.

 

Correction: An earlier version of the post misspelled “Project Lighting” as “Lightening”.

Snapchat’s ‘Our Story’ Could Be Revenue Driver

Snapchat is releasing “Our Story,” a new feature which lets people attending the same event contribute snaps to a collective story, viewable to the public. Debuting with the Electric Daisy Carnival, Our Story is a huge development that may be a source of revenue for Snapchat as it looks to monetize events. But with location services enabled and public viewing, could “Our Story” undermine Snapchat’s core product?

Russia Announces Mobile Photography Ban For 2014 Winter Olympics

The Sochi Winter Olympics, coming this January, are reportedly coming with a ban on any mobile photography by journalists.  In fact, the ban extends to all non-professional equipment, ruling out the possibility for reporting via Instagram, Vine, Whatsapp, Frontback, and any other media-creating platform presently shaking up what it means to broadcast information and media online.  This attempt at placing tight controls on the flow of news out of Russia during the games is not new – London tried to ban social media during its turn hosting the Olympics in 2012 – but the question remains, how effective can it be? Will journalists and news outlets be willing to risk their credentials to reach consumers faster, more effectively, and more intimately than ever before during one of the world’s testing grounds for media coverage?