October NY Tech Meetup - Photos and Review

Last night was the October NY Tech Meetup at Cooper Union in The Village! SoUrban.net was there and here is the review with photos!

Scott Heiferman greeting the crowd

Review and Photos after the jump...

ChangingThePresent

ChangingThePresent is a non-profit charity organization that has modeled their service around the Facebook $1 gifts. Instead of buying your friend some lame hotdog or whatnot, you can actually donate $1 to charity and post an image on your friend's Facebook profile. Not only do you help charity, but you get the credit for doing it too! All and all, it's a good idea.

Robert Tolmach from ChangingThePresent

Robert Tolmach from ChangingThePresent

Digicash

I have no idea what Digicash is or does. The presentation was pretty bad and I really couldn't follow it. I've slept through classes before and learned more.

Patrick Questembert presents Digicash, as a big question mark forms above my head

From Digicash.com:
"Based on patent-pending technology, Digicash provides a digital cash implementation empowering consumers and businesses to manipulate money in powerful and secure ways, yet through intuitive interfaces."

...More Digicash...

OrganizedWisdom

OrganizedWisdom is the intersection of WebMD, Mahalo(SoUrban.net is listed on Mahalo btw...) and About.com. OrganizedWisdom looks for quality medical websites and orgznizes them by topic. Each link or WisdomCard (as they call it) is reviewed by their Guides and a licensed doctor.

Steven Krein & Unity Stoakes demo OrganizedWisdom

OrganizedWisdom isn't the first human generated "search engine" and they already have stiff competition from WebMD. I briefly spoke with Unity after the meetup and there is a huge opportunity for beYOU.tv (my day job) and OrganizedWisdom to work together. Look for beYOU.tv posts on OrganizedWisdom in the near future.

Steven Krein & Unity Stoakes demo OrganizedWisdom

Yoinkd

Be prepared, it's the boyscout motto for a reason. Jing Chen demoed Yoinkd with what she repeatably called a "slow connection". Yoinkd is a video aggregator site, you plug in RSS feeds and it will create a playlist. You can also search for vidoes. Yoinkd sounds pretty half-baked and the demo didn't help. After 5 mins of presenting, I think video played for maybe 3 seconds, ouch!

Jing Chen demos Yoinkd

Opps, the network is slow... Always have a plan B...

Jing Chen demos Yoinkd

Clickable

Clickable was easily the best presentation at the tech meetup. I hope we use Clickable at beYOU.tv becuase I want to play with it!

David Kidder demos Clickable

Clickable allows you to monitor and tack your adwords campains through various sites, Yahoo, Google ect... Clickable will show you how each campaign is doing, which words are doing well/failing and will give you suggestions on how to increase your ROI. The UI was very sleek and looked easy to use, the perfect companion to Adsense.

MushyGushy

MushyGushy is going to be a fad at best, a soon-to-be empty domain at worst. MushyGushy created Me-Cards. They are animated flash cards with your head attached to an animated stick figure. You can upload a picture, cut our your head and attach it using their webpage. Probably a lot of fun the first time, after that, not so much.

Mike Mendoza demos MushyGushy

Mike didn't only demo, he took it one step further (which he shouldn't have). MushyGushy is going to grow into a marketing machine (or something like that) once they get enough users registered. The idea is that advertisers can send you ads with your head in the Me-Card. For example, if Radiohead has a new album coming out (which they do, checkout my Radiohead In Rainbows post), Radiohead could send you a Me-Card with their animated semi-stick bodies and heads attached with you in a card. You are suppose to care becuase your face is in the ad, but I doubt you will.

Mike Mendoza demos MushyGushy

Styky

Styky is a place to host your address book and phone numbers. You can network with others and update your phone number if you get a new one. It's a cool idea becuase you can easily get your numbers back after you lose your phone.

Kunal Gupta demos Styky

Will people actually use it? I give it a 50/50 shot. Crappy phones, like my Razor, aren't supported. If you are using a good smart phone, chances are that you can already sync with your computer...

Kunal Gupta demos Styky

NewGroper

NewGroper is a parody news website, it's the Daily Show in webpage form. They had their 15 minutes of fame when MSNBC ran one of their fake stories as fact. The crowd loved this and they got the largest response.

Greg Galant & Adam Varga demo NewsGroper

I've met Adam at Coobric, and I like him, but I don't see a bright future for NewGroper. I mean, what's the point? Are you really going to read a fake news website? I've read it a few times and have yet to LOL.

Action Shots

Crowd Shot 1

Crowd Shot 2