Tag: NY Tech Meetup

Event Recap: February 2015 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Lab Team

Once again, New York’s largest hangout of tech dorks and startups occurred at NYU’s Skirball Center to see apps, coding solutions, on-demand services, and (of course) personal robots.

Attendees seemed most excited about Pager, an app that brings back a very old on-demand service — house calls. Pager allows users to book house calls from doctors, submit their symptoms, and shows nearby doctors. The emerging connected health space is still mostly unregulated, but Pager says their app is HIPAA-complient.

Other standouts were Dasher, a messaging app complete with rich media like GIFs; MindMyBiz, which aggregates public data to give more insights to small businesses; and Abacus, an expensing tool for businesses (used by everyone from Foursquare to Y Combinator). A really unusual presentation was from Robotbase, an autonomous AI stand which connects to all IoT devices, apps and open tech in a house and interfaces via a cartoon avatar on a stand.

Rounding out the pack: Bowery, a cloud coding solution that facilitates development; Kids Creation Station, which uses 3D printing to bring children’s drawings to life; Classcraft, which turns any classroom into a role-playing; and Poacht, which is something like Tinder for job discovery.

(Image via tech.co)

Event Recap: December 2014 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Lab Team

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.

(Image via)

Event Recap: November 2014 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Lab Team

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.

(Image via)

Event Recap: September 2014 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Lab Team

The NY Tech Meetup celebrated its tenth anniversary Tuesday night with an audience of 800 and a special appearance by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Along with former Mayor Bloomberg’s visit in 2011, this is the second visit by a standing mayor to one of the city’s premier tech events. This month, NY Tech Meetup featured coding-free app creation, customizable product design, mobile payments, a heating detection sensor, and more

Mayor de Blasio used his surprise keynote to announce the creation of a Chief Technology Officer position in New York. The city’s first “tech czar” will be Queens native Minerva Tantoco, formerly of UBS and Merrill Lynch.

The rest of the NY Tech Meetup was populated by demos, precocious members (one of the audience members was eleven!) and the welcome trend of more women involved in tech.

The evening occurred under the shadow of Apple’s massive announcement that afternoon (“this is the second keynote you’ll see today”). Notable demos tonight were:

  • Dashlane, a mobile password/login/payment app that ensures quick and secure checkouts on mobile apps and Safari. It’s a beautifully designed app—users enter their name, shipping, and billing info, and never have to log in again. The recent announcement of Apple Pay will be very interesting for Dashlane; it was the elephant in the room all night.
  • Heat Seek NYC, a de Blasio-approved platform to detect apartment temperatures for heating complaints. Heat Seek explained that of the 200,000 annual heating complaints, many go unresolved due to unreliable data, leading to violations and health issues, disproportionally among low-income residents. Heat Seek NYC aims to fix that: their sensors can be installed cheaply, and will broadcast temperature data to make sure that a heating complaint can be backed up in court. Mayor de Blasio offered them a meeting with the Housing Commission, and the crowd gave them a massive ovation.
  • Bubble, a visual interface for app development in lieu of coding. Powerful and efficient, it includes a simulated front-end and back-end as well as a publishing element. The one troubling aspect is its lack of open source capability, but the functionality was impressive for non-coders.