Yesterday, I attended this month’s New York Tech Meetup at the IAC Building. As always, these events are a great place to meet the up-and-coming faces of the Web 2.0 world in NYC, as well as relate with other programmers, developers and professionals after a good day’s work. Below are the list of presenters from the Meetup, which I encourage everyone takes a look at as there are truly some great ideas brewing in the Northeast.
- Steve Rosenbaum—Magnify.net
- Oliver Hurst-Hiller—DonorsChoose.org
- Mark Ghuneim—Trendrr
- Ben Kaufman—Kluster
- Ben Satterfield—Twiddla
- Justin Ouellette—Muxtape
- Nate Westheimer—BricaBox
Although all of the presenters showed a fair amount of promise for their projects, there were a few companies that caught my eye as having the strongest ability to capture a large social community.
Here are my thoughts:
Although DonorsChoose.org has been around since 2000, assisting in connecting teachers with charitable folks willing to assist in the education of our youth near and far, they have recently released some new developer tools and fresh API that adds considerable appeal to this already great tool.
Trendrr allows users to track trends of companies, people and other entities across a variety of channels and topics. The design and concept for Trendrrlooks awesome, however, in the few minutes I took playing around with the Mashup, I could not get it to work effectively. I think if Trendrrcan get a few UI/UX kinks worked out, it will be a great utility.
Twiddla allows users to collaborate in real-time both audibly and visually. Best of all, its a free service. I saw these guys win an award at SXSW but I didn’t test out Twiddla until today. As a result, Chris and I spent our lunch hour grabbing a Carrotblog screenshot and collaborating on a drawing with it. Cool stuff.
Muxtape updates the creation of mix tapes to a very simple yet awesome social utility. I love the fact that they limit the amount of songs you can have on your muxtape to twelve tracks, which truly captures the selectivity and thought that must go into creating a mix tape. Great transference of a common ever day practice to the online community.
BricaBox combines a variety of applications and mashups to allow users to create an affordable, multi-functional website for personal or business use. All I can say is I wish I had built this site.
