Apture – (Tristan Acher) "We give readers power to search and explore information without leaving the page." Financial Times is their customer. It is embedded software that displays an in-page window popped up when a user selects text on the page. Used by newspapers (NY Times, Reuters, Financial Times, the Nation) to keep users on the page while providing a richer sense of what it is. Publishers will need to add only 1 line of code to integrate.
Last week that Apple said that the new iTunes 10 logo has dropped the CD. This logo change received much bally-hooed flack in the media, with designers even spawning replacement suggestions, such as this one.
Then, the popular spoof Steve Jobs tweeter @CEOSteveJobs sent this: "We're also taking the booth out of the Photo Booth icon because, frankly, no one uses those anymore either."
This is the 76th NY Tech meetup; September is going to be the 6th year anniversary. Nate has a little self back-patting before getting to the show.
Nate toutes his work brokering a connection for NY high school students to
get placed as interns at start-ups.
eventros.com – iPhone app to connect people at business networking events. Looks like it is
Usual round-up of tonight's NYTM with my brief annotations.
Betterfly.com – A personal betterment site. "Learn look and feel better." Helps independent freelances find clients. Online booking system, availability is displayed and clients can book freelancers online. Nice look site, looks like it could be rails, Web 2.0 polish. Not sure how this site will distinguish itself or if it will gain traction, but it looks nice.
The most dramatic thing at tonight's New York Tech Meetup was, far and away, Scott Heifferman, founder of Meetup.com, smashing an iPad on stage (yes, it was a real iPad). Perhaps the furor over Apple's ubiquitous onslaught of advertising got to him, perhaps it was to be dramatic, probably both. (He was telling us about a new feature on Meetup.com called "Meetups Everywhere" which allows anyone to spark Meetups around a specific topic all over the world.) His move was dramatic, albeit lacking in much of a point (His point was that his innovation is way more cool than the iPad.). http://meetup.com/everywhere
Jan 282010
In 1984 the personal computer industry was forever changed by the first Mac. More expensive and less familiar than the DOS-based computers that were gaining popularity, the Mac was a first: It shipped with a point-and-click mouse standard and its core operating system – the thing we used to tell the computer what to do – was a flat desk-like surface. Once we got used to the idea, we could move the pointer around with the mouse, move "icons" that represent ideas on our virtual desk from one place to another.
Two of the interesting startups presented tonight at NY Tech meetup underscore one of the crucial facets of the tech industry today: In terms of what will be successful, no one really knows what is going to happen next.
Unless something is really the next Facebook or Twitter, it is going to have to piggyback on existing tools or data sources.
Two more presentations from TechCrunch worth mentioning. The first, a interesting gift-card auction site that aims to expand retailers market for gift cards. RackUp is an EBay-like site where shoppers can bid on gift cards. The people who bid soonest (unlike ebay) and the most get the gift card, typically for less than the actual amount on the card. (You might pay $50 for an $80 gift card.) The discount you receive depends on a few factors which I didn't quite catch, but it has something to do with when you bid (rewarding earlier bidders first) and your 'score' on RackUp. It sounded like they give frequent shoppers bigger bonuses.
TechCrunch50, the industry's American Idol-like startup spring board, wasn't immune this year to the usual roundup of mediocre start-up ideas. Most of them pimped by overly optimistic business types who have convinced themselves their ambitious yet somewhat dubiously profitable start-up dreams are going to make it.
One wonders just how far outside the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley a conference full of fanciful startups will matter. Yes, Tech Crunch, now in its third year, provides a media pulpit from which countless mostly-unknown tech industry startups launch their hot new idea. Problem is, most people who run startups are woefully deluded as to the probably of success and are running on the same kind of bravado found requisite to be a tech startup today: You believe you've got an innovating edge to a growing market (or you believe you can create a market where there wasn't one anymore), you've got some piece of software that does something Web 2.0, and you've got a marketing team. Problem is, most of them don't actually have anything innovative and are running on hot air.