I attended last night’s NY Tech Meetup. And, apparently, it’s a coveted ticket. I had an extra and I received more than 25 emails in less than 24 hours requesting the ticket!
The group that “met up” was comprised of people in various Tech positions across many industries, located in NYC. I have to say, the evening was pretty cool.
The event consists of 2 hours of presentations by start-ups in the city, and then an “after-party” which yours truly was way too tired to attend. 🙂
It opened up with a very moving video from Mike Lazerow of Buddy Media. They just got acquired by Salesforce (who also owns Radian6) for $400Million. Not bad.
Then NYTM premiered the latest of their #startupstories, a video series co-created with NASDAQ and produced by HD Made. The series features members of the NY technology community (like Fred Wilson of USV, David Tisch of TechStars, John Borthwick of Betaworks, the founders of Birchbox, Warby Parker, SideTour, OkCupid, Food52, Artsicle and others) talking about key topics for anyone building a startup: The Pitch, The Team, Failure, and The Money (just released last night).
Here’s the link to their latest release – The Money: http://vimeo.com/43404794
Here’s where you can find all the videos in one place: http://nytm.org/resources/startupstories
Now the lineup of presenters — all which are worth checking out:
RentHackr – Lets you see competitive rents in NYC. It’s in Beta and they’re expanding to other markets.
CompStak – A database of crowdsourced commercial rent comps in NYC
Lover.ly – A pinterest-like ecommerce wedding community
RapGenius – You must check them out! They explain lyrics to rap songs and even have the rappers themselves explaining them.
Loosecubes – Enables you to find shared office space globally
estimize – This is a site for analysts to pool information about the market. Supposedly it’s 64% accurate.
Fitocracy – For all you fitness peeps it’s a global app/community segmented by geography and discipline (weight training, running, swimming etc.)
Venmo – A public payment system between friends. Got $100 you can lend me?
NimbleTV – This was the best of all…you can login to your TV service from anywhere in the world and watch from any computer, tablet and mobile phone. I’m all over this one! Someone made a comment last night about Nimble needing a big legal budget. That was hilarious!
I definitely found the evening very inspiring in terms of new, creative ideas. I was impressed to see the amount of really inventive and useful technologies across a variety of industries (Finance, Real Estate, Health, E-commerce). I was surprised though that there weren’t any gaming technologies on the docket, nor the non-profit space.
And, I was thrilled to see Women entrepreneurs as leaders (Loosecubes and Lover.ly.) Kudos to them. However, I did see a decent number of young Women in the audience, which gives me hope that at some point in the future, Tech won’t always be a male dominated industry.
I highly recommend attending the next meetup (if you can get a ticket.) It’s a great networking opportunity, food for thought on technology solutions, and a nice community environment.
Want to see the twitter conversation from last night? Go to twitter.com and search for #nytm in the search bar. You’ll see a few tweets from yours truly.
If you do check these sites out, let me know what you think of them.
