NYC tech meetup from the IAC building lobby
The NYC technology social graph migrated to Frank Gehry’s IAC building tonight, a different venue from the usual Cooper Union. This gathering was less about the startup scene and more to check what Facebook and Google had to say about their social/ad platforms. As usual Scott Heiferman was the host and did a great job to keep the presenters on time.
With some crowd pleasing presentations - although being around for a while - he brought two reruns from the Web 2.0 Summit 2006: Perceptive Pixel’s Jeff Han, with his always cool the-future-is-already-here-but-not-evenly-distributed wall/table multi-touch interface and Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth.
The startup category was represented by David Karp and his very cool Tumblr (which I should disclose I use for my personal blog). They had a very recent funding announcement and new release which he demonstrated. There are no plans to jump on Google’s Open Social and the plan is to grow the network, already with 150,000 tumblelogs.
Another startup to present was drop.io. Very cool drop tool for storage and sharing of any types of files. They call a drop a chunk of space people can use to store and share anything (pictures, video, audio, docs) privately, without accounts, personal registration, or an email addresses. While the two guys (Sam and sorry didn’t catch the other one’s name Darshan) demonstrated the crowd sent a number of files and notes to http://drop.io/techmeetupnov which you can check now.
Sleep.fm - a social alarm clock was presented to a puzzled audience, but the ground rules from Scott Heifferman prohibited questions about the business model.
In the post-startup category Jakob Lodwick showed the new hi-definition videos available now on Vimeo. Their HD channel is sponsored by Canon.
Google couldn’t be left out and a new business lady from the NYC office (apologies but her name wasn’t on the agenda) Mary Himinkoof talked a minute about Open Social. Nothing that you wouldn’t know if you’re didn’t land from Mars today.
Ami Vora, a former Microsoft product manager and currently a senior platform manager at Facebook, spoke about today’s announcement of Facebook Ads and its four components (Ads, Pages, Beacon, Insight). The best question (from Scott) wasn’t answered. “Madison Avenue needs it pretty simple & dumbed-down. How to make sure ad agencies get the potential of what has been launched and take advantage of it?”. That’s up to them to answer that.
