NYC tech meetup from the IAC building lobby
It was the first Tuesday of the month and as usual the New York tech community gathered for Scott Heiferman’s Tech Meetup. The sold-out event crowded the lobby of Barry Diller’s IAC building. (And in case you’re curious no sightings of Jakob Lodwick, recently fired from Vimeo one of IAC’s young web companies.)
Ignighter
It’s a group dating application where friends get together and find other groups to schedule dates events. It’s headed by Peter Kamali co-fouder and former CTO of Meetup. They soft launched as a pure Facebook app play and mentioned plans of extending the app to other platforms (i.e. Google’s Open Social)
Evolvist
It’s a user-generated business directory for green and eco-friendly companies. Planned to launch soon with focus on the food category (e.g. find a coffee shop that serves fair-trade organic coffee). Typical Ruby on Rails application mashed up with Google Maps, I guess they could have used Ning to get to the same point.
The Funded
If you’re in the startup scene I’m sure you’re familiar with The Funded - a private community for web entrepreneurs to exchange information and experiences dealing with VC companies. The novelty factor here was to see Adeo Ressi’s first public appearance after leaving anoniminity. He walked through some of the features of the site which VC’s will “never be able to access”. But, hey, closing that Series B seems like a pretty good deal in exchange of your login info.
Kaltura
This online group video making startup won the “people’s choice” award at TechCrunch40 past summer. It’s a complete video editing application that allows multiple people to collaborate. Very rich (and complex) user interface.
Unype
Some people find life too boring and move to virtual words. Murat Aktihanoglu created a virtual world that reminds people of the real life by using Google Earth as the model environment for Unype. While the experience seems a bit cumbersome jumping from the browser to Google Earth and back they get a “cool factor” bonus for enabling Unype on Facebook and Open Social (i.e. Hi5 and Ning).
Meetup Alliance
After hosting more than 50 tech meetups Scott Heifferman finally gets to demo his own product. It’s the Meetup Alliance, (prevously announced here) a product separate from the regular Meetup website which allows the creation of groups (or alliances) of groups. The idea extends beyond the Meetup groups allowing Facebook, Google, Yahoo and MySpace groups to interoperate creating large alliances.
