New York Tech Meetup October Wrap-Up

The mayor was in the house last night. It was his first visit to NY Tech and he got a (somewhat forced) standing ovation at the end of his speech. @elbloombito talked about the city's geeky new initiatives, his history in the NYC tech community and the death of Steve Jobs. There was no Q & A afterwards, so I didn't get to say "En Espanol, por favor." Anyway, it was a great setup for a fun, if somewhat rushed evening of demos.

Occupy Together

Meetup came to NYTM to announce a hackathon in support of Occupy Wall Street. It's happening this Friday at noon. They've also recently released a new Meetup Everywhere platform that lets people set up meetup topics and establish groups anywhere. I can't make it on Friday, but here's my idea. I'd like to see a map with all the geotagged tweets coming in with the #ows hashtag so we could follow the action across the globe.

Bit.ly

Bit.ly was there to remind us that they're more than just an URL shortener. They've come out with some big new features this week that will allow people to track sentiment analysis based on link sharing. They uses Abercrombie's anti-The Situation press release as an example. Apparently it generated a bunch of positive sentiment. That's definitely one to keep a close eye on.

LayerVault

LayerVault is version control for designers and it could be a huge deal. They take the Adobe Suite and set up a cloud-backed version control system for collaborative design. I'm sending an email out to the rest of the creative department here today. I think it will help to eliminate a lot of pain points around here.

Aurasma

They can't all be winners, and for me this week's low point was Aurasma. Aurasma is gimmicky beyond belief and they work under the false assumption that I want video ads on top of my regular print display ads. Sorry, guys, the advertisers might like this idea, but us regular consumers could care less.

Hack of the Month!

Fiesta.cc makes creating a new email group as easy as copying them on an email. I love all these new email based apps that are coming out these days. A longer post dedicated to that is coming soon.

Frame Socket

If you want more control over your online video content, Frame Socket just might have the answer. By hosting video through them (as opposed to YouTube or Vimeo), you'll get all the traffic generated by your content. I think you lose out on some of the social action you'd get from those channels, but some will definitely be more interested in control than exposure.