New York Tech MeetUp – July Round Up
July 7th, 2009 
Augmented Environments, Business, Innovation, NYC, New Media, Research, Social Media, Video 
Mark Kizelshteyn
TurtleThink attended this evenings New York Tech Meet Up, where a few startups presented some interesting products and services. None of the applications were particularly ground breaking, but a few are worth noting.
The first interesting one was a collaborative polling company called urtak, which offers different categories of user generated polling topics. From their website: “The goal of the Urtak project is to find an answer to the question “What do men and women live by?” Since no single person has the knowledge to answer this question, we propose that we must work together, pooling our knowledge and insight to learn what we all care about, what unites us, and what makes us different from each other.” It seems like an interesting company, however, what compels those people to answer the polls. This is a good idea that is lacking a sticky component.
Vocab Sushi was another interesting concept. The free service offers “bite size” vocabulary words and sources them from thousands of news and media outlets daily. The vocab words are offered in contextual examples and one can play “never ending” games with those words. The company was founded by Jeff Novich and the website notes: “VocabSushi provides thousands of sentences that demonstrate any vocab word’s contemporary usage in news articles. Compared to the brute force method of flashcard definitions, a deeper understanding of the word can be attained simply by reading several interesting sentences that contain that word.” It is an interesting replacement for flashcards, and I believe this will catch on. I would have loved to use this years ago when I was studying for the SATs. Although I subscribe to Anu Garg’s Word.A.Day, I can nonetheless see myself using this service once in a while.
Sponge Cell presented a new form of flash based interactive banner advertising. The company is using social networking tools built into ad banners to help push content directly from banners as opposed to relying on clicking through the banner and arriving at a new website. The company writes: “The best advertising gives its audience information that they want to hold onto and share. Sponge Cell lets people do just that, by pushing advertising onto calendars, social profiles, mobile devices, home pages and other permanent places, without disrupting their browsing experience.” The company is attempting to mitigate a persons aversion to clicking a banner and being steered away from their chosen website. Sponge Cell’s banner’s allow for brand interaction directly on the banner. Another interesting idea, but once again, what compels me to interact with a banner which has an added social media component? Sponge Cell did discuss their advertising algorithm (patent pending) which bases the ad not on the search key word but on the aggregated data that the search terms yields. I thought this was already built into Google’s algorithm, but go figure.
The most interesting application was Zagat’s Augmented Reality Application called NRU.
The application allows you to find restaurants, nightspots, and shops “near you.” As you rotate your mobile device (360 degrees), the location of the restaurants appear relative to you. It also syncs with Zagat’s detailed reports on the restaurants. Although Zagat reviews are not user generated and have a top-down approach, the service is still fairly compelling as a closed source offering of reviews opposed to Urban Spoon. Check out a video demo of the product here:
The product is only offered on the Android as of now, but with the release of the magnetometer on the iPhone — we should see this application at the app store shortly (as long as Apple opens up the channels for AR production on the iPhone). This is a cool app and just the beginning of compelling AR apps to reach the market.
NYTM also invited two guest speakers: Iranian technologist, Ali Amami, who discussed the recent Iranian election, consequential revolt and the role of social media. This was the 10th election in Iran after the Islamic revolution and is the first election since then to see the levels of protest. Ali Amami stated that this was a new school revolution as a result of social media. He said that cell phones were used as capturing devices, where citizens became independent news outlets. Facebook was used as a community organization tool and YouTube was a video distribution channel that major media outlets, like CNN, turned towards. The question, however, was what went wrong? Well, first off, Nokia sold wiretapping equipment to Iran’s Telecom giant (source: Wall Street Journal). Also, Iran’s internet is state owned and they intercepted and filtered content with the ultimate suspension of internet service across the country.
Amami’s message to NYTM was that as technologists, we need to think about ways to work towards solving the issues of wiretapping/filtration, interception and suspension of the world wide web. He urged companies like Google and Yahoo to not bow to fascist government requests.
And the evening ended with Douglas Rushkoff discussing his new book, Life inc., about an open source economy.
It is always a pleasure to hear Rushkoff speak — he is intelligent, charismatic and extremely articulate. Speaking to the NYTM crowd, Rushkoff offered the analogy that our economic system is like a closed source operating system, though we behave as if our role in the economy was somehow organic. He argues that although there are natural elements and emergent properties of our system, our currency and economic affairs hold a bias to corporations (which are anti-competitive) and a centralized currency (which seeks to create value from top down) — the opposite of an open source economy, which was most closely realized in the late Middle Ages. During the late Middle Ages, there was tremendous spending and abundance, where with local currency people invested and reinvested from the bottom-up — wealth was distributed to people who created value. Those who did not create value, did not make money. The aristocracy, seeing the uprising of the middle class and that wealth was no longer controlled by the centralized authority — made local currency illegal. This type of approach extends to today’s times. Rushkoff offers the solution (to the NYTM crowd) of an open source economy which is being facilitated by the internet and low start-up capital. As our economy is at a downfall, he is urging us to take advantage of the situation and create value through the net.
It was an interesting evening at NYTM, and I look forward to the next meet up! NYTM also showcased the 3 finalists of their t-shirts competition (you can vote here.)
Tags: Augmented Reality, New York, NRU, NYTM, Round Up, Rushkoff, Sponge Cell, urtak, Vocab Sushi, Zagat
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