The Technoverse Blog

I’ve generally taken the train into  Manhattan to discover the latest social media startups to come out of our local tech scene.  Last week, I serendipitously came upon an intriguing company in my own extended New Jersey neighborhood.  Located in Montclair, Bubbalon is a rating website that asks its community to rate the value of restaurants, TV shows,  music, movies, politicians, ideas, and just about anything else in this whole wide world.

Sure, it is similar to other sites in this genre. Like Hot Potato, Hunch, and Foodspotting, Bubbalon banks on its members’ social altruism and cognitive surplus.  Ratings of friends (as supplied by Facebook) also give users a benchmark on which to gauge  judgments and potentially sway decisions. And there’s a Foursquare integration to boot.

Bubbalon, though, separates itself from other social sites in its emphasis on the emotional value assigned to rated objects— in other words, does it make you happy. Read more …

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I was looking for a no-sweat way to introduce Flash presentations into my blog for all the usual reasons: richer interactions without web server intervention, more space efficient way to present photos and videos, and just the plain fun of embedding multi-media into my text-centric blog. When I saw Frontal’s presentation at New York Tech Meetup last month,  I was inclined to be very receptive to a free development environment, simple scripting language, and easy deployment scenario (also, free) for creating and rendering SWFs. Did I mention the whole thing is free?

There are other shareware Flash tools out there, and  so I wanted to take a quick peek at the competition before making my commitment to Frontal.  It didn’t take long during my survey to realize Frontal’s advantages.  Most of my issues with the likes of MiniBuilder, FlashDevelop, and a few others involved having to learn Adobe’s ActionScript, deal with compilers, or overcome my severe allergic reaction to integrated development environments.

I was sold.  On page two you can see an embedded Frontal photo slideshow I put together in under 15 minutes. Read more …

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My ears are still ringing from a rant by Sam Lessin, Drop.io founder, as he went about trying to disprove intrinsic altruism and trust, and reclaim the commanding heights with neo-classical economics. More on this later, but it is curious position for a tech entrepreneur whose site is based on people uploading and sharing content for a cost of bupkis.

A few of the high points for me at last night’s New York Tech Meetup: TurnTo, which lets online shoppers find out what friends have purchased; Twilio (which I’ve written about before) had a nice telephony demo for this data-centric audience, and Indaba is a great site for helping musicians monetize their craft.

Oh, and there was a startup, I think called Microsoft, showing off their Bink, or maybe it’s Bing(?) search engine. And Willow Garage, a robotics startup, gave us a glimpse into a future where we stay at home and let our mechanical avatars roam the corridors and aisles of faraway office suites. Read more …

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Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures (Foursquare), recently called Apple an evil company. The reason?  “They believe they know what is best for you and me. And I think that is evil.”

It’s a definition of evil I think most of us would not agree with. On the other side of Wilson’s argument, you’ll find a few light-weight thinkers such as Socrates (see Plato’s Republic).  So … doctors are evil because they claim to know what’s best for us. Add to the list accountants, plumbers, carpenters, and architects.

I think Wilson has a different gripe with Apple. Apple has successfully shown that the America consumer has an appetite for quality products, even though they’re based on walled-off hardware and software.  While passing Wilson’s test for goodness, Google’s open-source Android platform is not necessarily a path to quality and may actually do some evil. Read more …

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It’s been a slow Friday afternoon at the end of a four day heatwave—it’s now a chilly 84° in NJ.  When my beta invitation to Atmosphir, the do-it-yourself virtual world startup, appeared in my mailbox, I decided to take the bait and escape reality for an hour or two

I’m not really that interested in multi-player games, but after seeing what a 12-year-old boy  did with Amosphir during a what-kids-are-doing-with-the-Internet interlude at a recent New York Tech Meetup, I was impressed. At his age I was making paper-mache volcanoes.

What’s unique about Atmosphir is that it gives users a well-developed tool kit to create their own multi-level games on a 100×100 grid.   While it looked easy when demoed by that tech-savvy child, this adult was having his share of design challenges.

As Groucho said, “it’s so easy a four-year old could do it, quick someone get me a four-year old.”

After the jump, you can see a few virtual worlds built by members of the Atmosphir community. Read more …

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Last night was my fourth NYC Tech Meetup, and I think the first time I’ve been in Manhattan in recent memory during a major heat wave. Thankfully, the electro-mechanical HVAC at Skirball worked flawlessly, far better than this new venue’s Internet access.

One of the highpoints for me was listening to Clay Shirky talk about his new book, Cognitive Surplus. Shirky is a gifted narrator and explainer, and the TED videos I’ve seen of him only hint at the powerful thought waves he radiates during a live presentation.

He is an optimist, a true believer on the Internet’s ability to beneficially channel otherwise wasted human CPU cycles devoted to legacy TV watching into crowdsourced content creation: Wikipedia, Amazon book reviews, Aardvark experts on tap, tweets, and as you’ll see after the jump, food photography. Read more …

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Kikin is a NYC startup that, as their web copy says, “brings you more relevant posts, tweets, videos, and other cool stuff from popular sites,” by automatically displaying interesting links on your browser page.  Its proposition is that you trust your social network, so the Kikin software trolls your Twitter and Facebook streams for relevant content that has been contributed by friends, family, and co-workers.

This idea is especially powerful when making purchasing decisions, less so for knowledge areas  involving, say, the new FCC policy on cable set-top boxes.

This small company garnered some good press about a year ago.

Since then Google has been busy filling in a few of its holes, a platform tweak that will ultimately force  niche players to, well, find a new niche in the ecosystem.  Of course, Google has also been expanding the pond with products such as  Google Wave, Google Buzz,  and Google Predict. Read more …

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I had been meaning to set up a database containing all the startup companies that I’ve been following in this blog.  Finally, with enough entries and notes  in my spreadsheets, and some spare time that opened up this week and last, I was able to put something together.  You can peruse the results  of my efforts under this blog’s Up Starts category.

A word about my selection criteria:  it is not meant to  generate a list of all-the-usual well funded NYC start-up suspects (but we’ll have some of those as well).  It’s teeny start-ups, private betas, open source efforts, contest winners, or perhaps an interesting idea  that a few enterprising folks have swarmed around. Hence,  the “Up Start” label.

It will be an ongoing effort to keep this up to date. If you have a tip, email me at editor@technoverseblog.com.

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I was able to catch most of the Startup Weekend NYC closing presentations, which were held this year at New York University’s Courant Institute. It was my first time as an attendee, and though I’m sorry I missed Mantrophy’s pitch, after about ten or so presentations, I definitely got a feel for the energy, industry, and the sheer fun of hatching a business.

If the rest of the events of Internet Week NY could be considered watching the early careers of startups, Startup Weekend NYC was a front row seat to witnessing the first big break for a future Foursquare or Etsy— American Idol for the tech set.

The whirlwind began on Friday evening when developers, marketers, designers, and business managers paired up to launch their plans. By Sunday, there were software mock-ups, sales projection spreadsheets, marketing roadmaps, and elevator pitches. Considering the limited time, the final PowerPoints and closing remarks were compelling enough, I believe, for most of these startups to continue with their efforts.

There were a few I liked. Read more …

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I took a quick peek at the Internet Week NY headquarters on 18th street in Manhattan while on the way to New York Tech Meetup’s “action packed” June event. I had just enough time to see some of the booths, grok the social media aspects of the planned discussion topics, and take a picture of Brooklyn-based MakerBot Industries’ CupCake CNC machine (also known as a 3-D printer) before I left for the Skirball Center.

My take away from IWNY: engaged communities swarming around focused content and, thanks to startups like MakerBot, custom hardware will rule the future. And it’s happening here in NYC!

Then I went to the NYTM and watched a man smash an iPad with a sledge hammer. Read more …

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