Last Night’s NYC Tech Meetup

I was lucky to get one of the few seats that suddenly became available for what I had thought was a sold-out  New York City Tech Meetup. I assume Spring fever infected a few early RSVPers. Anyway, I grabbed the opportunity, and took the train into Manhattan.

It was worth it. These events—it is my second— are a little bit of a grab bag. In my mind, the theme last night could be described as  quirky.  My impressions were  heavily colored by RandomDorm, the college video chat service, and stickybits, the bar-code-the-world company.  I think both will find their markets, but I just have to process them a little more before I can say anything else.

There’s one that stood out and was familiar as the sound of a batter swatting a ball. The start-up is  GameChanger, and they have a free iPhone app (Android and Blackberry planned ) that lets the zillions of school coaches score their team statistics in real-time.

GameChanger is a terrific idea. It takes a technologically overlooked area—pre-college score keeping—that has a huge market and throws at it smartphone software to take the tedium out of generating stats.

There is more, of course.

Parents and friends can follow the game on the web (uses Tornado push technology for real-time updates) or on their own devices via SMS or emails. They’ve also got a GameChanger widget that can be embedded in news sites and sports pages.  Ted Sullivan, the company founder, showed how the widget can be configured to pull in all high school games within a 20-mile radius from Dallas.

The business model for now is simple.  While it is free during beta, ultimately fans will be charged a small fee and GameChanger will also pull in a revenue stream from ads and premium content.