At New York Tech Meetup’s election day event, a bunch of young college-age upstarts stole the show from some of the slightly older incumbents. I’m referring to student projects and hackathon winners who were up on stage at Skirball demoing their software efforts.
The evening’s theme was set by host Evan Korth, assistant professor of computer science at NYU and one of the co-founders of HackNY. Korth laid out his vision of New York City as an East Coast tech hub with NYU, Columbia, Parsons, and Rutgers acting as an educational seedbed for startup activity in this area—i.e., the Stanford University model.
And based on the demos I saw and the various entrepreneurial opportunities and programs around town, I’m becoming more of a believer.
NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program was well represented with Paul Rothman’s “open-source, user-programmable MIDI controller”—a programmable guitar sensitive to gestures—and Craig Kapps’s 3D pop-up book and augmented reality software for interactive story telling. Kapp, who just graduated, has commercialized what was a thesis into a product called Zooburst.
You can read more about Rothman’s and Kapp’s ITP work in the reference section below.
Anyway, these guys are practically seasoned entrepreneurs compared to, say, Ian Jennings Jablonowski (Rutgers, School of Communication and Information) who won the recent HackNY hackathon weekend with his Twilio-based social media alarm tool.
Jablonowski was on hand with a more finished version of his hack, which I think he’s now calling Rooster.am (née Cock-a-Doodle-Doo). It’s a cute tool —and keep in mind he’s still a student and taking classes—that I’d actually like to use.
Rooster calls you up in the morning to read news feeds, twitter posts, and Facebook activity. It’s a kind of concierge for social media, and the next step in automated personal attendants.
And my favorite student project of the night … was the hack from three current Brown University undergraduates, “Touch Tone Tanks”, which was also a runner up winner at HackNY.
Before there was Zooburst, there was an NYU ITP thesis project by Craig Kapp.
Described as a “touch-tone controlled party game,” TTT lets party goers call into a conference number to control a simple video game that’s projected on a wall. Combatants engage tanks to shoot at each other and move their weapons around a grid based on a few DTMF keys.
Essentially, the Brown group virtualized 70’s era Space Invaders over a long weekend, making clever use of Twilio’s APIs and post-millennium consumer electronica—cell phones, laptop, and digital projector.
They call it a great ice breaker for parties. Kudos for their imagination and creativity.
For a full run-down of the other demos, check out NY Convergence’s post.
No, I wasn’t there to participate in the giant virtual beach ball game that involved NYU Movement Lab’s Squidball technology.
I was being a couch potato and watching it all on LiveStream.
Related articles
- Fall:Leaves, Hackathons, and Hatching Startups (technoverseblog.com)
- NYU Movement Lab (movement.nyu.edu)
- Zooburst
- Craig Kapp’s ITP thesis page (itp.nyu.edu)
- Paul Rothman’s ITP thesis page (itp.nyu.edu)
- College Night at the NY Tech Meetup (nyconvergence.com)
