Last night at New York Tech Meetup there were clear signs that the local tech ecosystem is growing and evolving.
First, the NYTM organization itself is looking for a managing director to essentially oversee the affairs of the organization—events, outreach, special programs, marketing. The jobs starts at $65k per year (see below).
The second data point was NYTM board member, Evan Korth, announcing that hackNY.org, which he helped co-found, is doubling the size of its summer intern program. Last year, hackNY, placed 12 students in NYC startups, including etsy, 10gen, and others. Note to startups: you have till February 18 to submit an application for interns.
The third data point was that the demos last night were really good.
As Nate Westheimer emphasized, tech growth in New York City is fed by a niche of talented hackers, the programmers and engineers who design and build interesting software that makes NYC a hackopolis on the Hudson.
In the demos I saw, one could find examples of the hacker ethos playing out in interesting ways, and sense hints of viable business models hidden in the glitzy pitches.
Don’t Eat At
In a new segment called “Hack of the Month”, NYU comp sci student Max Stoller presented his inspired hack. The project, worked out during Stoller’s winter break, is called Don’t Eat At.
He’s done us all a public service.
Taking open government data on restaurant violations from the NYC Datamine, Stoller joined the restaurant name with a Foursquare check-in. (Yes, Stoller has submitted his app into the NYC Big App competition.)
If the diner, wine bar, pizza parlor, or chain restaurant that’s now serving your food has reached a certain number of unaddressed violations, you’ll receive a text message.
Brilliant. For the hackers out there, his programming tools were Ruby on Rails (with the Delayed Jobs plugin for asynch processing), Mongo DB, and one of our faves, Twilio, for SMSing.
There was code on the big screen.
This is the kind of effort that’s central to NYTM’s mission.
By the way, ny hacker, which both Stoller and NYTM’s Brandon Diamond are involved with, is another organization that’s helping nourish the hacker population.
Fancy Hands
Fancy Hands is an on-line concierge service that employs remote umpa lumpas to answer queries, make or cancel appointments, find a babysitter, and basically handle informational transactions on your behalf.
No, this staff-in-the-cloud can’t handle physical requests to move, deliver, or pick something up.
The service has received lots of press already, so I won’t say too much more.
The most significant point about Fancy Hands is that is was started by a single person, Ted Rosen. He appears to be a combination hacker, entrepreneur, marketer, and creative wunderkind. Just the kind of person that NYTM is supposed to encourage.
Proust
Proust was incubated at IAC by Tom Cortese and Jason Fotinatos, who were both on other projects within Barry Diller’s media company. They pitched their idea, a web site for holding and presenting family and personal histories, to Diller. He hated it, told them so during a long harangue, then frictionlessly turned on a dime, and said ‘let’s do it.’
Proust works by asking questions to help you “tell your story.” As you develop more of your digital memoir and build links to other Proustians, you’ll be prompted to ask and get answers from other family members and friends —”where did you hide my Gameboy when I was 6?—thereby enriching your narrative.
These guys admittedly have had a lot of help from IAC resources, most notably Vimeo for video processing. When they two showed off the ability of Proust to pull in on-they-fly only those photos from Facebook tagged with certain keywords, there was a gasp from the guy sitting next to me.
Two final thoughts, one positive, one negative.
This is certainly a concept that would lend itself to a printed, bound version of your Proustian story.
On the negative, the Proust end-user agreement is pretty clear about the fact that you don’t own content. Despite all of Facebook’s questionable privacy practices, your wall posts belong to you.
With Proust, you instead sign away a “worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-revocable license.” “Perpetual” is the troubling term since it means if you decide to end your account with Proust, they still can use your life story.
Facebook offers somewhat similar terms, but drops the “perpetual” claim, and unlike Proust, does not openly extend its right to distribute your content as “marketing and/or promotional materials in any form or manner whatsoever.”
What would Marcel think of this?
TinyPass
For those interested in getting paid for their content, TinyPass has a partial solution. This startup has built a set of APIs that make it very easy for publishers to collect micro payments for their premium content.
Yes, this does lead to a walled garden. On the other hand, this could enable struggling magazines and, um, blogs to get off life support.
With the TinyPass toolkit, shown off for the first time by the founders, a news website could, for example, selectively and unobtrusively mark certain content as requiring a small payment.
On the subscriber side of the equation, readers open an account with TinyPass and replenish their content kitty as needed. To make the back-end accounting even smoother, TinyPass integrates with existing PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments accounts.
Hey, Proust people, how about changing your policy and incorporating TinyPass as a way to get paid for your life story if it’s used in some future IAC media project?
Related articles
- We Are Hiring! (nytm.org)
- ny hacker (nyhacker.org)
- hackNY application for interns (hackny.org)
- NYC Datamine (nyc.gov)
- Proust
- TinyPass
- Fancy Hands
