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Taap.it’s Artistic Ambitions

 

The Taap.it crew has been busy this month reaching out to the artist community in the NYC area.

This Manhattan startup has a geo-aware mobile app—one of our small biz favorites—that brings together local buyers and sellers. Besides all the usual items found in the classifieds, Taap.it also has a special section devoted to art.

In my quick browse through this category, I found Andy Warhol lithographs, arty photographs, needlepoint, and a Mickey Mantle painting. Something for everyone.Continue reading

@NYC

NYC Startup Weekend: Pitches for a Rainy Afternoon

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The last time I attended a NYC Startup Weekend at General Assembly I found myself wedged against the wall near the kitchen serving area with just enough elbow room to jot down a few notes.

While it was less crowded on Sunday evening during the final presentations for this August SW—maybe something to do with the monsoon rains and flooded subways—the energy levels were still very high and it was great fun watching these raw but spirited pitches.

After a careful review of my notes, I’ve come up with my list of favorites: LockeRoom, ReadBak, OinkerBox, Walkey.me and Sharewith911.

This time around I was in partial sync with the judges’ choices: Sharewith911 garnered a first, and ReadBak took second place.Continue reading

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Shoutomatic Trademarks Shout

 

Shouts, in the context of audio messages used on the Internet as part of social media, have been given trademark protection by the US Trademark Office.

This is of course good news for Shoutomatic, the web service that allows you to record and deliver short audio messages via Twitter or Facebook or directly from their own web site and who did the actual trademark submission.Continue reading

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NYC Big Apps Ideas Winners

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New York City Economic Development Corporation announced the winners of its Big Apps Idea Contest.

These are not actual apps, but ideas for applications, which were submitted and then voted on by the public.

The wise panel of judges, including Clay Shirky, NYTM’s Dawn Barber, and BMW iVentures’ Alex Diehl, picked 10 winning cerebrations.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Summer Fun: Baseball and Phono

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Last week, I wrote about the under-appreciated but impressive Phono, a jQuery plugin that lets you embed a softphone into any web page.

Phono is made by Florida-based Voxeo, a long-standing and innovative telephony software vendor.

With a pinch of JavaScript, anybody—developer, HTML-phobic designer—can add a voice channel widget, accessible from laptop, smartphone, or tablet.

What’s cooler than an embedded JavaScript softphone?

Connecting said softphone up with Tropo, Voxeo’s server-side telephony environment.

I usually free associate baseball, not JavaScript, with the month of August, so I decided to take on a small Tropo project to read back current major league baseball scores into my Phono widget, which I’ve conveniently inserted into this post.

Go Yankees!Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Test Your VoIP Connection with OnSIP

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OnSIP, the virtual PBX service that we use, has a web page that allows you to test your VoIP connection.

It simulates a voice conservation to OnSIP’s remotes, measuring packet loss and jitter or variation in transit times.

My performance over my information cable provided by Comcast here in NJ was pretty good: no packet loss and .9 ms in jitter. Continue reading

@NYC

Aussie Angel Opens Shop in NYC

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It’s Friday, and what better way to end the week than to learn that another angel investor is doing business in NYC.

Haig Kayserian is an Australian web entrepreneur, who according to the press release we received, is making investments in three US startups though his new NYC-based KAYWEB Angels.

He is divvying up $900K to Cafrino (gaming), Minute Lister (mobile ecommerce), and You Need My Guy (business networking).Continue reading

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Meetup at Google NY: JavaScript Gets Serious

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I was at Google last night, at their 8th Ave. location in NYC, attending a JavaScript Meetup.

I almost didn’t make it: I was on the waiting list up until the last minute.

So what brought over 125 people into the 10th Floor of Google’s Manhattan franchise?

(By the way, Googlers know how to dress for a NYC summer: they were pouring out of the building around 6:30 all wearing cargo shorts and comfy T-shirts.)

Anyway, we were all there to hear about their JavaScript in-the-cloud service, called Apps Script.

Who would have thunk so many so many passionate developers would be coming out on this rainy night, and why would Google put a client-side language into the stratosphere?

It all became clearer by the end of the talk.

Continue reading

@NYC

Idea Flight:Collaboration for iPad

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I haven’t been attending New York Tech Meetups lately but there was one demo at last night’s gathering I would have liked to have seen.

Idea Flight from the folks at Conde Nast Digital turns the iPad into a collaborative document and screen sharing tool—think of it as WebEx for tablets.

One person is the host, or as Idea Flight calls it, the pilot, and the attendees are known as “passengers”.

I’m not sure I entirely get the flight metaphor, but this iPad app looks to be an on-the-fly approach to do shared presentations over a WiFi network.

Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Comcast Responds to Bloomberg

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The  200+ page response  to Bloomberg TV’s complaint that it had been exiled in Comcast’s lineup from the major players news neighborhoods —Fox, CNN, CNBC, etc.— has been submitted to the FCC.

The lawyers must have had loads of fun writing this thing.

The gist of Comcast’s argument is that it all depends on what you mean by news and a neighborhood. Continue reading

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Pay the Blogger

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Pavan Katepalli had his ‘aha’ moment about blogs when he was running his second startup, a search engine marketing service.

In trying to expand the online marketing presence of one his clients, he discovered that bloggers hold a lot of power in terms of directing traffic and boosting visits.

After selling the SEM company—his first startup, by the way, was hatched while he was a Rutger’s undergraduate—Pavan then went on to found BloggersCompete.

The idea is simple: advertisers initiate a contest for bloggers, suggesting general themes to write about. Bloggers get exposure by being part of the contest, and the winner or winners receive cash, while runner-ups get some non-cash swag or other prizes.  Continue reading

@NYC

Taap.it Reaches $2.4 Million in Transactions

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Taap.it, the geo-aware classified mobile app that launched at TechCruch Disrupt in late May, has experienced impressive growth in the last two months.

They’ve seen $2.4 million in transactions cleared through their online marketplace

With the Taap.it iPhone (and Android) app, sellers post a picture of the item they wish to sell along with embedded geo-data. Buyers search using distance and keyword parameters.

The focus here is, of course, on local business, and the assumption is that delivery and payment can be handled without any messy third-parties—perhaps the whole transaction can be settled at the local coffee bar.Continue reading

@NYC

HTML5: Bigger and Better Than TV

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I was in NYC on Wednesday, attending part of DevCon5, a two-day conference devoted to the magical HTML5 browser standard.

As I was staring at a Pac-Man app during ‘The Power of Canvas” session— actually the  largest Pac-Man mazes in the world crafted completely in HTML5— my mind wandered back to the 1980s.

You know that time when people went to special arcades to play videos games, like Pac-Man, and returned home to get the news or watch a movie on their TV sets.

If you wanted an interactive graphical experience, you essentially rented time on an appliance that connected together cathode ray tube, CPU, and memory.Continue reading