You know that summer’s over when you’re at the September New York Tech Meetup and Executive Director Nate Westheimer takes to the stage to announce that half the room are VCs who are pissed off because they’re back at work, the other half are Camp Interactive students who are pissed off because they’re back in school, and then NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio himself shows up to announce the new initiatives he’s implementing to back the city’s burgeoning tech community – and to introduce the city’s first CTO, Queens-born and Bronx Science educated Minerva Tantoco and to announce that Girl Who Code’s Kristen Titus is assuming the position of Founding Director for the Tech Talent Pipeline.
With the .nyc domains now available, and the Land Rush phase set to expire on October 3rd, the Tech Meetup also announced the launch of their own .nyc domain, Future.nyc.
Since the meetup did take place on the same day that Apple announced their new products, and in honor of Steve Jobs, just one more thing… the presentations, of course:
TenGrade
TenGrade cuts through the clutter of fake and irrelevant reviews (not that Yelp or TripAdvisor were mentioned, mind you) to provide real opinions from your friends on any topic from pop-culture to pizza to politics. Use it on desktop, mobile, or
directly on Facebook and Twitter. Bonus points: you can see how your friends rate things (remember: it’s quality, not quantity) and you can also find out how positive or negative your friends really are. Or sort through information by gender and age group, which can come in pretty handy, all things considered.
Knotable
Knotable is a conversation platform that lets you edit, delete, and rearrange messages in your email to focus on what’s important. Unlike ordinary email, you can edit notes and move them around, too, in the name of prioritizing, and send the notes to friends/associates whom you want to literally keep in the loop, via email. It works with any email platform, and allows you to focus on the topics and emails that matter most.
Quick MVP
Quick MVP is a customer validation platform that’s the quickest and easiest way to measure customer demand and what they’ll pay for your product – or if they will at all. It takes the average person 40 minutes to set up a landing page. QuickMVP allows you to test your new business idea in just five minutes. There’s a time/money/energy saver, what, eh?
Makr
Makr literally turns everyone into a maker, enabling anyone to design, produce – and now sell – cool stuff on-demand, like tees, totes and other products. Its fully editable design tool also allows you to edit and swap designs onto other products. Good timing, with the holidays coming…
Bubble
How often have u been told learn to code already? Well, Bubble does it for you via the bubble editor, and there’s an app page on site, so you can see what other people and companies have built.
Heat Seek
Heat Seek NYC is an affordable heat seeking sensor that can potentially help the city to identify the deadbeat landlords who aren’t providing adequate heat, come winter. Lack of heat is underreported, and most deaths are due to the cold inside, rather than the cold outside. They built the units on the cheap (about $30) so that they’re affordable for the city to deploy, and since NYC’s 109th Mayor was sitting front and center during the presentation, the BigApps finalists did have a special message for “his mayorness.”
“I’m a civic hacker from the Flatiron School and the fact that I’m presenting to the mayor of NYC is mind blowing,” said Harold Cooper, imploring the mayor to help the company to deliver 1,000 sensors this winter to buildings that have heat violations. “We have reports you can download, too, as judges generally don’t have Mac books.”
“ I have one wish from the city, since the mayor is here. Let us help! We think we can bring costs down on heating complaints. (Our sensors) can be deployed in any city and keep citizens healthy – NYC can be a role model.”
So can Cooper, for that matter.
The Mayor agreed to arrange a meeting for them. Timing is everything, and winter is coming, after all.
Bill De Blasio/Minerva Tantoco
“Most people don’t call me ‘Your Mayorness,’” said Bill De Blasio, referring to Heat Seek and taking the stage at to announce two new appointments to further the City’s tech initiatives: NYC’s first-ever CTO, Minerva Tantoco, and first-ever Director for the Tech Talent Pipeline, Kristen Titus.
He also guaranteed Heat Seek a meeting with the Housing Authority.
“You’ve created 291,000 jobs in the tech sector in NYC,” he said, addressing the crowd. “It’s the second largest tech community in the country right now – and growing!”
With the goal of keeping up the momentum and making NYC the most tech driven city in the world, Tantoco, who also took to the stage, asked the audience to forward any ideas they have to her at #ForwardNYC.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled hack of the month…
Bit Shift
Bit Shift is an open-source semantic source code search engine developed by programmers, for programmers. It solves the problem for people who are searching for code on Google or Duck Duck Go “or, if you’re a masochist, Yahoo or Bing,” said the presenters: the search engines aren’t as nuanced as source code. And now there’s bit shift! Problem solved.
Campus Jobs
There are 7500 schools in the US and thousands of students, most of whom have part time jobs during the school year. Campus Jobs is an online marketplace that connects students with part-time jobs during school – paid and unpaid jobs, as well as internships. There are over 1500 jobs currently posted on the site (it’s free to post) – and they leave you with an hilarious message when you log out. Check it out!
Dashlane
Dashlane was this month’s Alumni Demo (yes, we know that Heat Seek has presented before as well – details!) and it’s “the world’s best password manager and secure digital wallet,” making payments simple and secure everywhere. Password sharing, too.
So if you want to buy a book on B&N, just call up your Dashlane extension, sign in and check out.
Dashlane now has a new share feature so that you can share passwords/company credit cards other people in the company, but you control the rights, so that, for example, a consultant gets limited rights, and when they finish their consulting, or if someone quits, you can easily revoke the password.
As for Apple announcing Apple Pay earlier that day?
“Apple not so good at anything but hardware,” said the presenters.
Hopscotch
Hopscotch is a visual programming language on the iPad, designed for everyone. Yes, it’s an actual programming language, and while you may not need to know how to program, you do need to know how to read. Designed for kids 8 and up, one can drag and drop blocks of code into a scripting area as you begin to understand the basics of computer programming. You can even ‘write’ your own games that are sharable with the Hopscotch community, who can add to it as well. They’re also about to release a version for the iPhone.
For the record, Hopscotch was one of last year’s NYC BIgApps winners.
