There are It girls and the Next Thing. New York Tech Meetup bills itself as a place where the big guns like Foursquare and Tumblr made their debut. Which is wy the organization’s reputation in the tech community attracted special guest attendees this month, like Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer, a staunch “advocate for open data,” and the City’s first Chief Technology Officer Minerva Tantoco.
Here are the companies that presented. Can you spot the winners?
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For a full listing of upcoming events for the NYC startup and tech community, please visit the AlleyWatch NYC Tech and Startup Event Calendar.
Mind My Business
“NYC is a city of opportunity,” said Mind My Business founder Aileen Gemma Smith. It is their belief that local mom and pop shops make up the backbone of our city, and MMB provide the ope n data that benefits those small businesses.
From that open data, the company infers relevant information, such as what kind of business it is, and which permits they need to comply with city regulations. Mind My Business sends on average 5 to 10 targeted daily alerts.
“Businesses love us because we’re so simple.” Mind My Business currently has 700 businesses receiving alerts every day. Live in NY, beta in Chicago, they’ve identified 200 cities where they want to implement the targeted alerts.
Kids Creation Station
Kids Creation Station is an innovative way to turn your children’s artwork into 3-D printed sculptures. The fun dioramas, created using a gypsum-based sandstone concoction, are a $100 to make your first 3-D diorama and $60 after that.
To convert the drawing into a 3D model takes five days, and users will receive the actual diorama in 3-4 weeks. Currently, the sculptures come with a diorama case to display it. As awesome as they may look, the 3D sculptures are too fragile for kids to play with. KCS isn’t just for kids – adults are already taking advantage of the technology to draw pictures of themselves, or of a loved one, to present to them as birthday presents.
Dasher
Coordinating with friends is impossible, so instead of sending static messages Dasher users can send dynamic images, video and real time data. Packed with features that make regular texting look like snail mail Dasher’s convos look, well, not unlike a Facebook newsfeed.
You can embed Vines directly in conversations, delete your messages. It even allows users to send money through Venmo. When you share your current location, your avatar will move in real time. Including a hashtag will automatically bring up gifs on that subject. Dasher is available on iPhone and Android.
Poacht
Poacht is a covert job search app for currently employed. In other words, using the poacht app, the happily employed are able to keep their respective hats in the ring – while keeping the fact that they’re open to new opportunities under their hats. Poachcurrently has 350 companies on the platform, and a growing userbase of covert candidates.
Bowery
The Googles and Facebooks of the world use specially designed systems that mimic launching code in various operating systems, according to Bowery founder David Byrd. “Since we’re not all Internet giants, Bowery built that.” Bowery is a cloud based development environment. Anything in your stack you want to share across your team can happen on Bowery. One update is all you need to keep all of your databases, libraries and dependencies up-to-date across your team. And developers can run their applications in less than 30 seconds.
Pager
Pager provides a direct connection between doctors and patients for high quality medical care without the hassle of a long wait time. “The next time you get sick you can get the doctor to come to you.” Said Pager’s Toby Hervey. Pager patients get results quickly, with pricing transparency. Doctors within the startup’s network can look up the patient’s medical history and location, and text message or communicate through twilio. No matter the services provided during the visit -from stitches to testing – the fee is all you’re paying.
The startup is in the process of becoming credentialed with a large number of providers, as their services are all currently out of network. All Pager doctors, who show up in less than two hours once booked, are HIPAA compliant and use a smartphone that needs a security code or fingerprint to open. Who says that there’s no such thing as house calls anymore? Pager literally brings you the care you need without the hassle,” said Hervey.
UnderlineJS
February’s Hack of the Month may not be a business, but it is a very cool feature.
“For the perfectionist UX designer, there’s UnderlineJS” said UX designer and creator Wentin Zhang. If you were to look at normal typography under a microscope, you’d see that beautiful type is more of a jumble than originally thought. The Hack of the Month is a Javascript library that renders underlines more uniformly, with NASA-like precise measurements that hold up even under microscopic scrutiny, especially on retina displays. With UnderlineJS, the underline is always rendered relative and precisely to other typographical features such as the period and baseline. The type also becomes animated when you hover the mouse over it.
UnderlineJS is the beginning of a proposal to W3C to adopt it for the next CSS standards.
Abacus
Abacus will make expense reports obsolete. With the app, employees can get paid that much more quickly – often, the next day – for personal money spent on business-related activities. Account managers can approve, deny, or add comments about submitted requests.
Abacus is $5 per active user per month. An active user is considered someone with at least one expense approved within the month. With Abacus expenses are filed in real time, eliminating the long lag time and process normally associated with an expense report.
Abacus allows account managers to sync the information with accounting software, so that all statements are fully reconciled.. So far, the company is growing. Early adopters included a number of tech companies, and now they’re starting to bring on non-techies clients – they recently signed up a dairy company.
Classcraft
While teachers can’t completely eliminate the fact that they frequently play mediator in the classroom, as part of their job descriptions, it’s a less harried teacher who doesn’t need to devote an ungodly amount of time to keeping his or her class orderly. For teachers, Classcraft is about to make classroom management a whole lot more fun.
The role-playing game outfitted especially for educational environments evolves and transforms the classroom experience into an engaging experience where students earn powers through doing things in class, and interacting with class content in a digital environment, through quests and challenges.
Bootstrapped for the past two years Classcraft is completely transforming school into a collective experience. Students can customize their characters, form meaningful relationships, and gain competency within these games. Most importantly, the students get a sense of cause and effect as to negative behavior such as not finishing your work, or that excessive talking will lower your score.
While Classcraft’s average user age is 14, there have even been cases of university students using it. Parent portals and multi-class integration are in the works.
Robotbase
At first glance, Robotbase’s Maya is a larger scale Siri. Sort of. She takes pictures like a giant iPhone, looks up information like a giant iPhone – but she’s not. Maya’s applications are more expansive than a phone’s. If Maya seems familiar, it’s because this is what “The Jetsons” and other science fiction has been promising us for so long – our own butler. Or Rosie. Maya is a multi-purpose personal robot that performs a number of functions.
With its ability to move about, Maya gives a whole new meaning to the idea of mobile technology. Maya can learn to navigate through spaces. Its video and photo capabilities can be used for video chatting, taking pictures, or sending a video feed of your home for surveillance purposes.
It also recognizes emotions, faces, speeches, and objects. The whole list of what she can do can be found on their Kickstarter. After reading it you might come to the same conclusion we did: that Maya can do everything but dunk a basketball -for now.
For a full listing of upcoming events for the NYC startup and tech community, please visit the AlleyWatch NYC Tech and Startup Event Calendar.
