Soup

Tonight’s New York Tech Meetup was one of the best I’ve attended. Ali Emami, who runs a social music networking site for musicians called babulous.com, was a guest speaker and gave us all some insight into where Iran has been, where it is going, and what we can do to help.

An important point made was that corporations like Nokia have aided the Iranian government by providing wiretapping capabilities to make communication between members of the revolution difficult to keep confidential.

Another important point was that companies like Yahoo! have aided governments like China to help locate citizens who dare to speak out against their government. We all need to put pressure on these corporations to support human rights over government tyranny. Ali pointed us to WhereIsMyVote.org to mobilize and support the cause.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life Inc. spoke about how new media companies are breaking down economies based on monopoly and institutional wealth. He praised people who develop the type of applications demonstrated at New York Tech Meetup and the culture in general that promotes and helps cultivate work that adds value rather than profits from moving money from one place to another.

A quick recap of the demos:

Designer Pages is a system created for interior design to collaborate on the objects they plan on purchasing for their properties. It looks well designed and could be potentially used for other markets to collaborate on purchasing. Seems like a good procurement system.

Zagat created a sort of virtual reality application for finding restaurants nearby. As you move the phone the application shows you in real time what restaurants are in your field of vision, and allows you to find out more information about. Only out on Android now but soon to come to iPhone G3S.

SpongeCell makes online banner ads more interactive. Coolest thing is how you can build a google map right into the banner to make it easy to find nearby stores for the product. Also, the interactions can be tracked with a great deal of granularity.

Gliider is a firefox plug in that makes it easy to grab and organize information to plan a trip. I will definitely be using this soon for a cross country road trip.

VocabSushi helps build up your vocabulary using games. Seems real useful for practicing for SATs.

urtak is a survey system trying to using multiple data points to come up with better results. Surveys are flawed because they make it too easy to game the system. urtak tried to develop a new system to make it more accurate.

Exit Strategy, my favorite app, and the one I mentioned earlier today, was demonstrated. The most interesting thing was how the brother and sister who founded the company explored every inch of the New York City to figure out which subway car is closest to the exits for the street you are trying to get to or to help you know which car is closest to the next train line you need to transfer to. This kind of application is incredibly useful to New Yorkers, and it works whether or not you have an internet connection.

Tony Bacigalupo, NYTM Committee member and founder of New Work City gave us a look at how membership of the NYTM, which is now over 10,000 people, has grown exponentially in the past two years. 3,000+ of the 10,000 members have joined in just the past six months.

The entire meetup was live streamed on web. This should help in the future for folks who aren’t fortunate enough to RSVP in time for the limited number of seats which were filled to capacity last night.

Great job by Nate and the board for putting together a great night.