We’re pleased to welcome Sheryl Victor Levy to the blog. As a coach for businesspeople who don’t want to be left behind by technology, and as a digital strategist in her own right, she always aims to be a little bit ahead of the curve. She’ll be blogging for us about the ways that digital marketing, advertising, and media are changing just about every other aspect of business — and what you need to know to use this knowledge to your advantage.
Last week I attended the June New York Tech Meetup, along with nearly 800 other guests. Given that the group as a whole has some 24,000 members, these Meetups are always in demand. I had an extra ticket, and I received more than 25 emails in less than 24 hours asking about it.
The event consists of two hours of presentations by local startups, and then an after-party (which yours truly was way too tired to attend). I have to say, the evening was pretty cool.
It opened up with a very moving video from Mike Lazerow of Buddy Media, which just got acquired by Salesforce for $400 million. Not bad.
Then NYTM premiered The Money, the latest of their #startupstories, a video series cocreated with NASDAQ. The series features members of the NY technology community (including Fred Wilson of USV, David Tisch of TechStars, and John Borthwick of Betaworks, among others) talking about key topics for anyone building a startup. The Money episode is below; earlier segments covered The Pitch, The Team, and Failure.
Here’s the lineup of all the Meetup presenters — I think they were all worth checking out.
- RentHackr lets you see competitive rents in NYC and get on the inside track for apartments before the lease expires. They are currently in beta and plan on expanding to other markets.
- CompStak is a database of crowdsourced commercial rent comparisons in NYC.
- Lover.ly, a Pinterest-like ecommerce wedding community.
- RapGenius – you must check them out! The site explains lyrics to rap songs, sometimes with explanations by the rappers themselves.
- Loosecubes enables you to find shared office space around the world.
- Estimize helps financial analysts pool information about the market. Supposedly it’s 64% accurate.
- Fitocracy is a global app to help bring together people interested in fitness. It’s segmented by geography and discipline (weight training, running, swimming etc.)
- Venmo is a public payment system between friends. Got $100 you can lend me?
- NimbleTV – This was the best of all. . . . you can log in to your TV service from anywhere in the world and watch from any computer, tablet, or mobile phone. I’m all over this one! Someone made a comment about Nimble needing a big legal budget. That was hilarious!
I found the evening very inspiring in terms of new, creative ideas. I was impressed to see the amount of really inventive and useful technologies in a variety of industries, including finance, real estate, health, and e-commerce. I was surprised that there weren’t any gaming companies as part of the mix, or any nonprofits.
I was also thrilled to see women entrepreneurs leading at Loosecubes and Lover.ly. Kudos to them. I also saw a decent number of young women in the audience, which gives me hope that at some point, tech won’t be a male-dominated industry.
I highly recommend attending the next Meetup — if you can get a ticket. It combines great networking, food for thought on tech solutions, and a nice community.
If you do check these sites out, let me know what you think of them in the comments below or at savvystrategyonline.com/blog.
