“This is not a test. This is not a drill. This is a bona fide emergency,” said Clay Shirky, taking the stage at the New York Tech Meetup to address the importance of Net Neutrality. “Right now, anyone has the same terms of access as huge old rich media companies – and they hate that,” the NYU Associate Professor continued. “Comcast is proposing to set themselves up as a private tax collector over the Internet” and those who truly understand the implications of the coming proposed changes “wouldn’t fill Yankee Stadium. The Internet means that you don’t have to convince anyone else that you have a good idea before you get to try it.”
Shirky expressed surprise that President Obama would allow Net Neutrality to be compromised, despite the fact that it was the President himself who appointed the current FCC Chairman.
“Internet fast lanes would hurt startups,” said Union Square Venture’s Brad Burnham, who also addressed concern over the FCC’s proposed Net Neutrality rules, urged that everyone express their opinions at the FCC website – and quickly. The ruling comes in less than 100 days.
And now for the startups themselves…
Goodnikels
Instead of having to depend on volunteers all the time, Goodnikels is a new way of getting people to help you with your social impact project. It’s basically a skill swapping service where one earns Goodnikels, which can be exchanged to ‘buy’ someone else’s services/expertise. In fact, they even gave out some wooden Goodnikels at the meetup. Yes, we all know the adage that one should never take any wooden nickels, but these are Goodnikels and potentially worth their weight in gold.
Glimpse
Glimpse is a disappearing video and photo sharing service. With its unique camera features and military grade encryption, Glimpse is the most fun way to send private messages, but you’d better download it quickly. Some features are about to disappear. We kid you not. They’re doing away w screenshot protection, but rolling out groups and social discovery features.
Simplest
“How many people are looking for cofounders? How many are looking for investors,” asked Simplist co-founder Ron Williams. Is that really a fair question to ask at the New York Tech Meetup? Simplist is the best way for your team to get to the right people – using your own network, no less (Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and your address book). But Simplist makes it easy to search all of their profiles in one place. It gets even better: the list updates automatically as you connect with new people.
Rukkus
This iPhone app is the easiest way to find and buy the cheapest tickets to sporting events and concerts near you. Theatre tickets, too. If you happen to live in New York, but it seems that they’ll be rolling out to other cities as well, if the website is any indication.
Social Bicycles
For those of us who were in the room that evening, this month’s NYTM Alum company (sobi) first presented nearly two years ago, at the July NYTM. New York Angels founder David Rose happened to be in the audience that evening – and ended up leading the seed round. Social bicycles is a bike sharing service not unlike citi bike, except that the technology is on the bike itself. They’ll be coming to Long Beach later this summer.
Commonkey
CommonKey is a cloud-based password management platform that allows a company to securely manager and share passwords across apps. Ok, so say that you’re PiedPiper and because Nelson went to go work for Hooli, you have to make sure that he doesn’t have access to any of your accounts anymore. With CommonKey, all of Nelson’s access to PiedPiper accounts are easily removed, without disrupting the whole company. And if you create a new account on another service that you’d like to incorporate, you’re automatically asked if you’d like to save it to CommonKey. And yes, that was a gorilla on stage. It’s their mascot.
“You know what really floats my boat in the programming world?” asked Brandon Diamond as he took to the stage to present the hacks of the month. “C.”
There were three Hack of the Month presentations this month, all from student Hackathon winners:
Flyer Penguin allow you to make a print-ready flyer from a Facebook event. You can edit/customize the flyer as well. The team came out of NYU and Columbia engineering.
2048 Against Cancer was created by Rutgers engineering student Sam Agnew, whose friend, Tyler, was diagnosed with cancer. Agnew wanted to figure out a way to help him raise money for a life saving clinical trial, so he and another friend hacked together a new version of the popular addicting game, 2048. Log in with Venmo in order to play, and you can donate one cent for every pair of tiles that you merge!
moteio2048 is a multiplayer and mote.io-compatible 2048 game.
Jewliebots
Jewliebots are programmable jewelry for teenage girls, from Sarah Chipps, CTO at the Flatiron School, and Maria Paula Saba, who developed it as part of her master thesis at ITP/NYU. The idea behind jewliebots is to introduce software education to teenaged girls in a way that is appealing to them.
Floored
Floored is a 3D scanning and data visualization company for real estate applications, and they’re nothing less than amazing. They presented their newest technology this month, what founder Dave Eisenberg called “3D content for the digital world.” Not only is it a spacial representation of a space/room/office: it reflects the lighting in the room. Of course you can also move the furniture around, and wouldn’t it be nice to know that that new couch can fit through the door before you buy it and try to get it home? He also demoed a 3D interactive floor plan of the Louvre in Paris. “Imagine learning art history like this rather than via text book.” Seems that real estate is/was just the beginning, but it seems that there will be more to come on that front as well. What they’ve developed is nothing short of a video game engine for the real world: the floor plan isn’t dead – it’s just been disrupted and made to be much more enjoyable.