Earlier today I attended the second annual NY Tech Day at Pier 92 in Manhattan, billed as the “largest startup event in the world,” hoping to network and recruit some iOS developers for IIN. I was blown away by the sheer size of the event. It took hours to see all 400+ booths, weaving through a crowd of thousands of people. Plenty of big names were there, including Microsoft, Box, Shutterstock, Zipcar, Seamless, TheLadders, and General Assembly. A few of the interesting ones that caught my eye were:
- Haggle is a “personalized pricing engine” that analyze your social network data to see how “valuable” you are to a particular company. For example, if you are a food blogger with a large Twitter following and eat out often, a restaurant will be very likely to offer you a sizable discount coupon.
- Meddle makes content marketing practical for everybody by letting you “showcase your insights without the hassle of blogging.” It lies somewhere between blogs and Twitter, which is a very fertile niche market. It by being “as quick as a tweet, but as impactful as a blog post.” I will definitely try it out.
- Bespoke is a cross between Pinterest and Flipboard. It lets you pull in various Flipboard-like feeds and presents them in Pinterest-like format. Unlike Pinterest, images cannot be “stolen”. Shared images and resources always preserve their original source, giving the credit to the originators and context to the consumers. The visually stunning app and was designed by Eric Kass.
- Animoto hosted a NYC iOS Developer Meetup back in February, but it wasn’t until today that I found out what they actually do! They developed a unique platform that takes your still photos and videos and composes them into a video slideshow complete with fancy layouts, transitions, and even licensed music! Users upload the content, set up a basic timeline, and Animoto’s “smart director” AI engine does the rest.
- RunPee is just plain hilarious. This simple service analyzes movies for quiet periods to tell you when is a good time to run to the bathroom. That way viewers don’t have to worry about missing a crucial scene or a great line. Crazy you say? Just wait until they get bought out by Yahoo Movies or RottenTomatoes!
Overall, I couldn’t help but wonder, how is it that so many smart people be involved in so many seemingly frivolous endeavors? Alas, that is the fascination with the startup scene. You never know which one of those crazy ideas will go big one day, and then you’ll be saying, “why didn’t I think of that??”
Objective C# 
Cool highlights! I think I’ve heard of RunPee before, but forgot their name 😀