Tonight, I went to the NY Tech Meetup held at NYU. I've been a member of Meetup.com for quite a bit of time now, but I've never been in town or always been busy when prior meetups have been held. This evening was my first experience of a NY Tech meetup and I am pleased to say that I had a great time.
There were apparently 202 people who RSVP'd that they'd attend the meeting and it was a 'sold out' event. The majority (98%) of folks in attendance were males - so it was essentially one big sausage party. I was pleasantly surprised that the CEO/Founder of Meetup.com was leading the NY Tech meetup and he was the moderator throughout the entire presentation program.
There were 5 presentations that lasted about 7 minutes each with questions coming at the end. It was very similar to the "gong" show - if a company pitched too much, or wasn't crowd pleasing, the crowd certainly got restless. The second speaker was almost "boo'ed" off stage, literally! One of the technologies that I found interesting was that of the "soft search" as I call it. When we query databases, we normally are searching for something 'hard' - such as a direct match. What if you're looking for an apartment in New York between 2,000 square feet and 5,000 square feet. If there are no apartments that exist, don't you want to see an apartment that may be 1,998 square feet? Sure you do, but previously, in our database schema's, we do not account for that. This now opens up a whole new way of database transactional search.
It was nice to see some old friends from FortuneCity.com, i33 Communications and other previous companies I'd worked with. Looking forward to the next NY Tech Meetup!
Tags: meetup, NYU, technology, internet, transparancee, and entrepreneur
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