I’m honored to participate in New York Entrepreneur Week (NYEW), the largest entrepreneurial movement in New York State.  Thousands of entrepreneurs across the state will have the opportunity to actively engage with the foremost entrepreneurs, investors and dealmakers both in the State and from around the world.   Gary Whitehill and his team have done a fantastic job pulling this together.

Taking place from November 16-20th, 2009, NYEW will hold over 350 (!) events.  Among the many noteable speakers are:

Gil Beyda
Managing Partner at Genacast Ventures

Marc Cenedella
Founder & CEO, TheLadders.com

Marc Ecko
Chairman & CEO of Marc Ecko Enterprises

Scott Heiferman
Co-Founder & CEO of Meetup.com

Jason Olim
Co-Founder of CDNOW.com

Barry E. Silbert
CEO and Co-Founder of SecondMarket, Inc.

Jeff Stewart
Angel Investor & Founder of Mimeo

See you there!

(Image courtesy of Breakaway Communications)

This week, NYConvergence stopped by The Altman Building in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood to view the ng Connect Program's LTE Connected Car.  The program, conceived of and founded by Alcatel-Lucent, brought together "infrastructure, device, application and content companies," including New York-based Atlantic Records, and the car is the first result of this group's work. 

It was designed to “allow consumers to to access network- and cloud-based applications that put on-demand entertainment, infotainment, diagnostics, navigation and much more at their fingertips.”  Atlantic Record’s Fanbase, a "next-generation music application" where fans can get the latest content from their favorite artists in a single download, is featured in the car.  It features an audio player, chat room, and continuous feed of all the official news, photos, and video from some of today’s most popular artists.  It also pulls content from MySpace, MTV, Twitter, Yahoo! News, Google News, Flickr, YouTube, and Buzznet. 

Technologists of many types came to the Social Media Club event, held at the PRNewswire offices on Hudson St., to weigh in on recent Federal Trade Commission Endorsement Guide updates and watch a Google Wave in action.

When NY Tech Meetup organizer Nate Westheimer asked the crowd if they liked the one minute company demo experiment, he was met with a single nay. Several hundred other event attendees were either in support or unwilling to say otherwise.

For four companies, the new event format offered an opportunity to give a very quick overview to a full auditorium at the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology. Within sixty seconds, presenters queued up their sites, laid out their business models and demoed their technology.

• Urban Interns discussed their job marketplace for connecting small business owners with part-time workers. "We believe hiring is changing," said co-founder Cari Sommer, who was joined on stage by co-founder Lauren Porat. The service gives employers the opportunity to search and communicate directly with prospective part-time employees, all of whom are college educated.
• Superglued co-founder Rush Doshi presented the site as a place where people who attended the same live music show can get together online. "The crowd at a show sort of makes or breaks an experience," he said, "but there is no where to go afterward." Doshi hopes that users of the site will connect over their shared experience via the Superglued community.
• Neighborhoodr! demoed their local blog network. Content is separated by NYC neighborhood and is entirely user generated and moderated. The blog is run on the Tumblr platform, making it possible for users to add content without needing to login or register.
• Maggwire displayed their online destination for aggregated magazine articles. The site curates content from various magazine publishers, and over time makes recommendations to readers based on their preferences. In a response to an audience member's question, presenter Ryan Klenovich explained that the next stage for the company is to move to offer a premium, subscription based model.

The next phase of presentations was moderated in the standard NY Tech Meetup five minute format, leaving more time for presenters to demonstrate their product as they discussed features and benefits.

• Solvate co-founder and COO, Julie Ruvolo, spoke about the company's model for delegating busy work. Clients of the service fill out a request for work and Solvate assigns the request to a specialist from their network, also known as a timesmith. "We're not only figuring out the distribution model," said Ruvolo, "but we are taking full responsibility for the finished product."
• Belgrave Trust founding members Nick Baily and Jeff Stewart presented their service for offsetting a user's carbon footprint. The site uses actuarial models to determine a user's carbon consumption based on a short series of questions that the user answers. A monetary amount is attached to the consumption and when the user makes this payment through the site, the money is invested in, "an actively managed portfolio of carbon offset securities," said Baily.
• MongoDB founders Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz demonstrated features of their non-relational database. According to Merriman, the database is open-source, document-oriented and schema-free. "We've left out about 20 percent of what a relational database does in order to focus on scalability and efficiency," Merriman said.
• KlickableTV co-founder Roger Wu explained how the service allows both users to add messages, links and advertisements to certain points, called hotspots, within a video. The software allows information to be added to videos within a variety of video players, and the company also has a proprietary video player of its own. 
• AdMeld co-founder Brian Adams discussed how the company helps, "publishers make money with ad inventory they can't sell on their own." AdMeld's software allows their clients to optimize results from ad networks and exchanges. Adams also demonstrated the client analytics interface, where real time and historical data can be referenced by the publisher.

The technology presented at the November NY Tech Meetup did not share a specific platform or objective, but flexibility in the face of change was a common theme. Wu summarized the sentiment, saying, "When you build something for today it is already too late. We wanted to build for tomorrow."

[Editor's Note: Trylon SMR, publisher of NYConvergence, has utilized Urban Interns' service.  Video of the event is available online here.]

The application allows New Yorkers to search for deals by bar, type of drink, and distance from any location.  It also encourages them to add bars, photos, reviews, and happy hours according to a press release received by NYConvergence.  More information on the application is available here.

NYConvergence ORIGINAL

 
(DJ booth at Motorola's cocktail reception, Morimoto, Meatpacking District, New York City)

Motorola hosted a cocktail reception last night at Morimoto in Manhattan's Meatpacking District last night to unveil its latest phones to members of New York City's digital scene.  In a gadget room, right next to the entrance, representatives from the company were on hand to let attendees handle both phones, the Cliq, which had launched earlier, and the Droid, which had launched in New York City earlier that same day. 

Mashahuru Morimoto himself was on hand and attendees were able to sample sushi freshly-prepared on site while mingling and listening to music spun by the two DJs hired for the event.  Downstairs, there was a Motorola-themed photo booth where guests could get their photo taken holding Motorola-themed props, including an oversized, 1980s style cell phone.

[Editor's Note: Each attendee at the event is being provided with either a Droid or Cliq phone courtesy of Motorola.]

NYConvergence ORIGINAL

Last night at the 92YTribeca, Aaron Tveit and Louis Hobson, cast members of the Broadway musical Next to Normal, debuted Something I Can't See, a new song created via the Next to Normal Twitter page. 

The creative team behind the show had asked the musical's more than 100,000 followers on Twitter for their thoughts on a new song for the musical, asking them to provide feedback on who should sing it, where in the muical the song should be sung, and what the motivation or emotion was behind it. 

Something I Can't See was the result.  It's a song which takes place in Act 2 following lead characters Diana's and Dan's visit to her doctor where Diana's doctor talks about the memory loss she is experiencing from electro-shock therapy.

NYConvergence ORIGINAL

The network of community-specific online news and information sites plans to launch 11 new sites spanning Long Island and Westchester in the next three months for:

• the Long Island communities of Bellmore, Garden City, Merrick, and Port Washington
• the Westchester County communities of Bedford-Katonah, Chappaqua-Mount Kisco, Harrison, Larchmont-Mamaroneck, Rye, Scarsdale, and Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow

In addition, the press release received by NYConvergence adds that by the end of this week, Patch will have launched in Livingston, NJ and Ridgefield, CT.