NYConvergence ORIGINAL

More than 700 members of the NYC tech community RSVPed to attend the July NY Tech Meetup last night, held at the Haft Auditorium on the campus of SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.  From our seat in the front near the team from presenter Designer Pages, it certainly appeared that it was a packed house this month. 

This month's presenters included:

• Exit Strategy NYC: We blogged about this yesterday, but we learned a few additional details about their iPhone application last night.  The brother and sister team behind the application compiled their data over a ten-week period of riding the NYC subways and it's now available on iTunes for $1.99.
• Gliider: This startup's Firefox add-on allows you to copy and paste travel items of note into it and it can recommend deals on, for instance, hotels based on your tentative plans.
• Designer Pages: The design community can use this Web site to share information about products; they have also devloped a patent-pending, result-based advertising system for product manufacturers to get their products highlighted.
• urtak: Users can submit questions that can be answered by other users.  The developers called it "collaborative public opinion."
• VocabSushi: Billed as a "bento box for vocabulary," this Web site can help users develop their vocabulary based on quizzes pulled from the text of newspaper articles freely available online.
• SpongeCell: Buttons can be layered into banner advertisements using this startup's technology, creating a more interactive experience for users by allowing them to share advertisements, get more information, etc.
• Zagat: The dining guide's new Near2U application, currently available on Google's Android phone and soon to be available on the iPhone 3GS, allows you to see restaurants around you in a radar-screen layout.

There were also three other presentations, one about the membership of the meetup by committee member and "mayor" of co-working space New Work City, Tony Bacigalupo, Iranian musician Ali Emami about the current unrest in his country, and Douglas Rushkoff about his new book Life Inc.

I started thinking, what could you do to use physical media to drive digital sales?  And I just thought,m barcodes, barcodes, barcodes, barcodes.  There are books all around us, and a lot of them might be worth reading, but book discovery takes some work.  However, what's great about most books is the barcode/ ISBN number, guaranteeing a wealth of available metadata...if we could only get to it. 

I immediately thought of the CueCat, which represented gadget-hungry tech hubris in a way that made it memorable forever- including prominent placement as one of the ten worst tech products of the past decade by C|net, (I wonder what CueCat inventor Dave Matthews is up to these days.) It was closed and limited, but there was something alluring.  For a certain generation, the CueCat has something to offer as an idea, and this was NOT a failure of technology so much as timing, product, and business.

So how about scanning a barcode, or taking a photo of one, and getting a quick license to read that book on your kindle, ad supported?  That sounds like a business to me.  Users are engaged, publishers get a new audience that otherwise would have flipped through a book and then put it down- it's too easy to let it go away.  Not sure if you could also use this for triggering ancillary book content but that would also be interesting. 

Go for it, AMZN!

appssavvy, a NYC-based company that provides an advertising network for social network applications,  is launching a social-media campaign involving Huggies and Circle of Moms, an online community for moms. 

According to a e-mail received by NYConvergence, appsavvy is partnering with Mindshare to set up various sponsorship and social-media apps to connect Huggies with Circle of Moms.  One of these components is "Huggies Zone," which will feature expert advice, diaper information, and the ability for moms to upload photos of their babies.

 More information about the partnership can be found here.

Previous:
> Appssavvy, Social Media Applications Companies Partner
> Q&A: Chris Cunningham, appssavvy

NYConvergence ORIGINAL

The New York: Media Information Exchange Group (NY:MIEG) is hosting a conversation with Aryeh Green, Director of Media Central, on Thursday, July 9, at 8 AM at the Samsung Experience, located in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan's Columbus Circle neighborhood.  This event will explore the current situation from a traditional and new media point of view, how the press is currently covering ongoing developments in the region, and the impact on media coverage in the United States.

Media Central is an independent non-profit, non-partisan organization that provides services, information, acess, and materials to journalists based in or visiting Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the region.

You can register to attend here.

[Editor's Note: NY:MIEG is a current client of Trylon SMR, publisher of NYConvergence.] 

I will be uploading the rest of the videos soon. Please check back.

This makes Centrl a more continuous experience and makes sure you get notified instantly on important messages from your friends. The new version of our app is now waiting to be approved in the App Store. Here is a screenshot of how it will look like:

As always, we are looking forward to your feedback at feedback-at-centrl.com.

While browsing our Twitter feed today, NYConvergence noticed that not only is there a Twitter feed for the entire NYC subway, but someone has created feeds for each of the individual subway lines.  [Editor's Note: Thanks to AllThingsD's Peter Kafka for this tip.]

Previous:
> MTA Text Message Alerts Begin Today

NYConvergence ORIGINAL
By: Gloria Sin

(Photo Credit: Gloria Sin, NYConvergence)

For a conference that bills itself as “the serious study of virtual worlds,” the sixth annual State of Play, hosted by New York Law School in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood this past weekend (June 19-20), was just as serious about having (real and digital) fun.

Not only were the cross-discipline conversations about the future of virtual worlds simulcasted in Second Life, attendees also got to do a mixed reality dance-off with the avatars -- only to rickroll them! And in the real world and between sessions, panelists and attendees could be found jamming to Bon Jovi on the Xbox, or killing each other through the conference role-playing card game, Eschaton.

Of course, game designers, social scientists, legal and law enforcement experts from as far away as Helsinki did not trek to the city just to hang in an arcade. In the span of two jam-packed days (there wasn’t even time for a lunch break on the last day), speakers fast-forwarded through their experiences of working with(in) virtual worlds in the panels I attended:

• Opening Keynote: A New Kind of World, Raph Koster
• Current Legal Issues for Virtual Worlds
• Beyond the Magic Circle
• Economies and Economics
• Developer Roundtable
• Security and Surveillance
• Lunch: Old Media, New Media, and New New Media
• The Laws and Governance of Virtual Worlds
• Studying Virtual Worlds

For me, the surprise hit of this year’s conference was the Security and Surveillance session, which featured such unlikely speakers at a gaming conference as an ex-Scotland Yard detective and a Special Deputy United States Marshal. When Charles Cohen, the officer who heads Indiana State’s Special Investigations and Criminal Intelligences Sections, talked about the similarities between the murder scene of a young girl and the fantasies that her father had simulated in virtual worlds, it really drove home that:

• Virtual and real worlds are increasingly blurred and real people are being impacted.
• Virtual worlds could potentially inform real world behaviors.

State of Play 2009 was unique in that most panelists attended their colleagues’ sessions and were incredibly accessible to attendees. The comraderie between industry experts and participants was evident online and off, which made the conference not only a success but truly fun. What did you like most about #sop09?   

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