Greetings fellow Netizens. It’s been a crazy day for us…with the release of our Beta 6 version of Netizen (which I encourage everyone to try out), to tonight’s Meetup, it’s been a whirlwind of a day.

I just got back from the November NY Tech Meetup, this time, held at the luxurious and ultra-hip NY home of Google. Yes, for the first time, the event was held in the auditorium of the new Google office, which many of you have probably read about recently. I won’t rehash all the great things about this place, but I will say that it looked like an incredible place to show up every day for work. The event was limited to only 250 people, keeping the crowd smaller and more manageable than usual. Plus, they served lots of beer, wine, and snacks – always a plus after a long day at work.

Scott started the evening by bringing up two employees from Google to welcome us, and to let us know that they were hiring. For those looking for work, this was a pleasant surprise. But we were all there to see some cool technology, so without further ado, here’s my monthly recap of the presenters:

Momentum

The evening started with Allison Fine, author of the new book, Momentum. Allison spent some time discussing how social media and technology have started to affect the broader community of social activists. The discussion was timely, given the recent political happenings in the country. She talked about how the technological maturation of various tools and products has progressed from the ’04 elections to today, and how things like online registration, meetups, the blogosphere, and YouTube have made instantaneous involvement and participation the new way to conduct politics and campaigning. Ultimately, she sees a shift in the power from institutions to individuals.

The timeliness of this presentation couldn’t have been better. The George Allen ‘macaca’ incident is a perfect example of how the game of campaigning has changed. It’s nice to see how the technology that we all know and love can create vast changes in our social structure – this book should be an interesting look into that phenomenon.

Motionbox

Next was Jenn, from Motionbox, a video sharing site with a twist. Their overall goal is to make it easier for users to “get the good stuff” from their online video. What does that mean? It’s pretty simple. Their site allows users to upload, share, and tag their videos, nothing huge there. However, what makes them unique is how they enable you to better view, parse, and identify the content that’s important to you and your friends. Besides allowing you to scrub through the preview thumbnails, each full clip has a frame bar which allows you see to what’s coming up in a video. You can then mark and tag specific sections of the clip that are the parts you find most important. When you share these clips, others will see the parts that you marked as important. Jenn mentioned a few other features that will be coming out soon including their subscription model and even sales of hard goods based on the videos (like DVDs).

Though there are tons of video sites out there, I have to admit I was very impressed with Motionbox. For anyone who’s ever used YouTube, getting and viewing the good stuff can be a pain. Keep an eye on this site, they’re definitely doing some innovative work.

RoboRat

Lee was next, presenting some slides on some work being done with Brain Machine Learning at one of the SUNY Medical Centers (I think that’s what he said). They’re doing some fascinating work in the Neurological field, focusing on brain inputs and outputs. He showed examples of how they can force behavior in rats by stimulating various parts of the brain. He also demonstrated how the brain can output signals to control mechanical limbs. The room all had a good laugh watching a clip of their RoboRat completing a military training exercise…you really had to be there for this one – they call it “Rat Deployment & Control”. I’m sure Donald Rumsfeld could have used this stuff. Their ultimate goal is to create a full loop so to connect brain inputs and outputs, so the mechanical appendages can provide real-time feedback to the brain. Cool stuff, and oh yeah, their looking for funding.

Scott then took the opportunity to segue into a quick promo for another meetup group - The New York City Rat Meetup Group. I think you’ll just have to read that one on your own.

Prosper Marketplace

Jane Boone, a self-described evangelist for Prosper came up to describe the product. She described Prosper as a combination between Ebay, Paypal, and Match.com. Simply, it’s a site that connects people who need loans with individual lenders. The site allows people to post profiles describing why they need a loan and what their credit rating is. Then, individual lenders participate in a dutch auction to determine who wins the right to loan money to the customer. It’s a very creative concept, and based on the numbers she presented, it sounds like they’re growing fast. In her own words, Prosper is all about disintermediation – removing folks like credit card companies, banks, and other institutional lenders from the process. Cool stuff, and certainly a great example of how the internet can level the playing field for new players out there.

Google Web Toolkit

Joel Webber, fresh from the Atlanta Google Office came by to discuss his pet project, Google Web Toolkit. GWT is a pretty tech-heavy product, but for those who have ever dealt with the hassle of writing Javascript for websites and dealing with debugging or cross-platform issues, this product was meant for you. It allows you to write website code in Java using all the existing libraries out there. GWT then compiles it to Javascript and runs it in the browser, across any platform. Using the tool, you can easy step in and out of the code view the output in the browser, something that’s a nightmare when writing raw Jscript. If you’re a website developer, it’s worth checking out. It’s a bit over the top for me, but it certainly seemed to excite some of the developers in the room.

Following the presentations, Scott organized the room into discussion groups, allowing people the opportunity to not only meet the presenters, but to chat and network. As I told Scott at the end, I was thrilled to see this happen. With the huge crowds and so-so venues in the past few months, the networking and meeting has been lacking at the meetups. Tonight’s event changed that, and it made for a great time for those who stayed to chat with each other.

Personally, I had a chance to chat with Chris Lopinto, of expertflyer.com, for a bit, and was impressed enough by his site that I’ll mention it here as well. In a nutshell, ExpertFlyer allows you to access information about airlines and flights that was historically only available to travel agents. For a small monthly fee, users can dig deep to get every bit of information about fares, available seats, upgrade options, and more without having to navigate through an unwieldy ticketing site. For those who travel a lot, this information can be essential in helping you get the best deal on a ticket on the best flight available. As airline websites continue to obfuscate the purchasing process, the more raw information you have, the more power you have in making the best travel decisions for yourself - experflyer.com is the best way to empower yourself with that data. So good luck to you Chris, I’ll definitely be trying it out.

So that’s it for tonight…it was by far my favorite NY Tech Meetup, and I’m looking forward to next month’s, held at the Meetup offices…till next time.