Tonight the three of us, along with Ken "the friendly ghost" Rossi, went to our first ever Meetup.com NY Tech Meetup event.  The group was created by Meetup.com's founder, Scott Heiferman.

The event was a good chance to see what new and interesting ideas were being born here on the slightly dirty streets of New York City.   The auditorium at the NYU medical center was packed with tons of techies and a large contingency of investors -  I was quite impressed with the enthusiastic crowd on hand.

Six different companies were profiled tonight at the event:

FreshNotes - Search Engines that associates people with web documents, and people with people - a clever way to evaluate explicit social networks
IONdb.com - A pretty nifty web media aggregator that allows users to publish playlists of their favorite clips
Axioma - A search assistant tool that allows users to better refine huge volumes of search data
Weebly - A simple and elegant website creation tool that even, as the creators say, "your mom could use".  My mom could probably figure this out, but I'm sure Paolo's would have problems.
Electric Sheep - Developers of objects for 3D worlds and marketplaces that can be used with Linden Lab's Second Life.  Showed a bit of Second Life on the Mac - a pretty amazing 3D world. (Thanks Joshua for the correction.)
NowPublic.com - And now our favorite pick of the night which tied for best presentation...NowPublic.com is a news aggregator that allows its users to share news with each other.  Besides logging and tagging existing stories, it allows users to create and add their own news to the collective pool.  We were all impressed by this site and are looking forward to watching it grow.

We'll be going to these events from now on, so if you're interested in meeting and chatting with us, sign up and stop by as well - we'd love the opportunity to chat with you.  And you never know, perhaps we'll have a chance to present at the NY Tech Meetup sometime in the near future...