Tonight we ventured back uptown to the lesser known of Manhattan to our Alma Mater, Columbia, for the August NY Tech Meetup. This time around, there was a full billing with 8 different presentations. As always, I'll share my thoughts on the presentations themselves:

Iterating - "A Collaborative IT Product Guide" for open source and and commercial software. They host user-written reviews of software products and projects. It's a wiki site, built on semantic web technologies, accessible in RSS and RDF.  They custom built the wiki engine using open source resources to allow for custom data fields for each piece of software.  The product is still very green, so I guess we'll see how it evolves over the next few months.

MeetMoi - A web and mobile based service that allows users to alert people in the network of their location and meetup. Its a clever new way to meet singles near you. Think Dodgeball + Match.com.  It was founded by Andrew Weinreich, who was the original founder of sixdegrees.com, so he has a strong history in the social networking site.  He hopes MeetMoi will revolutionize the dating world.  It's a tall claim that's been made by many, but I do admit the idea of instantly connecting people while you're out and being social is clever.

We've Met - A site to help you reconnect with folks you've met before at parties, events, etc.  Similar concept to Craigslist's "Missed Connections", with a touch of Evite. I must admit, there's a striking similarity to the MeetMoi, We've Met, and even Meetup logos...

:)

TheLadders.com - An online job board targeted towards professionals who make over $100k. It's definitely not the first job board, nor the first for high level execs, it still has a nice look. Their tech demo included some slick AJAX interfaces that seems snappy and flashy at the same time - not an easy feat to accomplish. 

Streambase - Reading the initial description of Streambase, "Fast real-time historical complex event processing software", I was a bit confused and think I once saw that description from a buzzworld generator.  However, after reading and hearing more about it, I think they've built a pretty impressive technology product that could be very valuable to a lot of firms who rely on fast and reliable data analysis. This seems to be a deeper product than what the presentation makes it out to be.

BudgetSnap - An online personal budgeting system. Sounds pretty simple, and that's what they promise to be.  To be honest, budgeting is not very glamorous, but having used apps like Quicken and Money, a simple yet usable product like this seems very compelling. I can't wait to try this one out and see if it makes managing my day to day finances any easier.  My only question is how good is security.  It'll take some leap of faith for people to post their lives on a new site like this.  Right now they're offering a 90 day free trial which I'll sign up for...if it works as easily as they say, and if it makes my life easier, I'd certainly pay for a product like this. 

Panther Express - A content delivery network, ala Akamai. In their business, if they can be faster and cheaper, they'll make a name for themselves. Apparently, Greylock Partners agrees.

OneWebDay - As they state, "The mission of OneWebDay is to create, maintain, advance, and promote a global day to celebrate online life: September 22, 2006". It's like Earth Day for Netizens. Any group or event that helps promote what the web has done and will do to change the world is A-OK with me. Perhaps we'll participate and do something in honor of the event as well with Civil Netizen.

As a whole there was a good variety of presentations tonight.  I must admit I'm most excited about BudgetSnap.  Yeah, I know, I clearly need to get my paperwork in order, but hey, what's better than having a great website to help.  Thanks again to Scott and Meetup for the great event, and thanks to good ol' CU for hosting.