Just as a perfect lunar eclipse happens on very rare, but special occasions, tonight members of the NY tech community were treated to a special night - one in which the NY Tech Meetup held its monthly meeting, and NextNY held one of its socials.  Those who attended benefitted with nearly five hours of great tech entertainment and socialization. 

I'll start my recap of the night at the February NY Tech Meetup.  The format was the same as before...5 presenters, each with five minutes.  So, without further ado, here's what happened tonight:

DonorsChoose.org

Oliver, the CTO of DonorsChoose presented this novel charitable site.  The site allows teachers from across the country to post requests for funds for projects they're working on.  Whether its for computers for their classroom, or for books for the students, the site allows teachers to make requests for whatever they need.  Users of the site can then 'power browse' to find projects that they want to support.  They call it 'citizen philanthropy' - allowing individuals to make a direct and transparent impact on their chosen charitable cause.  It's so personal in fact, that after the project has been funded and completed, the teacher and students send their funders personal thank you notes.  We've seen quite a few online donation sites here at the meetup, but  I really am impressed by DonorsChoose.  I can't think of a better way to help a cause, and to immediately see the impact my money has. 

Proto Software

Byron Binkley of Proto Software came to present their product that allows users to create 'desktop mashups' using an intuitive visual interface.   Users can create custom applications using the WYSIWYG visual development environment, drawing in various feeds of information from either the Internet (via web services) to more traditional data sources such as a database.  Once data is in the system, Proto allows the data to be manipulated and displayed in many ways.  The product was built for the financial services industry - hedge funds, banks, etc, but is fully capable in a variety of industries.  One example he gave was using the software to build a sales tool, linking data from Outlook and Salesforce.com.  Perhaps one of the most interesting lines was when Byron was asked how they make money.  His answer was simple - 'they sell software' - a novel idea in this day in age.  We had a chance to talk to some of the folks from the Proto team later in the evening, and really enjoyed our chat.  They're very nice and smart guys, and gave us a deeper insight into the product and its history.  I'm looking forward to giving Proto a try and see how I can use my limited tech saaviness to make a cool mashup.

Evaal.com

Timothy came to talk about Evaal.com.  I'll be completely honest - I wasn't too impressed by it.  I'm not really even sure what it does.  It seems like Evaal is a search engine that replaces sponsored links with experts who can help you find what you need.  Sounds a bit like ChaCha.  He mentioned that the experts would be payed by sponsors  who they refer people to, which is a major conflict of interest.  The one nugget that I got from the presentation is that their goal is to level the playing field in the search industry by giving users a choice between the search engines.  For now, Evaal won't be a choice of mine

Payoneer 

Yuval and Talia presented Payoneer, and like Evaal, it took me a while to get exactly what they do.  Yes, I might be a bit slow, but it also helps to hear a brief description of what the product or service is at the opening of the presentation.  Payoneer provides websites with the ability to send out branded Mastercard stored valued cards to their customers and to then credit money to them after a transaction is complete.  It's a really easy way for websites who pay their customers to get the money into their hands.

I actually think this is a novel way to handle financial transactions between websites and their members.  I would have liked to have seen a bit more about how it works, along with a more direct explanation of what it does.

And finally, our good friend Lee was back to show us another cool technology trick of his.  You might remember him from past meetups, demonstrating his unique contraptions.  Tonight, he demonstrated how to deconstruct a furby and to add parts to custom program its behavior.  As always, his presentations brought some good laughs to the crowd.  While I still liked his homemade animation techniques, I found the furby demonstration to be both fun and innovative.

After the Tech Meetup, we took a walk down St. Marks for the NextNY social.  For those who don't know, NextNY helps to bring together the movers and shakers in the NY Tech scene to socialize and collaborate.  I've always had a great time at their events, and find them to be a great way to just meet really cool people.  Tonight was no exception.  I had a chance to chat with a number of folks about interesting topics, including the ethics of blogging, the rise and fall of digg, 24, Lost, and many other random things.  As mentioned above, we had a great chat with the guys from Proto Software.  We also chatted with Caroline McCarthy of CNET and Eric Skiff of Clipmarks and GlitchNYC.com about Netizen and lots of other interesting things going on in the tech world.

All in all, it was a great night for the NY Tech scene, and I hope it continues.  Nights like these really help bring the community together in new and more meaningful ways.