This months NewTech Meetup was held at Google. They built a beautiful, yet typically Google, office space at 9th and 15th. Just getting to see the new Google building was worth the price of admission. Here’s a quick summary of the presenters:
Allison h. Fine - Momentum (a book): She discussed how social media affected the 06 campaign season. Mypollingplace.com had a substantial impact on aiding voters, RockTheVote integrated into Facebook to affect youth voting. However, campaigns did not significantly leverage newtech. YouTube enabled America to watch people have trouble with voting machines in real-time. Social media aided social change.
Allison’s most interesting statement was: “Leadership will not come from a corner office. It will happen throughout networks, throughout communities.”
While I am sympathetic to this notion, I think it is far off in the future. As long as video is a popular medium, we will always watch our leaders
compete to be the center of attention and take credit for success. Network leadership has no figurehead by definition, and so it cannot compete in rich media. Network leadership cannot give a speech in a nice suit and look strong, bold, and presidential.
Motionbox: The biggest problem with user generated video is that it’s unproduced by definition. Getting to the good part of a video or highlighting the good part of a video should be short, fast, and sweet for both viewers and creators.
Their implementation exposes what’s upcoming in the video using thumbnails exploded over the timeline. Tagging can be linked to directly (that’s a big feature for bloggers IMHO). They will be introducing online video editing soon. There is no rev share. No storage capacity limit. It is an ad-supported free product. Will do hard-good sales in the future (buy a DVD of your favorite videos. Based in NYC. 25 employees. They have received funding from Canaan, SAS, and Itochu. They wouldn’t disclose the number of users they have.
Roborat (Yes, this demo was called Roborat): Based out of the SUNY med center, they do Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI). THey showed examples of both input based BMI and output based BMI. For the input example, They trained a rat to run a maze and detect fake explosives by stimulating the whiskers sector of the brain and rewarding it via the orgasum sector of the brain. Very entertaining, yet equally disturbing, to watch. The output example was a monkey controling robot arm via only its brain (no muscle input). Input BMI combined with output BMI could create Star Wars-esque solutions for parapalegics (think: Luke’s robot hand).
Prosper: The presenter of this demo was not an entrepreneur, but instead a fan of the service. She hosted a local Prosper meetup. Prosper currently has 102,000 users. 62,000 listings. 4,400 loans. They are the democratization of personal loans. This was released back in February, so I won’t discuss it further. Just go play with it if you want to learn more.
Google Web Toolkit: Write you AJAX web service entirely in Java. The compiler compiles to javascript and runs in a browser. It’s open source. The main benefit is the ability to program in an IDE and use a traditional debugger, both of which are not currently possible in AJAX programming. Also, you get cross-browser compatibility for free, no extra work or forking code for different browsers. The demo was done in Eclipse, but it works with any Java IDE. Built-in support for permalinking to any internal state in the app (solves one of Nielson’s biggest complaints about AJAX apps).
The big news with this service is a debugger for AJAX. No more “Alerts” and other types of printouts. I would have killed for that while programming Deme.
The only true demos at this Meetup were Motionbox and Google Web Toolkit. Everything else was, in one way or another, not a live demo. Usually non-demos are booed off the stage, but not at this Meetup. Looks like the crowd is getting soft ;)
