Last night at NY Tech Meetup

Gomobo

Gomobo was one of the slickest presentations I have seen at a Tech Meetup. Typically the products are presented by techies that cant talk, but Gomobo's founder was slick, fast, and got to the point. I am not saying the product is earth shaking (its not) but it does serve a need. Basically its a service where you can text in your order to a bunch of restaurants via a cell phone. Not that deep. But very nicely done.

Tagiton

I think, I'm smart, I think I'm smart, I know I'm smart, I know I'm smart!

Unfortunately I am not smart enough to understand what Tagiton does. But then again I barely get Facebook which they say they are kinda like, but based around your email contacts. Oh well.

Gilt Group

Luxury brand name stuff sold at sample sale prices online, sold by a hot chick. Nuff said.

Ok well not quite nuff said. It appear they have a few sales a week of specific items. So initially they won't have a great breadth of stuff. They organize the sales themselves, take all the pictures of the merchandise etc. Obviously there is a market here. But I doubt they will ever sell anything I care about as I suspect it will be totally female focused.

Blockles

Tetris + talk. A slick app written in flash. I'd love to know more about the framework they use. He said it was homegrown, and given that they wrote is app in 15 days, I bet there is some opportunity for these guys to leverage their brand with their development framework like the 37signals guys do by making rails available open source, or by maybe even selling it.

Tablexchange

They allow people to sell their highly coveted reservations. I'm not sure this will work but interesting idea. Scott asked who thought this was genius, who thought it was evil, and who thought both. I think the evil crowd won but I'm not sure.

Anyway, I asked if they had Rao's in the system. No one got it so I will explain here. Rao's is the hardest reservation in New York to get. Essentially if you don't know someone you're not getting in. They have eight tables and the regulars have life long standing reservations. Calling five years advance will not help you. One of the regulars has to give you their table. Anyway the place is, as I understand it, kinda mobbed up, and someone was murdered there a few years ago so maybe you just wanna go to Fairway and just buy a bottle of their pasta sauce instead.

US First

This is basically a promotional site for Dean Kamen's FIRST robotics competition for super smart high school kids. They build robots which fight each other. This is a very worthy cause but does not present well at a meetup. Perhaps they could have brought a robot!