Last night I had the pleasure of attending my first New York Tech Meetup. Things started off a bit rough for me. I worked up a serious thirst after eating a large bag of barbecue Pop Chips on the way to a the Skirball Center For Performing Arts at NYU only to drop and shatter my ice cold Snapple on the stairs leading to the auditorium. (Sorry to everyone with wet feet…) For those with a good appreciation for  comeuppance you’ll be happy to know I endured barbecue flavored cotton mouth for the duration of the show.

Note to future presenters: Test your website on a low-end Mac,  with 10 applications running in the background, spotty wireless connection and a stylus to get a full appreciation for what you may be up against in your next presentation.

• HowAboutWe – Activity based blind first dates. HowAboutWe was the standout for the whole event. This company has legs. For $8-15 per month you can respond to the opposite sex who are looking for things to do in Manhattan. Basically you broadcast out to their Datetopia community “How About We…insert compelling date activity here” and people who are interested can respond, and you choose if you want to meet up with them.
• HOWABOUTWE VERDICT: If your single in New York City, sign up for this dating site immediately.

• FoodSpotting – Fine dishes, not just restaurant. FoodSpotting asks users to snap pics of their favorite dishes at restaurants and share them with others. Its a great way to filter out the best dishes at any restaurant. I would liken this to foursquare meets amateur Zagat. I like this for 2 reasons. First, people already take pics of food at restaurants, my significant other included. Second, food has already proven to be a very attractive vertical. Third, these guys are building some serious value by compiling a photo database of the best dishes at a localized level. Everyone from Yelp, to OpenTable, to Zagat’s would love to get their hands on this kind of data.
• FOOD SPOTTING VERDICT: Will catch on for the sheer fact that people love to give their two cents and feel like their an expert. But please let’s all brainstorm and figure out something better then badges. Sure it worked for the boy scouts, but what about us grown men?

• HotPotato -Share what your doing with friends. Hot Potato is a cool concept, it’s like Twitter in the sense of communicating with your friends about various topics, but its more event based, organizing the conversations around specific activities (attending the NY Tech show, watching TV, watching the World Cup, etc.) Vs. specific people. The main hurdle these guys face is moving existing conversations off  of places like Twitter and Facebook and giving users a compelling reason why they should do that in the first place.These guys got short-changed with a lot of presentation technical issues. Next time bring your video on USB guys. Watch the Hot Potato Video.
• HOTPOTATO VERDICT: Cool, but Facebook and Twitter are some lofty competitors

• Betterfly – Learn, Look & Feel Better Betterfly matches people looking for services ranging from piano lessons to hair cuts and connects them with the individuals who provide them. I really like this concept. Virtually everyone I know has either a side-gig, or  a desire to start their own business, but still works to get that weekly paycheck. This approach to connecting people at the human level Vs. the company level makes a lot of sense. They offer on-the-fly scheduling and time billing for the service provider and for the customer they offer a wide selection of human powered services.
• BETTERFLY VERDICT: I think their engineers need to take a good look at the Freshbooks API to complete their end-to-end offering. After that they’ve got some real potential

• StuffBuff – Decentralized Auctions Neat concept. Real-time auction widgets that take place in the context of the page that your in. These guys have a decent concept, but may be too early and up against some serious competition to make enough headway. (Cough…Cough…eBay) They’ll need to partner with some eBay power sellers and make them converts in order to establish a meaningful user base.
• STUFFBUFF VERDICT: Sticking to eBay for selling my junk for now

• Cognitive Surplus – by Clay Shirky Did you know Wikipedia took 100 million hours to write yet American’s watch about 200 billion hours of television? No wonder the economy is in the toilet! Clay Shirky investigates the flood of creative contribution (cognitive surplus) that exists in our world and how it will change our future. I’ll be reading this one and posting a review.
• COGNITIVE SURPLUS VERDICT: I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ll let you know. Clay seems to know what he’s talking about