NY Tech Meetup - #35

It's Tuesday again, and I didn't have a chance to tell you about last Tuesday's NY Tech Meetup! So let me go back to my notes, and try to give an overview of the presentations that you may have missed:

DesignMyRoom.com www.designmyroom.com	A simple idea well done. This Flash 8.0-based web site allows you to design your room with endless options of paint, accessories, and 3D models of real furniture available from Target and other suppliers. You can save your own creations, share them, or be inspired by the creations of leading internal designers. Check it out!
Collector's Quest www.collectorsquest.com	This is more for the hardcore nerd-collectors among us. Do you have the biggest collection in the world of Batman action figures? Want to tell the world about it, and perhaps find others with similar tastes? Manage your collection online with this simple application, and the promise for the passionate, slightly geekly community that will surely grow around it.
Animoto www.animoto.com	Animoto makes professional looking videoclips out of your photos and your choice of music. That's all there is to it, but if that's what you're looking for - this tool seems to be doing a great job. You can share your video clips, but guess what - no two viewings are exactly the same!
Silicon Alley Insider www.alleyinsider.com	Ah, if you're a New Yorker who's in technology, surely you've felt belittled, marginalized, and a little jealous of your Silicon Valley friends. Well, there's no reason to - according to Henry Blodget, Co-Founder, CEO, and Editor in Chief of the Silicon Alley Insider. New York has a strong presence of information technology companies, a growing startup culture, and perhaps the largest concentration of new media, old media getting into new media, and financial technologies. Makes sense. This site aspires to become your inside journalistic source for NYC tech, as well as be a voice for the NYC tech community.
JKN www.jkn.com	JKN might be a good idea, but I did not go crazy for the implementation or, for that matter, the presentation: the tool allows you to add comments to any web page, and share them with others. I've known many companies that tried to do the same thing, most of them went out of business, and virtually all of them did a better job. But hey, that's just my opinion.
Hakia ScoopBar www.hakia.com	Hakia is an intruiging technology, but this presentation missed the point completely. Hakia is a semantic search engine that offers results based on meaning and intention, more than keywords. So for example, if I'm asking "what is the capital of Spain," it might know that I am not looking for "what, capital, Spain" in a page, but that I am looking for an answer, which will probably present itself in a certain grammatical structure. (For instance: "The capital of Spain is..." or "X, the Capital of Spain, is..." The presentation, however, focused on Hakia's "ScoopBar", a toolbar that is completely uninteresting in itself, unless you already know and implicitly trust Hakia's algorithm. (Which, incidentally, I don't.)
Gawker's Publishing Platform www.gawker.com	Okay, so if you know and love Gawker, you might be excited to hear that last Friday they made their publishing platform available to all Gawker commenters. I'm sure this is very exciting to some people, I just don't know any of them.
BookSwim www.bookswim.com	Ah, BookSwim. I have a complex reaction to this service, the so called Netflix of Books. Let me explain. On the one hand: I would have killed to have a service like this 10 years ago. It's a really neat idea: for a small monthly amount you can have up to 11 books at your home at any given point. I spoke to George Burke, one of the founders, and he seems like a really nice, enthusiastic guy who loves books. On the other hand: Call me a germophobe, but I don't like the idea of getting into bed with a book that was read by hundreds of people before me. (George did say they might consider the idea of periodic fumigation of their entire store, when I suggested it). One of the greatest benefit of Netflix is the database they built around movies, with ratings, reviews, previews, and pattern recognition. This positions Netflix as a leader even in an age where movies can be downloaded directly and not shipped. For books, though, the biggest book-related database in the world already belongs to Amazon, and as eBooks become more prevalent, it will be very hard, if not impossible to compete with them. It might be just be me, but returning a book is always a heartbreaking experience. That's why I stopped using the excellent NYPL, and instead simply buy used books whenever I'm not willing to invest in a new one.
I'mInLikeWithYou www.iminlikewithyou.com	I'm In Like With You is a Flash-based social networking and dating web site. It has some cool ideas incorporated, like the idea of Games. Games, as I understand it, are user-generated challenges that allow you to test and compare others in your network. The top 5 ranked users in a Game may connect to the game creator. That, you have to admit, is quite brilliant.