Internet Week New York Startup Demo Recap

This week brings the third-annual Internet Week to New York City. Four new web startups took to the stage in a fast-paced, lightning round of demos at the NY Tech Meetup.

Allen Stern, Contributor

June 11, 2010

3 Min Read
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This week brings the third-annual Internet Week to New York City. Four new web startups took to the stage in a fast-paced, lightning round of demos at the NY Tech Meetup.The NY Tech Meetup was held this month in a new location which brought together the largest crowd to-date for the monthly web tech startup event. I was told that the space at New York University (NYU) is booked for the monthly gathering through the summer and the meetup organizer is working on a long-term deal with NYU event management.

SnackSquare SnackSquare provides a location-based advertising tool which aggregates data from Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook. SnackSquare founders showed off their advertising tool geared towards local businesses. Their service allows a local business to "buy" an area/location on the map (they call it a square). When users of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare post that they are in the selected location or check-in at a venue within that location, SnackSquare will send the user a coupon for the advertiser's product or service. Pricing varies based on the number of businesses and quantity of customers to reach.

Tynt After reading the reviews of Tynt over the past few months and watching the demo last night, I believe this is a blog and website plugin that is a must install. Tynt offers multiple services that helps users share content while providing content creators with fresh inbound links (think SEO) and analytics of how the content is shared. The main Tynt service provides a rich copy and paste experience. When a reader highlights a block of text to copy, a link back to the article is added and when pasted into the destination, the content plus the link is displayed.

Tynt also provides a "short highlight" service which displays search results when a reader highlights a short amount of content. Lastly, Tynt offers a statistics service which helps publishers to understand where their text is shared and analytics from the links that are included in the shared content. The amazing part about Tynt is that it doesn't change the content and the added links are normal, SEO-rich links.

FareShare FareShare provides a NYC taxi-sharing application that allows you to enter the desired time, where you are going and where you are located and find others who are looking for similar taxi trips. The FareShare team completed extensive taxi analysis and they note, "we looked at data from more than 14 million taxi rides taken all over New York in March 2009. For that single month, there was an average of approximately 456,000 fares each day (ed note - seems high in discussions), and almost 10 million single person taxi rides." Based on their analysis and their proximity settings, they estimate that 1 in 4 taxi rides could be shared. FareShare is currently available for the iPhone. FareShare generates revenue by taking a piece of the transactions that use Paypal for the taxi share payment.

KnowMore Knowmore, currently in private beta, is working on creating a new social aggregator. Their demo reminded me a lot of the nearly defunct Friendfeed. While I didn't like every aspect of Friendfeed, it was great at aggregating content from all of the social services and the user experience was very clean. It will be interesting to see what new strategies and tactics Knowmore will add or change from the Friendfeed style of social aggregation.

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