Recently (Well, June 11th, eons in Internet time) they went through a revamp. So, don’t forget to stop by Meetup.com and see what’s new.

Also, check out their new campaign: Unplug Your Friends

This video is brilliant.

Enjoy! And be sure to share it around. :-) iPhone Madness

Sorry for the lack of an embed. Apparently, MobileMe isn’t as hip as it’d like to be. C’mon Apple get with it!

Of course, as with any good support group, some of us lamented our recent experiences with twitter’s infamous downtime and the possibilities of FriendFeed. (<hypnoticVoice>come to FriendFeed Rebecca </hypnoticVoice> ;-)

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the tech/start-up scene in NYC is impressive. This time, it was Whitney Hess’s fault for getting us all together. I’d never met her before, but began following her randomly on twitter through Livia Labate, who I began following through Christina Wodtke. I thought for sure it was going to be all awkward, but was pleasantly surprised to find several familiar faces and some familiar names of whom I’d only talked with online (glad to finally shake hands, Charlie) Plus, met a few others with whom I share new connections. (@mknell, thanks for getting me on the right train!)

Whitney was saying that one of the reasons she did this was because she promised herself to get out in the community more this year. I’m on the same track actually. Well, she did a great job and I hope to see more… (hint hint: use meetup.com or upcoming)

Actually, funny thing about meeting Ms. Hess. Turns out we’re closer than we thought. Apparently, she worked on the new Earthlink site at TribalDDB with Brian Regan (to whom I owe many thanks for giving me a shot in UX) before I did and then came back on after I left. Knew her name sounded familiar before following her. {insert small-world cliché here}

Glad I followed the randomness because the “Tweetup” was teh awesome! Tony Bacigalupo showed up with Sanford and I hadn’t talked with him since the CooBric opening. He and Brett Petersel of Mashable fame shared a bit about Tech-Karaoke which just sounds like a blast. Awesome seeing you guys again, really glad you could make it out. (Can’t find linkage for Tech-Karaoke!) Sanford had to bail early, though. (Boooo!)

I’ve probably missed some people. Sorry! :-)
Update:Whitney posted an excellent round-up of everyone. (with easy-to-read bullets too :-)

Some Benefits of Getting Out for Face-Time, Post-Online Time

This is when our inter-connected technologies literally come to life. Here are people all met entirely through online activities (for me anyway) now with the chance to meet in person. And because most of our interactions had been sans-physical, there was an excitement set to see and hear who we all are in a real-time, real-world interaction. Interestingly, and I’m sure there could be an entire psych dissertation written about this, it seems that experiences like this have some pre-existing social grease on them because a common ground is already established.

The Web is finally becoming the *Web*.

Shout-Outs

d.b.a. was the spot: great service, great priced drinks.

I want to give an awesome big thanks to Tom Limegello from CrispMedia for getting the pizza. Owe you one.

This was the only good photos I got. Brett has some on his FB page, though.

Oh, and @webmetricsguru has some video, need to find links, though.

NYC Tech Scene is Quiet?

Pishaw! The New York Web scene always seems somewhat quieter compared to the freewheelin’ West-Coaster Valley folks, but don’t be fooled. There is a mighty reserve of fine peeps here creating fun, ad-hoc cross-polinating events all the same. Maybe it’s just quality trumping quantity. ;-)

Not-To-Miss NYC Internet Social Events for Summer 2008

• Internet Week New York
• Mashable’s Exhibit Hall for Internet Week NY
• Follow Web2NewYork
• LinkedData Planet
• Digg NYC Meetup with a Live Diggnation!
• More NYC Tweetups?!?
• Anything else??

Photo by cstoller

Well, I wanted to get my hands dirty in the IDE. So, I went to the SDK installation, and xCode introduction. I’ve been through the tutorials, but thought that some real face-time instruction would be good.

 It was pretty straight forward, but this was way cool, though: Bonjour technology can connect other phones over WiFi. There is some sample code that allows you see how this works on the wiki page. (Link Below)

I didn’t get my “Hello World” to even say “hi,” but I also had to cut it short before tweaking it because we wanted to get into what we thought would be the app for us: Interface Builder.

IB is tricky, definitely fun, but I don’t see how I could use it in my workflow just yet. It’s still really buggy and not complete. Some where saying that it’s the weakest part of the SDK. Certainly didn’t do it for me at this point.
(See Links at end of post for notes.)

Session 2: User Experience with Chris Fahey and Rob Marini

This, for me, and perhaps many others because the room was packed, was the headline event. The iPhone is in such infancy that we’re all starving and grasping for what it takes to make a great app for the device. In case you don’t know, Apple (they’re not the only one’s, though, they’re just one of the more well-known) puts User Experience at the front-end of the development process. I reiterate this as it’s a relatively new notion for software developers who are used to system-driven UI design.

Which is kind of a “duh.” I mean, if you’re creating something for an audience, shouldn’t you have a deep understanding of that audience? Anyway, another topic for another day.

Photo by bisceglie

Chris showed off his densely-layered Photoshop interface prototype maker – complete with moveable finger (unfortunately not shown)– from which he hand-stiched various screen shots he found on the Web (he’ll be releasing to the public soon, watch graphpaper.com). He was quick to point out that he did his protoype Pre-SDK release with InterfaceBuilder (IB), but Rob actually advised against using IB for making prototypes anyway. There’s just too much time involved. Perhaps it will get better/easier, but right now, as designers,we should stick with what we know.

Prototyping is an extremely important part of the design process, but not the first. It’s best to start of with a graph-paper sketch pad. Chris suggested to use one the size of an actual handheld. I think this might be what he’s talking about: Moleskine (scroll to bottom of the page).

The photoshop file was definitely an undertaking on his part, but the take-away from Fahey’s presentation is this: design is sometimes the “Art of taking features out.” Sure, in the initial phases, jam-pack a concept with features, but then give it a critical look to take out stuff; what I like to call “design triage.”

Actually there is another take away, “Get pixel-perfect as soon as you can.” Many designers are coming from desktop or Web design where screen real estate is a luxury compared to the iPhone. So, it’s really important to see what it’s truly going to look like.

Rob Marini really got some great discussion going. One of Rob’s points was that once a prototype is really fleshed out and the experience is coming together, then start bringing things into UI Builder.

Rob’s posted his notes on his site: The New High Standard.

Warning For the Developer

Eric Redlinger, creator of CrossWalk a handy Subway map app for NYC, pointed out to programmers: if you worked with pre-beta “unofficial SDK” don’t be surprised if everything gets thrown out. Apparently, Apple’s made a ton of changes to the CocoaTouch’s (iPhone rendition of Cocoa) methods and syntax.

Photo by cstoller

Webkit Areas for Native Development

Here’s an interesting idea. Something I was pondering as I’ve played with xTools: design and develop using Webkit with a “thin CocoaTouch layer” and then turn it into a iPhone app. Apparently, the guys were saying that this is a perfectly valid way to develop because “Webkit views” will run with the benefits of a native app having that thin Cocoa layer, but easy enough for Web technologists to get apps rapidly built. Some features like camera, corelocation are not available through Webkit, but that’s where the native aspect can come in.

Eric allowed us to rip up his CrossWalk app, but unfortunately I had to jet off to a friend’s Seder. So, I couldn’t participate much.

Here’s some other helpful Webkit topics:

SproutCore – OpenSource framework for Web. Think of it as Cocoa for the Web.
iUI – is another option, but a little immature.

Anyway, this iPhoneDevCamp was my first BarCamp experience. It was awesome, definitely will be attending more in the future. If you’re in the technology dev/design industry in any capacity, either go to one or get one started if they’re not available in your area.

Thanks for the volunteering and sponsorship:

• Eric Redlinger: CrossWalk
• Michael Sharon
• Hans-Christoph Steiner
• Shawn Van Every
• IDMI at PolyTech
• Socialight
• Organic
• PinchMedia
• ZWorkBench
• ITP at NYU

More linkage:

• TUAW
• HyperRadiant’s Notes from the Interface Builder Session
• CocoaHeadsNYC Yahoo! Group
• iPhoneDevcampNYC Wiki with Samples Link and IRC Channel
• BarCamp.org

Please, by all means add more local groups, events, blog posts, reviews, software downloads, help files, (whatever) in the comments and I’ll update. If you were there, definitely put your comments below or link to your site.

Anytime I attend these smaller homegrown/grassroots events, I try to be one of the first there for a couple reasons:

1) Coming in from NJ and going somewhere different (like Brooklyn), it’s good to pad time. That’s obvious, but
2) There’s usually a ton of things that need setting up and that’s a great opportunity to pitch in and meet the lead volunteers before things get hectic.

oh and the refreshments are at their freshest. :-)

All the Smart Peeps

It was great to catch up with a couple folks such as Joshua Keay and his brother, Dave from Magnetism Studios and Chris Fahey from Behavior Design plus met a few new ones. These people are brilliant and lots of great discussions get going. 

Tell ya what’s funny, though is organizing the day. It’s truly an organic process. During the meet and greet, everyone suggested the topics for the day.

Then after introductions, we organized the topics into a schedule. There is nothing more hilarious than a hundred+ technology/experience professionals/enthusiasts creating what will ultimately be the “unconference” ad-hoc experience that are BarCamps.

There we were, deliberating over what order the topics should be in, which should run concurrently with what, who’s going to teach and miss out on a topic in another room. I was getting worried as I wanted to see UX and InterfaceBuilder in the beginning because I had to leave early. Then once we got it all figured out, we wound up starting all over again because… well, just because someone had to say something. Yeah, there was nothing planned up front!

But you know, something that could typically take event planners weeks to figure out, we did it in a matter of minutes. Experts surfaced, presentations were crafted on the fly, and the event was great.

Lunch

(We actually went on to the sessions first and then came back for lunch. Just wanted to group my topics.) 

Good pizza; good discussions. Met some great folks and caught up with Patrick Ewing, brill rubyist working for Gary Vaynerchuk. Talked up some good ideas with him and Robert Marini who I just met for the first time. That guy’s smart. Look for good things to come from him. Also, got to meet Mac coder, Buzz Anderson creator of PodWorks and Cocoalicious. We got to chatter on general usability and development for the phone and some history growing up with the Mac. Ahh, the nostalgia…. Met wit one of the sponsors, Mike Sharon from socialight, about his move from South Africa to NYC and the cultural differences. So, it’s not all tech jabber, which is way cool.

Anyway, meeting people at these events is perhaps my favorite part (there were so many, I’m not going to be able to link to everyone, sorry!) There’s always either some new ideas or refinements to existing ideas that come out the cross-pollenization.

Read on the Sessions.

Don’t Miss

• Josh and Dave KeayMagnetism Studios
• Buzz Anderson sci•fi hi•fi
• BarCamp.org
• Mike Sharon
• Chris Fahey
• Dave Troy has some video on Qik.com
• Flickr Pics
• Rob Marini

Please, by all means add more local groups, events, blog posts, reviews, software downloads, help files, (whatever) in the comments and I’ll update.

Oh, and anything you post elsewhere, use the tag iPhoneDevCampNYC (especially if you twitter it, use a hashtag)

Technorati Tags:
iPhoneDevCampNYC,iPhone,barcamp, coworking

Eric Litman is a young VC from WashingtonVC who sobered the whole group with one simple facts about his industry:

DON’T GO LOOKING FOR MONEY<

Eric brought light to distinguish something I personally found valuable: Social Capital is more valuable than Money Capital. Making friends is more important than making money, but either way

His keypoint: Engagement. It’s all about making connections and developing relationships. Finding people who can be ambassadoors for your personal brand.

“A creator only needs 1000 fans to make a living.”
- Kevin Kelly

To put a fine point on it, he brought the infamously infectious Gary Vaynerchuck from Wine TV and purchaser of Cork’d to explain.

If you’ve never seen Gary, watch his show. Watch him for a bit because that’s all it takes to wonder, what’s this guy on??! Just kidding, he’s actually an inspiring listen. And I’m not saying that because he gave away free wine and the Web 2.0 meetup (well, not totally ;-)

Gary made some really great points as to what we should be considering as we develop who we are as online socialites and promote our personal brands (if that’s your thing, anyway). Among them:

Don’t look for people to buy, but to build relationships and care about your friends.

This is a golden era of “Personal brand;” recession proof yourself.

Talk about what makes you happy. There is opportunity in talking about what you love. You are the media: Pump out so much content that people can’t help but notice.

Content is King, but Marketing is Queen (and you know who runs the house)

Too people many give up. Don’t!

Get real-life social. Do your face-2-faces.

Legacy is better than currency; remember your legacy, focus on it.

(That last one hit me hard as I was just writing about my legacy on Sunday.)

That was the gist of it. Then he took questions from the crowd. Actually, it was kinda funny. Everyone was in shock after his electrifying presentation, the room of about 300 people – for the first time all evening – went dead silent.

Finally someone spoke up and the asked about something I’ve been pondering lately: to niche or not. Gary’s view: Don’t niche. Spend time talking about all things you’re passionate about.

Check out the other reviews from NextWeb’s NYC Web 2.0 March 31st Meetup:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Extreme social collaboration. This is real stuff. Real biz model. Real work being done here.

If you’re at the TED conference in SF a few weeks ago, you might have heard of them. They put their product to the test and had some of the most brilliant minds in technology develop a product using their platform.

Basically, in about 72 hours, through Kluster’s Collaboration platform, an entire product replete with marketing campaign and logistics.

Now, I want to be clear about thier “platform,” This is not like OpenSocial or Facebook; that is, a framework for coders on which to program. Their framework is comprised of real people creating real products…. with, get this, are you ready, their imagination!

Kluster has their own currency called “watts.” Watts do translate into real dollars when projects are complete.

To be honest, I didn’t get all the details, but I did speak with, Ben Kaufman after his presentation, and the implications of this project hits hard to what the new economy is about: earning by doing. Which segue’s nicely to the final presenter.

More to come…

Check out Kluster.com

Check out the other reviews from NextWeb’s NYC Web 2.0 March 31st Meetup:

• Part 1
• Part 3

Surprisingly, most of the people with whom I spoke were also first-timers. I thought I was going to be the only one.

I intentionally did not bring biz cards as I’m trying to promote some “green-ness.” I tried taking photographs with my phone in the hopes I’d just be able to tag and archive, but need a macro lense. In fact, I’ll probably write about it later.

NextWeb is not like the other meetups. It was more like a concert – I know Webster Hall, duh.

Mostly, the stage was run by folks who we already know, but I want to give some props to a few lesser-knowns: Eyebees and Angelwish.org.

Angelwish.org

This is a non-profit who has a heart for children infected with HIV. They events

The presentation was really short. So, not much to say about what they talked about, but that it was heart-touching. I’m glad to see there’s more to the tech scene than trying create the next great thing.

(angelwish.org to learn more)

Eyebees

Essentially, Eyebees project let’s you see every live being on your site at any given time. Which given the real-time stats market, this is nothing new, but they give it a new spin. In the spirit of Web 2.0, these stats are transparent to others using the site as well – with a splash of serendipity.

So, as a participant, you’re able to connect with others who are “buzzing” about a site that you’re on and talk with them about the content they’re looking at.

For instance, say you’re reading an article about a politician, and you see other visitors buzzing about the article and you see them move to another article. You could follow them if it’s to a topic in which you’re interested.

Frankly, I thought it was a little too-cutesy for my clients’ purposes, but I can see some usefulness. I’m going to give a whirl in a day or so and see what it’s all about.

(Eyebees.com for their beta)

• Part 1
• Part 3

The captain of conversation for the duration of the meal was Sanford Dickert. Sanford is an animated and infectious visionary who is surely going to drive success in our lackluster market and if you have the opportunity, definitely sit in on a chat with him. If you’re even considering doing biz with Gotham start-ups, this guy is a must-have connection in your network. He’s instigated disruptions in the past, and he’s bound to do it again.

His current project is CooperBricolage. Which I mentioned briefly in a previous post regarding NYC. “CooBric” ‚Äì as the chief instigator calls it ‚Äì is brewing in a quaint cuban restaurant in the east village, Café Fuego. (Side Note: The food is freakin’ awesome and the daytime waitress, Demaris, is sweetheart.) The main point of CooBric is to create a collaborative environment in a restaurant….Yes, a restaurant workspace.

I know that sounds crazy, but it’s not. It’s typical of our Valley counterparts. And imagine how it makes sense: food, the great social coagulant; mix in a some creative juices creating kick-butt apps and you have formula for social activity that forges friendships. (well, hopefully :-\)

As a fledgling entrepreneur, I think what gets me excited the most about projects like CooBric is the potential for cross-pollenization. When you’re working on projects completely irrelevant to other persons projects and you start talking about them together, innovations are inevitable.

Another interesting cat at the noonhat (rhyme unintentional) was Andrew Parker. Andrew is analyst with a VC group, Union Square Ventures. I know we should be cautious of VC peeps, but this guy is cool. He’s coming up from an interaction designer/ fine arts background. That kinda mix is intriguing.

One the groups he’s working with is Etsy, which I’ve shared before at ma.gnolia. Etsy has got to be the COOLest way to shop for crafts and other décor. Andrew did an email-ping-introduction with the brains over there, Rob Kalin and me. If I get the opp to meet Rob, that will certainly be a highlight in my adventures.

The fourth guy was Peter (i didn’t get his last name). Peter came with Sanford, but opposite to the animated Dickert, was rather quiet. So, that’s scary. He seemed to be having the gears just going, plotting a global takeover. ;-) Just kidding. I didn’t get to learn much about him in that session.

If you’re in NYC and you’ve just stumbled across and you scanned this entire post, without reading –thus adding to my bounce rate –fine, thanks :-). If you’re interested in tech start-ups in the around northeast NYC-metro area. Even in Philly. I’d HIGHLY encourage you to get in on the ground floor of this one: goto CooperBricolage, put yourself on the RSVP list and come out Wed, Sept. 5th. 2007

Oh! And there’s bound to be some more noonhat action here in NYC. Just sign up.

I’m keeping a list of NYC start-ups here.