Michael Carrano

Hoboken Tech Meetup

Published by Michael Carrano on October 31, 2010

On Monday, October 25th, I attended my first Hoboken Tech Meetup. The meetup took place at Stevens Institute of Technology where I am currently enrolled as a computer science student. I had no idea what to expect since I have never been to this type of event before. I have to say, I had a great time and look forward to future meetups.

At the meetup, I met a bunch of great people working on interesting projects and ideas. Some of the people I met work for Google, ThumbPlay, or working on their own startup. I look forward to future meetups so I can follow up on their progress and cheer them on. Hopefully I will have a project of my own to share with everyone soon.

The format of the meetup involves the following:

• Speed networking with people who are in attendance. Get to know the person, find out what they are working on, what they need help with and offer help if you can help.

• Listen to the 3-4 startups that will demo their product. The startups are involved in all different industries. At the end of the night, one of them is crowned the champion.

• Guest speaker. This is someone who has been in the startup world and knows what it takes to be successful. Their insightful knowledge and advice really helps everyone out.

The following are the three startsups that presented and demoed their product:

• Bubbalon - Bubbalon is a website where you can express your likes and dislikes for anything. Rather than a simple Facebook Like, you will be able to rate the items on various attributes. These scores will then be collected by Bubbalon and you will be able to see the average score based on World, Gender, etc.

• Knowem - Knowem is a website where you can instantly check to see if your brand / identity is available (or taken) on over 400+ websites. They will even register your identity on all the social media websites. Knowem also has the ability to predict upcoming popular websites. This is very helpful if you are looking to protect your trademark(s).

• Innovid - Innovid is working on some fascinating advertising technology. They are looking to redefine how a user interacts with advertisements before a video starts. Rather than being intrusive and out of context with the video, Innovid is looking to be engaging and fun.

The champion of this Hoboken Tech Meetup was Knowem. I have actually heard of Knowem prior to this meetup so it was cool to see the CEO giving his pitch.

I also spent some time after the meetup taking with the representative from Innovid. I was able to see further demos and wish Youtube would use these kinds of ads. The demo I saw was for the movie Prince of Persia. The Innovid advertisement allowed me to watch trailers of the movie and if I really wanted to, I could have purchased movie tickets within the advertisement. It was great that I never had to leave the website I was on or go away from the video.

See you all at the next meetup!