The New York Tech MeetUp- The March Edition

I know it is late.  I’ve had a humongously amazing, yet busy week. (and I don’t normally talk like that)  I feel so thankful that I am finally really starting to become less shy with people in the NY Tech Community.  Everyone I am meeting has been wonderful.  Y’all are great people.  Just has to be said.

First Off- Surphace S4.  In some ways, it works a lot like Zemanta.  It will distribute your content across their servers, get similar articles and videos for you, and try finding similar stuff of your own to publish in a nice little box at the bottom of your blog.  It’s basically another way of pumping your content across a wider network.  Further, it has an analytics engine attached (unlike Zemanta), as well as a very easy way to customize the box.

One note: Surphace was acquired by AOL.  A question came up by an audience member “So are you part of AOL, how much of the content is theirs”- on the assumption that most bloggers don’t want to be fodder for only AOL or alternatively, only give out AOL’s content.  At the end of the day, as Dave McClure would say “The Internet Wants to Be Fuckin’ Paid,” and you don’t get paid by being AOL’s peon.  Apparently the answer is that they monitor the situation, since they are run independently.

I have but one question-Some topics are clearly more AOL-y than others (eg: a Celeb gossip site focusing on their fashion…since it is Award Season).  Since it never came up- although I would never ask for details, are they fairly distributing content despite blog type (IE, is this blog, which seems to somewhat be more focused on personas and tech, be more or less likely to get more independent content than our fake example of Celebrities and their fashion)  I have no idea without testing, and I didn’t sign up with the private code.  (I’m burning out here people).  Other questions here I ask can I integrate services like these into short form blogging?  As someone who is seriously trying out short form tumblogging on Tumblr for the first time (I’m trying to write enough to assemble a book on social media and dating*), the content there is meant to be seen in aggregate.  Same with a fashion blog, and many other blogs in these short-form blogs on both Posterous and Tumblr.  What exactly should something like S4 (and I would add Zemanta on some level) Link to?

Products like these raise some real questions about the needs of users as content producers.  I think it is worthwhile to watch this field and see what happens.  Since we don’t know what the future of content should look like, (cf ChatRoulette anyone?) it’s really hard to predict what the best, let alone better ways of distributing content should be.

Crowdfusion.  A really interesting idea. Bigass CRM in the Vein of What the Pros get custom built.  And now you get something equally as nice!  And get you get to customize it!  But the Word “Drupal” made it really hard to understand why not uhhh Drupal?  And why am I hearing this story?  Just tell me why I need this item.  Look I know you are an important guy in Tech land, and I respect that, but I want to know about the tech.  I had to go look at the TechCrunch video to find out it is a CRM that does everything (social, wiki-database, blogging).  I was just assuming this is the progression of tech (possibly).  It’s open source (that’s cool).  But still, although the story behind it was nice, please don’t do that.  Though I did like the story…  Still I really want to know from someone who understands Drupal better than me (I’ve never used it, and I’ve heard it has a significant learning curve, but that it is very powerful) why Crowdfusion over Drupal?

And as much as I really want to test both CrowdFusion and Drupal, I need a need (even a fake need) to test them with.  Just to give a fair analysis.  I am not sure when I could recommend one over the other, mostly because I am not familar enough with CRMs and the specific purposes behind each one, nor who should they be aimed at for each situation that they could be used with.  ’Nuff said.

No more blogging tools….for now

Bundle is a competitor to Mint.  Except with a larger data set.  And a “take” on the data set. It’s cool charts.  Very Cool charts.  I can now tell you that a Female, my age, living where I live, grossing $40,000-$50,000, largest expense is shopping: with somewhere between a half and a third going to shoes and clothing…

Here is my take on all of this: Dr. Robert Cialdini, who is the seminal researcher on how humans influence each other (or at least in the US), mentions that social pressure is one of the best ways to change people’s behavior.  Will showing people what other anymous people similar to them spend make a person want to kick anonymous’s spending butt- probably.  We already know it does from experimental energy saving programs across the country, where your utility company shows how much power you are using compared to your neighbors. (Yes I was the girl who had asked that question).

Unlike Energy, Bundle has the same business model as Mint (currently): they want to sell you better loans, etc.  And while I doubt they could fudge the data they bought and potentially could develop, since the scandals would rock them, they already are weaker when it comes to presentation data.  Right now I see bubbles floating across my screen, of various sizes, that are easy to compare to each other.  One of the critical things Mint did was made that data easy to understand visually (it’s a simple pie chart….)- the bubbles, which cool, are quite complex to guesstimate, especially once one digs down into the data.  If I had to look at the data and ask “where compared to this average girl my age in my area should I cut expenses” and compare bubbles, I would be more than a tad confused, because visual information parity isn’t easily understood. I don’t know why the bubbles are in the locations they are, the relative sizes they are, etc.

This is fiscally advantageous to someone selling a loan, not trying to save you money.  Just so you know.  Clarity comes from clear information and clear visual design, which this product falls short.

Granted, numbers and percents of items, especially items like money which can be infinitely divided, are extremely hard to create visualizations for, so congratulations for trying to keep the ball rolling.  For some, even pie chart to new pie chart is confusing.  Huge bonus points for at least realizing conceptually in large amounts of people’s heads, division is a problem.

Plus, without really clarifying these “charts” and “methods,” as someone in the tweet stream mentioned, is there a strong incentive to switch from Mint?  Or even get at the population that isn’t using the web to track expenses?  (I would say there are large chunks of my friends who aren’t Mint Users, and I am a bad one at that…)

Qliupso is weirdly interesting.  It’s an avatar environment, or a videocam environment, or an icon environment, in which you watch your videos in I guess private chatrooms with your friends.  Like a small group of friends, say three.  And while I see it having many uses (hello massive controlled virtual conference? Hello virtual Movie Night date where I actually see the guy? Stop thinking naughty things about a virtual date.  People have them.) I think the following things are really important to consider:

1) If you have videocam capabilities, why use the SecondLife style avatars?  It’s very gimmicky. Is it a speed up/down thing?  I’m just lost.  I rather see you do the happy dance if I had to cowatch a sports games with you than your avatar.  I mean, yeah cool tech, but I want to connect with you, not your avatar, once the technology is in place that I can see you.  Or to purposely misquote a male friend of mine “I want to videochat with you so I can hit on you.”^

2) You have an ugly unfriendly theme going for you that is 80′s video arcade. B’vakasha, Talk to the usability society in Israel, since I realize one of your cofounders there is based out of Israel.  They need the boost, and you need the boost, and then everyone will be happier.  A cleaner, less 80′s green neon with black version will allow you to penetrate to private webinar world and classroom world.

3) Stop being a windows special.  I’m not running Parallels (maybe I should already…)  Realize that with tech like this, you may as well make it portable,  Some of the most popular places to amuse oneself is while commuting on buses, trains, and airplanes.  I might as well make that time family-time.  Or hanging out time.  And that means stop thinking about computers as a big box, usually with windows, and instead moving towards the idea of computers as the many sized, many operating systems box.

4) Edit: After successfully downloading to my other machine, named Josiah,- I can’t use Facebook connect.  WTF?  Further problems include that Josiah is a netbook.  And like most products, you suffer the Netbook display problem.  Please buy a netbook and check the displays.  They’re tinier.  And not by a little.  By a lot.  So things you think are appearing on the page, are actually disappearing.  That hereby concludes testing early.

Venmo was by far an away the best demo I have seen.  It is also by far an away the best product I have seen.  By that I mean it is a scary product.  It will change the world as we know it.  I don’t talk that way about most products.  I tend to think I am slightly curmudgeonly (Bah You over there!!!).  Venmo will.  That is high praise from the curmudgeonly side of me.

This is extremely hard to comprehend, even for me.  Venmo is effectively another layer of banking, particularly if you think about the importance of M1.  They’ve attached a debit like system (that’s checking, aka still in M1) to cell phone numbers.  You pay by text message.  You can have an account, linked to an actual bank account.  And if it gets widely adopted, I doubt you would even need the separate account to exit the cash as dollar bills.  The website is basically a semi-moot feature there for management purposes, much like actual bank account websites exist for.  You could go though for your entire Venmo existence without seeing the website (though for responsibility reasons, I don’t recommend it…this product, as far as I can tell, is using real money in real ways, and you should treat your transactions there as carefully as you would your real life bank account.  Don’t say I didn’t tell you now.)

Furthermore, there is this idea known as trust.  If I trust someone, they can take money automatically from my account, whenever that entity wants to.  The one thing I don’t like about trust, now that I have sat there with it- I can’t put limits on my trust.  I can’t say person a has a $20 buck trust with me and Starbucks has a $50 trust with me.  I would love to see some sense of limits, just because effectively it would be automatic billpay between friends and entities of all sorts whenever, however, I want if I could place limits (I mean I don’t want to trust my coffee place infinitely, mostly because I don’t trust me…)

Plus they email you with all of your transactions.

I’ve never seen anything more interesting in my entire life.  Considering that children can’t get bank accounts, and that you have 10 year olds walking around with cell phones, this is essentially the first real bridge step of banking digitally for whole groups of people who may not otherwise have access to the power of checking.  Plus with a few sets of tweaking, Trust really could radicalize how we understand credit and its demands, especially on the micro level.  It means a place where we negotiate and renegotiate credit as individuals with various other individuals and organizations.  That’s radical.  So radical my head is still spinning a little.  And very scary, for measuring trust in a banking sense has gotten really screwed up over the past 30 years.  (don’t believe me, believe Joseph Stiglitz who remarked in the mid-nineties about the shift from loans to bonds- “Banks versus Markets as Mechanisms for Allocating and Coordinating Investment.“)  I’m not sure what to think when I see Trust, does this mean I can open up bids for my credit independent of the banks, the way a larger coorporation can.  The possibilities, with this sort of product, are endless, because of how it de-ties the negotiating relationships away from the our large banking centers.  And that, is incredible…

No matter how much hype Square has, it can’t provide that level of monetary liquidity.  It still relies, at the end of the day, on leveraging the power of Visa and Mastercard.  And while Venmo could add credit cards to the system, it effectively bypasses the idea of old credit/debit cards, banking whatever.  Theoretically, your money never has to leave the Venmo system to use it.  That means your money is moving, and moving more rapidly.  And that, essentially, makes the definition of M1 much more complicated, and much more powerful.  Effectively, money at the M1 level is much more liquid, and hence now much more speedy in the system of finance.  Kudos to them for figuring this out.  I’m extremely impressed.  This is one of the most socially powerful pieces of technology I have seen.  Good luck, and godspeed, for this will change banking as we know it.

_____

The 1 minute shorts:

Filife:  This could be awesome.  It is crowdsourced questions and answers about your finances.  There is a premium service as well, where you get to crowdsourceyour answers to super-certified people who know stuff.  This however, does not help the fact that their CSS does not work in 4 different browsers.  That sucks.  And is silly.  And makes your website hard to navigate and is a very rookie mistake.  Does not make me want to click on the “Credit” Link.  OTOH, it is one of the few websites that seems to want to explain to the public in simple terms what a credit swap is.  And that is cool.  How many places on the web can you find that out, besides wikipedia.

Bellaga: This is Etsy for Emerging Fashion.  The clothing is beautiful, the site stunning, and the margins ??????.  Fashion is a notoriously cutting business.  The web can be very lightweight (It’s servers and serverload).  They really need to get on say the DailyCandy now, or some major fashion blog as the new it place to shop.  Or else.  If too many fashion brands go under while they are launching, the website may not have enough of a margin to continue running.  But it is a totally interesting revenue model for someone who likes clothing (and who saw how much someone my age pays for in clothing because of Bundle, so I know there is space for a site like this)  They definitely also need to get lots of people to sign up as emerging designers while they are, apprenticing, or in school, in say, FIT, or Parsons.  I know they only launched a week ago, but still, they need more clothing.  Because clothing is yummy and makes them seem more legit as a place to go to to see what is emerging (though they are featuring an extremely cutting edge look that I would kill to wear, and would look damn good in, if I say so myself, and not because I am vain, it is because it is the kind of clothing that would make me feel very confident…)

Also the site is disorganized right now.  There is definitely more clothing from the seller if you look around, but not a lot comes up when you search (like only one dress for cocktail, but the seller seems to actually be listing multiple??? Maybe it is a definition issue)  Please fix that, I like looking…

PinkDingo:  Essentially, they are on target about who gives to charities, and about the idea of Microgiving.  Now if only they could realize that you are mostly likely to give if you give via subscription.  And I think most people would do monthly subscriptions to charities. (Especially since they socialize the giving.) I wonder if they do charity suggestions (you like x charity, try y)  The charities listed are all in Guidestar. If that makes you feel better.

It needs a User experience Workover, only slightly.  It’s a little too light blue, I would like to see some contrast.  However, they are on their mark for older people, lots of big text.  One of the very few sites that realize you need lots of big text that I have seen (even if it is a dead ugly site).  Older people tend to donate more money, as they are wealthier than me, and older people are more likely to wear reading glasses, hence kudos on the big text.  Someone was smart there. Smart is also storing your credit card information as soon as possible. (Can we say we learned from the App store about seamless transactions).  They also have challenges and organization tools.  Still, it needs a hook.  I am not sure why I need this site, as opposed to knowing what charities I like?  Further, although I love the facebook hook-in, I almost want to leverage that hook more, since I know people spend way too much time on that site (including me…)  It’s not enough to publish to feed anymore, especially when your site is a little visually weak.  What is going to draw me into giving (Answer: the stories that make facebook a place to become a digital human, so my digital humanity wants to know why I am giving to this charity and spread that story to my friends….)

NeedAKick.  It’s based on a simple premise.  You pay the site designer (which again needs a makeover, it isn’t hook-y enough) if you fail to do your important task.

My imperial question: Is that enough? Or at least the best way- My foot doctor (I recently had a badly sprained ankle) likes to make you sign papers to make sure you remember when to come.  The system mostly work.  Dr. Robert Cialdini (there he is mentioned again) writes about influence: does negative influence, even on yourself, work?

Probably not.  Most people would still avoid the task, and lose the money.  So our frum yid* would make a good buck, oddly enough- I doubt he would help anyone though.  If it were a site where I paid to find people to help me prove that I could complete the task and to break it down into micropeices, that might work (that sort of exists already, though….)

^I have a weird sense of ironic humor.  And I like detournement…

*That is not insulting.  As they say in Chabad, a Yid is a Yid.