An article in the New York Times about the New York Tech Meetup’s monthly meetings made the audience sound a bit intimidating with references to “Showtime at the Apollo for geeks” and “a ‘Gong Show’ thing.” Tonight, I went to the May event to see it with my own eyes and the audience was actually a pretty easy going group of people.

The speakers were great and I’ve added four things to my to-do list based on the presentations.

  1. Harvest is a web-based time tracking app which can, among other things, track the way you are spending your time in real-time. I want to try this out to see how much time each day I spend browsing the web versus emailing versus doing real productivity-intensive tasks.
  2. Explore XY is an innovative research tool designed to help explore sources of knowledge online. I’ve been wanting to see if I can compile a list of all mobile and wireless companies in New York. I’m not sure if this is the type of knowledge exploration that Explore XY would be best at, but I’ll give it a go and see what happens.
  3. ShopWiki is a shopping search engine. I need to find a male to male IR cable and failed on Froogle, so I plan to see if ShopWiki is up to the task.
  4. SkyScout is a device that tells you all about the planets and stars as you are looking at them. It is truly amazing and my favorite presentation of the evening. This device is definitely going on my Christmas list.

Anyone interested in getting involved with the New York technology scene should check out the group’s Meetup site at http://newtech.meetup.com/1/.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,