Benefit Kitchen, Slash, Everbliss stand out at NY Tech Meetup
NEW YORK-A screening benefit tool for low-income families, a stock market crowd-rating platform, an instant coach or therapist hotline app and elegant toy apps for kids stood out among the nine presenters at the NY Tech Meetup last January 5 at the Skirball Theater.
http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/events/226594137/
A winner at the NYC Big Apps for its civic tech initiative, Benefit Kitchen is a web and mobile app that helps connects working Americans with the $80-billion underutilized food, health and child care assistance industry.
The tool only needs an email address to answer and — for safety — doesn’t ask for a social security number. It answers how much you can get. It was described at the meetup as “the TurboTax for poverty.”
Slash wowed the audience with its supercharge keyboard that makes it easy to share anything. Available on iOS app, you can share links by tapping “/” to unlock Foursquare, GIFs, Spotify, Stickers, YouTube and many more without switching apps.
Everbliss got the crowd laughing when the presenters called it “basically Tinder but not self destructive. “ Doing a live demonstration can be a hit or miss, but it showed how in a few taps, it connects people to a qualified coach or therapist in a live video call anytime, anywhere. It just did that by having a coach respond to a call.
For its part, Tinybop, demonstrated how its apps, three voted the best of 2015 by the App Store (The Robot Factory, The Everything Machine and Simple Machines). It makes elegant educational apps for kids to dive deep into ideas and see how things work.
Vetr likens its app to the “wisdom of the smart crowd” the way it delivers stock market insights from people and the news sources they follow. If you join in “you can build your own homepage and watch list.”
Other presenters included GreatHorn, a cloud security platform that helps detect and prevent spear phishing and credential theft attacks in real time as well as The Segovia, which fights poverty through software tools.
LiquidTalent is an talent marketplace where you can connect with and hire vetted developers and designers within hours. Job seekers must have evidence of past projects and repositories in Github. It offers instant chat and calls to developers.
The meetup’s hack of the month was http://www.justnotsorry.com/ which works like spell check for email; only difference is that it checks your over-reliance of words like “just” and suggests options for you to provide a more authoritative voice in your emails.
