NY Tech Meetup launches Apple Watch app, 7 other startups present
NEW YORK–It’s good to see Scott Heiferman show up at NY Tech Meetup last May 5. Once a regular fixture of it many years ago, even as co-host, the Meetup founder has understandably been busy building his community of meetups, 30,000 for tech alone around the country. It was, as he has explained over time, a “9/11 baby.” He was at this particular meetup to announce the NY Tech Meetup Apple Watch app.
he presenters of the night were Ananas, AptDeco, Amadeus, CornellTech, Epicure, OneDrop and X.ai with Wikitongues as hack of the night.
Ananas founder Arielle Shekel made the right decision of showing an actual demonstration of a child on video, at Skirball Theater’s giant screen at that, teaching her own language to answer Shekel’s vision of having two children connect with each other from opposite sides of the world.
Shekel said her app was inspired by her international background. She was born in New York but moved to Tel Aviv, Israel.
For safety concerns, Shekel said her app’s first version will only offer recorded versions for now. She also said how she prefers to keep one child interacting with another child in their respective languages, instead of having them talk in many other languages. “In the future, we will have other languages but in our research, most (parents) know the other language they want their kids to learn,” she said.
The platform is designed for children with friendly flashcards and icons and reinforced by playful memory games.
Made in New York in 2013, AptDeco is a buy-and-sell marketplace for used furniture. The startup provides a platform for buying or selling used furniture. It’s an end-to-end process that includes arranging pick-up, delivery, payments and customer service. Listing items is free.
AptDeco reportedly verifies and buyers and sellers, then works with local delivery teams to pick up and deliver the furniture. For every sale, it deducts 14 to 19 percent from you depending on price item.
Amadeus is a data and payments platform for the music industry marketing to independent labels now.
Cornell Tech updated the audience about how its students are building a startup from the ground up, developing a pitch, deck and prototype that can be shared with others, tested with users and leveraged as a launching pad for future endeavors.
How would you like to stay healthy starting with the food you buy? Epicure analyzes your online receipts and recommends healthier options from its licensed nutritionists. Just take a photo of your receipt and send it to Epicure.
It is looking for health insurers and online grocers, even Instacart to be a partner. It is currently working on a color-coded system—red, yellow and green—for easier monitoring of your diet.
Hack of the month featured Daniel Udell and Freddie Andrade’s Wikitongues project, a global effort to record and provide access to every language in the world using a network of volunteers. People simply submit transcriptions. It now carries 200 videos.
Dennis Mortensen has been busy doing one meetup after another. This time, he was at the NY Tech meetup with Amy, the artificial intelligence-driven personal assistant of X.ai which schedules meetings for you.
Being diabetic inspired Jeff Dachis of One Drop to create a free diabetes management app, a place to log everything and anonymously share information with a community of like-minded people, delivering actionable, data driven insights on the platform.
