NY Tech StartUp Showcase: Lots of Location

June 3, 2009 · Posted in Companies, Conferences

So I had the pleasure of going by to check out the NY Tech MeetUp StartUp showcase held yesterday at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The hike down West 27th street was an eye opener… ever wondered where those guys who sell the knock off Lewwy Viton or the Burkin bags in midtown get their goods… well there is a pretty good chance it’s from this lovely stretch of Manhattan. And the Fashion Institute of Technology? Well not much fashionable or technical about it as far as I could tell… reminded me more of PS 212… not that there is anything wrong with that.

But the technology on display from this group of start ups was pretty impressive, there were a number of companies focused on video and many tools for helping small publishers & bloggers with their trade. But there were also a surprising number of location oriented companies… some of the highlights:

Centrl – a mobile social networking app, that has one of the most slick user interfaces I’ve seen and is super simple to use. It seems Centrl is trying to integrate some of the best features from other mobile social networking apps while also making the barrier to entry as low as humanly possible… you don’t even need a Centrl account you can just sign in using one of your favorite existing social networks like via Facebook Connect. Centrl includes some nice rich content layers like Yelp and Wikipedia, plugs into twitter, has gameplay elements ala FourSquare, and deal finding features which seems to be where Centrl’s revenue may one day come in.

Xtify – Xtify is brought to us by Andrew Weinreich, the same guy that runs Meetmoi (another LBS company in the showcase). Xtify seems to be trying to simplify the process of allowing application developers to easily integrate location into their web products with all the nice bells and whistles and controls already baked in. Location is taken from a mobile device, by whatever means it can, stored by Xtify with things like timestamp/accuracy associated and then later used by an accompanying web applications for delivering location oriented content… that sort of thing. Presumably Andrew went through the painful process of trying to figure out how best to work with location data across myriad devices while building MeetMoi and decided to take his experience and learning and productize it for others in Xtify. It seemed to me to be an awful lot like the Yahoo fireeagle product, although according to their rep they are more ‘end-to-end’… maybe something to dig deeper into in a future post.

Plott.me – Plott.me is focusing on creating a platform for the development and distribution of location aware tour guides for the iPhone and web. While the product wasn’t available to play with first hand, it struck me as being quite similar to something being done by a U.K. company Node Explorer. The idea is essentially to allow individuals or another company, ideally those already with location oriented content to easily upload and organize video, audio and text that will be triggered when the phone is located in relevant geographic locations. The content and application would then be offered for sale or rental, ideal for tourist destinations, presumably with both the content provider and Plott getting a share of the application revenue.

Padmapper and Streeteasy were two service focused on the real estate market. Both trying to make heavy use of maps and more powerful yet easy to use filtering features to make it easier to connect you to your next apartment or home. I didn’t have a chance to chat with the Streeteasy folks, but Padmapper seems to be primarily scraping the Craigslist real estate sections (no APIs) and then using a giant map as the interface… real estate IS all about location afterall. You can then easily filter the listings by all the typical aspects like features and price. On the downside they throw out all the listings that can’t be resolved down to a street address… which in NYC at least is probably a lot, so it can’t readily serve as a substitute to going directly to Craigslist. But I loved the maps orientation and they added some cool features like “filter by commute time” based on your place of work. Definitely worth playing with if you’re in the market for a new pad.

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