November starts off with a bang. Sort of. It's also Movember, so donate. This post will be short but full of gems you can click on.

I got an opportunity to attend my first New York Tech Meetup (NYTM). I work on a side project (One of my 1001 side projects - http://www.vima.co.za/pages/projects.html) called UPOD (User Programming of Devices), scratch implementation of the idea: http://scratchabledevices.com/.  My team and I were there to present our latest advances on the project. So the website does not do it justice. We will have an update on all that we have done soon. Our presentation did not go as we planned as we had wi-fi problems at the venue. People did leave understanding our idea which is a consolation and we had respectable tweets :-). Now to the tech meetup.

What is NYTM? From the website:

NYTM centers around its monthly events, where members gather to watch emerging companies demo new ideas, hear leading-edge thinking on technology topics, and build their networks to develop their businesses.

From that description alone, one gets the feeling that this is something special, it was. The theme for Nov 2 was education. So a lot of teams from universities were presenting. Rutgers had a good showing with a number of projects. I even think we had the most representation. Anyway on to the projects of the night. I will not cover all of them. You can get the list here: http://nytm.org/2011/11/01/november-2-nytm-presenters/

BodyJam

Shopping online for clothes? Dont know how that piece of clothing will look on you? Well BodyJam has a solution. Using the Kinect Sensor, the projects fits your body with the clothes you want to try out in real-time. So you can see what you would look like in that shirt. Words cannot do this justice, you have to see it.

Commons

Commons is an iPhone app that encourages civic engagement. So you spot a pothole on the street in your city, you can then take a picture of the pothole and upload it to report it. But the app is also a game. You get points for what you report. Other users can also vote for your report and you get more points. News Blurb: http://bit.ly/vbbGkY

Video:

Rediscovering New York City with the Commons App by 5minTech

Grafighters

We all remember those great fighting games we played. Now imagine being able to draw your own characters and uploading them into the game. #nufsaid head over: http://grafighters.com/

This was just a taste of the presentations. There were much more. You can check out the presenters here - http://nytm.org/2011/11/01/november-2-nytm-presenters/

Of note were BlueFin Labs, finally proper analytics for TV and the HackNY Projects - http://hackerleague.com/hackathons/hackny-fall-2011

I enjoyed the presentations even though our demo didnt go as well. We will be fixing that and also presenting at the Rutgers Entrepreneurship day in less than two weeks. I want to say thanks to the whole team for all of the work they had put into this. Its not our main research work, but it has certainly been fun seeing our project move from idea to prototypes. We are getting better at this.

I also kept track of the tweets about the event. You can checkout the simple analytics here:

vukosi's Archive on nytm Containing 500 Tweets; http://archivist.visitmix.com/vukosi/14