Jeff Pulver’s breakfast (with friends) in NYC
This morning I was at Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and friends. A supremely interesting and entertaining event with 101 people at Friend of a Farmer near Union Square.
When you enter, you are presented with your social networking toolkit:
which is two large name tags and bunch of small stickers for real-time social ‘tag’ging. You write down “cool”, “new york”, “internet video”, etc. on the small stickers and quite literally put them on people you are talking to, a very entertaining and quite literal social tagging experience. I think it’s brilliant, I felt the urge to tag everything on the way home on the subway “nice shoes”, “annoying ad”, etc 
One thing of note was I had a chance to meet and chat with David Troy of TwitterVision fame. Unype shares a lot of characteristics with Dave’s work (which also includes FlickrVision and the new spinvision.tv). TwitterVision and FlickrVision are also featured at the new MOMA exhibit, Design and the Elastic Mind, definitely check it out.
If you can make it here…(part 2)
Recently there has been a lot of talk about the New York startup scene (I covered a lot of New York-based metaverse companies in this post ) and how we can improve it.
I proposed a simple litmus test with this scenario on the NY Tech Meetup mailing list: Larry Page and Sergey Brin are in New York and they are not connected yet (and no, they did not conveniently work for an investment bank or a VC before) and they try to start Google in NYC. If they can get to where they are today in NYC, then we have what we are looking for.
This thread was initiated after reading this article about many Silicon Valley networking companies are now organizing their invstor/entrepreneur networking events in Los Angeles and how it’s helping the local economy and the startup scene.
We have many excellent networking events in New York City, probably more than any other place other than Silicon Valley. But we still believe this is not enough. As a community we will work on attracting as many networking companies to NYC as possible so we can have many successful startups in the city.
One part of this will be a non-profit organization, (very similar to Svase, if not a branch of it) that will be a central community of NY entrepreneurs, founders and startup people. The organization will provide a forum for entrepreneurs for learning, solving problems common to all startups, brainstorming, getting access to resources and more with the goal of creating many successful startups.
In the meantime, if you are a newcomer to the NY startup scene, here are some first steps (non-comprehensive) to get acquainted with fellow entrepreneurs:
http://groups.google.com/group/SeedCapital
http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/305/
http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1124/
There are definitely more events/resources out there, some of them invitation-only like the Founders Club.
And definitely do not even think of missing the upcoming BarCampNYC3!
Unype in the classroom
Great article at the Google Lat Long Blog from Adelia L. Barber about the benefits of using Google Earth in the classroom, along with a fun quiz, that can be solved by GE. This is very similar to the “Unype Game” that Emily Davidow wrote about recently:
Unype Inc. is very interested in making Unype a useful tool and environment in education and we’d love to hear from you about how we can make Unype even more useful to you educators out there. Please let us know at murat at unype dot com.
The million-user mirror-world march (test)
We are improving our proprietary algorithms to be able to handle up to a million users per server and recently over-achieved our performance goals by 30% and we think there is still room to improve. The Unype server is also horizontally scalable, just by adding more server machines. Here is a screenshot from our recent test:
Unype on Bebo
The Unype Bebo application is now live.
Bebo has licensed the Facebook platform for their applications API but they have modified the API slightly so you cannot just copy/paste your Facebook application into your Bebo application. Actually the structure of the application is quite different. But their tools and the overall development process is very smooth and well-polished. What we are seeing is that late-comers to the scene are catching up with Facebook pretty quickly ( by licensing their platform, sometimes ), and that is why Facebook will have to innovate and come up with more wonderful new differentiation points like their new javascript library. In the meantime, OpenSocial is -still- not there yet. Working applications stop working as they fiddle with the platform everyday, so you need to be on top of your OpenSocial application everyday, reading all forum posts, reading all documentation updates etc. But then, Ning and Hi5 are the only public containers (Orkut and Pulse are sandbox’ed) so it is best to wait until OpenSocial hits 1.0, which is promised to be in 2 weeks.
Looking forward to seeing you in Bebo with 32 million other users!
Unype on Google Maps
Now Unype works on Google Maps as well as Google Earth, so if you are on a machine without Google Earth (which works on Windows, MacOSX and Linux by the way), you can chat, mark locations, insert photos, videos, 3d models, play games and more right on the page, using “Unype on Maps”:
You can right-click on the map to mark or insert an item to a specific location. You can also set your status and IM client information in the Preferences page.
Unype MySpace’d
3:03AM EST received the ‘Welcome to MySpace developers program’ message. Dived in, massaged the Unype OpenSocial application and by 3:30AM EST the Unype MySpace application was up and running:
First thoughts:
MySpace definitely came out much more prepared, they have very useful tools but unfortunately everything feels very clunky, the documentation doesn’t match the actual outcome, registering the app keeps on throwing errors ‘that are reported to technical support’ with no other explanation. The test harness is first-grade though, no more edit/upload/reload while developing an application.
There is also some funny business when you register your new application, MySpace forces you to create another MySpace account that requires a different email, but then that new account does not have access to the application. I guess it is for testing, and if so, a very thoughtful gesture since all Facebook developers are always clamoring to keep their secondary accounts from getting canceled by Facebook.
Unype MySpace app is ready in under 30 minutes for the March roll-out.
