Stamford Tech Meetup #6

Last night's Stamford Tech Meetup #6 was really well attended. It was a beautiful night in the neighborhood and an awesome night to be talking tech. Our presenters included Watch It Too, Tutor Trove, and Pond 5.

First up was Tutor Trove. Tutor Trove a New Haven, CT based startup aims to help tutors online visually display what they are teaching. The Flash interface was awesome and I have to say the ability to take a math equation and turn it into a chart in about 1 second was awesome. The various interfaces for chemistry and biology I'm sure were just as impressive (although we didn't have enough time to see everything). Who says Flash is dead? Awesome presentation, Eli.

Next up was Pond5. Pond5 is a New York based company that provides stock clips to film makers but also gives shooters a chance to sell their clips in the marketplace. With a 50% payout rate, they are the highest in the business and the largest marketplace out there. Dana Tower, co founder, showed us some of the great things about the service which included the ease in which to preview a clip. Simply roll over a clip and watch it or listen to it. That's it. No downloading or anything like that. If you are a film maker, that's key. Kudos Dana and Tom for building an awesome business.

Finally we had Watch It Too. Watch it Too is a Flash based conferencing service with a simple drag and drop interface. It was very easy to get concurrent users into a "room" and easy to drag and drop all kinds of media in. Brian August (the VP of Biz Dev) did a simple demo where we had another user in the room and we were able to watch YouTube clips in about 2 seconds. (Brian's a slow typer :) ). I can see where Webex is scared here.

After Watch It Too, I wanted to build a forum where we could get extremely early stage ventures and ideas up for feedback from the community. Moocrunch was the guinea pig. It was something that was whipped up after seeing how poor video comments were. Lots of great feedback including focus groups, education, a Watch It Too plugin, etc.

Then came everyone's favorite part of the night, the Vote. Watch it Too and Tutor Trove were locked in a dead heat and in the Vote Off Watch it Too won by a single vote. Congratulations to all that presented last night and all that attended to witness the excellent presentations and show that was put on.