NY Tech Meetup February Meetup

“ I think I may have been in an unforgiving mood, because the strong accents of two presenters and the strong affect of one of the other ones (the furby hacker) were off-putting. ”

“ i loved the way the moderator included the audience in group participation - it felt very comfortable to speak out ”

“ More tech startups are destroyed by bad communication than by bad technology. Rarely has this concept been more clearly demonstrated than at last night's NY Tech Meetup. Things could have been improved greatly if the presenters followed a few simple rules. It would be tremendously helpful to the audience if the first slide of ALL presentations had the company's name, the company's web address, the presenter's name and his/her email -and- the second slide had a brief description of what the company is doing and any important terms defined. And please do not ask the audience if everyone is familiar with some concept that is important to your talk - if it's important, put it on a a slide and spend the 10 seconds explaining it. If your English language skills are weak, put lots of details on your slides, so we can at least read them. If English is your native language, don't speak 450 words per minute because many people won't understand what you are saying. ”

“ Presenters were ok. I think there needss to be a format they should follow. Nobody wants to hear someone ramble for 5 minutes about a tool while viewing a power piont presentation. Get to the demo! Say why its unique, good and we can't live without it! ”

“ I think a little more filtering of the presenters is in order. Since we are only seeing 5 presenters now (we see a lot more...), it really needs to be worth our time. There were 2-3 presenters that we could have done without. Evaal was awful and a waste of time to sit thru. ”

“ This was my first time with this group. Mostly about "web-related" rather than "general" tech stuff. I will probably attend future ones - but low on my priority list. ”

“ the presentation about donorschoose.org was by far the best. the rest of the presentations lagged ”

“ Donors Choice was good (I'll look more in the AM), but the other presentations were somewhat underhinged.... ”

“ I guess in all meetups, the value is in the people that come and the content. At this meetup there was a lot of interesting people in the audience, however, the speakers were pretty much just eh. Donorschoose seemed like a great site though! It seems as if there is a struggle to get quality presenters. Some of the presenters were so bad, that they weren't even heckleable (i wordified it) ”

“ One guy rambled incoherently, another presented his science project in robotics as if this were show-and-tell. Donorchoose and Pay- (I forget the exact name) were solid presentations, though. ”

“ It was my first meeting. and it was wonderful. I look forward for the next one !! ”

“ Two too many weak business-oriented presentations. ”

“ Clearly, the people who put on this event work their butts off to get it together. My only regret is what someone said earlier in this thread... need more networking opportunities. I'd be willing to pay $20 to have the sort of event that occurred in Dec. But, I realize that may put a serious hurting on those who put the event together in terms of time commitment. ”

“ Really low quality. Loved the Donors one, and the Furby was fun, but otherwise really bad. I'll be nice and not comment on the "search engine" demo. ”

“ GREAT networking. People are prepping their presentations. Wow! ”

“ Found myself (a second time attendee) telling first time attendees that other meetups were better and not to be put off by a set of lackluster presentations. ”

“ One of the presenters today made me wish we had a collective, real-time feedback mechanism where the meetup determines how long a person remains on stage. If enough of us are unimpressed, and we start pushing our eject/gong/trapdoor buttons, time is cut and saved. ”

“ Very uneven group of presenters...some very good...some pretty awful. ”

“ As always, this is an excellent format for a meetup.. The short 5 minute presentations, short Q & A afterwards, etc. always works. Donors Choose seems like it was the most viable of all the web sites presented. Lee?s Furby hack was interesting and relevant. Someone made the comment, ?no robot shit?. I disagree with this. Use of embedded microcontrollers, sensors, actuators, h-bridges, servos, etc. has as much to do with technology as Java, AJAX, Perl or HTML. It may seem out of place in this group, because this meetup seems to be focused primarily on web technology and the development of social networking sites. But this IS the NY Tech Meetup afterall, and not just the NY Software & Web Tech Meetup. I do not see a problem with introducing some hardware presentations into the mix, especially if they involve using software to control that hardware. Despite the seemingly impractical nature of Lee?s Furby presentation, it illustrated some interesting uses of microcontrollers, specifically the use of these small simple computers to develop specialized embedded applications to control custom hardware. Anyway, the presentation was much more original, and more ?tech? than some of the other more business oriented presentations during which I find myself asking ?exactly what NEW technology, or at least what new and innovative USE of technology is being shown here?? Finally, some of the presenters should have taken more time to prepare. Perhaps they could have used outlines to help them. An example of this was the Proto Software demo, which looked interesting, but unfortunately suffered from a lack of preparation. The presenter could have taken the time to make the demo concise enough to fit into the five minute time period that he had, it appears that he did not, as a result, the whole thing felt rather rushed. ”

“ For a meetup that large, it needs to start on time. ”

“ A little long....wish it had started on time. ”

“ No robot shit - keep the meeting to its original purpose ”

“ This is only my second MeetUp, having just moved here from London. It's a great event and a clearly you're getting a great turnout. It is a shame however that there is not more networking opportunities afterwards. I felt that people were just milling around rather than looking to connect with new people. Cheers Toby ”

“ Was a cold night. Caught the last part. ”