NY Tech Meetup

Here’s the lineup for the February 8 NY Tech Meetup:

BestVendor - @BestVendor

CartoDB - @cartoDB

Everything Butt Art - @buttart

Lenddo - @lenddofriend

MVF – @mvf

MyMatchmaker -  @mymatchmaker

Scroll Kit - @scrollkit

Paperlex - @paperlex

Umami - @umamitv

The main event is sold out, but as of this posting (February 6 at 8:22 a.m.) there are still a few open spots for the simulcast at General Assembly.

Jessica just announced this to our membership via email, but I wanted to make a note of it here too. From Jessica:

We know that getting tickets to NYTM is a challenge, so we’re experimenting with something new this month: we’re partnering with New Work City and General Assembly to provide simulcasts of the event. Connect with a small group of your peers at either venue, grab a beer, and sit back and enjoy the show. Cost is $10, which supports the venues and their setup, clean up, and staff costs, as well as providing attendees with a few beers whenever possible (see each listing for the imbibing specifics).

RSVP for the New Work City simulcast here.

RSVP for the General Assembly simulcast here.

Aside from thanking the teams at New Work City and General Assembly for “beta testing” this new program, I wanted to thank two other people for inspiring this idea and pushing to make it happen.

First the inspiration: Back in 2009, right after we moved the NY Tech Meetup to the 700 seat Haft Auditorium, we started selling out our events faster and faster. To help, Livestream began streaming each of our events to the broader community that couldn’t get tickets. Soon thereafter, Eric Friedman (then Analyst at Union Square Ventures, now BD maestro at Foursquare) started inviting people to the Union Square Ventures offices for NY Tech Meetup viewing parties. As he explained it back then, it was an opportunity for people to still have community even if they couldn’t make the main event; it also provided the opportunity to talk more deeply about the companies and trends they saw.

Fast forward three years and Brandon Diamond joins our Board after running on a platform which included a desire to find smarter ways to alleviate the ticketing / demand issues we have at NYTM (e.g. next week’s event sold out in 4 minutes, leaving many disappointed and with no way to enjoy the event). At Brandon’s first Programming/Community Committee meeting, he pushed us to consider setting up simulcasting relationships with key venues/communities in NYC and around the country, following the ethos that Eric Friedman set out 3 years before.

Three weeks later, thanks to the flexibility of the great folks at GA and NWC, and really thanks to the hard work of our own Jessica Lawrence, we’re beta testing the idea. If it works well for our hosts and attendees, we’ll be doing it again. We’ll also be looking to other cities to see if there should be viewing parties there as well.

This is an exciting step for the NY Tech Meetup. I hope this helps with our ticketing issue and lets us continue to build community in the broader NY tech ecosystem. So thanks for Eric for the inspiration. Thanks to Brandon for the push. Thanks for Jessica for getting it done.

~Nate

Dear NY Tech Meetup Community:

WE DID IT!

The Senate has postponed its vote on “cloture” effectively ending the possibility PIPA will ever be voted on in its current form.

democrats.senate.gov/2012/01/20/reid-statement-on-intellectual-property-bill/

This morning Senate Majority Leader Nevada Senator Harry Reid released the following statement on the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act:

“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act.

“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved. Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs. We must take action to stop these illegal practices. We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day’s work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City, or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio.

“I admire the work that Chairman Leahy has put into this bill. I encourage him to continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet. We made good progress through the discussions we’ve held in recent days, and I am optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks.”

This happened because of you!

As important as all of the online protests were around the country and the world, our Emergency NY Tech Meetup provided the physical, people-filled backdrop that filled the papers and newswires with photos of us fighting for our industry, our city, our Internet, and our democracy.

Our next step will be to make sure that whatever gets proposed by the other side as they try to salvage something from the ashes of their SOPA/PIPA push, that we, THE NEW YORK TECH COMMUNITY, is included in the process and has a major role.

We won’t let Congress, the copyright organizations, or the press, look only to Silicon Valley as representative of the tech industry or the Internet community.

What is at stake is making sure that we permanently protect the web from future attempts to attack and redesign its basic structure and insure that the NY tech community continues to grow and flourish.

In the meantime, congratulate yourselves for a job well done.

Sincerely:

Andrew Rasiej, Chairman — @rasiej
Scott Heiferman, Founder — @heif
Dawn Barber, Co-Founder – @dawntweet
Nate Westheimer, Executive Director — @innonate
Jessica Lawrence, Managing Director — @jessicalawrence
And the entire NY Tech Meetup Board — @nytm