Professionalism
Today I attended one of the events for Internet Week here in New York City. Mashable’s Exhibit Hall, showing off some startups and new upcoming companies, more info here. I was pretty excited to see what was looming on the interwebs. Ir started out pretty well with me meeting some guys from edopter. A website where they, by aggregating ratings from their users and a variety of other sites, tries to predict the latest trends, breaking it further down by regions (right now it is limited to major cities, but I was told it would eventually spread out to more cities) and categories that range from things on the Internet to things outside of the world of the Internet and the mainstream, as well as age and gender. Though I never tested out the feature, you could even create your own trends and see how your prediction works out with their algorithm. Eventually they will add a geographical map to point out which locations are feeding into which trends the most. They said they had to pull the feature, but will work hard to work it in by Monday, which is when they plan to do the official launch. It was a pretty robust application and worked well from the brief time I spent with it. The team was made up of three guys, two of which were present and seemed to be very knowledgeable, which I can’t say for the next company I met with.
The Rubicon Project was a mess. I loved their idea, which was an ad optimization stats site. Depending on the content you have and the current ad networks, it figures out which ads work best on your differing pages, even breaking it down to individual pages and not just the entire website. It has many cool features and can be beneficial to anyone. The project itself impressed me, but the exhibitors were unprepared and seemed very disingenius and did not impress. Since the exhibition was being held in a bar, one of the exhibitors of the Rubicon Project decided to get a beer, he was slurring his words and were not able to answer most of my questions. I came away unimpressed and downright feeling awful that any company’s PR person would act so much like a drunken idiot presenting an idea that could actually compete with the big boys. I felt so disgusted I decided to leave the event.
I hope this weekend’s other Internet Week goes well. Tomorrow I’ll trying to make it over to the Chelsea Art Museum to check out the Design and Technology Thesis Exhibit of students from the New Schools. More info here. I will also make my way to the Come Out and Play Festival here in NYC and try out their Re: Activism political scavenger hunt. I’m number 27 and only 25 get to play, so I hope I get to play. Link here. The night will end at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater to check out this Improve Music Show. It sounds pretty cool, they use audience members music and remix them or use them as inspiration for their acts that follow.
--written by Peter To--
