As 2007 rolls in, I’m looking forward to what the next year will bring for the NYC tech community. As for nextNY, I hope we broaden our reach to more digital media folks, and to those who support the core tech, like marketing, PR, financial folks. We’re also starting to see more meetings with smaller groups… niches within the group that meet to roll up their sleeves and accomplish some great things. That would be a great trend to continue in ‘07. Another area I think we can make great strides in is connnecting to governmental and academic resouces… to the local infrastructure of NYC for space, expertise, etc… in an effort to help make NYC even more innovation friendly in 2007.

Happy New Year, nextNY! Let’s get back to work ASAP!

After hanging out on the email list and blog of nextNY for several months now, I really enjoyed my first official nextNY event on Wednesday night. The aptly named “nextNY Holiday Drinking”, hosted at Apple Restaurant and Bombar in the West Village, turned out a great mix of nextNY members, new and old, current, future, and past. From a newbie’s perspective, here’s what went down:

Apple Restaurant turned out to be a great location for the event and fit everyone comfortably. Some people got tables and food, while most stayed within 15 feet of the bar, refilling their glasses as often as possible.

nextNY old-timer Lee Semel, of Innofinity, was seen talking to nearly everyone in the room, as I saw him in every corner of the bar throughout the evening. It was certainly good to see this guy, after meeting him for the first time several months ago. He also seemed to serve as a welcoming committee, singling out first time nextNYers and giving them a nice introduction to the group.

Charlie O’Donnell, of Oddcast, was on site of course, but he seemed to have the crowd move to him, not staying very far from his table of food. I was one of many to make the trek over to his corner and make an introduction. Good to finally meet the man behind the talking avatar. It was a very Wizard of Oz-like moment.

Most stylin’ of the night was Michael Galpert of Worth 1000, with his brimmed beanie tilted to one side. We chatted for a while about SEO optimization and had a few brewskies. The few times I’ve met him (the first at the Fred Wilson event reported here), I’ve come away with the impression that he’s a jack-of-all-trade type. Good times.

He and I, along with just about everyone else in the room, were also seen talking to Courtney Pulitzer (Cocktails With Courtney) at one point or another. Courtney managed to get more insider info into her tightly held notebook than imaginable (and I managed to say “off the record” more times than I thought imaginable, though mostly just for the fun of saying “off the record”).

Also in the press corner, but of more credentialed bylines, was Caroline McCarthy, of CNET’s Webware.com. She was one of the first to arrive and managed to stay longer than most. Surprisingly, and quite pleasantly, she seemed to be at the party more to mingle than to get a scoop.

Seen chasing Caroline down (to thank her for this great review of his product) was Anthony Casalena, of Squarespace (which powers the nextNY blog!). We chatted, not surprisingly, about press coverage and the type of customers it brings. “Not paying,” was his succinct conclusion, though he conceded it was nice to get recognition nonetheless.

Not too far along in the night I got to say hi to the organizer of the Drinking party himself, Keshava Dasarathy. When I asked him how things were going at his new job at Bain, he said two things: “Amazing” and “I should be back to the office by 10 tonight.” nextNY is lucky to have him still organizing events. Thank you.

At one point, I think after wandering to Charlie’s side of the bar, I stood and held an interesting conversation with Scott Cherkin of DealMine.com and David Dundas of YouAreTV.com. We spoke mostly of David’s company and my soon-to-be-announced project. In the video space, we all agreed that niche video sites will probably be where we see the most growth in the future, as content providers become wary of having their quality videos next to Jackass-wannabe videos. Good luck to David and his team.

Near the end of the night I said hi to Greg Galant, of RadioTail and VentureVoice, who I had not seen since RadioTail had been “TechCrunched” back in September. We actually spoke mostly about RadioTail developer Aaron Quint’s old school animations from his (and my) days at Brandeis University’s BTV. “The Story of A Triangle”, Greg and I agreed, definitely needs to be uploaded to YouTube.

We all know Steve Eisenberg was there, as he took these photos and uploaded them to Flickr.

Last, but certainly not least, I spent a while chatting up Danny Wen of Iridesco (of Harvest and SuprGlu fame). Our conversations revolved around the merits of using traditional forms of advertising to market Web 2.0 products, which, for the record, I’m not sure is done enough.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

(Note: I saw and met others, but have since forgotten. Write your observations in the comment area so I can remember you were there!)

— Nate Westheimer is the Founder & CEO of BricaBox, LLC, a company based in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He blogs at innonate.com.

Steven Levy kicked things off with some reminiscences from his 2001 book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”. The book traces the PC revolution to its origins in the model railroad club at MIT, and he also touched on the Homebrew Computer Club, portraying it as a direct inspiration for events like the NY Tech Meetup, where geeks would show off their new toys and network. In an amusing anecdote, he told of the first program homebrew wrote for the Altair, enabling the computer to play the song Daisy by manipulating feedback through a radio (Altair had no internal sound). He then discussed his new book “The Perfect Thing” which covers the design and launch of the iPod along with its subsequent success. In keeping with one of the iPod’s signature features, the book comes in four versions with identical chapters but, apart from Chapter 1, the other chapters are all shuffled in different orders across the four versions.

Steven was asked about the Zune in the Q&A and commented on the crippled wifi that shares songs but only gives “3 days or 3 plays” and said the Zune should have launched with the ability to detect playlists over wifi. He thinks it will be a contender eventually but that “right now the Zune is a non-starter.” As for the iPhone, he thinks it’s for real and believes Apple will rethink the phone in the same way the iPod rethought the MP3 player.

Next up was Steve Spurgat, founder of Urbis, a feedback, social-networking and freelance employment community for content creators. Writers is the only launched category to date, but Steve said Video and Audio would be coming soon. Urbis lets you post content, define who can review your content, get feedback, and set goals for your content (ex. “make children laugh”). He claimed 12,000 registered users with a monthly activity rate of 13%, 2 published writers and an imminent deal with Harper Collins to offer concrete publishing opportunities to Urbis members.

Steve was asked how he differentiates urbis from trigger street. He said the screenplay ranking site, founded by Kevin Spacey, is more of a pass/fail environment, where as urbis offers many more metrics for evaluating content and in urbis “the reviewers are also being reviewed,” allowing artists to evaluate the quality of their feedback as well. He was also asked if urbis would be used to test advertising copy against target demos, and he replied that ad agencies were “expressing interest” in the site.

Scott Kolber from Linkstorm presented his onsite drop-down/drill-down technology for deep linking related content from publishers or in online advertising. The technology was developed by TCP/IP inventor Robert Kahn. Kolber highlighted Linkstorm’s ability to “control links remotely from a central point, without specific knowledge of where the links are deployed.” He claimed the technology generates increased direct response rates from advertising with “unfurling [rolling over the ad to initiate the drop-down list] rates as high as 23% and CTRs on unfurled ads as high as 40%.”

Scott was asked why their technology could not just be replicated by the publisher on-page using dynamic HTML, and replied that the centralised control for deployment on a large publisher’s site or in a distributed advertising campaign was the value added by linkstorm.

Cogmap is a wiki for company org charts, a “B2B UGC play.” The founder, Brent Halliburton, is out to disintermediate B2B direct mailing, which he pegged as a $2 Billion per year industry.

When asked what contributors ultimately get out of building this tool, Brent replied “I don’t know.” But he said the site will hopefully provide you a large return for a relatively small amount of effort on the part of any individual user. An audience member suggested charging sales people a fee to swap leads with other sales people as one way in which the site might monetize its content.

David Fishman presented uPlayMe, a P2P client that matches your music playlists with other users on the system to generate new song recommendations and do the virtual friend thing with like content consumers. The current version works only for music but future versions will include video, gaming and ebooks. David also said that a deal with an internet dating site to use their media matching technology was in it’s “final throes.”

Finally, Jed Katz of DFJ Gotham said the firm would most likely be debuting a seed capital fund in 2007, which seemed to be well-received by the audience. He was then asked how many NY Tech Meetup companies DFJ has invested in, and gave a diplomatic reply that translated to “none.” Wilson-Sonsini’s Adam Denau finished things up with a plug for their entrepreneur’s college, with a Term Sheets class December 13th and a reset presenting the entire curriculum again starting in April 2007.

Jonah Keegan is an entrepreneur with a business, a blog and a few other things.