"Skirball!" hecklers shouted, when the audience was prompted for questions after demos or asked who would win the BCS title.

Ten companies demo'ed Web and mobile apps:

• Dump.FM, an image-based chatroom reminiscent of 4chan
• JaaVuu, a way to create openly-editable image galleries
• Munchly, an app to order movie or ballpark concessions from your seat
• Firefly, a Twitter client that aggregates geotagged check-ins from a variety of apps
• Sitesimon, a browser add-on for broadcasting what sites you're viewing
• Adstruc, an online marketplace for the antiquated world of billboard advertising
• Superfluid, a project collaboration tool and marketplace that lets you pay for skills with social capital
• VYou, a video-based question and answer site
• DOTGO, a markup language to add interactive SMS technology to your site
• Guguchu, a platform for bands to manage sales, distribution and marketing

Munchly, the "mobile concession booth," got cheers from the audience, even before founder Andrew Tider offered to buy everyone a beer. The mobile app lets you see what concessions are on offer, order and pay for them at your seat, and then either have them delivered to you and get a notification that they're ready for pickup at the counter. The company is about to announce a partnership with a major movie chain, Tider said, and it's looking for funding.

Another company that got the audience buzzing was VYou. VYou is part social network, part YouTube. VYou takes Formspring's proposition--"ask me anything"--and adds video, categories and asynchronous following. The site managed to attract director Kevin Smith, who uploaded a video of himself picking his nose.

Porn is the common use for the conversational video technology, and the "Chatroulette issue"--where the video chat site became overrun with nudity and drove away clothed users--naturally came up in the Q&A. VYou plans to moderate content, said founder Steve Spurgat, but so far the site has seen 60,000 videos uploaded "and only one boob."

DOTGO wrote an SMS polling app in less than a minute using its own markup language, which scored some goodwill from the audience for sheer hackery. Sitesimon (sites-im-on) pushed the envelope on oversharing with a demo of how it broadcasts what you're looking at online in real-time and gives points for discovering content before it goes viral.

TechStars alum Adstruc did not have the sexiest demo, but theirs was by far the most polished. Founder John Laramie showed the extensive online marketplace his company has built to replace the Excel spreadsheets that still power the outdoor advertising industry. The database of available billboard space is integrated with Google Maps so that advertisers can see a streetview of the space they're considering.

As an example, Laramie plugged a $1,500, 5'1" by 5'11" ad space in the subway at 23rd and Park and offered to pay for printing. "Half a million people will see this ad," he said.

NYTM and Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman took the stage (video below) to talk about the vibrancy of New York's tech scene and how much NYTM has grown.

"We came together in 2004 because New York had not made any of the great things about the Internet," he said. "Finally New York is kicking ass. Etsy is kicking it. Foursquare is kicking it. Tumblr is kicking it. Kickstarter is kicking it."

The group now has more than 15,000 members, two sponsors at every meetup and two newly-elected community board members. He then tossed an iPad off the stage--a reference to this--and proposed a toast to the new year.

"Cheers!" the audience echoed, and clinked phones.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The city greatly expanded its second annual Big Apps competition, Deputy Mayor Robert K. Steele stopped by Google's offices to announce that the city is wooing a top-flight engineering school, and the EDC even hosted a mixer, Startup Exchange, where founders and VCs mingled with folks from city government.

These efforts, however, have been met with increasingly loud cries of frustration and cynicism. Many in the tech community feel the EDC is big-footing the natives, throwing city dollars behind unnecessarily bureaucratic solutions instead of supporting the grassroots organizations already in place. The fight recently became public with a long post on NY Convergence, a site dedicated to covering tech in the tri-state area, which called the city's efforts a largely symbolic, heavy-handed exercise that is out of step with the community.

"I keep my finger on the pulse of what's going on, and if there are real initiatives from the city, I haven't heard about it and none of my cohorts have heard about it either," Reece Pacheco, founder of Overtime Media, wrote in an email thread in which members of the nextNY group criticized the EDC.

Anil Dash, recently elected as one of the first community board members at the 16,000 strong NY Tech Meetup, feels the city needs to try a less traditional approach. "They seem to be starting from the side of the usual economic development machinery and trying to ‘tech-ify' it, if you'll pardon the expression. Will that work? I don't know. But it seems like it must be at least a little less efficient than it could be. Seems like a lot more could be done, beginning by engaging with infrastructure like the NY Tech Meetup that already exists."

The city's proposal for a new engineering campus in New York is emblematic to many of what's wrong with its approach. "They're taking answers from the very institutions that have failed to educate enough technical innovators in the first place. And then they're going to stick them in a big building somewhere," wrote Charlie O'Donnell, a partner at First Round Capital and one of the most active presences on the NY tech scene.

EDC spokesperson Julie Wood thinks O'Donnell is way off the mark. "We are talking about an initiative in which, it was reported, the LC/City is prepared to invest $100 million. That's a very, very big number in today's fiscal environment. This is a major initiative that is designed to transform the City's place in the world of applied sciences—not 'stick people in a building somewhere.'"

The city's track record in the past few years is certainly more than symbolic. Its Big Apps competition made more city data available for public consumption and development than any municipality in the nation. And the winner of the inaugural effort, MyCityWay, went on to receive funding from the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a $22 million investment partnership between the EDC and private venture capital, the only city sponsored investment fund outside of Silicon Valley.

Check Out Some of the City's Recent Tech Initiatives >>

The EDC has also backed incubators like NYU-Poly Varick Street Incubator and The Hive at 55, helping numerous startups get a foothold in a high-cost environment. "Initiatives they support like the NYU-Poly incubator are of great importance to the long term viability of NYC as a world-class technology center," wrote Evan Korth, community board member at the NY Tech Meetup and co-founder of hackNY, a program that connects students with internships at tech companies.

Wood says accusations that the EDC has ignored the grassroots tech organizations are ridiculous. "City officials and EDC representatives have presented information about the Big Apps competition at many Meetup events, and two Deputy Mayors--Robert Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development, and Stephen Goldsmith, the deputy mayor for operations, both have presented to Tech Meetup--proof that we are not only interested in, but do actively take advantage of the existing community."

To some, these efforts have come across as tone-deaf. "Sending out e-mail blasts and having high level people speak for five minutes at a couple of Meetups here and there is not relationship building, nor is it the kind of participation we're looking for," said Charlie O'Donnell. "That's what some of the EDC folks I've met fail to understand."

But Jacob Brody, founder and CEO of Standard Start, says the tech community has to meet the city halfway.

"There is a fundamental disconnect, because people in the tech community expect things to work the way they do in the VC world," he said. "Except the government doesn't make risky investments, have Twitter conversations or pivot on a dime. Their plan for an engineering school, for example, is a big, expensive, long-term play, and the tech community should recognize that there is value in that, which is different from what a great, grassroots organization like hackNY can provide."

In the end the friction between the city and the tech community is actually a sign of progress. "We wouldn't have been having this conversation five years ago, because the city wasn't at the table," said Jonathan Bowles, Director of the Center for the Urban Future. "In the last two years there has been a big shift, with the city really trying to get behind the local tech industry. Do they always get everything right? Of course not, this is government. But that doesn't mean we should get mad at them for showing up late to the party."

Check Out Some of the City's Recent Tech Initiatives >>

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

This morning we wrote about the lack of women at the top positions at Twitter, Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, arguably the biggest four companies on the social Web.

Now local designer Whitney Hess has put together a counterpart to that list with a roundup of the gender breakdown at some some well-known startups.

Most of the women working at hot startups are in marketing, she noted.

"Not only are women in tech mostly invisible, the vast majority of those who are on display are selling, not making," she wrote.

Foursquare? Six out of 40 employees are women, Hess writes. Their roles include Community Manager, Lead Designer, Marketing Manager, Head of Recruiting and Community Support Coordinator.

Kickstarter? Four out of 14 employees are women, Hess writes, working in Customer Service, Marketing and Community.

Tumblr's lone female employee, according to Hess, is Director of Outreach. (She left out intern Annie Werner. UPDATE: Turner was recently hired as Meetup Coordinator, bringing Tumblr's female employee count up to two.)

New York's BankSimple had nine employees, none of whom are women.

"Thanks for highlighting this," CEO Josh Reich responded in the comments. "As a company, this is something we would like to rectify."

BankSimple isn't excluding women from its team, he said, but it's tough to hire women who are technical. It's much easier to find women to take a marketing or communications position, he suggested.

"I just scanned through all the applicants we have received for advertised 'making' positions. To date, we have yet to receive a single female applicant. We currently have an open position in customer relations. Nearly two-thirds of the applicants to this position are female," he said.

Hess was briefly the only woman running for a spot on the board of the New York Tech Meetup, the largest tech organization in New York City, before she dropped out. When Tech Observer asked why, she declined to comment.

The ratio may be shifting, however. Newly-elected board member Anil Dash has said he wants to make the NYTM more diverse, and some local techies like developer Sara Chipps of Girl Develop It are working to teach women how to code.

Of course, women aren't the only faces missing from the tech industry.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Protoblogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash, with 118 votes, and New York University computer science professor Evan Korth, with 97 votes, nabbed the two open seats on the board of the 15,000-strong organization.

Seventeen candidates campaigned for the positions (see them in our feature: Meet the Candidates Vying for NY Tech Meetup's Board).

Creator of the New Work City coworking office Tony Bacigalupo came in third with 75 votes.

Only 590 members of the NYTM voted, adding up to a turnout of less than 6 percent.

The election generated some controversy because members were only allowed one vote each despite the two open spots, and some members vocally criticized the current members of the board for complacency.

Candidate Noel Hidalgo is one of the members who feels he has unfinished business. "Ahem... are we really going to wipe clean the slate of issues that materialized?" he wrote to the highly-active NYTM listserve after results were announced.

But most of the group was oblivious, as discussions on the listserve continued to center around office space, development, phones, and the other usual topics.

Korth was at a coffee shop when he saw a tweet from Sanford Dickert, another candidate, congratulating him and Dash.

"I'm looking forward to working with the other members of the board of directors as soon as possible," he said. "Specifically I want to continue doing what I've been doing for the past five years, strengthening the ties between New York's academic institutions and the New York City innovation community."

"I look forward to doing that with the New York Tech Meetup as one of the primary vehicles to help embiggen that pipieline," he said.

Korth's platform was focused on expanding initiatives like hackNY, a summer program that matches local startups to NYU students so they can learn skills outside the classroom, expand opportunities for students and strengthen the ties in the local tech and entrepreneurial communities.

He is also an adviser for the NYU Association for Computing Machinery, a student organization for computer science, and tech@NYU, which produces NYU Startup Week.

Dash was not available for comment but he tweeted his victory speech: "Honored to have been elected to the @NYTM board, along with @evankorth. Lots of work to do to make #NYTM more inclusive and effective."

Dash has a strong following in and outside of New York thanks to his blog, dashes.com, which he started in 1999. His platform included broadening the meetup to include the Maker Movement and technology beyond the mobile and web applications that are trendy right now.

He also emphasized that New York should be doing more to compete with San Francisco for talent, and that New York's techies should be more aggressive in flexing "our formidable financial and cultural muscles to make sure that elected officials know there are political consequences to ignoring the values of the technology community."

NYTM recently registered with the state of New York and is seeking not-for-profit status. The group will elect two more community members to its 13-member board over the next two years.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

It's really not that surprising says director Nate Westheimer. "I think I got elected with like 400 votes." 

Candidate Noel "NoNeck" Hidalgo was the first to publicly raise the questions about the policy of giving each member just one vote, even though the race is for two seats.

"I find it disingenuous that we, candidates & community, are told one thing and then forced to deal with "on the fly" circumstances," he wrote to the NYTM listserve. "If our "16,000 strong" community has the ability to create multi-million dollar applications, surely we can find the community resource to architect a real democratic solution. I know we can do this, and I know we can do more."

Westheimer, for his part, said there was nothing "on the fly" about it. "There are many ways to hold an election. We choose this one." 

Tune back in here at 3 p.m. sharp for the election results. 

Last Chance To Meet The Candidates and Cast a Vote >>

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

That's because last night was not the usual New York Tech Meetup, a monthly event in which six people get five minutes each to demonstrate a cool project to New York's tech community. Last month, a Google engineer spoke about the image recognition technology Google Goggles. Foursquare and Tumblr both demo'ed back in the day at NYTM, which usually happens at NYU's Skirball Center in Washington Square, but last night was held at W. 50th street.

NYTM is in transition. The organization incorporated and registered as a 501c6, the tax-free status for "business leagues," which includes chambers of commerce and trade organizations, and is adding an eventual total of four community members to its governing board.

Two of those spots are up for election and 16 candidates--lawyers, entrepreneurs, coders and professors--gave two-minute stump speeches last night in between demos. See our roundup of all the NYTM candidates.

SLIDESHOW: Meet the Candidates Running for NY Tech Meetup's Board >>

The political proceedings were confusing for members of the audience who hadn't heard about the election and were just there to see some nifty demos. Luckily a few startups were around to share their stories:

The travel discovery site Wanderfly had the slickest design, an app for syncing your music library across devices got the most audience excitement and the employee-review app ClearGears had the most obvious business model.

But NTYM is not about monetization. One audience member asked about the business model for Marco, the app that lets you find nearby friends using SMS, and the rest of the audience immediately started booing. "Are you serious?" presenter Tarikh Korula said.

NYTM director and emcee Nate Westheimer, moving things along, told the questioner to "Google business models and New York Tech Meetup." That search leads to an Economist article about NYTM etiquette, which excludes boring questions about business models, how to reach a critical mass of users, and money.

"Historically, we boo that question," said Westheimer. 

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Beyond just selling out the Skirball Center every month, the organization is seeking official status as a non-profit and adopting a set of Governing Bylaws. 

As part of this maturation, NYTM is creating a 13 member board, with four of the seats to be filled by community-elected members. 

The candidates for the first two community seats will introduce themselves tonight and voting will take place online over the next three days. 

It's a strong field of contenders. "Once I saw the folks running I called Nate and told him I was dropping out," says SeatGeek's Ben Kessler. "There are people I would rather vote for than myself." 

Check out The Candidates! >>

Dash is a cofounder of the consulting agency Activate and the founding director of the nonprofit Expert Labs, which helps policymakers use Facebook and Twitter to glean insight into what their constituency is thinking. But he's best known for writing more than half a million words about technology and culture since 1999, at his site Dashes.com. He has 346,841 followers on Twitter.

He's running for one of two open spots on the board that will be decided by a vote after tonight's meetup:

I'm a passionate and unrepentant New Yorker, an advisor to New York-based startups, non-profits and events, and someone who doesn't lightly enter into commitments to a community without knowing that I can do the job well.

Dash's platform includes broadening the meetup to include more diverse presenters, trying to represent the interests of more than just the New Yorkers who can afford $600 smartphones, recognizing that NYC is in competition with San Francisco, and more lobbying:

When we are ignored or insulted by politicians who don't know or don't care about technology, we should flex our formidable financial and cultural muscles to make sure that elected officials know there are political consequences to ignoring the values of the technology community.

Voters, you have 11 hours to read Dash's 5,230 tweets and the half-million words on his blog. Go!

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The presentations opened with a slick demo from Apture, a tool that publishers can implement to allow users to search without leaving the page. Clearly the Apture presenter had practiced in the mirror and had the timing down pat, which we appreciated. Then, a gentleman from a company called NearSay took the stage, showing a hyperlocal news site of sorts. And to complete the lightning round of opening demos, the team from MeetMoi did a clever demo of a dating app, which also plays off location. We give them points for demoing on Android, and for the sweet if predictable heart icon that shows up in one's notification tray when a "match" is within range. Also, points to their lead presenter, Andrew Weinreich, for having decisive, eloquent answers to the audience questions thrown at him.

After an introduction from NYTM organizer Nate Westheimer, a prison-striped blouse clad Reshma Saujani took the stage to discuss her candidacy for congress and her passion for technological entrepreneurship. The Transom tried to follow her train of thought about legislation surrounding an "Innovation Fund," but a tweet from Charlie O'Donnell seemed to say it all: "Last thing we want is govt investing in startups. Please leave it to experienced investors," he wrote. She signed off by asking audience members to tweet about the upcoming primary election. The request was a good enough idea in a broad sense, but perhaps a suggestion to use the #gotv hashtag and promote election awareness would have rung truer than a straightforward demand for @reshma2010 shilling.

Not to be outshone by the new kids on the block, Google sent a very intelligent-seeming engineer to discuss Google goggles, an application that guesses what objects are present in photos users submit. His photos of a can of Boddington's ale and a book cover were mildly interesting, but then he pulled out the big guns and presented a mind-bending invocation of a Verizon ad. Outside of saying it appeared as if a 3-D orb was exploding out of his Nexus One, there's not really a way to describe it. Then, a mind-reading robot manufactured a personal-size pizza with extra mushrooms and delivered it to the Transom's seat. Not really, but the moral of the story is that technology is just wild.

As the night wound down, Jibe took the spotlight and mentioned that the job posts on the cookies were real. By that point, Charlie O'Donnell had already eaten his. A few more presentations ensued, including one from Grovo, a service that provides educational videos, and from a charmingly foreign gentleman whose platform, Kodingen, allows developers to work on the cloud. In about 45 seconds, he made an application that pulled in tweets with the #nytm hashtag. The audience erupted in laughter when the top result was a tweet insulting the Kodingen presentation, but he took it well and soldiered on, and the Transom sort of wanted to give him a hug. The final demo of the evening came from a dapper-looking young man who has created custom-shirt making software. Besides the fact that the demo shirt he made would never pass the girlfriend-approval-test he made reference to, it seemed like a solid concept. That is, for when people in the New York tech community start deciding they care enough about haberdashery to spend upwards of $100 on shirts.

Afterwards, Meetup-goers moved around the corner to Amity Hall for drink specials courtesy of New Work City, the recently relocated coworking space that lots of entrepreneur types call home-away-from-home. It was the perfect early fall night, and the crowd spilled out of the open-front bar into the streets. The tech-types chatted and drank, and maybe a couple or two connected on MeetMoi, closing some kind of karmic infinite loop.

Mr. Emami, a former software engineer for CBS Interactive and creator of indie artist social networking site Babulous.com, was speaking at New York Tech Meetup last night at FIT on 27th Street about the political uprising in his home country. "So, well, we couldn't do anything about that one," he explained about the King of Pop's sudden death, which had most Twitterers recalling their favorite Thriller song, rather than passing around links about the ongoing election protests. But, of course, lots of other things went wrong, too, Mr. Emami said.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, the Iranian government created powerful tools to control their citizens' Internet service, and has been monitoring individual users' activities. They even shut down protesters' service.

Mr. Emami said free Internet access must be considered a human rights issue. "As technologists, we have to think about ways, basically, to create solutions for Internet proliferation and wire tapping," he said, challenging the room of software coders, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to join the movement by building new hardware and software to help Iranian protesters.

"We need to change so many things," Mr. Emami said. "We need to change how we think. I mean, now, in this world, we are not Iran's issue, or Iranian's people issue is not just Iran and Sudan, it's all of us. We live in a world where most of our friends are on Facebook and they belong to every country. Our Facebook friends, we don't ask them what country they're from, they're just our friends."