24 Jun Live from New York, its GDGT
By: Patrick Gensel
The Altman building in NYC was filled to the brim with geeks and tech toys this past Tuesday evening. The popular social knowledge base for all things tech, GDGT, held its second event in New York City.
The lighting in the venue was dim, the athmosphere felt “Cutting Edge” which was fitting considering the nearly 30 vendors all showing off the latest and greatest in consumer electronics. case maker Incipio was the first vendor visible upon entering the Altman building. They showed off new toys like their NGP iphone case which was made of a unique next generation polymer which resisted breaking and wear like traditional plastic or silicone cases would. They also had an external backup battery called the off grid which allowed you to charge your iPad, iPhone, iPod and more when you can’t plug into an outlet.
The next vendor in line was Roku. Their booth screamed “come play with us” thanks to the Angry Birds plush toys strewn about. If this seems a bit odd to you, thats alright, it caught me off guard too. Roku has recently inked a partnership deal with Rovio, the company behind the wildly popular game which has had folks glued to their mobile devices for hours on end. In addition to bringing the Angry Birds experience to the TV screen, the Roku marketplace will also enable folks to buy Angry Birds plush dolls. Another notable step for Roku is their move into big box retail. Look for their set top boxes this fall in places like Best Buy and others.
Marvell Semiconductor was present showing off their recent acquisition. Kinoma is a mobile applications platform that can be likened to that of Adobe Air; the big difference being that, unlike Air, Kinoma is completely open source. This allows for a more community driven experience. Marvell demonstrated Kinoma using a suite of apps on a mobile phone and simulated mobile phone on the LCD.
Out of all of the amazing innovations on the show floor, nothing was quite as peculiar as the Thing-O-Matic by MakerBot Industries. Think Creepy Crawlers oven meets desktop printer and you won’t be too far off from the Thing-O-Matic. The concept is simple: design an object on your computer and let the Thing-O-Matic do the rest. This open source 3D printer will churn out plastic sculptures of just about anything under 5”x 5” x 5”.
Speaking of bots, IRobot was present with the latest iterations of their Roomba and Scuba housekeeping robots. Why clean your floors when a robot will do it for you?
The GDGT New York event was a great show. In terms of scale, it was no CES, but the small size made it possible to visit most, if not all of the vendors. All the reps for the brands were really passionate about the products they represented and GDGT founders Peter Rojas and Ryan Block mingled with everyone as if they were part of the show going crowd themselves. Keep up the good work guys and lets see this thing back in New York soon for round 3.