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NYC invaded Austin, TX at SXSW Interactive and at the NY Tech Meetup event on Saturday, March 8th, where our home-grown startups demoed their products for the global tech community to see. As a member of the NYC tech community myself, I recognized quite a few of the prominent faces in the room that made it a great event for those who wanted an authentic taste of the NYC tech scene. Present  were the leading men of Fueled, Social Media Week and Startup Threads, in addition to representatives from NYCEDC and, of course, David S. Rose, Founder and Chairman Emeritus…

Long live Mongo!

These Are the New York Companies that Killed It at SXSW

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Tango, a messaging app and mobile social network, has raised $280 million … Eric Setton, CTO and co-founder of Tango, says 70 million of its 200 million registered users are active every month.

Tango Raises $280 Million via Business Insider

I used Tango for a short while on my Windows Phone before Skype was released on the platform. Not a surprising valuation for Tango given the recent WhatsApp purchase and their MAU’s. Their monetization and virality model seems focused on not dissuading users in any way (i.e. no core functionality behind paywalls). 

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We’ve heard that Google Voice is getting dragged to the trash can and most of its functionality will be incorporated into the G+ Hangouts apps on both Android and iOS. This has already happened to …

I’m really, really not enjoying the Hangouts app on my Android device. Since it’s a Nexus 5 I have no choice but to use it for SMS; it’s slow, sometimes crashes, and makes me miss iMessage (one of the few iOS things I really miss, a lot). 

It is good, however, to see the convergence Google is doing (as a consumer). I can’t wait to see how big of a lid the big carriers are going to flip when Google allows you to drop your normal carrier and map your number to Hangouts.

Google plans to kill Google Voice in coming months, integrate features into Hangouts

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The experience made it clear that WhatsApp, even with more than 450 million users, by no means has certain domination of the free texting market — and you would think it might if Facebook paid up to $19 billion to acquire the start-up.

“For Free Texting Apps, the Market Is Far From Conquered” via NYTimes.

I also have this “which app are you on?” experience whenever I meet people at conferences or networking events, especially internationally. My “messaging” folder of apps gets a workout daily as I switch between WhatsApp (friends in Mexico and Spain), GroupMe (Seattle friends), Skype (work), Facebook Messenger (NYC and Boston friends), then a much smaller percentage of time on Line and Viber (random international folks).

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With an app like Secret, a user could post an original photograph and write a post about it, and people connected to that user can help the secret propagate through the app’s network, as well as through the web.

“How Secret May Uncover A New Secret To Mobile Growth” via TechCrunch

I’m interested in what Secret is doing; not so much as an app on its own but instead as a lighthouse for seeing which types of content could find a new home in anonymous posting networks (beyond just NSFW Snapchatting).