Top 5 Startups from New York Tech Meetup

Every month at New York Tech Meetup, the NYC startup and tech community packs NYU’s Skirball Hall to watch sick demos from 12 of the city’s hottest young startups. Every major NY tech company, including Tumblr and Foursquare, has made their debut at NYTM since it started in 2004. Here are the Top 5 startups that we saw present last night:

5. FORETUIT

Foretuit wasn’t the sexiest startup to present last night for most people in the room, but if you’ve ever been trapped in Salesforce hell, Foretuit is a godsend.

Basically, Foretuit takes Salesforce’s dull, unreadable list of sales rep statistics and translates it into vibrant, color-coded graphs that allow you to instantly see where you’re succeeding and failing. This tool would be a godsend for hyperlocal publishing startups like Patch or Main St. Connect, who are perpetually bogged down in sales cost. Or any other company that utilizes a sales team. It also nicely organizes all of the players in your sales operation, from reps to clients to lawyers.

Better yet, Foretuit has a predictive algorithm that determines the probability that any given deal will close based on the parties interacting in the deal.

4. SMARTLING

Smartling is “on a mission to make the entire Internet—web and mobile—multi-lingual.”

But really, Smartling doesn’t want to make the whole Internet multi-lingual. Just the parts that sell shit, since, according to presenters Jack Welde and Matt DeLoca, you’re 6x as likely to convert a sale if you’re addressing the user in his native language. Makes sense.

Basically, Smartling is a software that extracts content from a page to translate, and makes the translation super easy to integrate. You can use a free translator, crowdsource the translation, or, if you’re not a cheap asshole, hire a real translator. And Smartling will help you find a translator, free of charge. Because they think you’re kind of cute.

Oh, Cutie, this too: If you go to Smartling.com/NYTM, you can sign up for their Silver Plan for 6 months free, a $600 value.

3. ZEMANTA

ZEMANTA!!! Sorry, I’ve been waiting to scream that since last night.

Anyway, Zemanta is a sick blogging platform/blogging plug-in that uses natural language processing to find images, links, and related stories to enhance any blog post. The results are spot-on, and the plug-in works with almost all of the major blogging platforms, including WordPress.

And yes, our blogger bias bumped them up to #3. Deal with it, techies.

T-2. PIXABLE and KOGETO

Okay, I lied. This is really a Top 6 this week. Too many sick demos, not enough hipsters. Just kidding, there are always enough hipsters at NYTM.

Pixable aims to solve a huge problem; 7 billion photos are shared each month on Facebook, except we don’t see most of them with social readers and Spotify now molesting our News Feeds. So, Pixable feeds you those photos in a beautiful, user-friendly display, ranking photos based on comments/likes and your affinity to the friend who posted them. Scroll horizontally and you see more pictures based on ranking; scroll vertically and you see more photos from that friend. Super slick.

You can choose to follow a friend (or ex-girlfriend) and get an update every time they post a picture; with Pixable, photo-stalking has never been so easy!

Kogeto

Kogeto presented an insane “new weapon for social media”—an iPhone “appcessory” that turns your iPhone into a panoramic video camera that shares seamlessly onto Facebook. You can drag and spin the video right in Facebook. Wow.

It’s only $79, and you have to see it to believe it.

1. SHAPEWAYS

Shapeways: the future of stuff.

Shapeways is absolutely incredible. It’s a site that allows you do limitless, on-demand production of almost anything under two and a half feet, from ceramics to sake sets to company logos. Their user-friendly 3D designer lets you create almost anything you can imagine. And it’s affordable, with the cheapest version of most products coming in at under $150. And they’re opening a manufacturing plant in NYC! And you get a free puppy with every purchase! (Not actually true.)

They have over 300,000 products designed already, and, well, I’ll let you spend the rest of the day creating a giant purple ceramic penis on their site.