Dazzy

These are sim­ply the lat­est of many efforts New York has made to tap into its grow­ing tech and start­up scene, and we’ll undoubtably see many more. No city gov­ern­ment is with­out its flaws…but there are plen­ty of rea­sons to be impressed at the moment.

To avoid turn­ing this into an ency­clo­pe­dia, I’m only list­ing a hand­ful of the most promis­ing new com­pa­nies as of late. If you think I missed some­thing impor­tant, def­i­nite­ly share it in the com­ments below.

Folio: Folio is a plat­form for design­ers, illus­tra­tors, devel­op­ers and cre­ators to mar­ket and sell their dig­i­tal con­tent. Cur­rent­ly, sup­port­ed file types include just about any­thing you can cre­ate in Pho­to­shop or Illus­tra­tor such as PSD, EPS, AI, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDF. In the future, the mar­ket­place will open up to all dig­i­tal assets includ­ing 3D mod­els, motion graph­ics, audio con­tent, pho­tog­ra­phy, finan­cial mod­els, MS Word Templates, drum beats, WAV files, audio loops and even snip­pets of code.

Sin­gle­Plat­form: After spend­ing 10-years lead­ing NYC’s online deliv­ery ser­vice Seam­less, founder Wiley Cer­il­li launched Sin­gle­Plat­form in Jan­u­ary 2010, to ease restau­rants into the next course of inter­net mar­ket­ing and social media. Restau­rants pro­vide the ser­vice with their infor­ma­tion like menus, pho­tos, events and spe­cials through an easy-to-use por­tal and Sin­gle­Plat­form updates it across their hun­dreds of pub­lish­ing part­ners includ­ing hotels, city guides, restaurant review sites and appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers.

Mov­able Ink: This start­up turns your email into a mar­ket­ing plat­form that per­son­al­izes live con­tent to the recip­i­ent’s loca­tion, cur­rent time and social con­text. Its vision is to make emails as rich and real­time as the web, and despite how much I hate email, Mov­able Ink is remark­able in its exe­cu­tion.

Wan­der (no, not that Wan­der): This start­up has gen­er­at­ed enough buzz to shake a stick at, despite still being in “mys­tery mode,” as our own CBM called it. In April, Wan­der raised $1.2 mil­lion from NextView Ven­tures, Google Ven­tures, Soft­Tech VC, SV Angel, Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund, Red Swan and Tech­Stars to fund its future growth and hire a solid team. The offi­cial Wan­der plat­form will debut the 2nd week of June. Stay tuned.

Jux: This high­ly visu­al blog­ging plat­form has been on our radar since August of last year, and con­tin­ues to grow more and more beau­ti­ful every day. I’ve already taken a close look at what Jux has to offer, and the sim­ple blog­ging plat­form keeps on grow­ing, adding HMTL5, iPhone and Insta­gram sup­port along the way. As TNW’s Court­ney Boyd Myers point­ed out, while there are sim­i­lar­i­ties to Tum­blr, Jux veers away from the run of the mill Tum­blel­ogs by focus­ing on show­cas­ing your own work, rather than inter­est­ing images from around the web.

Fancy Hands: One of my favorite ser­vices in the per­son­al assis­tance space, Fancy Hands is dead sim­ple to use, and the results you get back are solid. Unlike TaskRab­bit, you’re not going to find peo­ple to pick up gro­ceries for you with Fancy Hands, but if you need some­one to tell you how many dog parks there are in San Fran­cis­co and where they are, the ser­vice might be for you. Data col­lec­tion is its strong suit, and the ser­vice can even make appoint­ments for you in a pinch for a vari­ety of things.

Codecad­e­my: This site bills itself as “the eas­i­est way to learn how to code”. The Y-Com­bi­na­tor bred, New York City based com­pa­ny teach­es peo­ple to code through free inter­ac­tive instruc­tion. The com­pa­ny has made mas­sive waves this year and even received atten­tion from the White House for its Sum­mer Jobs + pro­gram.

News­Cred: This start­up is tak­ing a two-birds, one stone approach to fix­ing the cur­rent news model by deliv­er­ing exist­ing, high qual­i­ty news con­tent to pay­ing brands and pub­lish­ers. News­Cred’s licens­ing plat­form con­nects brands like Orange Tele­com and Leno­vo as well as pub­lish­ers like Yahoo and New York Daily News, with arti­cles, pho­tos and videos from over 700 news sources that it deems high-quality. Sources range from inter­na­tion­al news­pa­pers to blog­gers and online mag­a­zines like The Econ­o­mist, Forbes, Tele­graph, The Guardian, McClatchy/Tribune News­pa­pers, Bloomberg, Reuters and the LA Times.

Con­smr: To put it sim­ply, Con­smr is like Yelp for all con­sumer pack­aged goods. While there are hun­dreds of review sites for movies, restau­rants, elec­tron­ics, video games, etc, there are no defin­i­tive go-to sites for reviews of every­thing else; in fact it remains one of the few cat­e­gories lack­ing a online social plat­form. Until now. Consmr is a resource for reviews and social shar­ing on the prod­ucts you typ­i­cal­ly find at a gro­cery store or drug store – from bev­er­ages to frozen foods to skin care.

Triple Lift: Triple Lift is an enter­prise mar­ket­ing plat­form for Pin­ter­est, and as social image-based con­tent grows, the young com­pa­ny is poised to do very well in this space. In short, this may be the next Buddy Media and is worth keep­ing an eye on.

All in all, this mere­ly scratch­es the sur­face of the emerg­ing tech scene and com­mu­ni­ty in New York City. And with all of its strengths, weak­ness­es, hur­dles and ambi­tion, there’s no doubt­ing that a mas­sive amount of impres­sive work is com­ing out of this city.

There isn’t much pur­pose in com­par­ing NY to the Val­ley, for me at least, and it’s get­ting to the point where the city won’t ever even need to nod back to Cal­i­for­nia. It’s near­ly a scene of its own now, with dis­tinct abil­i­ties that result in some­thing the whole world needs — growth, jobs and promise.

What are your thoughts on the cur­rent state of NYC’s tech scene? I’m all ears.