Last September, techies across New York City celebrated fall at Tech in Motion's Adventure and Travel Demos & Drinks event, gathering at Libation NYC to network, drink and meet some great companies who were out showcasing their technologies. BioLite, goTenna, Hitlist, Tripstr, and Via all came out for the evening to demo their products.
BioLite is a dynamic social enterprise that develops, manufactures, and markets consumer energy products for off-grid communities around the world. It is most well-known for its patented thermoelectric technology that makes cooking with wood as clean, safe, and easy as modern fuels while simultaneously providing electricity to charge small devices.
goTenna is a small, rugged device designed to make “No Service” no problem. Users can pair their smartphone with a goTenna and communicate off-grid with those near you who also have goTenna, anywhere on the planet, regardless of access to cell reception or wi-fi. goTenna allows you to send and receive texts and share GPS locations on beautiful offline maps, without ever relying on central connectivity. goTenna is great in all situations: when hiking in remote areas, traveling abroad, attending music or sporting events or during an emergency. Plus, because goTenna is end-to-end encrypted, it’s not just for when you’re going off the grid, but when you want to be.
Hitlist is a mobile app that sends personalized, deeply discounted flight alerts for the places you want to go. Build your list of target destinations and they search through millions of airfares to find you the best in the market and help you travel more for less money.
App Review: “Very seamless and awesome way to track airfare deals on a short notice. The user interface is quite stunning, and it would be even better if the app would allow for multiple home airports.”
Tripstr is a free storytelling app for iPhone and iPad that makes it incredibly easy for people to turn the photos they take on their trips into beautiful, interactive, sharable stories that look great in the app or on any size screen on the web. They accomplish this by taking advantage of the rich metadata in smartphone photos, combined with (patent-pending) UX that compresses the entire story-creation process into a few minutes.
App Review: “This is a great app that allows you to easily create a scrap book from your camera roll. It is super easy to curate your photos, add captions and publish, but I would love to see the capability to print the stories through a service.”
Via is changing the way people get around cities. Via works by connecting in real time, multiple individuals traveling along the same route, allowing passengers to seamlessly share a chauffeured premium vehicle for just a few dollars more than the bus or subway. Despite the complexities inherent in matching routes for multiple passengers, average pickup times are under 5 minutes and trip durations are comparable to a taxi. It's on-demand transportation on a mass scale that's friendly to our planet.
App Review: “I love how simple this app is. It took me less than 5 minutes from downloading the app to sitting in the car. Every New Yorker should try this out”
“This app looks awesome and very intuitive. Slick interface, very responsive. Can’t wait to use!”
Tech in Motion New York, like all our chapters, had a drinks & demos event once a quarter as one of the monthly events. Click here to find a demo event near you.
Big thanks to our continued sponsors who helped make this event a success: Workbridge Associates, Jobspring Partners & Handy.