Meet Our TC NYC Meet-Up Volunteers

This is important, so listen up.

The people I’m about to describe are the most awesome of all the awesome people as they have volunteered to help out (free of charge) with our massive meet-up here in NYC next week. It’ll be amazing.

Let me paint you a little word picture: Imagine a sweet girl named Gail welcoming you to Bar 13 with a few drink tickets. As you walk up the stairs, you find two floors and a roof deck filled with guys in jeans, startup t-shirts and blazers. They graze the room like a herd of lean, brilliant cattle in search of the nearest TC editor and/or VC, beers in hands. (They aren’t real cows, so they can hold beers.)

From the dark corner on the second floor, a girl named Zhila appears. She’s holding a box of pizza, offering it up freely to hundreds of hungry hands as she gracefully crosses the room. Meanwhile, Nathaniel and David (more badass volunteers) are re-hanging our sponsor banner after a giveaway kerfuffle brought it to the ground.

A floor above, John Biggs is firing Nerf discs into the crowd out of sheer jadedness, as I sing Cher’s “Turn Back Time” at the top of my lungs courtesy of our sponsor TouchTunes’ Virtuo karaoke machine. On the other side of the room, Matt Burns and Chris Velazco are posing for a photostrip in our TC-flavored photo booth, as volunteer Kevin (at a hearty 6’2″) keeps a rowdy group of developers from accosting Peter Ha.

Honestly, how can you resist a night like this?

You can’t.

So get yourself familiar with our volunteers:

David Sikorski

Besides trying to find a way to directly download his thoughts to be stored in a cloud based network, David still has the AOL dial up sound haunting him from time to time. He spent the last couple years in Public Relations before returning to what he knows best as a Social Media Advisor throughout the Northeast ranging from Forbes top 100 companies to local non-for-profit groups. He was just very recently scooped up by the former CTO of Sony Corp America, the legendary Philip Wiser to be his right hand man and project manager as he moved to New York to be the first ever Chief Technology Officer of the Hearst Corporation. “We’re in a Digital Revolution, it’s never too late to join in the fun!”

Gail Axelrod

Gail works on marketing at BetterCloud, an NYC-based application developer that builds security and management tools specifically integrated with Google Apps. She’s also incredibly funny, and gluten intolerant (so it’s all work and no pizza and beer for her).

Kevin McIntyre

Kevin is a large nerd-jock who not only excels as a computer science student but also at lifting things. He’s interested in all things technology; particularly software and web development. He enjoys competition and good humor. If he’s not learning something, He’s bored. He doesn’t like to be bored. Start-up culture intrigues Him. If the right opportunity comes his way, he’d love to work at one; be it as an intern while he completes his degree or as an engineer after he graduates.

Nathaniel Padgett

He’s from the San Francisco Bay Area, previously worked at Google on the Google Apps team, but is now a Community Ambassador for Quirky Inc. He loves craft beer, collaborative product development, and kittens. Little known fact about him: He’s a master eye-brow dancer.

Zhila Shariat

Zhila is a Columbia Business School MBA graduate who lives in Brooklyn. She currently works for Constellation Energy, where she manages the electricity pricing desk for the New York and New Jersey markets. Outside of work, you can find her recording dj mixes, interviewing comedians for the serial optimist, posting Instagram photos, or making homemade donuts.

Full disclosure: I realize that all five of our volunteers are particularly beautiful people. I promise, however, that I was unaware of their attractiveness until after they were selected.
Here’s a refresh on the deets:

You can RSVP on our PlanCast page for the Meet-Up, which will go down on Tuesday, May 8 from 6pm-10pm at Bar 13 on 13th St. and University Pl.

And another look at our sponsors:

Yext helps provide amazing local search results with PowerListings, a local information hub that syncs listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, small and large businesses can quickly and easily update their business information, photos and specials from one central location. Today, Yext PowerListings syncs information for over 45,000 locations.

Traducto is a powerful and easy to use translation and localization app.
With Traducto users can leverage human translation to translate documents, emails, newsletters, social postings, marketing materials and more. TraductoPro allows developers to convert iOS or Mac apps, into a multilingual application, making the app available to a wider global audience. By making it simple to localize your application and offering 16 different language translations, TraductoPro is designed to reduce the pain typically associated with localization. Our integrated approach combines automating app localization through direct Xcode integration, with a high quality human translation service all within a single application. TraductoPro offers support for content translations, app store metadata and Xcode projects localization.

WhatRunsWhere is a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online; where they are running ads, who they are buying their inventory through and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website; who is advertising there, who’s selling the inventory for them and what ads are they using. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights regarding the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI media buying process.

Parlor® is the creator of unique branded communication applications: GroupCall™, TopicTalk™ and MobiCast™. Our goal is to make useful tools to communicate globally, both efficiently and for free. We will be unleashing these three awesome applications on iOS and Android at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Follow us at http://Parlor.fm for news and updates.

Speak to any business in the world with MyGenie™, a location-based 2-way communication platform that allows iPhone and Android users to speak to businesses in real-time! It’s free, it’s quick, and it’s simple to use. No need to find a manager, an email address, or a telephone # to contact. With MyGenie™ consumers send questions, comments, complaints, feedback, and more (can also upload photos) directly to any business they choose via their smart phones. Businesses can immediately respond (and include special offers) via a business portal. MyGenie™, not just ratings, not just feedback, it’s anything and everything you want it to be! Free on Apple App Store and Android Market.

Return on Change (RoC) connects innovative startups and investors who are looking to change tomorrow’s world today. Entrepreneurs with great ideas need capital funding to jumpstart their businesses, and investors are looking to help fund the next big idea. RoC provides the online medium through which startup companies and entrepreneurs will be able to pool capital through crowdsourcing. For more information about Return on Change, please visit www.returnonchange.com or contact RoC at RoC@returnonchange.com.

PeoplePerHour is Europe’s leading marketplace connecting startups and entrepreneurs to freelance talent worldwide and we’ve just landed in NYC! Project by project we’re awakening an enormous latent workforce, from the stay at home mom and the retiree to the moonlighter and the hobbyist, removing the constraints of the traditional 9-5 office. Be it for a quick logo design, building a website, copywriting or a small translation… we’re helping businesses keep their core lean and to get the job done fast. Our vision is for this to be the defining factor in the future of work.

TouchTunes Interactive Networks is the largest interactive out-of-home entertainment network in North America. TouchTunes provides entertainment and marketing solutions to 52,000 bars and restaurants. Founded in 1998, the network has become the largest of its kind with 54M monthly users who played more than 900 million songs in 2011. The TouchTunes mobile app allows consumers in bars, restaurants, hotels, retail and arenas to play any song from our catalog without having to leave their seat and is socially integrated. TouchTunes network is the largest digital out-of-home advertising network in the US (Nielsen) and includes TouchTunesTV, a unique screen-within-a-screen interactive television experience that provides custom advertising capabilities, venue promotions and social networking opportunities. TouchTunes is a privately held U.S. corporation with offices in New York City, Arlington Heights, Illinois and Montreal, Canada. For further information, please visit us at touchtunes.com.

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