We did it Chicago. Thanks to you, we had a great meetup to close out our northern meetups series last week. People made the trek out to the Zhou B gallery on Chicago’s south side for a night of networking, complete with an impromptu pitch battle.

As with other cities on the tour, we spent one day meeting with local area businesses and entrepreneurs at office hours, and then the next at the big event itself. In general, I think we saw a lot more very early stage (read: idea phase) projects come across our temporary desks than in previous cities, and we seemed to attract entrepreneurs from farther afield, with people making the trek in from Iowa and Arkansas, for example, to show off their projects.

You might expect Chicago’s startup scene to resemble New York’s, and it did in that many businesses getting started there seem to place a priority on building sustainable revenue models early, unlike west coast startups that repeatedly seem to talk about building user numbers fast and worry about money coming in later.

Chicago’s startup community was no less enthusiastic than we’ve seen elsewhere, however, and that was obvious during the heated pitch battle. All in all, it was a fitting end to a great trip introduced us to a lot of smart, innovative companies we might not have come across otherwise. Thanks again, Chicago.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Our meetups are the things of legend. There’s beer, sometimes food, but more important than any of that, TechCrunch promises the most wondrous geek party you’ve ever attended. And the latest round of meetups is almost sold out.

There are just a few tickets left for the Detroit and Chicago meetups; Toronto sold out within a matter of days, so RSVP now. If our past meetup tours are any indication, hitting up the Great White North should be a real hoot.

No, GaGa won’t be there in a meat dress, and for that matter, there probably won’t be that many women in general. Ladies of the tech world, please help me to rectify this.

We’ll be at awesome venues like Toronto’s Steam Whistle, Detroit’s Hockey Town Cafe, and Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center, and more TechCrunchers than ever before will be in attendance. Here’s the whole roster: Jordan Crook, John Biggs, Matt Burns, Colleen Taylor, and Darrell Etherington.

Apparently we chose a Chicago venue that is a bit out of the way. The space is awesome, but a bunch of readers indicated it’s hard to get to. Uber heard your cries. Enter the promo code, ‘TCNOVCHI12′ in the app or at Uber.com, and you’ll receive $10 off black car rides to/from the event. For more information, check out uber.com/chicago or tweet @Uber_CHI.

If you’d like to sponsor one or all of these fantastic gatherings, or know someone that should, shoot a message to our amazing sponsorship team here. For general meetup questions, please email our awesome events team here.

Click to view slideshow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Just a quick reminder that the Taipei Mini-Meetup is Tuesday, September 18, 2012, at about 8pm at OnTap Taipei, which is located at No 21, Alley 11, Lane 216, Zhongxiao East Road. I’ll be there – just look for the sweating American guy – as will Richard Lai of Engadget who graciously agreed to go as my chaperone.

To RSVP pop over to Plancast or email me at john@techcrunch.com with the subject line “TAIPEI.” If you’ve already emailed and haven’t gotten a response, never fear. You and your guests are welcome.

Special thanks to Richard from VIA who helped plan this little soiree.

I’d love to take your pitches and chat about the entrepreneurial environment in Taipei. Remember: This is an informal, bar-type event and not a formal presentation. Think networking, not seminar.

See you on Tuesday!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Gather is a newly launched mobile application which allows you to create “disposable” micro-meetups which can be quickly broadcast to Facebook and Twitter.  It’s meant to serve as a lightweight tool that helps you share your intended plans ahead of your Facebook or Foursquare check-in, for example. The benefit to using this app, instead of posting directly the to social networks themselves, is that it centralizes friends’ plans, so you don’t have to obsessively check Facebook and Twitter for updates and news. If your friends are doing something fun nearby, you’ll just get a push notification instead.

The app was created by former Yammer, CouchOne, and Mozilla developer Mikeal Rogers, and open web developer and Code for America fellow Max Ogden. The two had been collaborating on weekends, initially working on a larger vision of an “achievement engine for the real world,” but soon realized that users didn’t want apps that auto-tweeted so-called “achievements” for them. The earlier project also didn’t really serve the goal of getting more people out and doing things together.

Hence, Gather.

Although the concept of micro-meetups and sharing social plans is not new (see now-shuttered Forecast and Holler, for example…as well as every social events calendar ever), Gather is approaching the space not as “Yet Another Social Network,” but as a utility. And instead of having users shout into a seemingly empty void, Gather builds on top of your Facebook and Twitter social graphs. That means if your friends on those two networks begin using Gather to post plans, you’ll know – as long as they’re within 50 miles.

The app also supports a “nearby” feed which shows posts from just a mile or two away, but this isn’t fleshed out much beyond San Francisco (Gather’s home base) at this point.

To be clear, Gather isn’t a competitor with event platforms like Eventbrite, Meetup, Cvent, or others. “Those have a lot of infrastructure behind them,” says Rogers. “We don’t even require an end time for an event. You just put in a start time, a place from Foursquare, and a name for it, and you’re ready to go,” he says. “We really wanted to be much more lightweight…what a tweet is to blogging, we are to Meetup.com,” he explains.

Currently in the works for the app is Foursquare check-in support (for after you’ve arrived and want to re-share your plans), calendar integration, and expanded Android platform support. The current version only works on Android 4.0 and up, which, although that’s only some 15% of the userbase, Rogers estimates that it will at least make the app available to an important target demographic: early adopters.

As for a business model, that hasn’t been figured out yet – the team first wants to see how people use the app and whether it gains traction. Rogers says they’re working off advice they received from Tim O’Reilly here. “The business model will be really evident, it will be really obvious, and just let that happen,” Rogers says O’Reilly advised, “and don’t come into that with any preconceptions.”  However, that hasn’t stopped Gather from raising a bit of seed funding – under $500,000 from Atlas Ventures has already closed and Rogers says Gather is “good to the end of the year.”

Now let’s see about that traction. You can try out Gather for yourself from here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As we were wandering through the Atlanta meet-up last week we stumbled upon a charming young man wearing a glove studded with circuit boards and embroidered with what looked like silver thread. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was a wild homegrown glove made by a pair of former design students.

The project is called G.A.U.N.T.L.E.T. (Generally Accessible Universal Nomadic Tactile Low-power Electronic Typist) and is currently in beta stages. However, it would allow a person to type on any smartphone or computer with one hand, opening up interesting possibilities for people with stroke debilitation or a missing hand.

The creator, Jiake Liu, is co-founder of Kabob.it, a menu service for eateries. The glove, on the other hand, was an experiment he built in college and it has gone through a number iterations. Right now it uses electrically conductive embroidered letters to send signals via Bluetooth and they may improve the glove over time. Until then, I suggest that start-up founders wear something odd and cool when they come to our meetups in the future, thereby ensuring immediate attention.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tomorrow, TechCrunch turns five years old. We’ve grown up with the Web over that time from a one-man hobby in Michael’s home to an expanding media outfit of almost two dozen full-time staff around the world. Since all of you won’t fit in our new offices in San Francisco (as much as we’d like to invite you, especially the commenters on MG’s posts), we thought why not let readers throw their own parties around the world.

A couple weeks ago, with the launch of Meetups Everywhere at our Disrupt conference in New York, we started with about 50 Meetups. Quickly, that grew to 150, then 250, and now the number is at more than 350 TechCrunch Meetups from Bangalore and Jakarta to Johannesburg and Miami Beach. More than 4,000 readers will be celebrating with us, and you can join them.

Check out the nearest city with a TechCrunch Meetup, or create your own. The biggest Meetup right now is in American Fork, Utah, with 372 people all going to a BBQ, followed by San Francisco (333), New York (164), and Bangalore, India (137). Come meet me at the one in New York City, or TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher in the UK.

These Meetups are more about you, and how much the Web has changed in the past five years, than it is about us. Just think about it. Five years ago, Facebook hadn’t yet graduated from colleges. YouTube, Twitter, and Foursquare didn’t even exist. TechCrunch was writing about Web 2.0 startups, but now we don’t even use that term anymore because the entire Web has absorbed those concepts. It is social, programmable, and increasingly mobile. Every site with an API is a potential platform that can be mashed up to create new sites and apps. That’s just the way it is.

If you are an organizer of one of the 350+ Meetups, thank you. Here are some things you can do. Take plenty of photos and videos, and upload them to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, or YouTube. Tag everything #tcmeetup. Stream live video from your meetup, you can set up a free channel on Livestream, and we will be streaming on the New York City party on this here TCMeetup channel.

Get people on video answering these questions, and we’ll pull together the best answers in a highlight video:

• What technology can you not live without that did not exist five years ago?
• What will the Web look like five years from now?
• What kinds of startups will create the most wealth over the next five years?
• Why do you read TechCrunch?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch