The NY Tech Meetup, the mothership of Meetup.com, has become a real phenomenon. I was there 7 pm sharp, but to avoid the huge line I went to the vinyl record store across the street and missed the first few presentations.

The presentations I did see were impressive. Jinesh Varia traveled all the way from Seattle to introduce Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 is for computation what S3 is for storage.

Most impressive to me was UpNext, a 3D representation of New York (to start with) with integrated social networking features. Companies with bigger pockets are probably working on similar projects, but I’m rooting for the home team.

Unfortunately UpNext depends on the cumbersome Java Runtime Environment. On my laptop the 3D app clashed with Firefox’ Talkback quality assurance program.

The big finale QuestionParty puzzled everybody.