Queens Tech Meetup Rooftop Reception

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian stood at the front of a large room at the Hunters Point Plaza Penthouse in Long Island City, and looked out over the rows of tables set up for various startups based in the borough that, let’s be honest, doesn’t always have the best rep in the city.

“The New York tech community is just starting. There’s so much awesome stuff happening in all of New York City,” he said. “The only issue I’ve got is there’s a lot of it going on right around here.” He pointed to a map of Manhattan.

Speakers and guests alike welcomed the idea of Queens becoming a new hub for digital startup companies at last night’s inaugural Queens Tech Meetup. The crowded venue, which featured a rooftop deck looking out over an impressive view of the Manhattan skyline, attracted young professionals in the tech field who exchanged business cards constantly throughout the night.

Elias Roman, co-founder of Songza, a streaming music play list service, was equally enthused about the budding tech community in Queens. “After we got our first company funded, we moved the whole team to Long Island City and we could not be happier,” he said.

The Queens Tech Meetup is hosted by Coalition for Queens, a nonprofit focused on developing the local tech community. New York’s tech startups are concentrated heavily in Union Square and Flatiron, with Facebook and Twitter on the Upper West Side and a few hip hubs in Soho (Thrillist, Kickstarter), the West Village (Betaworks) and even Chinatown, where a few companies are clustered in a ratty building they call the “Silicon Sweatshop.” Brooklyn has got the startup bug, with hubs popping up in Dumbo and Williamsburg. Even Hoboken is making a name for itself with the New Jersey Tech Meetup, which now has almost 2,000 members.

Long Island City, primarily known for the Citi tower and, according to Wikipedia, it’s “rapid and ongoing gentrification,” is not generally thought of as a tech startup scene.

“This is a great location, I don’t know why this hasn’t become a more popular area,” said Michael Hillmeyer, an Ozone Park, Queens native and technology software developer. He came to the event because it seemed interesting and he has faith in the potential for Queens, and especially Long Island City, to build up in the next few years.

Marleen Vogelaar, COO of Shapeways, a 3-D printing company that is in the process of moving its production site to Long Island City, also presented, bringing along some 3D-printed jewelry pieces, a tiny espresso cup and an iPhone case.“When I came off the subway here from Manhattan for the first time, I just gravitated to Long Island City,” she said. “It’s a good fit for our company; it’s both an industrial and artistic community, it suits us.”

Brief Q&A sessions with each of the presenters followed the presentations. The remainder of the night consisted of demos by each of the companies that attended the meetup.

Jukay Hsu, founder of Coalition for Queens and the QTM event planner said he was happy with the event’s first turnout; he said he had to change the original venue of the event in order to fit more people. But he still hopes to see a bigger presence in the future.

“This is our first event and we had to expand our guest list multiple times,” he said. “That’s a really great indication of how big this can get and I hope this meetup continues to grow as we host more of them.”

Imagine the Internet is a vast hotel. (It probably looks a lot like the impossible hotel in The Shining, with hallways to nowhere and windows where they shouldn't be.) You're a guest in this Internet Hotel for the evening; you've just arrived from New York on the red-eye and you're exhausted. You need something to pep you up - perhaps some music. But you're too tired, disoriented and indecisive to pick, so you head for the concierge. "Excuse me, you look like you know your way around. Can you please just tell me what I should listen to right now?"

Songza, the Long Island City-based streaming music startup featured at Facebook's f8 developer conference in September, has been building a massive database of playlists across genres and for a range of occasions. The site has more than 100,000 searchable playlists, from "Aggressive Dubstep" to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," submitted by msuic experts and users. But if you're not sure if you want to hear something funky or something fresh, Songza's new Music Concierge feature can do that for you.

Music Concierge, which debuted today, will now be the central feature on Songza. First, give Songza some context. Are you working or studying? Still waking up? Taking the day off? Pick a genre and the site will serve up three playlists based on that, the time of day and the device you're using. If you're logged in, Songza also knows something about your tastes based on your listening habits and your friends' favorite tracks and uses that intelligence to make suggestions. You can also see what's been trending for the last three hours. Betabeat tried it this morning. "It's Monday morning," Songza said. We decided we were Feeling Confident and Looking Good, and picked the genre as "baller." We are now chair dancing to Nicki Minaj's "Starships." It's not what we thought we wanted to listen to, but it's not not what we wanted to listen to. Starships were meant to flyyyyy... You're probably right, Music Concierge.

It's Songza's move from "pull curation" to "push curation," CEO Elias Roman, who prefers energetic music, music for cardio workouts and dance pop, told Betabeat by phone last week. Later this year, Songza will make a push for a voice-activated version to be integrated into car computer systems, so you can bark your music selection the way you'd yell at the GPS. "ROAD TRIP. I SAID, ROAD. TRIP. ROAD TRIP! Dammit, Songza!"

You'll still be able to search for playlists, Mr. Roman said, but the concierge is really the main product.

Songza started out as a searchable database of streamable tunes, back in 2008 when it "rocked the college scene." But Songza today is a very different company.

A little backstory. In 2006, a group of seniors at Brown University had a pretty good idea for a website where you could buy music priced according to demand. Long Island-based Amie Street was born. Songs on Amie Street started out free and incrementally ticked up to $.99 depending on how many times they were downloaded. Even Mike Arrington loved it. Meanwhile, nearby Songza was building the Google for music; Amie Street acquired Songza in 2009. The next year, Amie Street was bought and basically shut down by Amazon, one of Amie Street's investors. Amie Street's cofounders left to focus on Songza. "We said, the new thing was going to be streaming," Mr. Roman told Betabeat.

Now, it's now the second coming of Songza. Amie Street's cofounders now call themselves Songza's cofounders. (Songza's original cofounders, Aza Raskin of Mozilla Fame and serial Chicago entrepreneur Scott Robbin, both left.) They raised an undisclosed seven-figure financing from Amazon, Deep Fork Capital and individual investors. The product relaunched in 2011. The company has nine full-time employees and 25 music experts.

Mr. Roman, who grew up in Queens, is trying to keep the company lean by working out of the affordable Long Island City. "Not yet a lot of startups out here," he said, although there are lots of small, new companies. "It's not quite Dumbo yet." Before they raised funding, the company was "five guys living in a house on Hicksville, Long Island," he said. And to think, now they've got their own concierge.

Songza Playlists

As a child, Betabeat used to lovingly curate the A and B sides of a 60 minutes cassette tape for each of our gift-giving relatives on Christmas. Since then, the mix tape has evolved into an element of the socially networked cloud, where we drag and drop mixes for friends on Spotify with a single click.

But there are plenty of occasions when Betabeat is pressed for time and hoping to find the suite of songs that will add just the right feeling to the gathering. So we were intrigued by Songza, a Long Island City startup which opens to the public tonight with a mobile app, web site, and the promise of better playlist discovery and development.

Songza doesn't ask users to start with their own collection. "You don't upload, front load, or side load your own tracks," says Songza co-founder and CEO Elias Roman. "We have fourteen million tracks in our collection, so we are a lot closer to Spotify than Pandora."

Users can search for playlists by artist, genre, mood or even event. Typing in BBQ, for example, pulls up a dozen playlists geared towards country BBQ, reggae sunshine or classic rock-rager.

The real challenge for Songza will be differentiating itself from larger, better-funded streaming services like Spotify. "You can't whip up an emergency Christmas mix in fifteen seconds on Spotify," says Roman. But typing "Christmas mix" into Spotify does pull up Spanish X-mas, Rocking Christmas Times and many others.

The Songza team just closed a seven figure round of financing led by Deep Fork Capital, has more than 100,000 users from their private beta and already have a successful music service under their belt, having built the indie music market Amie Street while still at Brown.

There are already 75,000 playlists created by people on Songza, so hopefully the human touch will be what separates them from the pack.