In the end, all anyone wanted to talk about was the legos. After 10 startups had demonstrated their projects at last night’s New York Tech Meetup, and after a bit of grumbling that the price of admission no longer included a free drink at the after party, meeting-goers and presenters alike turned their attention to the product that had lit up the evening. Literally.

“I call them legos on steroids,” said Adrian Sanders, who’d demonstrated his iPhone storytelling app, Backspac.es earlier in the evening.

They weren’t legos, they were littleBits, electronic modules that snap together with magnets. At the most basic level, the two inch-long rectangles click together to form a circuit, giving dabblers a simple way to light a bulb or honk a horn at the press of a button. But littleBits can do more than the most basic electronics class exercises. More advanced functions make use of sound receptors and revolving parts. The startup’s demonstration included a model that illuminated the image of a horse around its base when the audience clapped—a functionality the audience used to delay the Q&A with intermittent rounds of applause.

“The idea was to make it easier for developers and designers who don’t have the electrical engineering know-how a way to bring their ideas to life,” Jordi Borras, an industrial designer at the company, told us. “It turns out that everyone wants them for kids.”

We think we know what we’ll be buying our nieces and nephews for Christmas.

LittleBits wasn’t the only hardware project to earn raves. Tech manufacturer MPOWERD showed off the Luci, a low-cost collapsible lantern that presenter Jill Van Den Brule intended for countries where electricity isn’t a given, making third-world streets a little bit safer and easing dependence on kerosene lamps. It’s a noble project that could change the lives of the world’s poor. It’s also a cool enough gadget to serve as a low-cost conversation piece until the next hurricane hits New York.

In another Sandy-themed presentation. Mr. Sanders said Backspac.es, an iPhone app that lets users create stories in a vertical scroll of photos and text, had found use with volunteers who wanted to share their experiences helping out in the storm’s hardest hit areas. The startup takes its name from the empty space between photos, akin to the white space between comic book frames that illustrators have been using to create narrative tension for ages. “In comic books, they call that space the gutter,” Mr. Sanders told us during the after party. “But I was like, We’re not calling this 'Gutter.'”

Betterment, an online banking site, was also hit with meeting-goers. That might have been because founder and CEO Jon Stein played to the crowd: “We’ve done TechCrunch, we’ve done Finovate, all of that garbage,” he said at the start of his demo. “This is the big stage, we’re really proud to be here.”

Or maybe they were impressed with the way Betterment helps users manage their money. With a few clicks of the site’s dashboard, Mr. Stein showed how Betterment can help users hit saving goals, not simply tracking progress towards the amount needed for a down payment or luxury vacation, but automating the task of budgeting and transferring funds to meet those goals.

The company is a registered broker-dealer, Mr. Stein told us after his presentation, and hopes to compete with the Vanguards and Charles Schwaabs of the world. By the time we got home, we wondered why users would want to move money around their investment portfolio with the drag of a mouse—we should choose our advisers for their ability to manage our money, not the quality of their user interface, shouldn’t we? We’ll have to ask Mr. Stein about it another time.

Hakim El Hattab, lead interactive developer at Qwiki, showed off his side project rvl.io, a browser-based presentation platform that led one audience member to offer a Mr. El Hattab a job during the Q&A. “I’m not even sure he realizes how big it could be,” went the after-party chatter. “It could be a Prezi-killer.”

Less exciting, for us anyway, was Pling, a push-to-voice messaging app online that presenters Hashem Bajwa and Robert Spychala said would make it easier for companies to distribute voice messages across groups. Great—that much easier for our bosses to tell us to get our butts into work on the day after Christmas.

Maybe the most intriguing presentation was by the guys from Hacker Union, a “collective of builders working to sustain and grow a hacker culture” that grew out of the NYHacker listserve and was created by the team at HuffPost Labs. Co-founder Brandon Diamond drew laughs when he explained how the collective could help hackers new in town “meet bros” and “mack on ladies.”

What perked out ears up? When an audience member asked why the group had chosen the word “union.” “We’re not ignorant of the implications,” answered Jon Gottfried, developer evangelist at Twilio and webmaster for Hacker Union. “But it's not our focus at the moment."

When we asked Mr. Gottfried about the potential for an International Brotherhood of Hackers later in the evening, he said it wasn't an unreasonable notion. "First we have to build a community."

Too cute. (Via: Littlebits.com)

Local maker-minded startup LittleBits just announced a $3.65 million Series A, led by True Ventures. Also participating were Khosla Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

Founder (and MIT Media Lab alum, and TED speaker) Ayah Bdeir told Betabeat that the round will help the company to--pardon the expression--kick it up a notch. "The first phase was really sort of a proof of concept," she said. The response did not disappoint: LittleBits sold better than expected, "so that we actually now know it's time to press the peddle."

The company describes itself as "an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnants for prototyping and play." And what does that mean, precisely? Think wired Erector Sets.

The namesake "little bits" are small modules that snap together to create larger projects, like this car that goes when hit with a light or this "fire-breathing" Komodo dragon. The projects do not require a PhD in electrical engineering and are simple enough that a kid can assemble one without driving herself (or her parents) to distraction.

And those kids are exactly where LittleBits sees its biggest opportunity. While "open source" and "electronic modules" might trigger visions of enthusiastic geeks, Ms. Bdeir said that 60 to 70 percent of their sales are individuals who are "outside the circle."  "They're not hobbyists. They're not geeks. They're not engineers," she told us. Hence she's looking to education and educational toys as their largest potential market, and she's already pushing hard on why LittleBits is better than whatever throwaway tchotchke becomes this year's must-have:

"The toy market is a very large market, but the toy market unfortunately has been really sort of dominated by companies that are more interested in selling plastic toys that break than things that are of value."

That's where the open-source aspect comes in. Ms. Bdeir explained the approach is rooted in a desire to "make the very individual bricks of electronics available, accessible and allow them to be creative tools," with the aim of creating a relationship to technology that's "very symbiotic and very creative."Considering it's practically impossible to so much as change a carburetor any more, that goal seems both noble and much easier said than done.

And then there's the matter of scaling. Asked about how the company's growth changes the open source element, Ms. Bdeir told us, "It changes in a good way." Without elaborating, however, she shifted gears into the challenges such an approach presents.

"When you say you're open source, the number of investors that are interested starts to shrink." But the VCs that ultimately signed on "got involved because they believe in the mission. It wasn't an afterthought," she added.

It sounds like the number of orders really did catch the team by surprise. Ms. Bdeir also emphasized that LittleBits is "ramping up our production to really meet demand, demand which we really didn't expect so fast." To that end, company is handing over production to supply chain management company PCH International, while the LittleBits team will be focus on product design, marketing, and so forth.

With a Series A in the bank, Ms. Bdeir told us, the company can begin building out its product line, with new modules and kits already in the works. LittleBits will also be expanding its "really small" team of eight people with hires in education, sales and distribution, engineering--"really every facet," Ms. Bdeir said.