Representatives from Shindig, Skillcrush and Appguppy answer questions about their products.

Crowded into NYU’s Skirball center, the New York tech world got one step closer to developing Skynet Tuesday night at the monthly New York Tech Meetup, just one day after NYTM reached the 25,000 member mark.

“What I fell in love with was the community. I had not really had any tech in my background at all, and yet felt totally at home here,” gushed Jessica Lawrence, the managing director of NYTM, as she announced their membership accomplishments to cheers from the boisterous crowd.

Perhaps of more relevance to the future of our society—Jonathan Gottfried, a developer evangelist at Twilio, did a live demonstration of the TwilioBot 3000, a possible predecessor of assassin cyborgs. Mr. Gottfried was able to control the TwilioBot with his phone, sending it commands by typing numbers on his keypad … until he accidentally hung up on the TwilioBot.

But the robot didn’t drive off the stage, and Mr. Gottfried was able to answer a few questions about the bot, including a dreaded revenue inquiry. “I feel like I won’t need venture capital once my robot minions have taken over the world,” he responded, eliciting laughter from the tech savvy audience.

Vook and Appguppy Mobile also demoed during the evening, two platforms that allow you to respectively create your own ebook or your own mobile app in a matter of minutes.

Appguppy, founded by Anu Nadkarni, Raj Dandage and Ash Nadkarni, lets you make an app about your favorite topic: yourself! The service lets you integrate your personal webpage and social media presence--say tweets about a concert date if you're a singer. Watch out Apple, because Appguppy bypasses app stores and allows users to sell their all-about-me app to iPhone and Android-using friends directly through Facebook and Twitter. “Now your friends can be obsessed with you on your phones,” Ms. Nadkarni said.

In the same DIY spirit, Vook simplifies the process of designing and marketing an eBook, a process that Matthew Cavnar, the vice president of business development for Vook, insisted was unnecessarily painful.  Using the platform, you can quickly move and resize images (something that could usually take days according to Mr. Cavnar) and even insert those big, swirly letters that start chapters in all the important books. Once completed, users can sell their eBooks through iBook, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Vook’s website, and violá, you have self-published your no doubt fascinating memoir.  (Warning: don't bother trying to pretend you wrote The Bell Jar; Vook does have a quick screening process for the eBooks.)

Other notable presenters included Dashlane, Consmr and Instinct. Dashlane makes it much easier to spend your entire trust fund on Amazon by saving website passwords, emails, address and credit card information in a central location. So, instead of having to spend 15 minutes filling in the same information at every online checkout, the platform will automatically input your card number and billing information into online forms. For all you conspiracy theorists, the saved information is encrypted and can only be unencrypted with a special master password, a feature that pleased the many perpetually paranoid NYTM attendees. Dashlane does not keep any database of these passwords, only the users know them, so even if authorities subpoena the company, they would only have access to encrypted data. Dashlane: 1, Evil Government Masterminds: 0.

Consmr, which actually previously demoed at the NYTM about a year and a half ago as a website, is a smartphone app that also simplifies shopping, though in actual stores, by allowing users to scan barcodes and then see reviews of the product and alternative suggestions. Users can also look up top-rated products in certain fields, such as hair products for curly-hair.

Though Ryan Charles, the CEO of Consmr, struggled a bit with scanning the barcode on a box of Triscuits, the app does feature over 100,000 reviews. The platform will also soon be including nutrition information about food products. To underscore the brilliance of the design, Mr. Charles showed the crowd the page for a box of Trojan condoms. The top review: “Well, she didn’t get pregnant.”

Instinct, a real-life Guitar Hero-type app that teaches you to play the instrument, was a crowd favorite. Co-founder Brian Stoner practiced playing riffs as the audience clapped along. The website uses the computer’s microphone to detect the notes being played and indicate to the user whether they are hitting the correct notes. At the end of the lesson, users can show off their skills to a panel of three avatar judges. Mr. Stoner received a six, nine and seven from the judges for his lovely performance.

Shindig, a Skype-like platform that allows for more users and more complex interactions, Skillcrush, a tech education blog for anyone who has ever wondered what the hell an API or python is, Social Bycicles, which is pretty much a bicycle with a computer in it and Jirafe, a marketing tool, also demoed during the evening.

Picadilly CIrcus, London, (Source: Paul Atherton via Wikipedia)

LAWGIC. Today 2tor is partnering with Washington University to put their Master of Laws degree online. 2tor's previous partnerships with USC, UNC and Georgetown have put high-end higher education online with programs in social work, business and nursing. The Washington University partnership is specifically aimed at removing a hurdle for international students who want to study U.S. law. Now they can do it from abroad but still have access to the faculty they would be working with if they were physically in St. Lous.

BE MOBILE. Last week New York City based bMobilized locked down $1.5 million in series A funding from European VC firms Alliance Venture and Investinor. The mobile technology company uses cloud technology to convert websites from one of seven languages to HTML5 for a better mobile browsing experience.

RABBIT EARS. Yesterday NimbleTV named Lou Borrelli as their CMO. Mr. Borrelli joined the cloud-based television subscription service last year as an advisor and investor. His resume includes senior positions at NEP Broadcasting and AOL.

WORKSITE. Yesterday, Scrollkit, the intuitive site building platform, unrolled two big new features. Now users can draw on their websites and buy a domain that automatically propagates. Build entire websites at the speed of Twitter.

COMMUNITY. New Work City just revamped their community membership policy. Now, for $30 a month, members receive one free day pass, discounts on other days and events and access to happy hours, a startup support group, meetups and show and tells.

URBAN EXPLORATION. NYC BigApps winner MyCityWay has gone transatlantic. The urban concierge app is in London just ahead of the Olympics with all the features New Yorkers already enjoy. Need to find Tea? Crumpets? Petrol? They've got you covered.

PUNCH THE CLOCK. Hourly, a matching service for workers and employers looking for flexible work, just relaunched with a slew of new features including enhanced search, a premium membership offering and civic and trade group associations.

DIY. In response to customer feedback, Vook, the e-book creation, publishing and distribution platform, is making their product financially feasible for small players. The new Vook Starter Account is available for $9.99 a month and includes 100 MBs of storage and all the other features that make Vook so attractive, including automatic distribution to the Amazon and Barnes & Noble and royalty collection. Another victory for independent and individual publishers!

INTERNET INVASION. In celebration of Internet Week, WalkaboutNYC is pulling back the covers on New York tech. For the third year, everybody is invited to check out the offices of big names like 10gen, Behance, Art.sy, Codecademy, Gilt Groupe, Jetsetter, eBay, Knewton, Lot18, Spotify, Tumblr—there's a lot, okay? The citywide event is completely free thanks to time tracking company Harvest, and participants can tailor their experience with tours, founder talks and of course, demos.

NERD PROM. The 2012 Webutante Ball is a week from tomorrow where founders, investors and other big names in tech get together to drink dance and crown the king and queen of the Internet. "Series B" tickets are still available for $60 but if you wait for those to sell out the "IPO" ticket round bumps the cost up to $70. All this is happening on May 16 at Marquee, 289 10th Ave.

Mr. Cavnar (linkedin.com)

Hate to break it to you paper purists, but it looks like creating and publishing e-books just got a whole lot easier with Vook's new visual editor. Today, the e-book publisher launched a new platform that allows you to create, edit and publish your e-books across multiple devices, no code knowhow required.

Last month we reported that Vook hunkered down for three months with 500 engineers beta testers, transitioning their company from an e-book distributor to an all-in-one e-book publishing platform. Today's launch is the first official product to come from that pivot.

"Vook is a digital publishing house in a box," Vook's VP of business development Matt Cavnar told Betabeat via phone. "It's like a plugin for your business that automatically turns it into Sixth Avenue. Vook allows you to create an e-book and then style it with great granular precision, adjusting style templates, margins, dropcaps and headings. It gives you this extreme control over the content that no one else is giving you."

The platform also includes drag-and-drop multimedia placement, and an auto-distribute feature, which lets you send out your e-books to Barnes and Noble, iBook and Amazon with the click of a button, he said.

Mr. Cavnar believes that now that e-book creation is so easy, great publishers are going to become e-book publishers within the next six to eight months. "I think a lot of media companies are going to turn into e-book organizations, and Vook makes it easy to realize that vision. You're gonna see places like the New York Observer publishing e-books. You had the original 'Sex and the City' column, right? There's no reason to not start publishing some of this stuff in e-book form," he said. (We'll be sure to bring that up at the next editorial meeting.)

In case you're aching to create an e-book of your own, it's worth noting that Vook isn't just available to companies--individuals can also sign up to create and distribute e-books. This seems exciting at first, until you realize how many terrible publications are about to hit the Kindle store.

Vook's cost may also be an issue for e-book authors. Before you start digging through old blog posts to cobble together The Next Great American E-Book, you might want to check out pricing. A Vook membership for one user runs $79/month, or $849/year, which is a little hefty. "An interesting concept, but frankly, far too expensive for the average author to use on their own," noted one Publisher's Weekly commenter.

Mr. Cavnar said Vook learned firsthand the trials and tribulations associated with e-book creation. "We spent two and a half years publishing e-books. We made over 800 titles and that was an incredibly painful process. It was just difficult to make multimedia enhanced e-books, so we weaponized our suffering into this platform and put it at your disposal so you don't have to go through the hell we went through," he laughed. As someone who consistently fights with HTML snippets just to resize an image or start a new text line, we find this act incredibly noble.

"Why suffer if we can't share any enlightenment?" he added.

Every startup's gotta start somewhere (National Archief | flickr.com)

KNOWLEDGE. Max Stoller, the developer of Don't Eat At, an app that uses city data to warn Foursquare users when they've checked into a restaurant that's run afoul of city health inspectors, has found another cool way to use that same data set. Mr. Stoller and fellow crafty hacker Tal Safran created freshplac.es, a bi-weekly email of new drinking and dining sports near you. "We found that by analyzing the restaurant inspections data set for new records, we can identify brand new bars/restaurants, often before news publications get to them." (Techies! Stop scooping us newsies!) Sign up but please, don't forget about us!

EBOOK BINDING. Vook, the self publishing ebook tool from serial entrepreneur Brad Inman, just spent the past three months with 500 beta testers as they completely reengineered their platform. They've eliminated 200 bugs and added 31 brand new features including easier file conversion, and real time title rendering and even easier electronic distribution to Barnes & Noble and Amazon with the push of a button.

MIC CHECK. The winner of  last week's Investor's Feedback forum were Nihal Parthasarathi for CourseHorse, an online app that helps users find classes that interest them in New York City. The two other winners were Rob Caucci for SpaceSplitter, an online tool designed to make living with roommates less stressful and Julian Barnes of Body Local, the one-stop shop for classes, news, advice, a local directory and marketplace for everything to do with keeping fit. The next Investor Feedback Forum is March 8.

TRISTE NOTICIA. The guy behind the group emailing service Fiesta have announced the end of the party. In a blog post, cofounder Mike Dirolf said after thirteen months he's "lost the enthusiasm that is necessary to continue to work tirelessly on solving the problem" of group communication online. The website will remain active until March 1 so current users can login to collect their information. After that, the servers will be shutdown, emails will no longer be receivable and all personal data will be deleted.

MAKE FRIENDS. Tonight the NY Enterprise Technology Meetup will feature demos from Revolution Analytics, Thrupoint, Infragistics, and CB Insights. The meetup runs from 7-9. RSVP and pay $5 if you want to know where.

DESAYUNO. Hubitat wants to show you the benefits of reinventing the wheel over breakfast this Thursday at their HQ. RSVP here for $15 or pay $20 when you arrive.

WORK AND PLAY. Projective Space, the "community-centered coworking space for tech startups and entrepreneurs" is kicking off the opening of their brand new space by partnering with fundraising platform IndieGoGo for a "HUGE DANCE PARTY!" The bash is Thursday night at the new PS space at 72 Allen St. in the Lower East Side. RSVP and say hello to Reyka and Sailor Jerry for us.

ADOPT EARLY. Check out the new "powerful publishing optimization technology" from Betaworks.

INNOVATE.  Snap Interactive needs a Javascript expert.
Conductor is looking for a technical recruiter
HealthPrize wants a new project manager
Foursquare, HealthPrize, Conductor and Rent the Runway are looking for interns.