Google to Launch Another Cuecat

I was at Google's NYC HQ last night for an interesting Meetup with The Advertising Club of New York. Google's speakers included Tim Castelli, New York Sales Director; Long Ellis, Head of Sales, Television; Joseph Anastasi, Team Manager, Audio East; Sarah Carberry, Team Manager, Consumer Packaged Goods; Patrick Grandinetti, Senior Agency Lead, East Region; and Tiffany Shen Miller, Account Executive, Print Ads.

Anyway, the talked-about news of the night happened when Tiffany alluded to Google placing 'bar codes' of a sort in print ads in hopes that people would take a picture of them with their software enabled cell phones and be redirected to a website. The idea is that these bar codes would make it easier for consumers to get more information and easier for marketers to track the effectiveness of their print ads.

All I could think about was the CueCat. I had one of these things plugged into my computer for ages. I had the PS/2 version, not even USB. Anyway, at first I thought it was pretty cool that I could scan barcodes in my latest issue of Wired, but it quickly wore off. Google's taking a little bit of a different approach, using cell phones, but man, they have a long, long way to go with this one.

Good luck Tiffany.

How Do You Choose a Meetup Group?

There are a lot of Meetup groups in New York City. 2,028 "within 5 miles of New York" to be exact (there are a total of 36,967 worldwide). I'm a member of:

• Mashable Meetups
• New York Online Advertising and Marketing Group
• New York Web 2.0 Social Networking Tech Meetup
• NY P2P 2.0 Meetup Group
• NY Tech Meetup
• NY Video 2.0
• The Advertising Club of NY Meetup
• The Bay Ridge Friends Meetup Group

I was looking through the list of other Meetups that I might be interested in and it was, frankly, overwhelming. You can narrow the list down by geography (which makes sense because these are in-person Meetups) and then by topic. I navigated to: USA>New York>New York>Work & Career and was presented with a massive list of titles.

I was a little lost and, in the end, didn't end up joining any other Meetups. It got me thinking... It would be very cool if you could tell Meetup where your LinkedIn or Facebook profile lives and have it automatically scan for topics that you're interested in. Then, it would return a list of contextually relevant Meetup groups. It could even take a look at your friend's profiles to find out what types of people you tend to associate yourself with.

I'd also like to see further integration with photo/video sharing sites. Why should I go to CenterNetworks (not to knock Allen) to see a recap of the last NY Tech Meetup? I'd like to see it on the actual Meetup page.

I won't even begin on the improvements that could be made to the e-mail discussions.

I've got lots of ideas for you, Meetup. *wink**wink*