Ed Tech Start Ups Heating Up In New York

New York is a great city for start ups. There are a lot of hot marketing, web based and of course social discovery start ups out there. There are also a lot of culture start ups flourishing among the skyscraper of the concrete jungle where dreams are made of. Another important start up category is heating up in New York now as well. That category is Ed Tech, or Education Tech.

Douglas Crets, who works for Microsoft as the Developer Evangelist for the Bizspark program, founded the program, and then teamed up with Saad Alam CEO of citlighter, an online academic research tool, and came up with a new strategy to launch similar Ed Tech programs in Silicon Valley, L.A., Nairobi, Kenya and other countries.

More after the break
Last month they held their first meeting at Blueprint Health, a Manhattan startup accelerator. To their delight over 200 Ed Tech entrepreneurs, educators and community leaders showed up. 80% of the meet up was other Ed Tech entrepreneurs while the rest of the mix included educators, community leaders and even angels.

Crets and Alam organized the event with four Ed Tech pitches and then networking. They also had educational thought leaders like Yen Yen Woo professor of Education at Long Island University, and John Katzman the founder of the Princeton review and others make opening remarks.

The four start ups that pitched were:

• Edmond Kemokai, Appynote
• Zoli Honig, Chalkable
• Alec Turnbull and Steve Silvius, Three Ring
• Raluca Sirbu, MSPublishing House, showcasing Math Workbooks app

It was a successful night all around. In fact one entrepreneur reported to Crets that he may have found his angel at the event. The next event will be April 30th and if you’re a Tech Ed entrepreneur in New York you can go here to register.

Information from Startup America was used in this report. Startup America is a valuable resource to any entrepreneur at any stage in the start up process, and the best part is joining is free. Find out more about Startup America here.