10 people we met at Digital Dumbo’s Google Local Experts event

You could have come to sign up to be a Google Local expert, as part of the tech giant’s new initiative, but you also could have just come for the party.

The Dumbo Loft was hopping Thursday night with more than 300 registered for the latest event from Digital Dumbo, said Emily Cavalier, a cofounder of the local Internet culture social group.

The full title for the night was “Experience Your City: Google Local New York,” though you could have missed that by the music and the crowd of mostly 20 and 30-somethings. The new Google blitz is one for curated local reviewers in an attempt to leapfrog Yelp and Foursquare.

You can sign up to be a Local Expert here. Below, we show you some of the event attendees we spoke to.

Ema Takeda and Anastasia Khizenko were the two already inducted Google City Experts who we met. They told us that they are especially good at covering night life. Khizenko explained to us the difference between a bar (beers) and a lounge (cocktails). We thought it had something to do with singers.

Shashank Samala is developing a startup tentatively called Open Space. It’s for open source Arduino developers to share project ideas, specs and also to make it easy to order all the parts needed for an invention all at once. He is exploring how to share info about open source projects in a standardized way.

Robert Shields is a Branch Manager at recruiting agency Robert Half downtown. He brought his two brothers with him, Daniel and Anthony, all from Staten Island. Anthony works at PNC Mortgage and we were interested to learn that Daniel works for a Coney Island based ecommerce site for cameras and camera equipment, 1StopCamera.

Tech is all over the borough.

Felicitas Hackmann works in communications at the German startup Stuffle. She’s on a worldwide tour right now, stopping for a few days in New York before heading off to other parts of the world next. She let us have a look at her company’s app. It has a Pinterest quality, but it’s all about selling your junk. Not as an auction, though. You post a price and if someone is game, then the deal is done.

Victoria Freeman is a client specialist at eChalk, in Manhattan, an edtech platform that helps students, parents and teachers communicate. This reporter often asks people what their “claim to fame” is. When we asked it to Freeman she said, “Well, I’m not sure my work and my claim to fame are the same thing.”

So we asked her what he claim to fame would be, and she said, “Well, I have a lot of hair. It can do about anything hair can do.”

FTW.

Ryan Matta told us the story of emerging from the tough life of caring for luxury vacation homes on site to teaching himself 3D design and starting a whole new career trajectory. He’s now working in motion graphics design at CBS, but he also has a personal project that’s circulating for possible publication now. He began to put together a crowdfunding campaign for it, but then some real players in publishing began to show interest, he said, so, for now, the campaign is on hold.

John Coghlan of the DUMBO Startup Lab introduced us to a few different people he knew at the event, including Daniella Romano, shown here. Romano is the VP for Exhibits and Programs at Bldg 92 in the Navy Yard. 

Technically Brooklyn will be holding a still un-announced event at Bldg 92 on Jan. 28th.

The event also included a caricaturist, a jobs board, a photo station and lots of cannoli.