7 people who celebrated Digital DUMBO’s fifth anniversary

Just shy of 100 events successfully completed, Digital DUMBO marked its fifth anniversary of founding with dd:Social at the DUMBO Loft, Thursday night. Andrew Zarick, founder of the digital events community, gave a brief presentation, thanking the community for five strong years and cited some statistics marking its progress. Zarick said they had 16,000 members and Thursday’s dd:Social was their 93rd event.

He told the gathered crowd that they had two new initiatives to look forward to on top of their existing ones in the coming year:

• dd:Live — an effort to bring more of its events out to people who can’t attend by way of video content.
• dd:Topguns — giving the best companies a chance to present their culture and their work to the strongest talent.

As always, lots of interesting people came out to the event. Here are a few people we met:

Adam Lapalio and Stacy Bullard. The two came to New York in August from Chicago (tho Bullard grew up in Philadelphia). Lapalio is a cinematographer who is freelancing right now and Bullard is an Education Development Engineer at Reading Partners. Lapalio told us that he has strong experience in documentary work. They are living in Manhattan.

Ellen Kim, Williamsburg, and Alanna Gerver, Prospect Heights, work on the office side of Leaf Medical, a new across the board medical practice that features a physician, internist and gynecologist in the same office, with more services to come. The company just opened in Dumbo and Kim was their first hire.

A friend of Claudia Cukrov introduced her to us, and it was one of the strangest intros we have ever experienced: a plastic banana that could be used as telephone appeared. You had to have been there. Talking to Cukrov is like talking to an issue of the long lost Spy Magazine, only sped up. She’s a strategist at Carrot Creative (we confirmed she had a hand in the redneck recliner), Australian and she only really likes Twitter, of the social networks. “Anyone can talk to you. You can talk to anyone,” she says. Cukrov has conversed with Roseanne Barr and Gary Busey via TWTR.

This one is cheating a little because we have met brand strategist Kat O’Leary before. She was at the dd:Outpost where Kelly Jones of Microsoft spoke about Intelligently On devices. She introduced us to Amanda DeMeester, a content manager.