LI tech gurus starting gift website

At 12:01 a.m. today, Tyler Roye's new business was to be born -- an online social gift-giving service aimed at making it easier to celebrate retirements, birthdays or other occasions.

Roye also hopes it will provide employment to more tech types on Long Island while expanding the region's Internet industry.

GroupGifting.com is coming alive online only months after Roye -- one of Long Island's better-known tech gurus -- and his partners, brothers Eric and Mark Manno and David Levinsky, began planning the venture.

Roye and the others were all involved in starting Invision.com Inc., a Web application developer in Commack that was one of the few local Internet companies that survived the dot-com bust. Roye sold Invision to Waltham, Mass.-based mindSHIFT in 2007 for an undisclosed sum.

"We're ready to get going here," Roye said. "We had a prior company. We had the funds to get this off the ground."

The site simplifies the process of organizing a gift from a group of people, thus the name GroupGifting.

It allows many people to chip in to purchase an eGift Card, which is delivered to a recipient via email.

Gift-givers can use their credit cards or PayPal. Users can sign in with their Facebook accounts. The company is also planning a mobile app.

Already, the service has signed up 200 stores and restaurants, including Sports Authority, Lowe's and JCPenney, from which users can purchase gift cards.

Roye said GroupGifting has taken space in two places: at the Center of Excellence in Wireless & Information Technology at Stony Brook University, and at a building in Hauppauge that will host other tech companies as well as LISTnet, a technology organization.

GroupGifting has hired three programmers, and now has a staff of seven, including Roye and his partners. "We're going to make some more hires over the next few months," Roye said. "But it's going to depend on our growth curve. If it's as we hope, we'll hire more."