In New York City this week, Virginia Heffernan, author of The Medium, a weekly column about digital culture for the New York times Magazine and a blog on The Times site about online video, moderated a New York Women in Film and Television panel called "The Future of Content Production: The BIG Mash-Up!" Virginia was joined on the panel by Christopher Barry -  Senior Vice President, Digital Media and Business strategy, Sundance Channel, Peter Kay - Managing Director, Product Development, MTV Music and LOGO, Steven Mendelson - Founder and CEO of BrandX Network and Paul Kontonis - CEO and Co-Founder of For Your Imagination. Viriginia did a great job moderating as the panelists tried to address all the current and future Web TV challenges for the interested audience. And then...a DadLabs video shows up on Virginia's blog alongside a Sundance Channel "Green Porno" video by Isabella Rossellini. Thanks Virginia!

NY-based GoLark launched their events listing service last December. Most have called it a "Digg for events" based on the voting system that GoLark utilizes. The site utilizes an IP lookup and offers you location based events on the initial load. You can select any location you are interested in as well. Currently NYC has the largest number of listed events in the GoLark system.

To learn more about GoLark, I spoke with CEO Harlan Stern (no relation). Harlan describes GoLark as, "a really simple events sharing service." Harlan is most excited about their natural language processor for entering events into the system. This means when you enter an event you can type something like, "tuesday at 8pm" or "every monday at 2am". This can help when attemping to create complex events.

There are tons of events sites online and GoLark has no easy task. They will fight with some of the largest players in the game when it comes to event planning. GoLark seems to focus on fun and entertainment, for example they have the free coffee events listed at Dunkin Donuts and a good number of concerts as well.

The GoLark team is currently made up of three close friends. They have taken bootstrapping to a whole new level. They have rented a house on the beach in New Jersey during the winter to keep costs as low as possible.

Harlan tells me that they most likely won't add an events crawler to index other event planning services including Upcoming and Meetup. My concern with not crawling the other services is that it will be hard to ever convince site visitors that GoLark will have all of the events in their area.

We spoke briefly about their business model and Harlan noted that it will be a combination of ads and a variety of data aggregation offerings.

This morning I headed down to DUMBO (a neighborhood in Brooklyn) to check out the new Drop.io office. It's a great loft-style space that looks like the team can easily expand past their current headcount.

CN was the first media outlet to cover Drop.io on their alpha launch last November. Drop.io is a private, discreet file sharing service. This means you can share files with only the people you want. The most simple example is a designer who wants to show his or her sketches to their client without putting them on a public file server. Drop.io handles nearly all media types and offers a variety of methods to view the files including rss, mobile and a new embed option for videos.

Drop.io uses a variety of Amazon tools on the backend and in the interview below they note that Drop.io users have already stored several terabytes of data. What makes this even more significant is that Drop.io expires data -- so the reported figures are "active" stats.

One of the issues Drop.io faces is gaining brand awareness. Drop.io may have trouble getting brand recognition becuase its content is all private unlike other file sharing services which promote themselves as people share the content stored on the service.

Darshan and Sam have provided CN with ten free premium upgrade codes. Leave your information in the comments (do not leave your email in the comment, just in the email field) and I will send you an upgrade code.

Check out my interview below with co-founders Darshan Somashekar and Sam Lessin.

The NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring Student Show was great yesterday. The student projects were all very impressive, and this was one of the best shows in recent years.

The main theme this year was physical objects connected, networked, interacting with users and software. Waves of Leaves was one of my favorites for combining art esthetics with interaction:

Loyalty, WiiDraw, Funji, Blogicks, Moving Parts were all project combining physical setups with software and very impressive. Another interesting project:

There were also some very interesting software projects, for example Virtual Curator, imightlikeu, HanaHana, PostFort, Claymation for Curriculum (watch a claymation movie made by 9-year olds!). ITP is definitely feeding the New York technology companies with great talent. The projects were so good that later in the day, when I made it to the NY Tech Meetup, I felt like it was the continuation of the same show

NY-based ZocDoc presented at last night's NY Tech Meetup. ZocDoc is a tool to help you find doctors and dentists and instantly make appointments with them. The ZocDoc founders showed up wearing scrubs though Cyrus looked more like a criminal in jail with his bright orange outfit. You can think of ZocDoc as OpenTable combined with Yelp but on the medical side.

Each listed provider displays their current open appointments along with their education and experience. After you visit with the provider, ZocDoc sends you a survey and the results are displayed on the provider's page. Currently ZocDoc is available in NYC and offers both dentists and primary care doctor information. Cyrus explained that the real power of the ZocDoc system is in the ability to find a practitioner who serves your insurance provider.

There is no charge to book an appointment using ZocDoc and ZocDoc currently does not charge any fees to the primary care doctors in their system. They noted that PCPs generate less revenue than specialists.

ZocDoc is another one of those unsexy apps -- there's no facebook poke functionality -- but it's a very useful service and could change the way appointments are booked with medical care nationwide. Currently they are looking to expand in 2009 either in Washington or San Francisco - number of votes will determine where they expand next.

NY-based Magnify.net is launching a new tool today named Magnify Publisher. It's an add-on for blogging platforms -- the first installations are available for Wordpress and Movable Type.

Magnify Publisher offers a variety of video hosts to search from and you can filter to specific providers. Image search currently works with Flickr and more image providers are coming soon. There's also the ability to upload a video (it's stored on Magnify's servers) or record a video directly using a webcam.

I spoke with Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum who suggested that Magnify Publisher will allow bloggers to add more multimedia content to their posts. As we walked through the demo, it's clear that if you are looking for images or videos to add to a post, Magnify Publisher makes it very easy -- much easier than searching on a service, copying the embed or saving out the image and uploading or embedding. Rosenbaum also notes that by using the tool, it can help to add more video content to a site on a regular basis.

On a side note, Rosenbaum is very passionate about the NY tech community and believes we will see big growth this year.

Magnify.net currently hosts more than 36,000 video channels and launched their 3.0 version in March 2008.

Summize presented a demo of their conversational search engine last night at the NY Tech Meetup. They also announced the launch of local search. The local search allows you to select a location (i.e. New York, Berlin, etc.) and a distance (i.e. 10 miles) and Summize will present only the conversations related to your search in that location.

The conversational search works with Twitter and can also provide an on-the-fly translation service so you can check out the latest conversations in other countries (like the China earthquake).

One note, the majority of conversations between friends still occurs on private services including AIM, Google Chat, Skype, etc. These services are not indexed by Summize.

Lastly, Summize offers an API which many of the most popular Twitter applications are using.

NY-based GoMobo recently signed a test partnership with the WaWa chain of convenience stores. WaWa is similar to BP, QT and 7-11. We've written about GoMobo before including naming them as one of three products that will change 2008. The GoMobo-WaWa test has taken place in the Pennsylvania cities of Malvern, Media and Philadelphia and they plan to expand the test to four additional cities in Pennsylvania shortly. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but GoMobo did share that their typical fee is 10% of all orders.

Howard Stoeckel, WaWa's CEO, said testing online and text ordering is part of an initiative to increase the frequency with which customers buy deli foods and the amount they spend while doing so. The effort also entails a “Dinner Deals” promotion that discounts featured foods, he indicated.

So the next time you want a slushy or a large pop, you might just try ordering on your mobile on your way there. It will be interesting to see how this affects sales. I find in the 7-11, I always pick up something extra as I wander the store - will these impulse purchases be eliminated if the customer orders their hot dog and coke before they get to the store and it's waiting near the register for them?

Our monthly Web2NewYork networking party at Gallery Bar tonight has six startups presenting, including the unveiling of mobile application VIPTXT.

PodGlo and Sunshine Suites were previously featured in video interviews. The complete line-up is as follows:

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Arriving this week to the web will be an exclusive mini-series, “A Day with the Hiltons,” starring Kathy Hilton and her two daughters, Paris and Nicky. Produced by New York online media company For Your Imagination and distributed exclusively by TV Guide Broadband, the series will document the winners of the “Kathy Hilton - My Secret” Mother’s Day contest, in which a lucky mother and daughter duo receive an expense-paid trip to Los Angeles to spend the day with the Hiltons. The series follows Kathy, Paris and Nicky, as they talk about beauty, family and much more while they visit a salon, attend an intimate brunch and spend the afternoon shopping.

TV Guide Broadband will release “A Day with the Hiltons” in six daily installments starting on May 14, 2008. TV Guide Broadband is an online video service provided by TV Guide Network which delivers short-form entertainment programming on Hulu, YouTube, Veoh and other TV Guide Broadband affiliates. In March 2008, TV Guide Broadband delivered 8.7 million plays across all of its distribution partners.

“Kathy Hilton and her daughters are committed to fashion, luxury and the finer things that life has to offer, and this mini web series will highlight the family interests and their strong family bonds,” said Paul Kontonis, CEO of For Your Imagination. “We’re looking forward to working with TV Guide Broadband as they are the ideal partner to help distribute these videos.”

“Our audience craves celebrity coverage and Hollywood-driven video content, so an exclusive web series starring Kathy, Paris and Nicky Hilton is the perfect fit for us,” said Dmitri Ponomarev, vice president of TV Guide Broadband.

OmniReliant Holdings, Inc. launched the Kathy Hilton - My Secret fragrance in January 2008 with much fanfare and acclaim. Paul W. Morrison, CEO of OmniReliant Holdings, Inc. says, “This is a unique fragrance and event as no other mother has launched a perfume the same year as her daughter, regardless of celebrity status. It is truly a rare and special happening in the fragrance and celebrity market.”