NY-based WikiAnswers is reporting this evening that they have passed the one millionth question. For those of you who keep score, the question was, "Are there readily available substitutes for gold in industrial applications?" Today's interesting question is, "Why is pumpkin pie served on Thanksgiving and not on Halloween?" I can only guess it's because Halloween was created way before there was an America :)

WikiAnswers unique monthly visitor count in the U.S. has grown 317%, to over four million reports Comscore. This ranks WikiAnswers as the second-fastest growing domain of the top 1,500. Community Director Jay Bailey noted that yesterday, registered users grew by 1,867, a new daily record.

The best part about WikiAnswers is how smart of a marketing idea it is. People love to share bits of knowledge they have so this site should continue to grow. Of couse, should they want to increase pageviews, just have the guides as more questions because you know someone will answer. Their most popular users (example user) seem to contribute a huge number of the questions to the site.

Hosted by Kory Klem, Revver Co-Manager of Creator Development and Acquisitions, this is the first Revver Creators meetup in New York City and it will be held at the For Your Imagination studio on Thursday, November 1st, starting at 6:30pm. Revver creator videos will be screened along with a "News for Blondes" shoot of future episode called "Bonnie for President" set up in a faux-election environment. Should be a blast! Click here to RSVP for this event.

Charlie O’Donnell has been taking an anti-stealth approach to his new startup Path101, where he’s blogging everything that’s going on with the company, from meeting agendas to funding strategies. His strategy sparked a great thread on the nextNY mailing list about the advantages of being anti-stealth versus being secret. I contributed to the thread, and I’m going to steal my email to be the bulk of this blog post, because I think it’s a great topic.

I’m going to start with Marc Andreesen’s premise that “The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit” where he defines product/market fit as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Marc points out that it doesn’t matter how great your operations are or how good your people are if there’s not a market. And if you tap into a previously unexploited market, you can have terrible operations and mediocre people, but if your product basically works, “customers are knocking down your door to get the product”. So how do you find that fit between your company’s capabilities and a good market?

One possibility is planning. This is the myth of the MBA, where the MBA analyzes the market, plans out the strategy with fancy frameworks like the 4 Cs or the 4 Ps, does revenue projections, and the plan is executed perfectly, leading to market success. Yeah, right. As military leaders have known for centuries, no plan survives first contact with the enemy (or the market in this case). But this myth of planning leads to the emphasis on secrecy - keeping your plans secret makes sense if you are sure that you know everything about what you’re doing, who your audience is, and what the market is.

But in the real world, you know none of those things with certainty, so it makes more sense to be anti-stealth. You need to test your ideas in real markets as soon as possible. That will tell you if there’s a demand for the product, and if your potential customers believe that you can deliver a product that meets their demand. Being anti-stealth will get more people giving you feedback on your product, and the changes necessary to meet market demand.

If the most important thing is to find a product/market fit, then companies have to quickly find that fit. Taking a cue from Beinhocker’s Origin of Wealth, evolution is a good model for finding a niche in the battleground of competing business models. Going into stealth mode with your business idea is like hiding in an area with no predators - like large mammals in prehistoric North America, you can be very successful in such an area until a real predator finds you and destroys you (as humans did to those mammals). Being anti-stealth means getting out there and taking on all competitors; if you survive, your company will be the stronger for it. You have to change and change and change again to adjust to the environment, and if you don’t do that, you’ll fail.

There’s also an element of rapid prototyping and experimentation here. Test early, test often. If you’re going to fail, it’s better to fail earlier when you haven’t spent as much money. This is certainly true in engineering and development, and I think it applies in this arena as well - you have to identify the assumptions that are critical to your company’s success and test whether they hold true. You can’t fail if you are keeping everything secret. That may be why some companies stay in stealth mode so long, but it’s pointless because the company would save time and money by failing sooner.

I think an anti-stealth strategy also has real benefits from a publicity standpoint. Unless your network is phenomenal to begin with, you’re not going to know everybody who might have something to contribute to your project. Being anti-stealth gets your name out there, and gives you the opportunity for people you don’t know to contact you and give you help you didn’t even know you needed.

If a company is going to be successful in the market, it will have to have capabilities that nobody else has. There has to be a fit between what its employees can deliver and what its customers want; otherwise, any other company in the space could swoop in and take those customers away. Keeping the company’s strategy under wraps only delays the inevitable if the company has no differentiation from its competitors. Like security through obscurity, you are probably doomed if you are depending on keeping something secret. In other words, secrecy is not a competitive advantage.

NY-based Glam Media, the women's publisher network has hired Scott Swanson as the GM and VP of the Glam Media Publisher Network. Glam has added some key executives in October including Joe Lagani, Vice President & General Manager of GlamLiving and John Trimble, EVP of Sales.

"Scott's background at Tribal Fusion, Flycast and other top internet networks makes him the ideal hire as we continue to build the most powerful media network of life and style sites on the Web," said Samir Arora, chairman and CEO, Glam Media. "Scott will speed the growth of Glam's Distributed Media platform for publishers--enabling advertisers to reach highly-targeted audiences and vertical channels."

The New York Times has an article today about NY-based real estate blog network Curbed and their new $1.5 million round of financing. Think weblogs, b5media, gawker but for real estate. They appear to serve approximately five regions currently and the money will be used to expand the network. Lockhart Steele, the network’s publisher is a former Gawker employees and Gawker was one of the investors.

Author Dan notes, "At greater potential risk are national-focused sites like Zillow.com and Realtor.com that depend on an active market of buyers and sellers to thrive. Nonetheless, Zillow, which estimates home values, last month obtained $30 million in its latest round of financing, bringing the total to $87 million for the site, which was started less than two years ago. And its traffic in the third quarter was 20 percent higher than in the period a year earlier, according to Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s vice president for marketing and chief financial officer."

The question is whether a real estate blog network competes with sites such as Zillow and NY-based StreetEasy. And will these application sites add user-generated content blogs and expand that way thereby moving into Curbed's territory. At this point I think there is plenty of room for both.

Also check out my interview with Jeremy Wright, CEO b5media, another blog network who raised a round of financing to expand.

Tonight, like most Monday evenings, I sat down to thumb though my weekly intake of New York Magazine.

There is always some sort of editorial piece about a quarter of the way into the issue.

This week they f*cked up in their reporting of the Web 2.0 big time. It really pisses me off to continually read all these doomsday reports about how the web is blowing up (for all the wrong reasons) and everyone is about to be screwed in the start-up market.

The web for sure is expanding at a lightning fast speed. Facebook is expanding by 250,000 new users each day! No wonder they recently received a valuation of $15B (albeit a very high valuation). But still, certain web properties are going to go for extravagant sums of cash. Everyone thought that $560M for Myspace was ridiculous, only to see Youtube purchased months later for $1.6B. These aren't old companies either. Facebook was valued by Yahoo at around $1B only a year ago, but Zuckerberg knew better. He knew his company was worth more and held out, because he could.

Reading the misquoting of Howard Lindzon (whom I work with through Biltmore Ventures) and Fred Wilson, whom we have done deals with (Wallstrip, AdaptiveBlue) provides me with a reality check. John Heilmann presents the New York tech scene as a sad backwater for start-up companies. The debate about Silicon Alley versus Silcon Valley has always been playful in certain aspects. However, we do not need a New York based report debasing a burgeoning moment in our tech history.

Heilemann failed to take note of Doublclick's recent buyout by Google for $3.1B. Did he fail to notice that they are headquartered out of New York? Its not just Palo Alto and Menlo Park that have multi billion dollar companies. Isn't a little company called Microsoft headquartered in ... Washington State, oh and lest we forget Big Blue our friendly upstate New York counterpart. Where were Google and Yahoo when IBM started?

More money may be pouring into the Valley, but that is not stopping the Valley from coming to the Big Apple. Google has approximately 560,000 feet of office space in NYC. At our rental rates that is a major investment, even for a company of their dearth.

Next time (and I expect more misinformed reporting soon) someone decides to deride the efforts of all the start-up companies, the entrepreneurs and investors who strive each day to make the New York tech scene vibrant and meaningful, I hope they call Scott Heiferman or participate in an online discussion on NextNY before they call a our existence inconsequential or dead.

Tonight I had the pleasure of attending the NY Feedback Forum. The idea is simple. Each month a company brings their product to the group and is seeking help with their app. From marketing to technical aspects to communication to business plans, no topic is out of bounds.

Right Media (part of Yahoo) hosted the forum and around 15 people attended. The group was quite diverse with a variety of developers, marketers, and entrepreneurs. I have decided not to link to any as many of the attendees are working on stealth startups.

The product tonight is called BricaBox. Again, I can't share many details but it's a new publishing platform and will be launching in a "user" mode in the next week or so. I hope to have a full review once they are ready. I think the founders Kyle Bragger and Nate Westheimer received a large quantity of good advice and the group raised some excellent thought-provoking points.

My only gripe is that they collected $5 from each attendee for 2 pizzas. If a startup receives easily thousands of dollars worth of free consulting, they should spring for the pies.

The NY Feedback Forum is a great idea and I look forward to participating in future events. 

Couple photos (click for larger version):

NY-based Worktopia has received $5 Million in Series A Funding Led by DFJ Gotham Ventures. Worktopia is an online meeting booking service for small businesses. Other participants included Milestone Venture Partners and High Peaks Venture Partners.

"We identified DFJ Gotham Ventures as an ideal lead investor because of their broad network, highly relevant operational experience and the enthusiasm of its principals," stated John Arenas, CEO and Founder of Worktopia. Arenas added, "We are pleased to have attracted such an experienced group of New York-based venture capitalists." Concurrent with the financing, Jed Katz of DFJ Gotham and Ethan Ayer of Milestone have joined the company's board of directors. High Peaks' Brad Svrluga will be a board observer.

This is the first service I have seen that actually can take you directly through the booking process. Usually these engines help you find locations and then a human helps make the reservation. In my test, I was able to book a meeting space at the Crowne Plaza in Times Square directly. Almost as easy as booking a hotel room. They have hotel, airport, and conference center locations.

"Worktopia has established itself as the clear leader in addressing this large and under-served market," said Jed Katz, Managing Director of DFJ Gotham Ventures.

For Your Imagination, a New York-based company that produces and markets original Internet TV shows, will be teaching Web-savvy dads a thing or two about fatherhood with "DadLabs.” The weekly, informational Web series created for dads by dads focuses on providing the tools they need to take active roles in their children’s lives. For Your Imagination has contracted with DadLabs, Inc. to develop, market and monetize its show, as well as build awareness with traditional broadcast media.

“When I see most of the parenting media available to fathers – even content that is aimed at active fatherhood – it seems to have been written by women,” said Paul Kontonis, CEO of For Your Imagination. “’DadLabs’ is a very refreshing show for me. When I watch it, I can see, ‘A guy would do that.’ And the audiences agree. They have already attracted a loyal audience of fathers that marketers want to tap into, which gives us leverage and immediate opportunities to generate revenue.”

For Your Imagination will be rebranding the show and launching its new Web site, complete with social media tools and user forums. To expand "DadLabs" viewership and monetize the show, For Your Imagination has partnered with Viddler, an online video network with its own advertising network, which will be used as the primary video player for all episodes on the DadLabs site. In exchange, For Your Imagination has secured a 50/50 advertising revenue share with an unprecedented guarantee for at least $10 per CPM, nearly three times more than is typical for such deals.

"While the growth of our show has been steady in the past three years, we were looking to be more strategic in our marketing approach," said Clay Nichols, Chief Creative Officer of DadLabs, Inc. "We have seen the terrific work For Your Imagination has done with 'Break a Leg' and 'The Patrice Oneal Show - Coming Soon!' and feel excited about their team expanding our reach."

DadLabs, Inc was formed in 2004 by Troy Lanier, Clay Nichols and Brad Powell. Their mission was to keep 21st century fathers informed on parenting issues through online video programming, which is often easily accessible to working men. DadLabs also sells merchandise, including a DVDs of various paternal How-To's.

Since its inception, "DadLabs" has released over 90 episodes. New episodes can now be seen on www.dadlabs.com as well as popular online video sites such as Blip.tv, YouTube, Revver and iTunes. Four new episodes, one per day, will continue Monday through Thursday of every week until December 15th, when the show will take a short hiatus from its regular programming.

  ABC’s “Brothers And Sisters” audience must be affluent, status-conscious, and tired of walking. Last night’s epiode served up television commercials for auto-makers Mercedes, Volvo, Audi, Lexus, BMW, and Kia. I’m not sure how Kia snuck in there, but it was a stroke of genius - guilt by association, as it were. Speaking of [...]