So, I’ve succesfully installed Apple’s new OS, Leopard, rebooted, and I have in front of me “Aurora,” OS X’s new desktop wallpaper. Striking. My first thought is, new toy. My second thought is, OK, where do I start? Many of you are more than extremely Mac-savvy. But for those of you who are less experienced, or [...]

Nowadays, that person sitting on the bench next to you engrossed in their cellphone screen is more likely than ever to be watching videos or reading a newspaper. This is especially true now, with AT&T’s announcement this week (via CenterNetworks) of their expansion of broadband cell phone service in Brooklyn, Queens and Northern New Jersey. 200 new cell sites will offer high speed, third generation technology, or 3G, joining downtown Manhattan and the airports, which have enjoyed the technology since June last year. Users will need to subscribe to a plan to use the new technology, and they must have compatible phones. (The iPhone is not compatible, by the way.) While users can enter any web address, not all sites are formatted for mobile phones. Verizon, the national leader in 3G technology, has offered the service here since 2005. Maybe one day soon the person on the bus next to you will be reading the Eye Opener mobile edition?

Andrew Monfried’s presentation was the most interesting at tonight’s Ad Club Meetup. The founder/president of Lotame talked about advertising in social networks.

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I attended MatchupCamp tonight. It was an idea Eran mentioned to me when I first met him at Startupcamp awhile back and thought it was a great idea. It finally came into fruition.

The idea behind it was that it was going to be an "open-space networking event
where everyone you meet is a potential match for your talent or idea."

It was basically a nextNY networking event. Unfortunately one that was short on drinks.

They had some tools to facilitate the networking

• Color-coded nametags

• Demospace: If you brought your laptop you can show off your goods anywhere
  

• Pitch wall= physical job board.

The name tags were a nice touch. But I still felt that more could have been done to facilitate interaction between job providers and job seekers

Three ways of possibly facilitating the group
1. Either having a speed dating deal. Where startups looking for people would sit on one side and people looking to join a startup on the other. Every 5 minutes ppl would switch, etc...
2. Placing tags around the room and ppl would congregate in areas of interest. (ex. php, ruby, music, video, advertising, etc)
3. Have people go around the room announcing their names this way people could put faces to all the names that were posted on the wiki.

However I'm not really sure if the people attending tonights event would have benefited from these types of structure.
Since there were more people looking for hires than people looking to be hired.

All in all, I had a great time chatting with fellow nextNYers in person, thanks to Eran and everyone who helped organize and promote the event. I look forward to the next Matchupcamp.
If you attended I would love to hear your thoughts and experience.

Tonight was the first MatchupCamp in NYC put on by the NextNY crew with Eran Hammer-Lahav and Charlie O'Donnell leading the crew. The event was held at the For Your Imagination studios and Silicon Alley Insider provided the funds.

Turnout was great with about a 70/30 mix of startup/marketing and developers. Didn't see many designers but there were a lot of startups representing. I tried to capture all of the request flyers below. My suggestion for next time is to have people put their pictures with their flyers for easy identification. Someone else also suggested that startups get 5 minutes on a mic to go over who they are and what they are looking for. I would say shorten it to 2 minutes, no demo.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by and said hi - I grabbed many cards and will have more reviews coming as the products and services move into actually functioning prototypes.

Additional recaps:

• Michael Galpert

Here are some photos from the event (view all photos):

    

    

Here are the videos I captured:

Welcome video:

Wan Hsi Yuan - 8coupons.com (www.8coupons.com):

Jason Amster - BeenVerified (www.beenverified.com):

Kareem Kouddous - beYOU.tv (www.beyou.tv):

Looking forward to the next Matchup Camp!

Unype applications are now functional in Facebook, Orkut, Ning and Hi5 ( waiting to be approved for Pulse ). So now you can see a scene like this in Unype:

See you inside Unype!

I’m extremely excited to announce that I’m officially a chef. Well, not a chef you’d find in a typical kitchen, but more like a chef that you’d find over at The Media Kitchen. MediaWeek and PaidContent have released the news and I guess I can go public with my new role.

For those of you who know me well, I’m infatuated with the white space that exists between marketing, technology, and media. In my past entrepreneurial endeavors, I have innovated within this white space almost exclusively. Whether it was working with some of the original architects for the DART advertising server, executing a campaign across one of the top student websites in the 90s, helped land one of the largest online-only accounts in ‘96 to an interactive agency in Silicon Alley, or co-founding a world leading in-game advertising company with several other amazing co-founders, my experience has always been around brands and how they should interact with digital media.

Corporate entrepreneurship is what is next for me. I’m tasked with joining the senior ranks of The Media Kitchen to build out their entire digital media practice, from start to finish. I’ve got some incredibly talented and gifted individuals who have paved the path so far and they’ll be teaching me the ins/outs of the agency. As Mike Shields worte in the MediaWeek piece, I wanted to have the ability to help mold digital media when the opportunity is still around. By participating in the multiple conversations occuring now between the tech giants and the emerging startups, I can gain invaluable insight into the space and help The Media Kitchen position themselves as one of the most agile and forward thinking agencies.

I do bring an entirely different perspective than most agencies would staff in my rank. The perspective I am bringing to TMK is my entire thesis going forward: you cannot accurately and adequately plan digital media without understanding technology and emerging companies at the lowest level. Innovation creates new technologies and touchpoints where marketing can intersect, but unless you know how to harness these technologies and what they can do for your clients and the greater community, it’s a mute point. I am going to attempt to lead the charge at The Media Kitchen to understand this and build an entire group that believes in this at it’s core.

With this all said, I encourage ANY startup or emerging company to contact me through this site and I’d love to hear from you. My team is always on the lookout for new opportunities to join the marketing conversation and if your startup or emerging company has opportunities, we’d love to chat. If you’re passing through New York or wanted to know how an ad agency works, I encourage you to reach out.

To an amazing future and much more to come in the coming weeks,

Darren Herman

Snooth announced $1 million in angel funding from the company’s initial backers as well as a new group of international investors. The New York-based wine review site plans to spend the money on international expansion.

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NY-based Snooth has announced a $1 million angel round of financing today. This is in addition to their previous $300k funding round raised in December 2006.

Snooth is a data aggregator - they pull in content from thousands of sources. Snooth claims to be a "social shopping site" and their recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become. Snooth also maintains a wine database with over 1.9 million reviews for over 300,000 wines.

The new funds will be used to scale the development team, integrate the current backlog of merchants that have already partnered with Snooth, and add new retailers worldwide.

Check out our write-up of Snooth from the NY Social Networking Meetup from earlier this month.

Tomorrow (11/28), I will be at New York???s first MatchupCamp, an event I am helping to organize. MatchupCamp is matchmaking for startups. It is a unique networking events for those with an itch to join or start a tech startup in the New York area. Organized by nextNY, MatchupCamp is all about sharing ideas and skills in hopes to make some useful connections. There are many networking events in NY, but none focused on those ready to get their hands dirty and build something new. If you are in town, come and check it out. If you want to talk about Nouncer and the positions available, please find me there (or drop me a line).

I will be at Internet Identity Workshop next week in Mountain View, CA (12/3-5). It will OAuth???s primetime among many other great ideas and technologies. We plan to make OAuth Core 1.0 final and release it to the world. If you haven???t been keeping up, we???ve recently published OAuth Core 1.0 Draft 7 which is very stable and has a growing developer community and code libraries. Nouncer???s OAuth endpoint are due this week in the new alpha environment.