The following video was found at the home of a young couple in California. The video really captures the fear caused by the most recent child actor's guild violent activities. No violence has yet to be reported in the New York City area. Former child actors in the Los Angeles have been advised to secure their homes. We condemn the actions of the children and hope that guild leader Gary Coleman will put a stop to them at once.

Clear Channel last month launched ‘the largest online radio advertising network ever’ with their sales subsidiary Katz Media. Nearest competitor CBS Radio has been working on a similar online push through New York-based startup TargetSpot.

According to this filing on GroundReport.com, it seems my friend and fellow Silicon Alleyist Noel Hidalgo was recently deported from China for filming and uploading video from a protest held by Students for a Free Tibet, in Tiananmen Square.

He’s now safely back in New York.

Regardless of your opinion of Tibet/China relations or the politics of staging protests during the Olympic Games, Noel’s capture of this event, and subsequent deportation, should reveal an interesting and important balance between Citizen Journalism and world affairs to you.

We are extremely excited to have my friend Eric Redlinger join Unype, bringing along his deep research and development expertise on mobile devices, especially the iPhone.

We are also excited to present Eric’s immediate contribution: initial screenshots of an early version of Unype on the iPhone:

Eric’s previous projects include work on the popular multiuser media-synthesis platform KeyWorx project and several innovative iPhone applications: DropCopy, a wireless file transfer utility that has already been downloaded over 300,000 times in just 4 months and the shape-shifting MrMr, an amazing iPhone app that can morph its GUI on the fly according to instructions sent from a server.

We are excited to innovate on the iPhone to bring new kinds of user-focused experiences to the device.

Silicon Alley returned to the Flatiron District last night with a launch party for David Rose’s new incubator “SparkSpace”. Rose Tech Ventures is looking for another name for their ‘entrepreneurial tech center’. Entrepreneur in Residence Nate Westheimer explains.

Rose Tech Ventures held a grand opening launch party for their new SparkSpace incubator this evening in Union Square. We initially wrote about SparkSpace last month. A great crowd attended the launch and made their way through all four floors of space. I grabbed a bunch of videos and photos but unfortunately only a few appear to have made it all the way home. I will attempt to get back to SparkSpace soon to get more video interviews with the startups working in the space.

One of the companies in the space is PerformLine. PerformLine is a lead-generation and CPA network that's building a platform and is looking to bring transparency to the industry. Here's Founder and CEO Alex Baydin explaining why Performline is different.

Angelsoft helps investors manage deals and helps entrepreneurs find the right investors for their projects. Nearly 400 angel investor groups and venture capitalists use Angelsoft. Here's Angelsoft's Jason Schwartz explaining how the system works.

Starting a tech company used to be hard. You needed lots of developers, lots of resources, lots of money and more money.

Then web APIs made it easier to start companies. ProgrammableWeb has at last count 861 APIs available for use, and 3257 mashups created using these. Now instead of creating your own map application for your rock concert website, you can use one of 88 mapping APIs available and slap your concert listings on top of that.

In the meantime, there was still one big hurdle for startups: deploying and maintaining a backend that could scale if the startup actually indeed succeeded. Not all startups hit millions of users but still, every startup had to be ready for the onslaught or they could kiss their exits goodbye. This required buying/leasing servers, architecting, rearchitecting and then maintaining clusters of servers, replacing burnt hard drives, backing up, adding more hardware as more customers showed up and keeping an army of sysadmins fed and appropriately caffeinated during the process.

Google and Amazon’s big advantage was their infrastructure. Especially Google’s big competitive advantage was their MapReduce/BigTable-based seemingly-infinitely-scalable infrastructure that could support huge amounts of traffic and data, running on low-cost hardware.

Amazon opened the flood gates to offering this big competitive advantage to any company in the world by becoming the book store that sold cocaine out the back door. As Larry Dignan said “Books will be just a front to sell storage and cloud computing”.

Not a day goes by now without an announcement from another industry giant (Intel, HP, Yahoo, IBM, Verizon, AT&T) offering scalable compute clouds. Dell even tried to trademark the term ‘cloud computing’.

Now that cloud computing is going through what web APIs has gone through, it will be interesting to see if the competitive advantage for startups will be purely innovation now that all startups will be able to scale their service without a huge amount of investment and resources.

Just received the note below from the NY Tech Meetup organizer. Looks like there is a power outage at the IAC headquarters in NYC. I've tested a variety of the IAC Web services and all seem to be running fine - I wouldn't expect any hosting at the IAC hq anyway. I guess all of those $10 payments weren't enough to keep the lights on.

Dear NY Tech Meetuppers,

Very sorry to have to relay this news but tonight's NY Tech Meetup is CANCELED due to an emergency power outage at IAC.Everyone will automatically get a refund today or tomorrow.We tried to find a replacement venue for tonight, but couldn't find anything for all 400 of us at this late notice. Again, our August Meetup is CANCELED. Please spread the word to anyone you know who's planning on coming.The next NY Tech Meetup will be September 2nd.

Stay tuned for details.
dawn

SAI has a story on this outage as well.

Nightlife Reprogrammed - NYTimes Article
By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: August 3, 2008
Young Internet entrepreneurs, some holdouts from the old days and a few members of New York’s creative class (and underclass) are engaged in a new type of party.

I can’t say much more except to read the article. All I can say is that I must be a geek to think that a soldering contest is interesting.

The New York City technology and media networking scene is brimming with high profile, very connected Silicon Alley events and opportunities to interact with your peers and pioneers. The New York Times Style section features a look into this world with a photostory, "What Nerds Do After Hours". Included are photos from the most recent Video 2.0 meet up with panelist Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination with Kyle Piccolo playing on the big screen. Thanks for the great pictures Annie. Enjoy!