MatchupCamp — the ideal matchmaking scene for for ideas, talent and startups - will be taking place at For Your Imagination Studios on December 8 in conjunction with nextNY Digital. MatchupCamp has the sole objective of bringing together people looking to start, expand, or join a startup in New York and the tri-state area.  If you want to get your hands dirty and build something new, this is the place. To help organize the camp, join the MatchupCamp NYC Google Group. If you are interested in attending register for free at http://matchupcamp.eventbrite.com.

NYConvergence ORIGINAL

First noticed by PRNewser's Joe Ciarallo, NYConvergence thought that it should alert its readers traveling via NJ Transit today that the agency's Web site is currently down for maintenance with no indication of when it will be restored.

The hotel played host last night to the New York City edition of the Tweetsgiving "gratitude party," one of 30 other such events going on across the globe supporting the work of Epic Change, a nonprofit which aids "social entrepreneurs." During the event, there was live music by Amy Regan and a display of tweets hashtagged "#tweetsgiving" from attendees at each of these events.

The New York City edition was joined by one of these entrepreneurs, Mama Lucy Kampton.  Proceeds from the event will be used to benefit the primary school she founded, Shepherds Junior, in Arusha, Tanzania, and will help pay for the construction of a dormitory, orphanage, library, school cafeteria, and additional classrooms.

Almost overnight, the Ace Hotel lobby has become something of a phenomenon.  On any given day, you’ll run into an actor, a fashion designer, a model and—randomly enough--an tech entrepreneur. 

Just this week, as I was taking meetings in my relatively new role on the First Round Capital investment team, I got to meet Charlie Rose, spotted Tobey Maguire, and most notably, Boxee’s Avner Ronen and Jetsetter’s Drew Patterson.

With a long study hall style table, comfortable couches, and wifi whose codes are the worst kept secret since USV’s Foursquare funding, the Ace had attracted a growing following from the New York City startup world.  The Stumptown Coffee right off the lobby doesn’t hurt the geek pull either—everyone knows high quality caffeine is the fuel that makes code go.

I discovered the Ace Hotel thanks to a coffee invite from Nick Bilton.  As it turns out, Phin Barnes, my colleague at First Round had known about it for a while, and on any given day you’re likely to run into one of us taking meetings with entrepreneurs here. 

The question is whether the Ace Hotel will embrace its newfound friends in the Big Apple’s creative class.  While the waitresses aren’t pushy with getting people to order—yet—little cards have started showing up reminding folks that these seats are “guest only”.  I’ve yet to find a guest among the Ace’s laptop nation yet, but I’m currently sitting within spitting distance of Malcolm Gladwell as I write this.  I’m pretty sure he’s not staying at the hotel either.

There’s certainly an argument that attracting the local tech scene’s “cool kid” crowd, like Zach Klein, who I ran into the other day and passed on an office space tip to, is good for business.  Being community friendly will help the Ace become the go to place for innovators from the creative class.  I mean, wouldn’t you like to be the place where the next Google or Facebook was hatched?  That’s especially the case since many of the young innovators are also the trendsetters in music, food, clothing, etc.  I doubt anyone wants someone to build a router at the study hall table at Ace, but they should certainly extend an open invite for Anthony from Hype Machine to come hack here with his tech team. 

To look at a similar story, you can go back to when the local NYC tech community adopted the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park as its unofficial social hub.  That’s a good example of a business totally embracing the community.  Mentions of the Shake Shack on Fred Wilson’s blog date back to the summer of 2004, when foodie entrepreneur Joshua Schachter and del.icio.us had a little office at 915 Broadway.  Since then, the venue has hosted two of the best tech events in NYC and an epic snowball fight that featured Shake Shack employees participating and free hot chocolate.

The Shake Shack further fostered their relationship with the local tech community by letting a couple of hackers claim and build off of the @shackshack Twitter account.  By powering it with a retweet bot, they created a way for local “insiders” to skirt the line by seeing who they knew was already there.  Now, much of that functionality can be found on Foursquare, but still, the fact that the folks from Danny Meyer’s burger paradise in the park didn’t attempt to block the account speaks well to the kind of relationship they want to have with the community.

So the question is, will the employees from the Ace Hotel be ready for the West 29th Street snowball fight with local entrepreneurs or will we soon get booted for being wifi and table moochers. 

Video from last year’s Shake Shack snowball fight.

UPDATE:  I got this message via the little Plugoo chat window on my blog: 

“ACE NEW YORK LOBBY SIGNS > "Thanks for pointing this out. We want to balance the needs of our guests & the community - both are very important to us. NY lobby signs are down & we hope this flows naturally & organically. – Ace”

That’s really the best response I could have gotten.  It makes me want to go there more and to make sure I’m spending a little money and recommending them, too.

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LET THESE NYC STARTUPS MAKE YOUR HOLIDAY WEEK!

While this will be one of the quieter weeks in the NYC tech scene, no doubt that it's going to be one of the most hectic weeks at home. You're probably hosting, cooking, and shopping (and drinking), so why shouldn't the internet make your life a little bit easier and more entertaining this week. I've picked out a few local companies that might make this the best Thanksgiving week ever.

I did find free jazz on the (covered) rooftop of the Empire Hotel tomorrow night, which looks like a pretty cool thing to do.

First off, you can't host a great party without inviting anyone, so Pingg should be your first stop for party invites. They wrote up a piece for all the T-day hosts out there that you should check out.

Before all the festivities, you should definitely make the traditional trek to the Upper West Side to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade floats get blown up. Who else is going to be there, though? How will you find them and share the experience? Hotpotato, a First Round portfolio company, just got back from launching at Crunchup and should be up and live in the app store by the time the first bit of helium makes its way into Snoopy. Share photos, notes, etc., with others in real time all around this annual event.

Meals are going to be pretty standard--turkey, stuffing, etc.--but make sure your wine selection isn't. Check out Snooth.com for the best recommendations from the most comprehensive wine database in the world.

What on earth are you going to wear? Try out a bunch of outfits and ask your friends to vote on the most appropriate ensemble with Fashism. If you're like me, you can barely dress yourself, so this kind of thing is best left to crowdsourcing.

Men, you will undoubtedly spill wine, gravy, and cranberry sauce on your white shirts, so come this Friday, it's going to be time to go shopping for a new one. Don't just buy one off the rack. Customize and personalize your own unique dress shirt with Propercloth, another cool NYC startup.

You've made way too much food and will undoubtedly be eating turkey between now and 2015. Looking for the best recipe to mashup the leftovers? Look no further than this week's Food52 Turkey Leftovers contest. I feel like that one is going to be a win-win all the way around.

Enjoy your holiday!

Yesterday, I bought an Xbox off of BigDeal.com, one of our First Round Capital portfolio companies. I spent nearly an hour and a half bidding against some guy to try and buy at increments from about $18 all the way to $168.  I tried every strategy I knew…  holding out to the last second to try and lull him into a sense of security and then jump in…  then brute forcing it by counterbidding every second all throughout the $30 and $60 range to try to wear him out.  It was an addictive bidding frenzy—and my downside was just buying it at the Amazon price, so I couldn’t really lose.  (I didn’t win, but I’ll be back!)

TechCrunch did a good job of covering the company yesterday, so I’ll just pull the highlights:

“BigDeal lets users purchase virtual bids $0.75 each which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by $0.15 and an extra 30 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. With this model, items end up selling substantially below their market value. But one of the main criticisms of Swoopo was the risk of losing your money spent on bids (regardless of whether you win or not) when the auction concludes. BigDeal takes a couple of steps to mitigate this risk.

With BigDeal’s model, any users who get outbid get a full credit of the money uses for bids to buy the item via a “Buy Item Now” option (which Swoopo also has, called “Swoop-it-now”). So if you spent $10 on bids, your Buy It Now price will be dropped by $10. Of course, the Buy It Now price will frequently be higher than the price of item sold for in the auction but at least users aren’t necessarily losing money all together. And the Buy It Now price is set at the same price that Amazon lists for the same product.

That’s not all. BigDeal provides an added incentive for bids by letting all users trade in the money they spent on bids for gift cards. All users get $1 gift card discount for every $1 spent on bids. So if you buy $25 in bids, BigDeal will give you a $100 gift card for $75…

…It seems that Big Deal has taken the best elements of Swoopo’s model and added several features which make it more of a win-win for consumers. Plus, it adds information, like bidding history, to the process to make the auction more fair.”

I’ll be interested to see how the company works towards providing more and more auction transparency.  Admittedly, when I bought my Xbox, I didn’t realize that I wasn’t getting my bid points back when I took the “buy it now” price.  I thought everyone was seeing the same price, like a loaded gun on the table, and that everyone’s bid lowered it.  I figured everyone else’s lost bids were subsidizing my price, but as it turns out, I didn’t really get “refunded” my points back—they just came off the MSRP.  So, I effectively just paid the MSRP price…  not what I wanted, but not a terrible outcome, since it’s been years since I had a game system and I was kind of itching to get back into it.  Perhaps I’ll bring it to the new First Round offices in Union Square (coming this January) and we’ll have entrepreneur Madden tourneys!

Now when you are trying to pick a place to meet a friend, you can use Centrl. Instead of copy-pasting URLs and emailing back and forth, you can settle on a place quickly with a few clicks. Here is how:

Here is the Centrl presentation from the excellent Monaco Media Forum:

I've been thinking a lot about where entrepreneurs and startup talent come out of in NYC. A lot of folks believe that you can train people coming out of the financial services base to do something entrepreneurial, but honestly, I'm not so sure about that. What I do think, however, is that it takes more than just a visionary leader or a ninja-level hacker to start a business. There are tons of startup companies in New York City, many already making money or well funded, that are looking for top supporting talent--engineers, designers, salespeople, business development pros, product managers, etc. This is where we, as the startup community, can do a better job--mining the installed base of talent in big companies. I'm actively looking for ideas on how to tell the masses of talented, experiences folks slaving away in Cubeworld that there's a thriving innovation community in New York City with lots of great companies looking for talent. How do we pick apart the CondeNasts, JP Morgans, and Time Inc's? Please talk to me about it. If you're a recovering Fortune 500 employee, tell me how you got out. (charlie@firstround.com) One way the nextNY community is trying to help is with Matchup Camp.

MatchupCamp is for skilled professionals to find new opportunities—for developers to find inspiring projects, for salespeople to find interesting products to sell, etc.  It’s not a bunch of unemployed people handing out resumes.  It’s for people looking to explore where they might best fit.  When we did this two years ago, technical talent probably made up 40% of the crowd and we’re working hard to make sure it’s not just people with ideas, but people who can make them happen.

When: December 8th at 6:30

Where: FYI Studio 22 West 27th, 6th Floor

RSVP here