The view from Hearst Tower at Founders Club.
(Credit: Marc le Clef)NEW YORK--Thus far, my experience with the Internet Week New York party scene has one of dichotomies. On Wednesday I went from a lively dance floor to a room full of awkward male Kevin Rose groupies. Then, on Thursday, the social agenda involved one event that was impeccably classy and one that was so consciously puerile that it could only have come from CollegeHumor.
One more inch and this photo of America's Hottest College Girl (left) would be NSFW. She was honored at a party that coincided with but was not affiliated with Internet Week New York.
(Credit: Amandalyn Ferri)The earlier gathering was the latest installment of Founders Club, a series of quarterly events that pull together a bunch of local A-list entrepreneurs with the VCs who fund them and the big-media folks who want to get to know them. The Founders Club circuit kicked off last winter, fueled by the contacts lists of popular local digerati like Blip.tv's Dina Kaplan and IAC exec Jason Rapp. While its original digs in an investor's penthouse were nothing to scoff at, the events have grown more upscale in venue, this time taking over a 44th-floor space at the tower occupied by publishing stalwart Hearst.
For most, it was an escape from the Internet Week fray and a chance to catch up over an organic vodka-on-the-rocks with the likes of Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, News Corp. M&A exec Jeremy Phillips, digital-politics guru Andrew Rasiej, and Greycroft Partners' Alan Patricof. A few out-of-towners were in attendance too, like Digg founder Kevin Rose, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Facebook/Napster/other-stuff-in-the-Valley veteran Sean Parker.
The crowd at the Founders Club event on Thursday night.
(Credit: Marc le Clef)The most prolific topic of conversation: the fantastic views of Central Park and midtown Manhattan, including The New York Times building further south on Eighth Avenue--two arguably unstable exhibitionists had attempted to scale the outside of the building earlier in the day.
But the open bar and live jazz trio at Founders Club tapered off around 9 p.m., and several taxis full of fun-loving partygoers headed downtown to the flashy, chandelier-adorned Flatiron District nightclub known as Room Service, where the IAC-owned CollegeHumor was having its annual Hottest College Girl in America Party. The 2008 honoree was 19-year-old Alison from the University of Wisconsin, who eventually wants to be a high school English teacher. (Note to Alison: Those photos on CollegeHumor might make the average American high school think twice when you submit your resume.)
You know, it's kind of unfortunate that CollegeHumor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen hadn't scheduled their party for the previous night. I would've paid a few dollars to see Alison and her barely-clothed friends transported to the Digg party; maybe then those Digg fanboys would've diverted their attention to something other than their lionized Kevin Rose.
(Credit:
Ricky Van Veen, editor in chief, CollegeHumor)
With a $15 billion valuation, big-name investors, and high-profile Google employees jumping onto its payroll, Facebook can't play with the kids anymore.
That's probably why its New York branch's hyped-up beer pong tournament against dude entertainment site CollegeHumor was cancelled.
The match, scheduled for Thursday evening at CollegeHumor parent company Connected Ventures' offices near Manhattan's Union Square, was abruptly called off, according to a blog post from Josh Mohrer, director of retail at Connected Ventures brand BustedTees. "Facebook has backed out of the CH vs. Facebook beer pong tournament for 'legal and PR' reasons," Mohrer wrote. "Lame!"
For those who stepped in late, beer pong, known as "beirut" in some circles, is a popular slacker sport that involves throwing ping-pong balls at a triangle of cups half-full of beer. If you land the ball in a cup, your opponent must drink the beer in that cup. That's the basic rundown; rules and regulations differ wildly across the fabric of American college campuses.
A tipster told gossip blog Valleywag that Facebook's legal and public-relations team, which just hired former Googler Elliot Schrage as its director, took issue with the tournament.
A CollegeHumor representative told CNET News.com that the company was not familiar with Facebook's "internal stuff" and that an impending match between CollegeHumor and local blog powerhouse Gawker Media was still on the books.
Facebook declined to comment on the matter.
To be fair, Connected Ventures isn't exactly a freewheeling start-up: CollegeHumor has been around since the late '90s, its founders are closer to 30 than 20, and Connected Ventures (which also encompasses BustedTees and video-sharing platform Vimeo) was acquired by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp nearly two years ago.
Regardless, CollegeHumor remains an entertainment brand. Facebook gets talked about in the same sentences as Google and Microsoft--it might've gotten its start as a dorm room project at Harvard, but Mark Zuckerberg & Co. is playing in the Silicon Valley big leagues now.
At the same time, Facebook still has to prove that it can live up to the hype. Google and Amazon.com executives can get away with showing up at the Nevada counterculture fest Burning Man, but Facebook still has a "college kid" reputation to outgrow.
In other words, beer pong probably doesn't help.
Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.
Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.
StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's Wii console.
Now go ruin your productivity level. As for me, Stumble Video just told me I might want to watch some Daft Punk videos.
(Credit:
Columbia Pictures)
Let's just say this Superbad flick, which opens August 17, is pretty highly anticipated. Comedy fans are psyched because it's produced by Judd Apatow of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame. And geeks have been equally pumped to see teen nerd icon Michael Cera, formerly of Arrested Development and more recently of the CBS Web series Clark and Michael, doing what he does best--spending long durations of onscreen time acting as awkward as possible.
So, as you can imagine, the atmosphere was decently enthusiastic when the crew behind National Lampoon heir apparent CollegeHumor threw an advance screening at a movie theater in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday night. (The movie, as far as I know, does not have any formal connection to the site.) A raunchy and offbeat comedy about nerds, after all, is just about tailor-made for the brand: CollegeHumor parent company Connected Ventures, itself owned by InterActiveCorp (IAC), has inexplicably managed to cater to a three-pronged target audience of frat boys, tech culture geeks, and hipsters with a proclivity for ironic t-shirts. Well, perhaps it's not so inexplicable, as all three demographics likely would be amused by photos of passed-out drunks with "I <3 JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE" scrawled on their foreheads next to cartoon simulacra of male reproductive organs--which, by the way, are a crucial motif in Superbad.
The audience at the movie screening, consequently, seemed to enjoy itself. And as for my personal review: See it. It's funny. The cops are the best part. But it sure made me feel old to see how high school movies have evolved in this post-Napoleon Dynamite era, from the She's All That and American Pie knockoffs we had back in my day. Freddie Prinze, Jr. seems quite a bit antique.
Afterwards, CollegeHumor took over the bi-level midtown bar Mantra for a Svedka-sponsored soiree. Being a Wednesday night, the crowd wasn't too wild, and the music was a bit too loud for a bunch of outgoing 20-somethings who were eager to flex their senses of humor. (In other words, conversation bordered on difficult.) As for familiar tech-industry faces, the majority of those present seemed to be employees of Connected Ventures' various divisions or close friends thereof; however, representatives from local tech and new-media names like area/code, Next New Networks, and blip.tv were in the mix, as was Facebook's "New York guy," Kevin Colleran.
CollegeHumor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen were understandably present. But to all Valleywag readers who care about the latest trivialities in New York's geek dating ecosystem, I didn't spot Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick, so I would not be able to tell you whether he had Star magazine journo-socialite (journalite?) and rumored squeeze Julia Allison with him. Sorry. But hey, the movie was good.
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