The Social

DailyCandy crowds a SoHo bookstore for its book launch party on Tuesday night.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

NEW YORK--Tuesday night was the first time I'd been to a digital-media-related event at a bookstore, unless you count the time that Google threw a conference at the New York Public Library.

It was the launch party for girly e-newsletter DailyCandy's new book, The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist But Should, at the McNally Robinson bookstore-cafe in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. Refreshments consisted of rum cocktails and, not surprisingly, candy.

Sample entry in the book: "textual frustration: a late-night text exchange that fails to result in old-fashioned lip-locking." DailyCandy staffers told me that about half the entries in the book are wholly original, and the other half are sourced from "Lexicon"-themed DailyCandy e-mails from over the years.

The party was mostly full of DailyCandy's own sundress-clad legions--the company employs about 60 people--and their friends. Fellow blog folk were few and far between, though a handful of people from nearby new-media companies like Flavorpill and Gawker showed up. So did Bob Pittman, the MTV executive turned AOL executive turned Pilot Group chief, whose investment firm owns a majority stake in DailyCandy. (Regrettably, Pittman left before I had a chance to ask him about his reported foray into the tequila business.)

I also didn't get a good answer to this question: Why is there such an impulse to turn a blog (or, in DailyCandy's case, an online newsletter) into a book?

This blogs-to-books trend seems to keep chugging along, despite the fact that none of their predecessors have been particularly successful. Gawker Media's Guide to Conquering All Media sold dismally, as schadenfreude-happy blogger Jeff Bercovici gleefully pointed out. Options, the book takeoff of the wildly popular Fake Steve Jobs blog, wasn't exactly a chart-topper, either. And now there are books either just out or on the way for blogs Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, Postcards From Yo Momma, Passive-Aggressive Notes, and a heap of others.

For a popular blogger, somewhat ironically, getting a "dead-tree tie-in" (to quote Bercovici) seems to be the way of knowing you've made it. But is that canceled out if it doesn't sell well?

DailyCandy, for what it's worth, has a much more longstanding brand than the likes of I Can Has Cheezburger, and it already has an earlier book (DailyCandy A to Z, published in 2006) under its belt. But the question still stands: why venture offline when the online brand seems to be doing just fine on its own? Will it really convert enough new readers to offset the cost and energy of book publishing? Is a "blog book" really just an ego boost?

The world may never know.

The crowd at the New York Tech Meetup.

(Credit: David Karp)

NEW YORK--Typically, the monthly New York Tech Meetup is an opportunity for the unpolished founders of brand-new local start-ups to go up onstage, talk about their companies for five minutes, and risk heckling from an audience of 400.

But for the Internet Week New York installment of the gathering on Tuesday evening, host (and Meetup.com founder) Scott Heiferman invited a handful of Gotham tech success stories to talk about the state of their companies. Needless to say, the presentations were a little bit slicker, and the "How're you going to make money?" question, a staple for the green Tech Meetup regulars, was understandably absent.

Heiferman also took a jab at the previous night's press conference by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which kicked off Internet Week. Heiferman noted that the only tech company mentioned three times in Bloomberg's speech had been Google, a company that has a huge presence in the city but originated in the Valley. Bloomberg had added that he'd been on a tour of Google's New York office, to which Heiferman surveyed the techies in the room and asked, "Let's see a show of hands--how many of you have had Mayor Mike come and tour your office?"

Here's what else went down:

Kevin Ryan, co-founder and chairman of AlleyCorp, parent company of a number of properties including Panther Express and the Silicon Alley Insider, said that the company would be raising new venture funding in about the next two months. Ryan, an original founder of DoubleClick, also hailed New York's burgeoning tech culture, estimating that the city has produced about $35 billion in tech assets over the past decade. That makes it second only to the Bay Area.

DailyCandy's Catherine Levene said that the 8-year-old women's e-mail newsletter will be launching seven new localized editions of its DailyCandy Kids lists, capitalizing on the hot online parenting niche. As for longer-term plans, Levene said the company was "never really founded as an e-mail company; it was founded as a content company...We look to our future as beyond e-mail." The site will see more national and international editions, an expanded Web site, and potentially content more than once a day. That'd kind of render the name obsolete, but hey, that's just a triviality.

Rob Kalin, founder of handmade goods marketplace and cult favorite Etsy, said that 15,000 to 20,000 items are sold on the site every day. Etsy, which was founded two-and-a-half years ago in Brooklyn, just hired a COO and is looking forward to more growth. "It's a matter of time before Wal-Mart is just out of business," Kalin said of Etsy's handmade, buy-local mantra in the face of rising fuel costs that may render cheap labor not-so-cheap. "I wish I could be around to see it. He then admitted that Etsy actually shares a board member with Wal-Mart Stores.

Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan and co-founder Jonah Peretti dismissed criticisms that the liberal-leaning news aggregation site's traffic could plummet after 2008 election buzz quiets down, saying that over half the site's traffic now comes from its non-politics sections. "We're in six verticals, (and) we're going to many more," Morgan said. The Huffington Post now "employs" 1,600 unpaid bloggers but has fewer than 50 full-time employees, and has seen its traffic triple in the past seven months.

TheLadders founder and CEO Mark Cenedella showed off the white-collar job search site's slick interface, and reminisced about when he showed up at the first-ever New York Tech Meetup. There were eight people at the meetup and 22 on TheLadders' payroll; now there are 400 people at each Meetup (with a waiting list) and 240 TheLadders employees.

The chief technology officer and general product manager from Heiferman's own Meetup showed off an impressive impending relaunch of the site, which is designed to be "simpler and easier to use." Among the updates to Meetup are a location directory (the company is "starting to talk to Yelp" about a possible partnership with the business-reviews site), an integration with Amazon Payments to offer payment options besides PayPal, a "Meetup Alliances" feature to make networks of local groups, and a tweak to require people to pay before they RSVP to an event. There's also an Italian-language launch of the site on the way to reflect its popularity in Italy, and "crowdsourcing" efforts will translate it into more languages.

David Uyttendaele, CTO of print-and-ship on-demand service Mimeo now has an employee count of 550 and prints 2 million to 3 million pages per night. That's huge for a company that many people in the city still haven't heard of, perhaps because it's geared toward enterprise clients. The company also recently launched "Mimeo Marketplace," a way for document manufacturers to sell their creations.

Chris Phenner, vice president of business development at mobile content marketplace Thumbplay, said that there are over 80,000 ringtones, videos, games, and graphics available for download for a $10 monthly fee. The company is also "so very, very close" to letting independent content creators sell their own media through the service.

Money is boring, unless you're spending it on something like an iPhone or a cute new pair of shoes.

Or unless you make investment cool, which is what a new company called Thrasher Funds is trying to do. It's a new mutual fund that's targeting the under-35 crowd with a bunch of youth-oriented and tech-focused holdings (Apple, Uniqlo, Diageo, American Apparel, Volkswagen, Google, and Garmin), "investment parties," and a Web site that looks like a Good Charlotte album cover.

"Commercials from financial behemoths only implore Baby Boomers to start planning and saving for their retirements, and/or their children's college tuition," a company description explains. "That's fine if you're over 40 with children. But what if you're not? What if you're a child of the 70's, 80's or 90's? What should you be planning for?"

Yeah, it's different. New York magazine's Web site called Thrasher Funds "despicable [and] brilliant, and its young writers attested that "we already have an extreme case of generational embarrassment, one that may or may not be manifesting itself in a full-body rash right now. But then again, that's how we felt about Garden State!"

Thrasher Funds isn't a technology company, really. But they're targeting the social-networking generation, which means that yes, the company has a MySpace page. And they've set up shop in the Silicon Alley boardinghouse known as Sunshine Suites, meaning that they're getting plenty of cooties from local Web 2.0 start-ups also using the space.

They're additionally getting a boost from the city-focused women's newsletter Daily Candy, which not only has proudly touted Thrasher as the first-ever investment company to advertise on the e-mail list but also hosted the finance start-up's launch party last week at the Caravan clothing boutique in Manhattan's NoHo neighborhood. The sparkling rose wine was flowing, the company founders were chatting it up with guests, and everything in the store was priced at 20 percent off. (Now that's what I call a party!)

At this point, it looks like all Thrasher really needs is a celebrity executive, you know, like DanceJam's M.C. Hammer or Ooma's Ashton Kutcher.

Thrasher Funds' Web site, which looks like it took a cue from Good Charlotte.

(Credit: Thrasher Funds)

That said, the company also has to prove itself to some extent before young people (even the ones eager to jump on the trendiness bandwagon) are willing to commit actual cash to it. Word-of-mouth testimonials, when they exist, are going to mean a heck of a lot more than a savvy ad campaign. This is the generation that's reportedly afraid to tackle health insurance head-on; mutual funds still are going to look kind of scary to some, no matter how much hot pink is on the Web site.

I've got to say that I walked into Monday night's Ideal Bite party in midtown Manhattan with absolutely no idea of what to expect.

I knew that Ideal Bite was a new daily e-mail list that specialized in "light-green living"--you know, a sort of DailyCandy for eco-yuppies. The event, titled "Garden of Hedonism," promised "a night of total titillation that's both decadent and green," and that it would be held at--Johnny Utah's!?

New Yorkers who follow restaurant openings and closings are undoubtedly familiar with Johnny Utah's, an "upscale-cowboy" theme restaurant and bar across the street from Rockefeller Center. It's also home to one of only two mechanical bulls in Manhattan, and apparently, the rationale for holding a vaguely green-related party there is that the bull is solar-powered.

Al Gore would be proud.

Unfortunately, I didn't ride the bull; I had some reconnaissance to do because I still wasn't exactly sure what the event was all about. Ideal Bite, as I soon learned, is the newest offspring of Pilot Group, the on-the-down-low media investment group run by MTV co-founder and former AOL Chief Operating Officer Robert Pittman.

Pilot Group, as some better-informed attendees told me, currently has stakes of varying degrees in locally run e-mail newsletters DailyCandy and Thrillist, as well as music blog Stereogum. I also heard that there's a connection of sorts to elite social-networking site ASmallWorld.

This, of course, means that Ideal Bite is a well-moneyed start-up. As a result, the launch party featured an open bar with organic signature cocktails (like the "Forbidden Apple," consisting of vodka, apple juice, lime juice, apple brandy, sparkling cider, and mint leaves), scantily clad dancers wearing faux fig leaves, and well-stuffed swag bags.

The crowd was very Midtownish, very BlackBerry-friendly, and suspiciously good-looking for a dot-com launch party--thirty-somethings, mostly, the men in suits and the women wearing outfits strategically assembled to bridge the gap between office life and nightlife.

I ran into some of the folks behind Thrillist and DailyCandy--Thrillist co-founder Adam Rich reminded me that his start-up is having its own soiree later this week and asked, "What's with all these parties suddenly happening all the time?" Really, you'd swear it were, you know, Silicon Valley. Except we're cuter here.

Also around: Blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan, Flavorpill co-founder Mark Mangan, the team from events start-up SpongeCell--as well as two of the guys who run the Webby Awards, who have been very kind to CNET in the past.

Not spotted: anyone from TreeHugger, which presumably offers a less sassy shade of green than Ideal Bite. (TreeHuggers, correct me if I'm wrong, and you actually were there.)

One male attendee eagerly pointed out a couple of Ideal Bite's female writers. "They're hot!" he whispered to me. "I thought they'd be, like, crunchy!"

Pittman was there, but he was naturally mobbed by guests all night. The person I really wanted to talk to was Jason Rapp, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions at InterActiveCorp, whose company had just made a five-way split earlier that day. Rapp was receiving congratulations aplenty, perhaps for his company's candor in admitting to press and investors that its sprawling scope was a disadvantage.

Rapp was upbeat when I asked him how the outlook was for IAC. "We're doing great! Did you see the stock prices?" True, IAC shares did leap up a bit after Monday's announcement. Before I could grill him any further, someone else snagged him and presumably started asking the same questions.

So, the people were pretty, the conversation was good, and the drinks were free. The only problem, really, was the star attraction: the solar-powered bull. My only real familiarity with mechanical bull-equipped venues was when I was in Los Angeles in July for E3, and attended a party at the Sunset Strip's pseudo-legendary Saddle Ranch Chop House. Let's just say the ferocity of the bull at Johnny Utah's paled in comparison to its West Coast counterpart, which I pointed out to an anonymous observer.

"What, do they want to f***ing break the spinal column of some senior vice president at AOL or something?" He had a point.