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.
OK, this makes more sense.
CNET News.com reported earlier on a collaboration between crafts site Etsy and the NASA Ames Research Center on a new contest that encourages members of the Etsy community to design NASA-inspired handmade goods. The announcement was made at the PSFK Conference in New York during a panel discussion featuring NASA's Andrew Hoppin and Etsy founder Robert Kalin.
In an unintended verbal gaffe, Kalin said, "We'll send the two winners into space." The audience, along with this reporter, assumed he meant that the Etsy crafters who won the contest would get to be astronauts--in this world of Microsoft space tourists and Virgin Galactic, it didn't seem all that ridiculous.
Unfortunately for any wannabe astronauts, it'll be the winning artwork, not the artists, who get to go to space. Hoppin said later that he clarified the matter shortly thereafter, but that a malfunctioning microphone (there had been some sound issues earlier in the morning) may have that it wasn't widely heard.
So if you're an avid Etsy artist, you probably still won't fulfill your dreams of going into orbit--but your crocheted pillows might.
This post was updated at 11:51 AM PT in order to correct a misstatement that was made in the announcement. The winning artwork from the Etsy-NASA contest, not the artists, will make a trip into space. Read the correction post here.
NEW YORK--What does a marketplace for handmade crafts have to do with a NASA project in virtual world Second Life?
A lot, apparently, according to a panel at Thursday's PSFK Conference that paired Robert Kalin, founder of the Brooklyn-based handmade goods site Etsy, and Andrew Hoppin, co-founder of NASA Co-Labs at the NASA Ames Research Center. The topic of the panel, which was moderated by futurist consultant Greg Verdino of Crayon, was the collaborative working movement known as "co-working."
"This is no longer a phenomenon that is limited to the one-man shop," Verdino said. "What we're starting to see now is this notion of co-working transcending physical space and blending physical work spaces, digital and virtual."
Hoppin and Kalin announced as part of the panel that Etsy and NASA would actually be doing some co-working on their own. "Etsy and NASA are partnering on a program that we're calling Space Craft," Kalin explained. Space Craft will be a contest in which Etsy members create products inspired by NASA's logo; finalists' work will wind up in the NASA gift shop, and two piece of winning artwork will get to go into space. The audience seemed a bit taken aback, possibly due to the incorrect assumption that Kalin meant the artists would be the ones to go into space. "This is all sort of in the planning phase," Kalin added.
Sounds like more concrete information will be forthcoming.
Aside from the plan to put crafty hipsters in space, the panel mostly touched upon the two speakers' rationales for their support of collaborative working. Hoppin explained that the Ames Research Center, located in Silicon Valley, originally opened a virtual co-working space in Second Life because there was too much governmental red tape to open a physical one. In the Co-Labs work space, there are virtual lectures, 3D replications of the planets, and in-world projects that both NASA employees and outsiders can work on. "People can dress up as penguins," he said. "This is not really where you'd expect, as a NASA bureaucrat, to find NASA."
He added that the space agency is still working on opening a physical work-space in the Valley and is in talks with Yahoo.
Kalin, who says he "doesn't get" Second Life, was asked by Verdino about Etsy's "spirit of collaboration between buyer and seller." Etsy uses chat rooms, wikis, and other various social tools so that it's a bit more interactive than, say, eBay and its feedback ratings.
"There's something magical about the item that you get," Kalin explained. "It comes from this connection that you made online, but (then) you get the physical item."
One of New York's most talked about tech start-ups these days is undoubtedly Etsy, the Brooklyn-based online marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods. And it's continuing to generate headlines: co-founder Robert Kalin announced in a blog post Wednesday that the company has picked up an impressive $27 million in Series D financing.
The venture funding comes from existing investors Union Square Ventures and Hubert Burda Media, as well as Accel Partners' Jim Breyer, who will take on a seat on Etsy's board of directors.
Etsy is "almost break-even" when it comes to profits, Kalin admitted in his blog post, but it does have 650,000 registered users, 120,000 of whom are classified as "sellers." The company employs about 50 people, and last year opened the Etsy Labs community space in a converted industrial space in Brooklyn.
With the new financing, the company hopes to achieve a laundry list of goals: expand beyond the U.S. dollar and the English language, improve its search and checkout technology, ensure that it can pay its employees fairly, keep its servers running, and have a "cushion" to ensure stability through current economic woes.
It's as much a social mission as an economic one, Kalin wrote. "Throughout the myriad challenges since we launched the Web site, we have worked day and night to see things through. We're in this for the long haul," he said. "We believe that the world cannot keep consuming the way it does now, and that buying handmade is part of the solution."
(Credit:
Etsy)
Etsy, the two-year-old "eBay gone indie," has sold its millionth item, according to Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, one of the New York City start-up's investors. The company now stands at 42 employees and 300,000 registered users (both buyers, sellers, and those who dabble in both),
Click here for our video tour of Etsy Labs, the real-world space that the company opened in February.
As a side note, I'm going to give myself a pat on the back, because I guess that octopus-shaped necklace I bought from Etsy last week helped push 'em over the edge. It is, as you may imagine, a very addictive little marketplace: shopaholics beware.
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