The Social

I ended up spending the Memorial Day holiday weekend in Las Vegas, a city in which I do not set foot particularly often. When I wasn't partaking in my preferred activity of lounging by the hotel pool with a good book and a pina colada (yes, that's right, I don't gamble), I decided to test-drive a new iPhone app. Namely, it's the free app from lifestyle e-newsletter UrbanDaddy, which hit the iTunes App Store earlier this week.

UrbanDaddy--which operates city-specific newsletters for New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, and Los Angeles, as well as a "national" edition and a weekly travel guide--targets the young, louche, and well-moneyed, or at least those who want to be. Its newsletters frequently cover high-end restaurant and bar openings, as well as exotic vacation destinations. For its iPhone app, the company opted to build an automated "concierge" that will suggest activities for you if you fill in what you're looking for.

The interface and concept are very, very cool. It's like playing a Mad-Libs game to find out what you can do that day or night: the app will fill in your time and location, and then you specify what you're looking for (dinner, drinks, dancing, etc.) and who you're with (parents, friends, boss, ex) and then a few options for the situation. When I was looking for a Sunday brunch in Vegas, for example, the options included "and we want great bacon," "and we want champagne," or "and we're hung over." Like I said, very cool setup.

The results, however, were lacking. UrbanDaddy CEO Lance Broumand told me that the directory has been curated to only include establishments that fit the tastes of the newsletter's discerning target audience, which meant that my "and we want great bacon" brunch selection would not be bringing up the local Denny's. That said, the app only brings up very basic contact information for the restaurant or bar it's chosen for you--no hints at prices, no reviews from users, no tips like "the drink menu is really girly," "crowd is full of d-bags on Friday nights," or "vegetarians need not apply."

I realize that both the serendipity factor and the "money's not an issue" overtones are part of UrbanDaddy's carefully constructed image (complete with a Lexus sponsorship), but it certainly puts a damper on how helpful it can be when you're in an unfamiliar city.

These things, obviously, can come in version 2.0. But for now--especially in Vegas, where things can be alternately rock-bottom-cheap or unexpectedly expensive--it was too much of a gamble (ha, ha) for my tastes. After an unsuccessful quest to find great bacon, I went right back to the lounge chair by the pool.

This post was updated at 3:50 p.m. PT to correct the list of cities for which UrbanDaddy publishes newsletters.

The impromptu SXSWi party at the Driskill Hotel, one of the many sporadic parties that have been redefining the conference's nightlife scene.

(Credit: Brian Solis, via Flickr)

AUSTIN, Texas--Over a lunch of fajitas at the Iron Cactus restaurant Sunday, one of my friends here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival shrugged and said, "I'm just not into the party scene this year. It's all a little weird."

I had to concur. SXSWi, after all, is known for its wild parties. But two nights in, I've clocked in a total of 20 minutes at them before opting to hang out elsewhere, and I'm not the only one.

There are obviously a ton of people going to this year's bashes--the line at the late-night PureVolume House was ridiculously long on Saturday night, I hear, and the Digg party was packed with fans eager to see Diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht do a live taping of the show. But many people I've talked to, especially veteran SXSWi-goers, say they're skipping many of the big, planned soirees.

There are a couple of reasons, I think. First there's the fact that budget cuts have meant that admission to a party no longer guarantees access to an open bar. That's enough to make some people just want to hang out somewhere random where it won't be as crowded.

Then there's the fact that SXSWi has gotten simply huge: last year's long lines led to impromptu offshoot parties, and the heavy influence of Twitter and the half dozen location-based networking tools people are using have meant it's easy to find out where your real friends are. On Saturday night, for example, it seems like everyone wound up at the downtown Driskill Hotel via word of mouth.

It's not just the bar scene. Conference attendees have been shaking up the whole panels-by-day, parties-by-night model with surprise cupcake giveaways, scavenger hunts, games of geek Bingo, and something called "SXSW Star Wars" that I don't quite understand. GirlGamer.com wired an RV with a Rock Band game and has been conducting mobile karaoke excursions. (You might've seen me with some friends on Friday night running up and down 6th St. trying to catch it and get onboard. We succeeded.) Honestly, it's sort of more fun and unpredictable this way.

But who knows? This may all change on Sunday night with Facebook's big annual bash.

This is part three of a four-part series. Here are part one and part two.

Surprise: Despite budget cuts and a general malaise about making a big, bubbly scene when loads of people in the tech industry are out of work or in danger of losing their jobs, there are still a ton of parties at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which starts Friday in Austin, Texas. There will be fewer open bars for sure; nevertheless, rest assured that you'll still be able to find far more nightlife options than you could possibly want. They do refer to it as "spring break for geeks," after all.

You'll probably see a lot of the same people at most of these parties, the majority of which require only an SXSWi conference badge for entry (which means the lines get long). But the parties themselves vary wildly in size and vibe.

Some are off-the-walls wacky, like the "Pasties and Pastries Burlesque Cupcake Cookoff" on Friday night, or off-the-walls wacky for a good cause, like the Bacon-Flavored Benefit for the Children's Music Fund, which asks for a $5 donation at the door. On Monday evening there's something called Nuclear Taco Night. I don't think I'm "in" enough with the SXSWi scene to even start to explain that.

Many of the earlier parties (i.e. the ones that start at 6:30 p.m.) are networking-friendly cocktail hours sponsored by big and medium-size companies like Rackspace, several Microsoft divisions, and Google (well, Google Reader and Blogger). Then, of course, there's the official SXSWi party on Saturday night. Sponsored by Frog Design, it's held every year at the Mexican American Cultural Center, which is thankfully big enough to accommodate attendees but is maddeningly far from the rest of the SXSWi mayhem. With temperatures on Friday and Saturday expected to be unseasonably chilly, this partly outdoors party may be smaller than last year's.

The late-night parties will likely just be total nuthouses. Some of these, like Facebook's second annual "friends.get" party at the sceney Pangaea nightclub on Sunday night or RockYou's St. Patrick's Day bash at the Speakeasy music hall on Tuesday, have a guest-list policy and will be tough to get into. Others, like the annual Bigg Digg Shindigg (hosted by...um, Digg) are more open but will still likely have a line snaking around the block.

Keep tabs on your Twitter feed, too. One unofficial party, called 32bit, isn't even disclosing its location until the last minute via Twitter. And last year, the party that took everybody by surprise happened when a bunch of popular Twitterers let their friends known that seven cases of wine had just been carted to a hotel lobby. Expect the flash-mob model to get repeated this year, probably several times.

P.S.: Here's one you should totally check out: CNET's own Buzz Out Loud podcast is having a mixer at the Cedar Door on Friday at 6:30 p.m., after its live show taping.

Trendy men's newsletter Thrillist has already shown its penchant for giving the middle finger to all things recession-related, whether it be chartering party planes or throwing '90s-dot-com bubble-theme parties (granted, both of those stunts preceded the Wall Street meltdown by a few months). But the New York-based start-up may be savvier than its big-pimpin' image would have you think.

The latest move from the company is a monthly compendium called Thrillist Invites, which is a listing of stuff you can do for free, if you sign up and RSVP. The first Thrillist Invites list will be for its New York subscribers--you have to already be subscribed to the Thrillist New York newsletter to be ushered into Invites--but versions for other cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, are on the way.

"The concept is that these parties are events that typically, Thrillist readers wouldn't have access to: 100 percent free, open bar, great entertainment," co-founder Ben Lerer told CNET News. The invites will range from restaurant openings and wine tastings to nightclub parties and clothing sample sales.

It's sort of similar to MyOpenBar, a weekly listing of regional establishments that offer free or heavily discounted drinking opportunities, but Lerer said it will have a more exclusive, first-come, first-served focus than the "unlimited Pabst Blue Ribbon" offers that often fill up MyOpenBar's ranks.

Lerer added that launching Thrillist Invites wasn't recession-induced, even though belt-tightening readers may be looking for cheap entertainment, and venues may be looking for people to fill their spaces in a time when they might be booking fewer holiday parties.

"It originally stemmed from the fact that we surveyed our audience earlier this year and asked, 'What do you guys want more of?'" Lerer explained. "Something like 80 (percent) to 90 percent of our audience said they wanted more events coverage."

Earlier this month, Thrillist expanded its Web site to offer more content, putting it further into the niche of "lifestyle publication" rather than "daily newsletter," and Lerer said that with a bigger focus on events, the site may expand further--like into Cobrasnake-ish party photo coverage.

Thrillist will also throw more of its own events, a move that some other food-and-bar culture companies, including the San Francisco-based Yelp, have taken in order to fortify a loyal following and give their users an "insider" status. Plenty of liquor brands advertise on Thrillist already, which Lerer said has made it easy for them to nail down booze sponsors.

And Lerer said Thrillist, which is fully advertising-supported and plans to stay that way, is financially sound. Granted, he didn't start from ground zero: he's the progeny of former AOL executive and Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer, and fellow ex-AOLer Bob Pittman's Pilot Group investment firm has taken a big stake in the start-up. Another Pilot Group-backed newsletter brand, DailyCandy, sold to Comcast earlier this year for about $125 million.

"Obviously, we get asked this question 50 times a day," Ben Lerer said when asked about a recession strategy. "We are doing really good...even if things slow down in the advertising community, in the online ad space, and even if we're growing less quickly because of some recession."

Buzzd, a mobile service focused on "real-time" reviews of bars and restaurants, says it's making some inroads in the tough, crowded location-based networking market.

The New York-based start-up is set to release numbers on Thursday announcing that 1.2 million venues are now listed in its directory, 10 percent of which were added by users. As for demographics, about 80 percent of Buzzd's users (it doesn't provide specifics on active users) are in the U.S., concentrated around cities like New York and Los Angeles, with another 10 percent in Europe and 10 percent in India.

Like many "geo" services, Buzzd lets members tell their friends where they are; rival Brightkite also lets members post "notes" on those venues, but doesn't turn them into a real-time lookup service. Buzzd has partnered with event and venue listing services like Time Out, Flavorpill, MyOpenBar, and Zagat. You can also use Facebook's newly extended API to hook it up with your profile credentials.

While it's a mobile Web site that doesn't require a download or subscription service, Buzzd has nevertheless worked on forming carrier deals--and says that more are on the way--to improve visibility in exchange for ad revenue sharing.

So what's next? Founder Nihal Mehta told CNET News.com that the all-important iPhone application is on the way, as well as a "strategic investment" on behalf of a major player in the mobile market. He's not saying who that is, but one can guess it's likely a handset manufacturer (though probably not Nokia, because it just bought competitor Plazes) or a carrier.

Youth-oriented mobile carrier Helio announced Wednesday that it has launched a bar and restaurant search site through a partnership with Buzzd, which also powers the mobile sites for local events and entertainment services like TimeOut New York, and Flavorpill.

Helio's new service, which is ad-supported, lets people in major U.S. cities search on the mobile Web site--linked from the home page of the carrier's browser--for bars, clubs, and restaurants. Most of the data will be pulled from Buzzd partners like Flavorpill, TimeOut, and the IAC-owned Citysearch. Added on, however, will be "event feeds" with specific pricing and night-specific details as well as short user reviews in real time.

So, theoretically, searching for the downtown New York hotspot Libation on a Saturday night could yield an update from another Buzzd user an hour earlier, saying "Ew, tonight's bouncer's mean and the line takes 30 minutes."

Perhaps more exciting is the fact that Helio is working to pull GPS into the mix. The carrier's current handsets come with the technology already, and a representative told me that the Buzzd service will eventually integrate GPS, so people won't have to say exactly where they are in order to find nearby parties and bars. (Right now they have to provide a location or street intersection.)

The catch is that Helio, which has struggled with growth and profitability, is a small carrier. Generating the critical mass for "real-time" reviews of a particular nightclub on a particular date will be tough, so the service may not turn out to be quite as teeming with up-to-the-minute information as Helio and Buzzd are hoping.

That said, location-based mobile services are revving up, and some will take off as soon as GPS-enabled handsets go into broader use or as soon as people whose devices are equipped with GPS realize that they have it. (I've noticed many people still don't know.)

Competitors in this space include Loopt, which has deals with mobile carriers Sprint and Boost, and Socialight. The latter is currently more like a user-generated version of Gridskipper city maps but has hinted at plans to move into the GPS sector when the technology becomes more widespread.

NEW YORK--What if you could get that coveted table for two at one of the hottest restaurants in town...by paying $25 for the reservation?

New York's famed Restaurant Week is fast approaching, which means that black books and BlackBerrys are filling with reservations aplenty. But this year, a new start-up called Tablexchange.com might put a fork in the system. The New York-based company has a simple model: it's a marketplace for buying and selling reservations at chic, trendy restaurants. It's brand new, and it's already controversial.

"So let's have a show of hands. Who thinks this is genius, and who thinks this is evil?" Such was the question posed by Scott Heiferman, Meetup.com founder and host of the New York Tech Meetup, when Tablexchange co-founders Gabriel Erbst and Dwight Lee presented their site at the January edition of the event earlier this month. Tablexchange is still small; with only a thousand registered users so far, it doesn't exactly have eBay-caliber activity levels, but it's starting to quietly take off. A table for two on Friday night at Little Owl, a tiny West Village restaurant where reservations seem to sell out in minutes, is on the books for $20, and seats at the chic Italian restaurant Babbo are going for $40.

Gabriel Erbst described the site as a solution for busy New Yorkers trying to mitigate the tension between the city's competitive, see-and-be-seen social climate and hectic professional lives that make it unfeasible to reserve a table at a red-hot restaurant three weeks in advance. "I worked at an investment bank for two years as an analyst," Erbst said in an interview with CNET News.com several days later. "My friends and colleagues were constantly busy, constantly working all the time." He and some friends started Tablexchange, which also offers reservation auctions in San Francisco and the Hamptons, Long Island's upper-crust summer escape, for people who don't know when they're going to be free, or who may need to pull out of reservations with little notice.

For busy New Yorkers eager to savor the city's culinary culture, the concept makes sense on the surface. But at the New York Tech Meetup, there was no real consensus on Heiferman's "genius or evil" question. About half the audience, seeing Tablexchange as a smart new way to democratize the cutthroat business of fine dining, raised their hands in accordance with the "genius" option. The other half, billing it as just plain sleazy, opted for "evil."

Some prominent figures in the New York hospitality industry don't see much gray area. "I just find it distasteful and manipulative," said Richard Coraine, chief of operations for the Union Square Hospitality Group, which operates several dining hot-spots like Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, and Tabla.

"We want to know you. We want you to talk to our reservation people. We want you to know our staff," Coraine continued. "That's really what gets to me, is that we have no relation-building opportunity in (reservation reselling sites). There's an added price we can't control, and that skews the value to us. It's very parasitic in its nature, which I don't find to be in keeping with the hospitality business."

"Scalping," the practice of reselling tickets to hot sporting and music events, often at a shocking premium, has been going on for years and has only escalated with the conveniences offered by the Web. It's controversial, and in some areas there are laws and regulations against it: Several sports teams, like the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots, have banned season-ticket holders from reselling above face value. And a brief legal flurry erupted last fall when prices for kids' music sensation Hannah Montana soared above the $200 mark on ticket reselling Web sites like the eBay-owned StubHub, and consumer protection advocates weren't too happy.

"I think, realistically, reservations at some restaurants in New York are very scarce, and it's not surprising that some capitalist folks have found a way to take advantage of that," said Ben Leventhal of the popular local restaurant blog Eater. "I don't really see it being that different from scalping seats to the Yankees or the Knicks, frankly."

But it is different, because restaurant reservations typically do not come with a price tag--and putting a monetary value on it can just look tacky. "I'm already down a hundred when you walk in the front door, and that's not something that I find palatable," Coraine said in reference to the fact that a site like Tablexchange means that people are spending money on a restaurant that the restaurant never sees. "I want to control the entire value equation."

Tablexchange doesn't mark the first time that restaurateurs have felt threatened, or even just repulsed, by a reservation-selling site: Last year, an online "concierge" service called PrimeTimeTables gained some negative buzz around New York restaurant blogs for daring to charge an exorbitant subscription fee for "guaranteed" reservations. But Erbst says Tablexchange is different. "What we are, we operate like a peer exchange," he said when asked about PrimeTimeTables. "We match up buyers and sellers, whereas they are just the sellers themselves."

Erbst added that Tablexchange, which makes money by taking a commission from each sale as well as through advertising revenue, doesn't operate in an auction format, so you won't see people bidding into the triple figures. Additionally, buyers and sellers are restricted to reservations on coveted Friday and Saturday nights (as well as weekdays during Restaurant Week). This may help Tablexchange save face by looking less sleazy, but it also could mean that another, more brazen site could come along and fill that niche.

All in all, there's a good chance that this sort of commodity could take off in New York--but don't look for it to become an epidemic on the scale of Hannah Montana tickets. "I think it's going to grow and get uglier in New York for sure. I don't see there being much opportunity in very many other cities," Eater's Leventhal said, adding that there just aren't many U.S. municipalities with such a high-demand restaurant industry. "But again, for me, I think it really comes back to scarcity. If the tables are not available, and people are willing to spend money on them, then chances are you're going to be willing to find someone willing to sell them."

And in the unlikely event that Tablexchange and potential rivals do manage to cause real headaches for the restaurant industry, there are some undesirable but nevertheless possible steps that could be taken: photo identification, or credit card verification, for example. And at the very least, a meticulous restaurant staff could keep tabs on potential opportunists: for example, if "Bill Gates" makes a reservation every Friday night but a different couple shows up each time.

"I think, to varying degrees, they already are paying closer attention to the names in the book and how the reservations are being secured," Leventhal said. "In a very basic way, the restaurateurs are not happy losing control of their reservations so they're going to do whatever they can to get it back."

Please don't wear five-inch heels on these stairs.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

A friend of mine once told me that one of the most striking characteristics of the Manhattan mini-neighborhood known as the Meatpacking District was the proliferation of "baby giraffes."

Basically, what he meant were the hordes of impossibly skinny young women in mile-high stiletto heels, teetering through the cobblestone streets of the party-heavy neighborhood as though they were juvenile specimens of Giraffa camelopardalis who couldn't quite control their pole-like legs. (In case you couldn't tell, the Meatpacking District's warehouses have largely given way to pricey designer boutiques and the nightclubs that keep Us Weekly's readership happy).

But those Giraffe Girls had better watch out, because the nerds are invading their watering hole.

On Friday night at 6 p.m., the doors will formally open to the third and largest Apple retail store in Manhattan, at the northernmost end of the Meatpacking District (it's on the corner of West 14th Street and 9th Avenue, to be more specific). Unlike its Fifth Avenue sibling, the West 14th Street Apple store won't be open 24/7--it closes at midnight, which might as well be the Meatpacking District equivalent of three o'clock in the afternoon. It's probably for the better. Steve Jobs has enough on his hands; he doesn't need to have to deal with dubious lawsuits from drunk girls in stilettos who've tumbled down that three-story glass staircase while trying to go hit on the guys behind the Genius Bar (they get way cuter after four cosmopolitans!)

The geeks have already taken roost at the old Port Authority building two blocks north, now home to New York's sprawling Google headquarters. Now they've staked a second claim with the Apple Store. Don't hold your breath, fellow techies, but if Tenjune gets replaced by a late-night arcade or something, we'll know the transformation is complete.

Click here for the rest of CNET News.com's fanboy-friendly photo gallery.

(Credit: twentyfour)

The coolest after-dark attractions just have to be across the pond, don't they? I'm drooling over screenshots of Twentyfour, which looks pretty darn awesome (though who knows what the crowd's like). With over a thousand LED color combinations available, this is one place where the decor won't get boring--and did I mention the walls are actually projection screens?

The video walls kind of remind me of the Nokia flagship store in Manhattan, but from what it sounds like, they're a lot more functional. Bar patrons can control, or even contribute their own scenery somehow--I should point out that this could get bad if alcohol's involved, you know, "You bloody wanker, why did you put the rainforest scene up there again?" Some of the projections are even interactive, responding in one way or another if you touch them or hold your drink up to them ("Ooh, the fish swim toward my martini!")

(Credit: twentyfour)

Here's the part I like the most--lay a hand on the bar, and it'll alert the bartender that you need another drink. Those of us used to crowded urban nightspots where it can take a full ten minutes for the bartender to even notice your existence can attest to the gravity of this breakthrough.

More photos at Geeksugar.