This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Winter is coming.

No, I'm not talking about the weather (though it has been getting chilly lately). Nor Game of Thrones (FYI, season 3 begins on March 31 for those keeping track!). I'm talking about the growing perception in Startupland that the good times might really be coming to an end (for now). Following last week's post by Fred Wilson was this one by PandoDaily's Sarah Lacy, talking about the Series A crunch and how as many as thousand companies who've received seed rounds won't be around in six months. Then there's this one by TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis, arguing that the Series A crunch actually extended to Series B, C and D. So what should entrepreneurs make of all this? Do what ya should be doing anyway--focus on building an insanely great product that customers really want and start thinking about monetization early. Personally, I think this is the best time to build a company.

My buddy Steve Rosenbaum (founder/CEO of Magnify) is NYCEDC’s Entrepreneur at Large, and he'll be doing virtual office hours (via Google Hangout) to answer all your startup and entrepreneurship questions. Register here.

I have a couple of free tickets to the upcoming Mobile Loco conference in San Francisco on December 11. Speakers include Andrew Mason (Groupon), Bill Gurley (Benchmark Capital), Don Dodge (Google) and others. If interested, just shoot me an email at gary@garysguide.com with your Name, Title and Company. We'll pick two randomly selected winners.

The annual Amazon AWS Startup Challenge deadline is at midnight this Wed (December 5). This year there'll be four grand prizes (gaming, big data, consumer apps & business apps). Each prize includes $50,000 in cash + $50,000 in AWS credits. Nice!

And the deadline for nominating a startup for the Crunchies (co-hosted by TechCrunch, GigaOm and VentureBeat) is this Thursday (December 6).

In case ya missed TechDrinkup last week, a casting team from Bravo's Start-ups did show, looking for NYC-edition characters. Here's Betabeat's writeup, with all the juicy details.

Going slightly off-topic ... I'm in fairly good shape but I've been feeling the urge lately to find a kickass fitness regimen and get in reaaalllly great shape. But with a ton of holiday parties coming up, I'm wondering if I should start now or wait until after the holidays? Hmmmm ... If anyone has any interesting fitness or diet routines to recommend, feel free to email me.

And now let's see whats going down in the Alley this week...

TEDxSiliconAlley 2012
The theme is Rise of the Machines and the keynote speaker is Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near). Also includes Bre Pettis (founder, Makerbot), Francessca Ferrando (philosopher of posthumanism & visiting scholar at Columbia), Jincey Lumpkin (attorney & Huffington Post sex columnist) and Ken Segall (creative director of Apple's "Think Different" campaign).
Monday (Dec. 3), 9:30 a.m. @ Terminal 5, 610 W. 56th Street

Lean Startup Conference Livestream
Keynotes by Marc Andreessen, Steve Blank, Beth Comstock and Eric Ries.
Monday (Dec. 3), 12 p.m. @ WeWorkLabs, 175 Varick Street, 4th Fl.

Windows Apps Labs Launch at WeWork Labs
Access to the newest Windows 8 devices (including Microsoft Surface). Also Bing Fund, the new angel fund and incubation program backed by Microsoft, will be dropping in to talk about the program.
Monday (Dec. 3), 6 p.m. @ WeWork Labs, 175 Varick Street

NY Mobile First: App Pitch Showdown
With Nihal Mehta (ENIAC Ventures), Sim Blaustein (Bertelsmann Venture Capital), Charlie O'Donnell (Brooklyn Bridge Ventures), Chieh Huang (Zynga NY) and Heather Hromoho (Millennial Media).
Monday (Dec. 3), 7 p.m. @ Alley NYC, 500 7th Avenue, 17th Fl.

Think Commerce Summit
Rockstar speaker list including Jon Miller (former CEO, Digital Media Group, News Corp), Bob Pittman (chairman & CEO, Clear Channel), Ben Lerer (CEO, Thrillist), Eric Hippeau (partner, Lerer Ventures), Shana Fisher (Highline Venture Partners), Ezra Kucharz (president, Local Digital Media, CBS), Nick Lehman (president of digital, NBC Universal) and others.
Tuesday (Dec. 4), 12 a.m. @ Chelsea Piers - Pier 60, 23rd Street and 11th Avenue

Xconomy Forum: Mobile Madness New York
With Rich Miner (Google Ventures), Roger Ehrenberg (IA Ventures), Peter Flint (Polaris Venture Partners), Joe Essenfeld (Jibe), Eric Koester (Zaarly), Robby Stein (Yahoo), Jalak Jobanputra (FuturePerfect Ventures), Rahul Sood (Bing Fund) and others.
Tuesday (Dec. 4), 2 p.m. @ NYC Microsoft Office, 1290 6th Avenue

December 2012 NY Tech Meetup
You know the drill. Five-minute, rapid-fire demos. A bunch of amazing new startups. Now hopefully you've managed to snag one of those elusive tickets.
Tuesday (Dec. 4), 7 p.m. @ NYU Skirball Center For The Performing Arts, 566 Laguardia Place

TechHub NY - A Very Merry TechHub
Networking, hosted drinks and bites, DJs, photo-booth action, and more.
Wednesday (Dec. 5), 6:30 p.m. @ Ace Hotel, 20 W. 29th Street

Pitchcrawl 2.0 - Angel Investor / Entrepreneur Mixer
Investors include Marissa Campise (Venrock), Lucas Nelson (DFJ Gotham), Rahul Gandhi (High Peaks Venture Partners), Mark Wachen (DreamIt Ventures), Peter Flint (Polaris Venture Partners), Charlie Kemper (Revel Partners & ERA), William Peng (Raptor) and others.
Wednesday (Dec. 5), 7 p.m. @ To be decided

Columbia Engineering Entrepreneurship Night
Arguably among the most influential technology entrepreneurs over the last decade, Bill Campbell and Ben Horowitz will discuss the new NYC tech boom, how it is driving the East Coast startup ecosystem, and how NYC entrepreneurship is giving Silicon Valley a run for its money.
Thursday (Dec. 6), 6 p.m. @ Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W. 18th Street

Water Collective Holiday Party
An evening of open bar, hors d'oeuvres, silent auction, and raffle to celebrate a new year of clean water and economic empowerment.
Thursday (Dec. 6), 7 p.m. @ Top Of The Garden, 251 W. 30th Street, 16th Fl.

Celebrate the Arts with AlleyNYC (Holiday Party!)
Just pure partying and having fun with awesome people.
Thursday (Dec. 6), 8 p.m. @ AlleyNYC, 500 7th Avenue, 17th Fl.

Investor series with Erik Norlander of Google Ventures
Google is one of the largest companies and a frequent dream strategic partner, investor, acquirer. Hear from the inside how it works as well as the acquisition process.
Friday (Dec. 7), 4 p.m. @ The Lab, 122 W. 26th Street, 5th Fl.

Hack // Meat
Bringing together technologists, entrepreneurs, creatives, policy experts, non-profit leaders and industry executives to develop technologies and tools that help democratize meat.
Friday (Dec. 7), 6 p.m. @ Grind, 419 Park Avenue South, 2nd Fl.

TimesOpen Hack Day
A day filled with learning, coding, tinkering, having fun and hanging out with some of the best developers in NYC.
Saturday (Dec. 8), 10 a.m. @ The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, 15th Fl.

More events on the horizon...
Women in Wireless Holiday Party on Dec. 10 @ SoHo House
Charity Ball 2012 on Dec. 10 @ 69th Regiment Armory
FashInvest 2012 Capital Conference on Dec. 11 @ Fashion Institute of Technology
10 Startup Mistakes to Avoid on Dec. 11 @ Orrick at The CBS Building
Damsels in Design 2012 Holiday Soiree on Dec. 11 @ Museum of the City of New York
Perfecting Your Business Development Strategies on Dec. 12 @ Anchin
Ultra Light Startups: Investor Feedback Forum on Dec. 13 @ Microsoft
StartupBus: Accelerate NYC 2012 on Dec. 15 @ The Alley
December NY Enterprise Technology Meetup on Dec. 18 @ Cooley
Windows 8 Launch Celebration! on Dec. 18 @ Microsoft

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! ;)