(Photo: Branch)

Conversation platform Branch announced in a post on its blog today that it is now out of invite-only beta and open to the public. With no more wait list, users can sign up immediately to start a conversation or group on Branch.

The startup also announced a host of new features, including the ability to highlight quotes in various branches as a way to reward positive feedback. "We think this serves two purposes," wrote Branch cofounder Josh Miller. "Creating valuable feedback for writers by letting them know when something they write is great, and a helpful signal for other readers by making branches easier to skim."

A new activity feed feature also allows users to see who is listening or watching a conversation they're hosting or participating in. Sorry, y'all: no more anony eavesdropping.

Branch kicked off 2013 by moving out of Betaworks into its own office space on 23rd St. and 3rd Ave. Mr. Miller told Betabeat that the new office is serving as a coworking space for a veritable who's who of New York tech, including "Amanda Peyton and the Grand St. crew, two ex-Foursquare employees doing a banking app, Anil Dash, Gina Trapani and Paul Ford." Medium, the new blogging platform from Twitter founder (and Branch mentor) Ev Williams, will also host its content team out of the Branch HQ.

Ms. Peyton (Photo: @msg via AmandaPeyton.com)

All that hardware-is-the-new-software talk you've been hearing will soon get an equally avant-garde means of distribution, courtesy of a new venture called Grand St. "We are re-thinking online electronics retail for this new era in hardware," Grand St. cofounder Amanda Peyton, a Y Combinator alum, told Betabeat.

Between the financial model for hardware shifting--with pre-sales on Kickstarter and IndieGoGo or product development through Quirky--not to mention 3D printing and rise of the maker, "The experience of finding and buying new personal technology needs to adapt as well," Ms. Peyton wrote on her blog yesterday, in an introduction to Grand St.

"The biggest players are the same--Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Amazon," Ms. Peyton added. "Given all the above changes, surely this segment would have to shift." As one of her commenters noted, working capital requirements for retail deals is a big drag on getting new hardware to the masses. Presumably Grand St.--a reference to Williamsburg, natch--wants to fix that.

Ms. Peyton, an MBA from MIT, cofounded MessageParty, a since-shuttered location app. Her two cofounders at Grand St. are Betabeat poachable Joe Lallouz and his partner-in-crime Aaron Henshaw, both developers from the dearly departed Hashable.

What exactly does the trio mean by "personal technology"? A Nike Fuelband, a Makerbot, your very own hipster cooking device? "Personal technology is anything in your life with an on button," Ms. Peyton explained by email. "We would definitely be open to selling all three, though we are planning to focus on more independent producers in the beginning."

Ironically, a big part of this emerging push towards hardware has been facilitated by software, Ms. Peyton explained on her blog. She elaborated on that in an email to Betabeat, pointing to, "software/hardware combos like the Jambox, which can be customized from the web, or the Lark which tracks your sleep and gives you insight via iPhone app."

Customizing those iPhones and Android devices you can't seem to put down will play a big role in this sector, Ms. Peyton predicted. "This creates a huge demand for the right kind of customer service that can educate consumers on these new devices."

While the "gadget-obsessed web nerds," go about building out Grand St., early adopters can visit the placeholder site for a chance to win cash, credit, or a donation to charity playing a game called Snake. We're pretty sure you can beat Betabeat's score, a big, fat "0."

Discussing plans to ruin el Internet, probably.

Message Party founder Amanda Peyton was in for a rude awakening this morning when she tried to do the right thing. Rather than taking the Internet's word for it that the proposed Protect IP Act (PIPA) is inherently evil—"I know how myopic the tech world can be sometimes," she notes—Ms. Peyton decided to go to the source:  Senator Chuck Schumer, co-sponsor of the bill.

After protest from tech industry leaders and human rights groups, PIPA, in essence the Senate's version of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), is already being reconsidered by its author, Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT-D). Sen. Leahy is calling for more research. But as it stands, the legislation would subject a website that contains copyright infringing content to being de-indexed from search engines, blocked from ISPs, and stopped from doing accessing business services like PayPal.

Enough backstory. On her blog, Ms. Peyton, narrated what happened when she called up good ole Chuck.

The first question I asked was “why does the Senator support this legislation?”

The guy on the other end of the phone said: well, he’s a co-sponsor so he’s not changing his position.

He must have known why I was calling.

Asked the same question again. This time the reply I got this time was different: Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the internet.

....

No one has been brazen enough to drop the C-word without hesitation. But this dude apparently had no problem with it. I said again: “So you’re saying Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the internet?”

Yes.

He then backpedaled a bit, and mentioned that Schumer is in favor of censoring illegal activities on the internet. But still, the C-word.

I could hear the phone-answerer smacking his lips in the background, grinning and thinking: ALL YOUR CAT PHOTOS ARE BELONG TO US. on a centrally controlled website owned by Viacom.

If that rubs you the wrong way, not to fear: there's an (emergency) Meetup for that.

But there's another upside to this disappointing tale. When Ms. Peyton called, an actual human being answered the phone! "There’s no annoying menus, no transfers, no answering machines. Washington, please don’t ever change this." Everything else about Washington, however... big room for improvement.

CLARIFICATION: Ms. Peyton received a call from Sen. Schumer's office clarifying the senator's position:

1. It’s not just Hollywood – another big issue that they are trying to combat here is piracy related to physical products that are sold by overseas websites: counterfeit chips, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, etc.
2. DMCA is incredibly effective, but only for the companies that actually comply with it.
3. There have been some changes made to the bill already that take into account the concerns of the tech community. For example, yesterday one of the Senate sponsors said “he will recommend that the the Senate gives DNS blacklisting “more study” before moving ahead”.
4. The tech community is very important to New York State, and so are all the other industries here who support the bill (entertainment, manufacturing), and while the outcry from the opposition has been heard, it is also pretty recent. Back when they were researching the bill, they felt there was a balance of interest between those who were for and against it.

(flickr.com/usnationalarchives)

Underlit bars and blaring techno set the scene at the Park Avenue Armory earlier this month, when a who’s who of New York’s tech scene gathered in the cavernous block-length building for the sort of startup event that bore little resemblance to the usual beer, pizza and Powerpoint office gathering. No, this was a fashion show; a nerdy fashion show, to be sure, but one with glamour and theatrics. Raise Cache, a fundraiser for the apprentice developer program HackNY, tapped local tech personalities to walk the runway outfitted in glasses from local e-prescriber Warby Parker, slacks from e-tailor Bonobos and accessories from e-jeweler Bauble Bar. Larger-than-life cartoon avatars lorded over the crowd from the DJ booth as amateur DJs spun tracks using Union Square-based streaming music startup Turntable.fm. Founders and VCs milled about in gowns, coattails, pinstriped vests, glittery tights and cowboy hats. A recording of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has been pumping his pom-poms for the New York tech scene of late, boomed out at the close of the show: “Now more than ever, [New York] is the place for to be for tech soirees!”

That seems to be the consensus among a contingent of New York founders who made the pilgramge to the tech mecca of Silicon Valley but have returned to be part of an up-and-coming scene, as well as for the nightlife, the restaurants, and the higher baseline average peer attractiveness. “There's a lot more good-looking people in New York,” one founder told Betabeat. “Don't quote me about that, but if it's something you want to work that into the story, there's definitely something there.”

In the past, incubator programs in Silicon Valley contributed to a techie brain drain from East to West. Paul Graham, the architect of the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator, insists Silicon Valley is the best place to start a company, and often counsels his startup acolytes to set up shop nearby. The vast majority of the Y Combinator alumni network is in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View and San Francisco. Tales of New York-based founders like Matt Mireles, a Columbia graduate and uber-hustler founder of a video transcription startup, shipped out to the Valley when they found themselves struggling in New York are common. “But if you're a schmoe like me and you've got a big, world-changing dream, NYC is not the best place for you,” Mr. Mireles wrote in a heavy-hearted blog post about the move in February 2010. “The odds are already stacked against you. Being outside the Valley just stacks them higher.”

Whatever the reason, a passel of companies have recently boomeranged back to the city after a season on the far shore. The longtime tech mantra of ‘go West, young founder” is being revised for the simple reason that New York’s tech scene is up-and-coming, more social and more fun. Recent Y Combinator grads Codecademy, The Fridge, MessageParty, Hirehive and Tutorspree all moved back the New York within the past 18 months. Sam Rosen, plucked from Flatiron’s General Assembly for the Mountain View accelerator 500 Startups by superangel Dave McClure, returned after the program ended.  “My friends in New York City—one would be in marketing, my good friend was a producer at MTV, other friends are lawyers. Whereas in the Valley you go to the party and everyone is in tech,” he told Betabeat in January. “It’s not like I’m tired of talking about my company, but it’s all we talk about.” Josh Weinstein, founder of the Facebook competitor CollegeOnly who later pivoted to interactive web television with a startup called YouAre.TV, ventured out to the Valley to work with a cofounder and be closer to investor Peter Thiel. In September, he returned—mostly because the cofounder bailed on him, but partly because he felt “isolated,” he said.

Amanda Peyton, MIT business school graduate and proud owner of a 212 cell phone number, moved out to Menlo Park in the summer of 2010 to participate in Y Combinator with her cofounders of the mobile blogging platform MessageParty. “It reminded me of Westchester, where I grew up,” she told Betabeat. “We had a lot of space where we lived, and the grocery store was really big and nice and things like that.” At the end of the summer, she and her roommates found out they had been living in the three-bedroom house that Lisa Brennan Jobs, Steve Jobs’s daughter, grew up in. The house was also next to Sand Hill Road, where all the big VC firms are, but there were only two places to eat within walking distance: Safeway, and a well-loved bar called the Dutch Goose.

At the end of the program, Ms. Peyton started talking to friends and colleagues about where to go next. “I had two arguments for going back to New York,” she said. “One was more of a macro trends argument about how there's so many industries in New York that are going through truly fundamental shifts... but then I was talking to one guy, and he was like, why don't you just admit that the reason you want to move back to New York is because you want to live in New York? And I was like: you're totally right. I just want to.”

Ms. Peyton and her team are now ensconced in the former Williamsburg coworking space The Makery (currently transforming into the office of conversation-logger Bnter). “There's just more stuff to do in New York,” she said. “There's more places to eat, more people to hang out with. I just learned how to work smarter. Yeah I have cut down the hours a little bit, but I don't feel like I'm any less productive. I just don't feel like I'm only working.”

Same Same, but Different! 15 Parallels Between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley [SLIDESHOW] >>

Beyond the pizza and the social scene, New York’s startup support network is booming. There are more tech companies starting, more investors scouting for tech companies, more rockstar startups—Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter, Tumblr, to name a few—and more developers teaching themselves the lightweight coding skills that power much of the consumer internet. There have also been some high-profile exits, including GroupMe’s $85 million sale to Skype and Hunch’s $80 million acquisition by eBay, both in the last six months.

New York also embodies a camaraderie and enthusiasm that derives from being a relatively unproven startup hub still forging an identity.

RRE Ventures principal Tom Loverro, who recently moved back to New York after four years at a startup in Silicon Valley and a stint in Chicago, was impressed by the Raise Cache techie fashion show. “The New York Tech Scene has not only arrived, but it is different and it is defining its own trajectory,” he wrote in a blog post. “It is characteristically and unabashedly New York. The event itself was a fashion show. It was young and full of 21-35 year old urbanites.”

Kirill Sheynkman, who heads up the U.S. arm of RTP Ventures, a $750 $700 million fund based in Russia, was more cynical. “It’s great to have that attitude, but it’s [like] a high school football team,” he said. “What was the line from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? ‘San Dimas High School football rules!’”

Mr. Sheynkman spent most of his career in Silicon Valley as a former entrepreneur in residence at Sequoia Capital and venture partner at Greycroft before he moved to New York and became enamored of the city.

Traditionally there have been three reasons for starting a company in the Valley, he said. “For a long time the VCs in the Valley would only invest in local companies. That has changed,” he said. ”The old saying of, ‘I'm not going to invest anything unless I can drive to the board meeting’ … was in the days before we had Skype and iChat and Go To Meeting. Now you have weekly status meetings on video and they're just as great as being there. It was a little bit of an attitude. ‘You have to come to us and not us come to you.’”

The second argument is that when a company gets started, the top priority is hiring the right people. While there is more techie talent in Silicon Valley, he said, there is also a higher concentration of startups and significantly more established tech companies to suck that talent up. “Prices are higher in the Valley than they are in New York,” he said. “Although New York isn't cheap in terms of hiring people.”

The third argument is that there is a more active tech scene in the Valley, he said. “In terms of meeting people and hanging out, New York is much better. It's in the nature of the city to go out there and network and be social.” He pointed to Meetup.com, a ten-year-old New York-based startup that serves up tech rendezvous on every topic from Javascript to Hadoop to Twitter etiquette. “It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous,” he said. “There's a meeting every night somewhere.”

Indeed, the number of recurring tech events on Meetup.com has wildly accelerated: Startup Lunch, 193 members; Dumbo Tech Breakfast, 783 members; UWS Startup Meetup, 240 members; the New York Technology Bathhouse Meetup, 31 members; the Wall Street to Startups Meetup, 98 members.

And yet, “there's still a lot of learning that I think New York has to do,” Mr. Sheynkman said.  “A lot of the companies are in love with doing a startup for the sake of doing a startup. They're MBAs that think instead of a career at Goldman, we're going to do a startup company!” We imagined him rolling his eyes on the other end of the line. “You know, you actually might want to do your thing at Goldman Sachs, it might actually be better for you.”

By way of disclaimer, he added: “I'm a New Yorker, I'm never leaving Manhattan. I love the city. Let’s make sure we mention that.“

“I get the impression that there tend to be proportionally more folks in New York that are trying to start companies but have no fucking clue what they're doing,” Fitocracy CEO Brian Wang told Betabeat by Gchat. He and his cofounder, Dick Talens, are subletting their apartment in Clinton Hill while they complete a session at 500 Startups. “Granted, I don't think I have a fucking clue either.”

At any rate, he plans to head back east when the program is over. “We're pretty set on returning to New York,” he said. “Both Dick and I enjoy New York City as a place to live immensely. Honestly, that's 95 percent of the reason. The other five percent for me, is probably the hope and expectation that the New York City scene will continue to grow and mature and that we can call ourselves an important part of that.”

Same Same, but Different! 15 Parallels Between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley [SLIDESHOW] >>

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article identified Tom Loverro as a partner at RRE Ventures; that is incorrect. He is a principal. Betabeat regrets the error.

Full-time entrepreneur, part-time factchecker.

In in its Sunday issue, the New York Post put its own spin on data showing that New York City's tech start-ups racked up $1.7 billion in funding this past year. Using numbers from CB Insights, the paper identified nine "NYC tech giants" based on the amount of funding those start-ups had accrued. But at least one tech scene native was restless over the way the results were reported.

On her Tumblr, MessageParty co-founder Amanda Peyton, who works out of the Makery's co-working space in Williamsburg, pointed out some of the "half-truths or straight-up errors" in the piece. Her issue wasn't the numbers, but rather the way the paper described what the companies do. After acknowledging that the tech reporting isn't exactly in the Post's wheelhouse, Ms. Peyton added, "But surely someone there should know that Foursquare isn’t an e-commerce company."

Here are some of the points of contention Ms. Peyton circled in red:

“FourSquare Location E-Com” — Foursquare is misspelled and is not an e-commerce company. They have little revenue except for maybe the fact that they sell Foursquare shirts on their website, though that’s hardly a defining characteristic of the company.

“AppNexus Web Services” — web services?  What does this even mean?  That they do shit on the internets?  Yes, I suppose that’s fitting, but if you need to summarize the company in three words maybe “advertising” somewhere in there would help. “Real-time ad platform” is clearly too advanced.

”Squarespace Web Developement”  -- Web development implies a dev shop — a group of people who make website for other people.  Squarespace is not this.  Squarespace makes *software* that helps individuals make websites on their own. Big difference - one is scalable, the other is not.

“Adkeeper Web Ad Development”  Adkeeper does not make ads. “Ad Development” implies that they are somehow involved in the process of making advertisements for the web, which they in no way are.  They make software that allows consumers to save advertisements, which is tangentially related to “Ad Development," kinda.

If Ms. Peyton ever gets bored with building her own company, we bet old media's fact-checking departments will gladly snatch such an eye for detail.

Twitter symbolizes Wall Street: "Frenetic, Jumbled, Terse, but incredibly powerful."

Tumblr stands in for West Village and Meatpacking: "Coolness to a fault."

Worth checking out the whole thing here.

In the meantime, feel free to get even more specific in the comments. Betabeat was thinking 4Chan for the surviving smut of West Times Square and maybe Facebook knock-off Renren for Canal Street.

You looking at me? You blogging right here?

When it launched a year ago, MessageParty was a sort of Yobongo / Chat Roulette, letting users send messages to one another in a given local. But CEO Amanda Payton noticed that folks weren't talking to one another so much, instead they were recording a sort of narrative of the location. Today the service relaunches in New York as a Geo Blogging platform for users to leave notes, videos and images tagged to a certain place.

In this way MessageParty is kind of like an expanded version of Foursquare's Tips, and some folks, like Chris Carella, have taken to using it to leave small comments on venues. Another interesting comparison might be the audio check in service Broadcastr, although MessageParty lets users pin a variety of media to a venue.

At the Bedford L, for example, some noted that "Thursday night, 11:30pm. I sauntered onto the platform as the Manhattan-bound train pulled in, no big. As the hordes of hipsters packed onto the train, I couldn't help but notice one girl anchor herself against the door of the train and roll the most perfect hand-rolled cigarette (natch) while the train screeched and tumbled back and forth all the way to 1st avenue. Talent. Williamsburg-style."

There are no game mechanics at work here, so the service is going to need a critical mass of users in order to make itself the kind of app people would open on a daily basis. That, or they could try and pull localized content from other sources like Foursquare and Flickr so that items with the same geo-tag all get nested in the stream of info associated with a place on MessageParty.

"The decision to keep game mechanics out was intentional," said Peyton. "I think that synchronous interaction is really hard on mobile, especially with strangers. We want to spotlight great placed-based content."