Souvenir from South by.

"I got my first match!" one of the cofounders of Bang With Friends told Betabeat earlier this week as we scarfed down free grilled cheese on the curb outside the Austin Convention Center. Around us, hordes of lanyard-wearing South by Southwest attendees swarmed by, eyes firmly fixed on their smartphones.

Unfortunately, the match--facilitated on the since-banned Bangs with SXSW specialty site--wasn't a lust connection. "It happened at 3 or 4 am, so I was already too far gone at that point."

For the unaware monogamists among us, Bang With Friends--a play on Zynga's Words With Friends--is a website that serves up photos of your Facebook friends. It looks like a Pinterest page, but acts like a catalog of potential one night stands--pulled from your existing social network. If the urge strikes, users can click the "down to bang" button below their Facebook profile picture. The desired partner is only notified if they also selected you for a night of more-than-friendly benefits, reducing the risk of rejection and lowering the barrier to boning.

The trio of San Francisco-based cofounders, who met while working for the same tech company, are maintaining their anonymity for now. All we can say is the brosef was blond and friendly. However, he did reveal that Bang With Friends is moving from a side project into a full-time occupation. And it sounds like they're in the process of raising funds. "No comment" and a vague reference to SEC rules was all we could weasel out of our grilled cheese companion.

He was much more loquacious when it came to the Facebook-connected app's potential, which should be helped along by the mobile app currently under development. "It's too insane to ignore," he said of the service, which has already picked up  750,000 users who have hit the “down to bang” button 16 million times. About 70 percent of Bang With Friends users are between the ages of 18 and 34--a demo Facebook isn't willing to ignore. "Overall," he said, "we have a good relationship with [Facebook]. They're happy to have us on their platform."

"Our generation responds to that open and honest approach," he added, "We cut through the bullshit."

The aforementioned bullshit, of course, refers to the niceties of dating and online dating in particular, which can require a little more conversation--and game--before you know if someone is DTF. "How does anyone describe themselves? It's fucking insane that they're expected to do that," he said of the process of filling out profiles on sites like OkCupid. 

The shortcomings of online dating were a hot topic at SXSW. The day before we met Bang with Friends, Betabeat had attended a panel called "Dating By Accident: Finding Love While You Tweet," hosted by New York Times reporter Brian Stelter and his girlfriend, NY1 traffic reporter Jamie Shupak, who argued that DM flirting on Twitter might serve lonely hearts better than conventional matchmaking sites.

"I feel like the geo-location part [of finding love through social networks] is just starting to be tapped," Mr. Stelter told the crowd before adding that no, he didn’t mean “tapped,” like that. Ms. Shupak looked on aghast, but as Mr. Stelter pointed out with a YOLO-ish shrug, it was already 5pm and, hey, even Grindr was hosting a party later that night.

Bang With Friends was hardly the only libidinous brand with a presence at SXSW. There was also Qpid.me, the website that lets users verify a potential partner's STD status via smartphone. In an email to Betabeat, founder Ramin Bastani said he got the idea after, "A girl slapped me in the face after I'd essentially asked if she'd been 'tested.'  I figured there had to be a better way!" (He also directed us to "90 second video of that awkward story :)." In fact, Mr. Grilled Cheese was wearing one of the multi-colored leis from his previous meeting with Qpid.

To promote Bang With Friends in Austin, the cofounders launched that specialty SXSW site--somewhat superfluous considering the rivers of free alcohol and convenient hotel rooms. Conference organizers sent it a cease-and-desist letter for an unsanctioned use of "SXSW" in the original URL. But the startup still got 3,560 attendees to sign up and facilitated 221 matches by Tuesday. They also handed out "a few thousand" customized condoms with a Kama Sutra-esque logo.

If that sounds appealing, we should note that the company is hiring. "Culture is very important to us," said the cofounder--sounding like pretty much every other techie we know. "As you can imagine, we need to be able to talk about sex and say whatever the fuck we want," he added.

The company's 'no rules' approach to bed-hopping has gained traction on college campuses, he said, noting anecdotal evidence from U.C. Santa Barbara and Chico State. According to MakeLoveNotPorn founder Cindy Gallop, however, its popularity has traveled further than that. At a women in tech brunch the next day--"Lean in . . . to your mimosa"--she told us that after a recent debate at her alma mater, Oxford University, a number of students approached her to ask if she had heard of Bang with Friends. “They literally said to me: ‘This is exactly what we need. This is perfect for us!’” (The Bang with Friends cofounder told us the service is actually most popular in Germany, with the U.S. and Brazil vying for second place.)

Ms. Gallop, a veteran advertising exec, also brought up Bang With Friends on stage during her SXSW panel on the future of porn, which had a line snaking out past well past the ballroom doors. The app got a big round of applause. Ms. Gallop first met the cofounders in a Google hangout after chatting on Twitter. "I went into it quite cynical. I did not expect to be as impressed as I was by the team," she said.

The use case for women might be stronger than Hollywood would have you assume. The cofounder we spoke to said they receive a lot of thank you notes from members who say, "I've always wanted to do this and now it's easy." From women, the feedback has been around freedom from having to make the first move. "They're not overwhelmed by all these [online dating] messages. They can safely mark the guys they always had a crush on," he said.

He also brushed off the criticism that Bang With Friends is a sign of technology inhibiting our ability to talk to one another. "Just because we cut through the bullshit doesn't mean you're not gonna communicate," he said. Rather, it helps navigate the "fine line" of not wanting to compromise a friendship.

Venture capitalists should understand the appeal, he said. "The thing about VCs, they're humans too. It's okay to be curious and it's okay to take a look." That initial SXSW match may not have worked out, but he and his fellow cofounders have eaten their own dog food, so to speak.

Both he and Ms. Gallop situated the startup as a sign of sex positive culture because, he said, "It's putting sex it its proper place in the conversation. What we wanted to be is not necessarily a straight Grindr, but it has some of those elements."

Social media-phobes should be aware of one definite downside, though. In addition to your number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, you now have to worry about your "Bangability" quotient. The cofounder wouldn't offer many details about the "the exact proprietary algorithm," but it takes into account the number of times people have decided they're "down to bang" you, as well as views, clicks, number of Facebook friends, and the number of friends who have joined the service. Just imagine the Klout perks on that influencer metric.

A version of this story appeared in the March, 13, 2013 issue of The New York Observer. 

(Photo: DeviantArt)

2012 was quite a year for the New York tech community. Several NYC startups scored monster exits, while others raised millions to up their chances of scoring a ping pong table for the office. Whether or not that hotly debated bubble bursts, we imagine 2013 will be another exciting year for NYC's tech set. Here are some New Year's resolutions from some of the NYC tech community's boldest names.

Rachel Haot, NYC Chief Digital Officer

1.      Cook more meals at home (FreshDirect and BlueApron)

2.      Shop local (local goods on Etsy: http://on.nyc.gov/ZPpbIp)

3.      Read more books (both physical and digital: all three NYC public library systems now offer e-books)

4.      Volunteer more often (http://www.nycservice.org/#s)

5.      Learn a new skill – like middle eastern cooking or how to use a letterpress.

Ryder Ripps, Cofounder of OkFocus

Work more, vroom bye haters.

Mallory Blair, Cofounder of Small Girls PR

Identifying our year's wins and losses and using that information to create defined roles for new team members to hire in the first quarter. Then the rest of 2013 is  about running the business instead of being the business.

Cindy Gallop, Founder of Make Love Not Porn

1. To champion and help every entrepreneur who wants to change the world through sex....This is the one place with enormous potential for innovation, disruption, and colossal financial returns, that the tech world refuses to go. I want to help drive more open-mindedness in the tech community around startups to do with sex.

2. To identify and use anything that is the future of money and payments. This resolution is born out of the frustrations and difficulties we've had setting up our payments infrastructure for MakeLoveNotPorn.tv.

Those difficulties led us to spend a lot of time and effort researching and talking to fintech startups, with the result that I am now passionate about working with and using anyone/thing inventing the future of money, finance and payments, both in an MLNPTV context and also a personal context.

Paul Berry, Cofounder of RebelMouse

My resolution is to keep focused and clever and build the fundamental culture for RebelMouse to grow from.

Christina DiRusso, PR Manager at Livestream

More: Reading, Engineering (currently learning to be a Livestream Encoding Engineer), Entertaining in, and exploring, my new Brooklyn hood, and Reality-TV watching. Less: Emailing, English (honing my Italian skills), Gchatting with my dad.

Josh Miller, Cofounder of Branch

Figure out how to get my (non-techie) roommates to be addicted to Branch, and learn how to rap so I can complement A-Flock's beat boxing (one of our engineers).

Dave Winer, Software Developer and Writer

My resolution for the New Year is: I will do what I can to make tech writing more literate. (Ed. Note: Read more about Mr. Winer's resolution here.)

Ricky Robinett, Hacker at Ordr.in

Be the first hacker in XXL.

Jason Baptiste, Cofounder of OnSwipe

On a personal level, I really want to get back into writing and blogging.  It's why I started Onswipe and lead to my book coming out.  On a professional level?  It's growing Onswipe in a revenue generating machine.  It's an aggressive goal and year, but we have the team + traction to do it.

Jose Mejia, Editorial Director at Huge

One of my resolutions, which I think a lot of people can relate to if they're honest with themselves, is to stop using work/being busy as an easy excuse for what are really just basic character flaws that I need to fix. If I can avoid issuing  "Sorry I'm running late, something came up at work" texts like they're stock in the Shitty Friend IPO, it'll be a good year.

Alex Taub, Biz Dev Builder at Dwolla

My New Years resolution is to be faster and better at creating relevant pop culture twitter parody accounts- a la @invisibleobama

Suri Ratnatunga, Community Lead at Sidetour

To take no cabs in 2013 unless I'm stranded/drunk in Brooklyn.

Crystal Fawn, Community Engagement at Atavist

To read all the books that Stanley Kubrick based his films on.

Taylor Lorenz, Social Media Specialist at McGarryBowen

Stop and think before including emoji in every text message.

Nitasha Tiku, Editor of Betabeat

Make friends based on charger compatibility.

(Photo: Twitter)

Last time we heard from Jenna Haze, the infamous porn star was performing unspeakable acts on blissed-out, ripped male costars. Now officially an ex-porn actress, Ms. Haze has harnessed the same enthusiasm it takes to give a good BJ and transitioned it to the business world, partnering with startup Daily Desire, a "lifestyle flash-sale site created for the adventurous consumer with a penchant for high-end sexy luxury products and brands."

Daily Desire isn't the first site to merge sex and tech. A few weeks ago, we reported on Boink Box, which is essentially Birchbox for sex toys. Then the ever-salacious Queen Cougar Cindy Gallop launched her own reality-based porn site. So if we already have a sex toy subscription service and a video porn startup, a sexy flash site was really the only logical next step.

According to a press release, "DailyDesire.com will feature a collection of carefully selected products, from sexy swimwear, lingerie and alluring bedroom accessories, to provocative art, home furnishings and travel packages, available exclusively to its members." Oh, we really hope "home furnishings" includes a lamp in the shape of a dildo.

"We all know sex sells, but it never has in a safe and classy environment like this," Ms. Haze said in a press release (we assume she's never heard of Babeland?). "Shoppers will immediately notice the high-aesthetic and quality in all of the products we offer, as well as the new and exciting way we'll deliver them."

In order to inaugurate the partnership, Ms. Haze has filmed a typically NSFW ad spot for the new startup, costarring her butt. Watch it in the comfort of your own home here.

Ms. Gallop. (Photo: Kevin Abosch)

“Porn is homogenizing sex,” Cindy Gallop proclaimed on a recent rainy Wednesday, her blond bob swinging with emphasis. The result, according to Ms. Gallop: A generation of young men, all too many of whom think the most natural landing place for their ejaculate is a woman’s face, and a generation of young women, all too many of whom think they're required not just to participate, but wholly enjoy such an act.

This isn’t an academic notion for Ms. Gallop, a veteran advertising executive-turned-social theorist-turned-entrepreneur, or a societal ill stumbled across while perusing The Atlantic. “This is me going, ‘I fuck 22-year-olds,’” she said. “I know how this plays out in the real world. And that’s why I’m very motivated to do something about it.”

To that end, Ms. Gallop is launching—in barest beta form, strictly invite-only—MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, a startup she hopes will reverse the porn problem that she has dubbed the “single biggest impact that technology is having on human behavior today” in a manner befitting the internet: paying people to post videos of themselves having real sex.

Ms. Gallop lives in Chelsea, in a unit she ominously calls “the black apartment,” though the overall effect is more cabinet of curiosities than Amsterdam sex dungeon. A large painting of our hostess vamping in a tremendously low-cut black dress dominates the foyer. Inside, we encounterd low shelves littered with knickknacks including an impressive collection of erotic Japanese carvings and a pair of framed, crystal-encrusted handguns. We conducted our interview over a coffee table adornment of a taxidermied mongoose locked in eternal struggle with a cobra.

Before Ms. Gallop became a crusading sex educator hell-bent on changing the way Gen Y interacts with porn, she spent 27 years in the ad business, working with brands like Axe, Levi’s and Johnnie Walker. (Lately, she’s been consulting for L’Oréal, conceiving new fragrances.)

In 1998, she decamped from London to launch the American office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty. In 2005 she turned 45 and had, she said, “a bit of a midlife crisis.” After 16 years at BBH, she was ready to do something different but wasn’t quite sure what. So she left the agency with one organizing principle: “Let’s open myself up to everything that I possibly can.”

In 2008, she began kicking around the idea for MakeLoveNotPorn.com, a website designed to expose the various myths perpetrated by hard-core pornography. (For example, not all women are interested in facials of the bedroom variety.) The project was launched in 2009 with a brief talk at TED, an opening volley guaranteed to shake up the rarified proceedings at Long Beach’s gathering of ultra-hip eggheads. Ms. Gallop took the stage in black leather pants and pronounced: “I date younger men. And when I date younger men, I have sex with younger men.” (A pause for awkward giggles.) “And when I have sex with younger men, I encounter, very directly and personally, the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hard-core pornography in our culture.” (One loud laugh; much awkward shifting in seats.)

However, the website didn’t quite live up to its grab-the-world-by-the-shoulders introduction. It was bare-bones and, in terms of color palette, font and layout, evoked the sticky-floored sketchiness of an adult DVD store. Ms. Gallop freely admitted that she has put no money and little effort into the project since its initial launch, which is why it looks “so basic, so clunky, so minimal.”

Fixing the world’s impoverished sex education and making a dent in porn’s stranglehold on sexual norms would require something sexier. “If I want to counter the impact of porn as default sex education, I have to create something that has the potential to be, ultimately, as mass, as mainstream and as all-pervasive in our society today as porn currently is,” she said.

“I’m setting myself some very big goals, as you can see.”

Leaning forward and fixing us with a stare, she went on, “I want to help bring the individuality, the creativity and the self-expression back to [sex]. At the same time, I want to explode a lot of the received wisdom that exists out there about porn.” Porn itself, she was careful to emphasize, isn’t the problem. The problem is “the complete lack in our society of the open, healthy dialogue around sex and porn. If you boiled my entire message in Make Love Not Porn down to one thing, it’s pure and simply: Talk about it.”

Ms. Gallop in action. (Photo: Guest of a Guest)

Here’s how she proposes to turn her clunky myth-debunking site into a self-sustaining business powered by world-altering content: User-generated “real sex” videos. Not “amateur,” mind you—that term, as far as Ms. Gallop is concerned, implies that those of us who aren’t porn stars are clueless. No, these are videos of couples doing what they do, playing only to each other and not to the camera.

Would-be stars submit a video of themselves, fill out a couple of forms for compliance purposes (all information is immediately encrypted) and pay a nonrefundable $5 to have their work evaluated by Ms. Gallop and her head of content and community. Those videos that make the cut will be hosted and streamed on the Make Love Not Porn website. A payment of $5 will allow you to rent one of those videos for three weeks, and there’s no cap on the number of times you rewatch the video during that period. Submitters get 50 percent of the take, minus fees for hosting and the like.

A sneak peek of the site revealed a welcoming orange landing page, the platform seeded with 13 videos to set the tone. The first batch of videos is heavy on self-pleasure and “arty” shots, and the quality varies from video to video. One couple gets it on while remaining almost entirely clothed; the intro explains their apartment was cold. Lily Labeau and Danny Wylde, adult industry professionals, have contributed a video prefaced by a giggly introduction.

As for what will qualify going forward, well, Ms. Gallop and her colleagues will know it when they see it. She was quick to point out that the site is not anti-porn, and adamant that the goal is not simply “better pornography.” Nor is the object to provide a steady stream of soft-focus, cheesily romantic “female-friendly” adult content. “This is about simply recording what goes on in the real world,” she explained.

If that sounds a little fuzzy and open-ended, it’s meant to be. “We welcome anything and everything that is real-world, and that embraces a lot of different approaches,” she said.

Indeed, they are not shying away from the uncomfortable. For example, she’d like to see awkwardness-inducing bodily functions like “queefing” and “fanny farts,” she said. “Everyone does it, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Also welcome: period sex. “You never see that in porn,” she remarked, brow arched, before elaborating on what that might look like: “blood everywhere, no big deal, take the tampon out with your teeth, whatever turns you on.”

She also wants to see “the sexual equivalent of America’s Funniest Home Videos,” she told us: “If you can’t laugh at yourselves when you are having sex, when can you?" "Real world sex is more creative, more innovative, more surprising, more amazing, more arousing and more hot than porn will ever be.”

One couple, she told the Observer, had added an Instagram-like filter to their submission, a bit of stagecraft she seemed to find delightful.

However, for all her upbeat pitching, Ms. Gallop freely admitted that the site has been rather a bear to build. “Oh my bloody God,” she said, “you would not believe how extraordinarily difficult it has been.”

It took her two years to get funding. She finally raised $500,000 from an angel investor who’d prefer not to be named, and then she couldn’t get the cash for another two months, she said, because she couldn’t open a business banking account for a company with the word “porn” in the official name. Pivotal Labs, a San Francisco-based software design firm she’d worked with previously, turned down her request to build it. She’s had to resort to working with European credit card processors, to avoid the higher fees charged by American companies that work with adult businesses. Because PayPal won’t handle adult content, she’s working with online-payments upstart Dwolla to compensate contributors.

Ethan Imboden, the founder of luxe sex-toy maker JimmyJane, sympathizes. Venture capital firms often have limited partners like the California Pension System, which can’t exactly flounce around investing in sex-tech startups. And despite the “real-world” packaging, the site “will absolutely be categorized as pornography,” because, for the world at large, “that is the simplest way to describe what she’s doing."

“That’s a real hurdle,” he added, “because of one, the morality clauses banks and even VCs often have, and two, the general stigma, which is the result of such a long history of being seedy and often tied to unsavory characters.”

And getting the site up and running isn’t the end of the challenges Ms. Gallop and her team face. They’ve still got to add many of the social elements, like the system of badges for “exploring” and such. They haven’t even begun to build search functionality for the site.

A sampling of MakeLoveNotPorn.tv's wares.

The economics of porn aren’t what they used to be. The so-called “Tube Sites”—YouPorn, XTube and their ilk—have placed free pornography within a few mouse-clicks of anyone who wants it.  PornHub gets 15 million unique visitors per day; YouPorn gets 12 million. Both are owned by the blandly named Manwin Entertainment and used to funnel eyeballs toward an extensive network of paid sites.

In short, it’s far from given that anyone will cough up the $5 in cash to rent any kind of video, much less those that lack the production values of the standard San Fernando Valley skin flick.

The needs of discriminating adult content consumer aren’t going entirely unmet. Director and performer Madison Young pointed out that there are already people and production houses pushing back against the standard formula. For example, Tristan Taormino is doing sex ed videos for Vivid, the most mainstream porn company imaginable.

“Fast food pornography is now available online for free, and people don’t want to pay for it,” Ms. Young said, “but people are actually still buying sex-positive porn and feminist porn.”

Ultimately, the key to Ms. Gallop’s success will likely be publicity and momentum, Mr. Imboden said. “If she can get Bethenny Frankel talking about the importance of fantasy, of storytelling around sexuality, of exploration, and she goes to Cindy Gallop’s new site, it will really change the conversation.”

Offering up the example of Fifty Shades of Grey, like Deep Throat and Emmanuelle before it, he added, “It’s become a cultural meme, and I think that for her, there needs to be that same sort of crossover moment.”

Ms. Gallop is confident in her ability to plead her case. “I make a very good front person,” she said. “I’m a very articulate spokesperson, and I have no problem talking about any aspect of this whatsoever.”

Her co-founder, Oonie Chase, put it a little differently: “She has a reality-distortion field around her, like Steve Jobs is said to have had. You enter that field, and absolutely anything is possible. It doesn’t matter if you have no business doing it, it doesn’t matter if you have like no experience doing it—absolutely anything is possible.”

As she escorted the Observer to the door, Ms. Gallop confided that, whatever the fate of Make Love Not Porn, she is already plotting her next venture: an incubator/accelerator for “radically innovative sex-tech startups.” That’s right, she told us with a certain sparkle in her eye—she’d like to found the Y Combinator of porn. And, she promises, a tiny investment would generate returns “beyond Paul Graham’s wildest dreams.”

Now that’s a fantasy even a venture capitalist could get off on.

As PaidContent reports, the digital board includes TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque, IfWeRanTheWorld founder and CEO Cindy Gallop, Rent the Runway founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman, Google's Marissa Mayer, One Kings Lane cofounder Alison Pincus, Twitter's VP of media Chloe Sladden, New York City's Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne, LearnVest founder and CEO Alexa Von Tobel.

And that's in addition to Gilt Groupe chairman Susan Lyne and investor Esther Dyson, who are already on Women at NBCU's regular board and will join the digital extension. Guess NBCUniversal is waiting to tap Sheryl Sandberg until Facebook figures out its ad strategy.