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.

So we survived! The Mayan-predicted end-of-the-world-armaggedon-pocalypse was a no-show. Now it's time to party! Of course, I still have a dozen cans of anti-zombie spray lying around... interested? :)

In the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, Mayor Bloomberg and 750 other mayors have come together to create Demand A Plan to fight for gun safety. A ton of leaders from the tech industry, both here in New York and in Silicon Valley, have joined the cause including Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Marc Benioff (SalesForce), Evan Williams (Twitter), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Laurene Jobs, Randi Zuckerberg and many others. And a large-scale social media effort is underway, similar to how the industry came together during SOPA/PIPA.

New York City recently announced the H.E.L.M. (Hire Expand in Lower Manhattan) contest to bring more startups into Manhattan’s growing tech scene. It promises up to $1.2M (five cash grants of up to $250,000 each) to startups looking to reside in Lower Manhattan. The application deadline has been extended to noon of December 31.

Heard of Socratic Labs? They're an ed-tech accelerator based here in New York City, creating a community for education innovators. Deadline for applying for the first batch is December 31.

Here's some stuff I've been watching recently ..... Well-respected VC Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital talking about the venture capital business. GRP Partners' Mark Suster elaborating on where content, media and monetization are headed. Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson's insightful talk and Q&A at the Enterprise Tech meetup, where he talked about network effects, ankle biters and "shorting the entire big, fat, old, cynical, rip-off artist enterprise software business." Jason Calacanis interviewing XPrize and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis, who talked about tackling big issues through entrepreneurship including literacy, alzheimers, earthquake detection and curing cancer.

Random nugget: "I'll nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so." - Jerry Seinfeld in a recent feature in the NY Times.

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

Demo and Get Feedback
Designed to help founders get feedback on their ideas.
Tuesday (Dec. 25), 6:30 p.m. @ WeWork Labs, 175 Varick Street

Review BiohackersNYC 2012 & discuss 2013
Wednesday (Dec. 26), 6 p.m. @ Hu Kitchen, 78 5th Avenue

ConnectNYC Fiber Challenge: Application Deadline
Small and medium-sized businesses across the five boroughs can apply for high-speed broadband at their location. Winners will receive free fiber build-out to their place of business, an overall value of up to $7 million for all winning businesses.
Thursday (Dec. 27), 9 a.m. @ To be decided

Growth Hacking Workshop: Lean Marketing for Startups
With Mattan Griffel (founder and CEO at The Front Labs, Partner at Grow/Hack).
Thursday (Dec. 27), 6 p.m. @ General Assembly East, 902 Broadway, 4th Fl.

The What and Why of APIs
Learn all about APIs from one of the industry's leading specialists, Matt LeMay (Platform Manager, bitly).
Thursday (Dec. 27), 6 p.m. @ General Assembly East, 902 Broadway, 4th Fl.

Home for the Holidays Brooklyn!
Bringing together Etsy employees with local sellers, buyers, and friends of the handmade artisan community. A festive gathering with drinks & food.
Thursday (Dec. 27), 6 p.m. @ Etsy Labs, 55 Washington Street, #712

Reinvent the Payphone Meeting #2
Thursday (Dec. 27), 6:30 p.m. @ The Lab, 122 West 26th Street, 5th Fl.

DUMBO Tech Breakfast Meetup
Friday (Dec. 28), 8:30 a.m. @ DUMBO Kitchen, 108 Jay Street, Brooklyn

More events on the horizon...
The Product Group January 2013 on Jan. 3 @ MTV Networks / Viacom
Foursquare Hackathon 2012: Connect all the Apps! on Jan. 5 @ Foursquare HQ
A Conversation with Adaptly Founder Nikhil Sethi on Jan. 7 @ General Assembly East
#BARK Presents: New Year New You | What Can We Learn From Brands That Pivot on Jan. 8 @ Yotel
Invasion of The Hackathons: Creating Unique Opportunities for Entrepreneurs on Jan. 8 @ NYU Poly
January 2013 NY Tech Meetup on Jan. 8 @ NYU Skirball Center For The Performing Arts
NJ Tech Meetup 32 on Jan. 10 @ Stevens Institute Of Technology
Startup GC Panel #2 on Jan. 10 @ General Assembly
Enterprise Technology Meetup on Jan. 15 @ Cooley

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! And Happy Holidays! :)

Mr. Bloomberg. (Twitter)

Time Warner Still Sucks On Friday, Mayor Bloomberg made a big move toward ing promise to expand broadband in New York. He launched ConnectNYC, a contest for small businesses that will award free fiber cable wiring (overall value of up to $12 million) to 240 local businesses across the five boroughs over the next two years. But will it make slow cashiers go faster?

All Your Dwollas Belong To Us Dwolla, the way to pay people via smartphone, just rolled out a cool feature called MassPay. It allows you to pay up to 2,000 people at once, which is great for business owners or degenerate gamblers who have a lot of friends. Payments under 10 dollars are free, while anything higher than that requires a small fee of 25 cents per transaction. Parking Panda, VHX and Major League Gaming have all pledged to start using the service immediately.

Finna FinTech Startup Weekend is teaming up with the FinTech Innovation Lab and the NYC FinTech Startups meetup to put on the first ever FinTech Startup Weekend. It's set to take place on November 2 to 4 at Alley NYC. Throughout the weekend, there will be mentors, including VCs, lawyers and designers, stopping by to give teams advice on what they're doing.

Nick Gavronsky, an OpenFin employee who helps run Startup Weekend with Frank Denbow, spoke to Betabeat and said that he was surprised by the response the event is getting. "We've noticed over the last year or so that FinTech is growing and there's a need for engagement and bringing that community together--as well as around enterprise in general," Mr. Gavronsky said.

FinTech weekend, he said, is "not really like a hackathon, it’s more for first-time people” who want to start building something.

Costumes for a Cause! WeWork is organizing a Halloween party this coming Monday, October 29th benefiting Charity: Water that cofounder Matt Shampine promises will be a "crazy" good time, including "a lot of surprises and five hours of open bar." Better yet, you can feel good while throwing them back: WeWork will be matching everyone's donations to the event. WeWork generously offered Betabeat readers a 15 percent discount off the ticket price, which starts at a $35 donation. Just enter the discount code "betabeat" when you RSVP. While you figure out your binders of women vs. bayonets costume choice, here's a video WeWork put together to get you in the party mood.

Sexy Canadians Songza, the music streaming app that has a playlist for every mood, just reached 1 million users in Canada. To celebrate, we're going to listen to the "cold" playlist. The Songza team used its data and found that Canadians and Americans both chose "Mellow" more than any other mood. Americans' next most popular category was "Happy," while Canadians' second choice was "Sexual." The sexual playlist only works correctly if you're sleeping with Canada's finest export, Ryan Gosling.

Group Talk IRL Group messaging service GroupMe just launched a new service called Experiences. It lets you meet up and plan adventures with your groups and even helps you split the bill. The first round of experiences include a brunch at one of Todd English's restaurant and a zombie survival practice on Halloween. Sounds spooky enough for us.

Chatroulette With a Purpose Onswipe held its hackathon this weekend, and the overall winner created something really awesome. BlahBlahLearning is a language learning platform that works over video chat. A pair of speakers who are each learning the other’s native tongue are given five minutes to speak in one language, then five minutes to speak in the other. Take some notes, Airtime, these guys have the right idea.

Man Starts Blog internet gadfly Rex Sorgatz has just launched a personal project called Viewsource. He's posting one YouTube video a day and sharing his thoughts about it. The site has a really pretty layout, and Mr. Sorgatz's commentary is pretty spot-on. This one about Michael Richards is a pretty good read.

You Owe Us One Foursquare is hiring a PR director. If you get this job and you first found out about it through Betabeat, then you have to give us exclusives for the entirety of your career. It's only fair.

Publicidad Jun Group, the opt-in video advertising platform, has announced that it has new capabilities to specifically target the much-coveted Hispanic audience on the web. Jun Group says that it can now prescreen users to determine if they’re Hispanic and/or native Spanish speakers. In total, the company provides ads to 10 million Hispanic or Spanish-speaking users.

Advertise More, Save the World Pontiflex, another advertising platform, just released a new tool called AdLeads that helps nonprofits advertise themselves to prospective donors. The best part about the service is that organizations only have to pay when a person actually signs up to hear from them. They never waste money on wasted clicks or impressions.

College Admissions Suck Applying to college is the worst process in the world, but luckily things just got a bit easier thanks to Unigo. The site gives a free 15-minute private consultation to set you up with a plan, and then users can subscribe to Unigo's online college counseling services. If your child's guidance counselor is a total idiot, then this looks like a good option for you.

(Photo: Wikimedia)

Today Time Warner Cable announced that the company expects to invest $25 million to expand its fiber optic network in both "established and emerging" business sectors around New York City. Many of the areas highlighted in today's announcement happen to coincide with burgeoning tech hubs.

In a press release to Betabeat, Time Warner said it would extend its broadband capabilities in "the World Trade Center, the Flatiron District, all areas of Midtown and throughout the Financial District," in Manhattan. In addition to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Time Warner is also upgrading fiber in the "Brooklyn Tech Triangle, the Brooklyn Army Terminal and Industry City." Long Island City in Queens, the future home to Shapeways 3D-printing factory, will also benefit from the effort.

The investment is part of a deal with the city that was still being hammered out in June when Mayor Bloomberg announced his big plan to improve broadband. At the time, Time Warner was named in the ConnectNYC facet of the mayor's plan, which focused on wiring previously underserved areas and improving connectivity in commercial and industrial buildings.

Today's announcement, for example, was made at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, home to Carnegie Mellon's tech campus initiative, where Time Warner is finishing up "a multi-million dollar investment to provide fiber-based solutions to tenants of the 300-acre business complex."

But Time Warner isn't the only company the city has partnered with, as the Wall Street Journal reports, especially when it comes to residential initiatives.

The city also has tech agreements with Verizon Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and AT&T Inc. Companies are laying fiber, providing wireless hot spots in parks and opening learning labs that give residents access to computers.

Time Warner itself is opening a "state-of-the-art" Learning Lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, "located inside the massive complex and accessible to the public." Good news for the long-neglected residents of the three neighboring housing projects, we hope.