By Gary Sharma 2/18 9:06am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

sponsor_garys_red_tie_at_sxsw_2013

Best Tech Events This Week (Social Media Week, Funding the Best in Global Innovation, Queens Tech Meetup, Assembled E-Commerce, DreamIt Happy Hour, Running Away with the Band)

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.

Last week was crazy. First, the pope resigned (last time that happened? 1415). Then, a 55-foot-wide meteor crashed into the little Russian town of Chelyabinsk, sparking a 300-kiloton blast. Whoa. And then, an asteroid narrowly missed Earth (by a mere 17,000 miles). Yikes. Aaaand then….then everybody really went crazy and started doing the Harlem Shake! Google’s doing it. So are Facebook and Linkedin. Even my friends at WeWork, BuzzFeed, CollegeHumor, NYU Stern & ERA have gotten in on the action. There’s a cute puppy version and even a bookmarklet. Yup, it was a crazy, crazy week indeed!

Wanna hang out with David Pakman (Venrock), Esther Dyson (angel investor), John Frankel (ff Venture Capital) and other top investors at the Funding the Best in Global Innovation conference this Wednesday? But of course you do! I have a couple of free passes; email me if interested. (You also get 30 percent off with discount code “innovation”). Read More

By Gary Sharma 2/11 8:49am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

sponsor_garys_red_tie_at_sxsw_2013

Best Tech Events This Week (HackInteractive, TechCrunch NYC, OnDeck Sports Conference, One of a Kind, Decoded Fashion, Columbia PE/VC Conference)

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.

First things first: Stop reading this and go watch “House of Cards” on Netflix. Yup, it’s that good. You’re welcome!

Back? Okay! Hope y’all survived the weekend #snow-pocalypse (a.k.a. Nemo) and had a blast sledding in the park, hurling snowballs at each other and making elaborate snow sculptures. Here’s an awesome Vine mashup of the storm that my friends Kelsey and Steve made.

Now that you’ve had your winter fun, it’s time to get ready for spring. And that can only mean one thing: internships! That’s right. It’s that time of the year again, when bright-eyed young kids will be running around your offices eager to learn the ropes, change the world, and…err… get you your early-morning fix of decaf-grande-mocha-soy lattes.  So, who’s looking for interns? Everybody, that’s who! Squarespace, Metamorphic Ventures, UrbanDaddy, HowAboutWe, ff Ventures, MoviePass, Birchbox, Artsicle, Learnvest and many, many more. Read More

By Myles Tanzer 10/31/12 5:10pm

startup rundown

The Fancy's Fanciest Fan (Photo: wikipedia.org)

Startup News: NASA Images of Sandy Sold for Charity and Boxee Comes to a Walmart Near You

Ceci N’est Pas Une Sandy The affordable-art-dealing website 20 x 200 is now selling a print of a NASA satellite image of Hurricane Sandy. All proceeds from the sale will go to the Red Cross to help relief efforts. The striking image was taken at 9:02 a.m on Sunday, approximately 10 hours before NYC’s MTA shut transport service down throughout the tristate area. Hang it above your couch of a constant reminder of the grander universe and just how much you appreciate your wifi.

More Money, More Fancy Fancy, Pinterest’s cooler older brother, has raised just over $26 million in additional funding. New investors include Celtics owner Jim Pallotta, Twitter and Square cofounder Jack Dorsey and Edward Gilligan, the vice chairman of American Express. This also ruins rumors that Apple was planning to acquire the company. No word yet on what their favorite user, Kanye West, thinks of the new influx of cash. Read More

By Tamar Katz 8/08/12 5:41pm

Demo Daze

Dejamor's Rodrigo Fuentes

Love Was in the Air at DreamIt Ventures Demo Day

“Bow chicka wow wah,” someone yelled from the packed, cheering audience at the Time Life Conference Center this morning. The rowdy crowd was there for DreamIt Ventures Demo Day, a first opportunity for investors to see the startups who just finished a three-month stint at the well-regarded New York City incubator. The event featured seven-minute presentations from 15 different startups, five of which were part of DreamIt’s new program, DreamIt Israel. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 4/27/12 2:17pm

Accelerators

Dream it, bro. (dreamitventures.com)

DreamIt Ventures Announces New York Summer Class

Philly-based accelerator DreamIt Ventures, which debuted in New York last year, just announced the 15 startups that made it into the second New York summer session. Five of the companies selected are part of the DreamIt Access program, which aims to launch 15 minority-led startups over the next 12 months. Most of the companies from New York, but there’s a heavy contingent from Israel, where DreamIt just opened a hybrid program in cooperation with the New York program. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 2/23/12 2:28pm

Fashion Plate

clotheshorse_team

Can Clothes Horse’s Secret Algorithm Help You Buy Clothes That Actually Fit?

Last April, Stephanie Clifford’s New York Times story, “One Size Fits Nobody,” went viral. (Or at least as viral as a non-Linsane animal-based memes can possibly go.) That’s probably because Ms. Clifford’s confession–that she varies anywhere from a size 4 to size 8 without gaining a pound–is a near-universal dilemma. Clothes Horse, a New York-based startup that launched publicly today, thinks it can solve that.

Brands like Bonobos, one of Clothes Horse’s beta test cases, use the startup’s software to embed a widget on their e-commerce site. After 30-seconds of questions like “What brand’s shirt fits you best?” or “Is it tight around the chest?” the widget spits out information on how that retailer’s items are likely to fit.

To do that, Clothes Horse uses an algorithm that combines a database of human measurements, sizing specifics from about 50 brands, and some kind of “secret sauce,” which cofounder Vik Venkatraman declined to describe. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 2/13/12 9:44am

Accelerators

Mr. Crowder

DreamIt Ventures Formalizes Focus on Minority-Owned Startups With DreamIt Access NYC

DreamIt Ventures, the Philadelphia-based accelerator that launched its first New York program last May, has another offering for local startups in the works. The firm recently announced a program called DreamIt Access that will bring five minority-led businesses to each DreamIt Ventures class going forward. The new initiative begins with DreamIt’s summer class in New York City.

A number of notable New York startups have graduated from DreamIt’s program, including SeatGeek, Parse.ly, Postling, Adapt.ly, KeepRecipes, and more. The emphasis on minority-owned business is an attempt to institutionalize a program DreamIt developed in Philadelphia last year when Comcast sponsored five startups as part of special track in DreamIt’s accelerator called the Minority Entrepreneur Accelerator Program (MEAP). Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 8/10/11 12:24pm

And Now For Something Completely Different

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DreamIt’s Biggest Pivot: Class.io Mutated Into Pictour Over the Last Four Weeks

Philadelphia-based DreamIt Ventures incubator opened its first New York session in May with 15 companies culled from more than 500 applications, a three percent acceptance rate. Three months later, those companies are taking the stage at the McGraw Hill Conference Center in Midtown. There were a couple pivots in the class, but probably the most extreme came from the five founders who left their families back in Honduras to build a Facebook-integrated classroom management platform for teachers, Class.io. Read More

By Guest Post 8/08/11 7:00am

On The Calendar

garysguide

Goooood Morning, Silicon Alley! Gary Sharma’s Picks for the Week of August 8

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (a.k.a. “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder of GarysGuide and mentor at ER Accelerator.

Quote of the Week: “We’ll see if we can do hackathons every day so long as I don’t have to write code!” –Mayor Mike Bloomberg, at the Reinventing NYC hackathon winners’ breakfast at General Assembly last week.

Mayor Mike’s geek cred would have gone through the roof if he had decided to get down and dirty to crank out some code but big props on committing support to hackathons. Speaking of hackathons, we’ve got a bunch of hacking-related events this week. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 5/10/11 3:07pm

Accelerators

mark wachen

DreamIt Ventures Incubator Starts Monday; Demo Day in August

Philadelphia-based DreamIt Ventures, the second established accelerator to open a New York branch, is gearing up to open its doors on Monday. The first hurdle–getting enough quality applications–proved to be no trouble, as managing director Mark Wachen and team had more than 500 applications to sort through in order to pick 15 companies. That’s an acceptance rate of three percent–higher than Y Combinator and the 1.7 percent accepted for TechStarsNY, but still extremely selective. Read More