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.

Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day to all ye community managers out there! You guys 'n gals are on the front lines engaging with customers every day, putting out fires, making your customers smile, fostering conversation. Community is important and you guys are making it happen. Stay awesome! :) To celebrate, bitly is organizing a breakfast this Friday and later this month is the Community Manager UNconference.

My buddy Eyal and the good folks at WIN are organizing a must-attend conference later this month on February 21: Funding the Best in Global Innovation. There'll be a rockstar lineup of speakers including David Pakman (Venrock), Brian Cohen (NY Angels), Kirill Sheynkman (RTP Ventures), John Frankel (ff Ventures), David Kidder (Clickable), Esther Dyson (angel investor) and more. GarysGuide readers get a special 30 percent off, using the code "ecosystem." WIN, for the record, is on a mission to create a top-notch global ecosystem connecting the New York venture community with leading international tech startups.

The Lawrence Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College, the CUNY Institute for Virtual Enterprise (IVE) and IBM are hosting the inaugural SmartPitch Challenge to celebrate New York City as a center for innovation and new business development. Nice! The challenge kicks-off this Friday on February 1, and it's open to current students at New York colleges and universities.

Don't forget, the much-anticipated Lemonade Heroes Yacht Party is this Wednesday. The attendee list is shaping up to be pretty amazing, and of course I'll be there rocking the red carpet in my red tie ;-) Hope to see y'all there. (FYI, the boat will be docked. So, tempting as it sounds to take her out to sea and head for the Caribbean, it's prolly not gonna happen.)

Random Nugget: "Innovation is hard because 'solving problems people didn't know they had' and 'building something no one needs' look identical at first." - Aaron Levie (founder and CEO, Box).

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

MIT Clean Energy Prize NYC Kickoff
The world's premier student competition for early-stage clean tech ventures, with over $300K in prizes.
Monday (Jan. 28), 6 p.m. @ Morrison & Foerster, 1290 Avenue of the Americas

Data Privacy & Protection Day Town Hall & Breakfast
With Deborah Marrone (FTC), Milan Patel (Special Agent, FBI), Clark Russell (Asst. Attorney General, Internet Bureau, New York), Craig Spiezle (Exec. Director, Online Trust Alliance) and others.
Tuesday (Jan. 29), 8 a.m. @ Baruch College - William and Anita Newman Conference Center, 151 E. 25th Street, 7th Fl.

Mobile Payments Roundtable
With Jay Bhattacharya (Zipmark), Alex Taub (Dwolla), Yitz Mendlowitz (Paay), Jeff McGregor (Dash), Micah Bergdale (Bytemark), David Olk (ShopKeep), Neil Platt (Fiserv), Jim Schinella (Manilla) and others.
Tuesday (Jan. 29), 8:30 a.m. @ Frankfurt Kurnit, 488 Madison Avenue

Brooklyn Tech Meetup
With Victoria Brown (CEO, BigThink), GetGlue and Behance.
Tuesday (Jan. 29), 7 p.m. @ Feil Hall at Brooklyn Law School, 205 State Street, 22nd Fl., Brooklyn

Fashion+TechNY Meetup with AngelHack & Hearst Media
With Liza Kindred (Third Wave Fashion), David Goldberg (FreshNeck), Jill Sherman (Modalyst), Melissa Fudor (inSparq), Michael Rosom (Eye On Response), Sabine Seymour (Moondial) and Vale Kerbage (Leechee NY).
Tuesday (Jan. 29), 7 p.m. @ Hearst Interactive Media, 300 West 57th Street

Lemonade Heroes Yacht Party featuring a chance to Audition for a TV Series!
A night of dancing, mixing & mingling. On a yacht. With a chance to audition for an entrepreneurship TV series!
Wednesday (Jan. 30), 6 p.m. @ Hornblower Inifinity, 353 West Street, Pier 40

Entrepreneurship in the Beer Industry
With Chris Gallant (GM and cofounder, Bronx Brewery), Justin Philips (owner and operator, Beer Table) and Jordan Elpern-Waxman (founder, Craft Beer Co).
Wednesday (Jan. 30), 7 p.m. @ Professor Thoms, 219 2nd Avenue

DreamIt Health Road Show (NYC)
Meet the managing directors of DreamIt Health, network with other healthtech entrepreneurs and get your questions answered about their inaugural accelerator program.
Wednesday (Jan. 30), 7 p.m. @ General Assembly West, 10 E. 21st Street

Start-Up City: If You Can Make it Here ... Part 1: Getting Into the Game
With Rachel Haot (Chief Digital Officer, Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment), Mo Koyfman (Spark Capital), Clifford Schorer (EIR, Columbia Business School), David Rose (Gust), Rob Fassino (XO Group) and moderated by Bianca Bosker (senior tech editor, Huffington Post).
Thursday (Jan. 31), 6 p.m. @ Long Island University (Brooklyn Campus), 1 University Plaza, Brooklyn

Digital Dumbo dd:SOCIAL 4 Year Anniversary
Thursday (Jan. 31), 6:30 p.m. @ The DUMBO Loft, 155 Water Street, Brooklyn

Start-Up City: If You Can Make it Here ... Part 2: Tales from the Alley
With Ben McKean (founder and CEO, Savored), Vinicius Vacanti (cofounder and CEO, Yipit), Kathryn Minshew (founder and CEO, The Daily Muse), Kellee Khalil (founder, Lover.ly), Hursh Agrawal (cofounder, Branch) and moderated by Caroline McCarthy (business marketing manager, Google).
Thursday (Jan. 31), 7:30 p.m. @ Long Island University (Brooklyn Campus), 1 University Plaza, Brooklyn

Decoded Fashion Hackathon
Saturday (Feb. 2), 10 a.m. @ The Alley, 500 7th Avenue, 17th Fl.

Startup Singles Pre-Valentines Day Happy Hour
Is your Valentine this year your startup team members? That might be good for your startup, but not for your social life.
Wednesday (Feb. 6), 6 p.m. @ Tom & Jerry, 288 Elizabeth Street

More events on the horizon...
February 2013 NY Tech Meetup on Feb. 5 @ NYU Skirball Center For The Performing Arts
Business Insider Presents: Social Commerce Summit on Feb. 6 @ Pier 60
Critical New UX Design Optimization Research on Feb. 6 @ Anchin
Startup Singles Pre-Valentines Day Happy Hour on Feb. 6 @ Tom & Jerry
Advanced LinkedIn Marketing: Beyond the Request to Connect on Feb. 7 @ Infor
Hearst Fashion Hackathon 2013 on Feb. 9 @ Hearst
Tech@NYU DemoDays on Feb. 9 @ eBay NYC
February 2013 NY Enterprise Technology Meetup on Feb. 12 @ Cooley
Investor Feedback Forum on Feb. 14 @ Microsoft
Columbia Business School PE/VC Conference on Feb. 15 @ Alfred Lerner Hall at Columbia University
HackInteractive on Feb. 16 @ General Assembly
Social Media Week NY 2013 on Feb. 18 @ Metropolitan Pavilion
Funding the Best in Global Innovation II on Feb. 20 @ SNR Denton
AIPAC Technology Division: Launch Event w/Dan Senor on Feb. 27 @ Bloomberg Tower

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

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 you all probably know about the High Line. But have you heard about the LowLine? Cofounders Dan Barasch and James Ramsey are aiming to convert an abandoned trolley terminal beneath Delancey Street into an extraordinary subterranean public park. That's right--it's an economic revitalization opportunity.

But it's more than that. It also represents cutting-edge design and a new generation of green technology and  lies at the heart of a broader global discussion about the potential of remnant urban infrastructure and the need for cities to reinvent the meaning of space--above and below ground.

So go check it out, get involved and if you're living it up in the Hamptons these days, make it out to their Cocktail Fundraiser at Water Mill on August 4, organized by Mo Koyfman of Spark Capital and others.

Don't forget to sign the Declaration of Internet Freedom, either--that is, if you haven't already done so. It's being signed by all of us folks who believe that a free and open Internet can bring about a better world!

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

BarTech: Retro Computer Show & Mixer!
Where else will you be able to play with the first "portable" (or luggable, anyway) computer, the PONG home gaming system and floppy disks that are bigger than your head!
Monday (July 23), 6 p.m. @ Alley NYC, 500 Seventh Avenue, 17th Floor

MakeIt NYC July Maker Show-And-Tell
Featured guest are Bitbanger Labs, the creators of Remee, a user-programmable lucid dreaming mask. Yes, you heard me right.
Tuesday (July 24), 7 p.m. @ Houston Street Center, 273 Bowery

Google NYC Tech Talks: The Distributed Camera: Modeling the World from Online Photos with Noah Snavely
We live in a world of ubiquitous imagery. The number of images at our fingertips is growing at a seemingly exponential rate. Taken together, these billions and billions of images can be thought of as constituting a distributed camera. Want to learn more?
Wednesday (July 25), 5:30 p.m. @ Google NYC, 111 8th Avenue

Fashion 2.0: The Future of Digital Publishing
With Simone Oliver (Fashion Editor, New York Times), Melanie Schnuriger (GM, fashion & beauty digital media, Hearst Magazines), Matt Edelman (CEO, Glossi.com) and Jake Levine (GM, Digg).
Wednesday (July 25), 6 p.m. @ Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue

DreamIt NYC Tech Olympics sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank
Competitions will include: ping-pong, foosball, soccer shootout, air races and rock paper scissors. Prizes and medals will be awarded! There will be plenty of beer, snacks, fine conversation, and very little bloodshed.
Wednesday (July 25), 6:30 p.m. @ DreamIt Ventures NYC, 330 W. 38th Street, Suite 300

SMASH Summit with 500 Startups, Fred Wilson, & More
Learn how to hack and dominate customer acquisition. Covering new “hack-tics” & strategies for Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and more.
Thursday (July 26), 9:30 a.m. @ Crowne Plaza Hotel, 1605 Broadway

Social Retail Summit Summer 2012
With Ashley Heather (cofounder & CEO, Dotbox), David Goldberg (president, StyleCaster), Fatma Yalcin (cofounder & CEO, Curisma), David Fudge (director of consumer engagement, Bonobos), Mark Curtis (founder, Enter:New Media). Moderated by Liza Kindred (Third Wave Fashion).
Thursday (July 26), 3 p.m. @ The Dumbo Spot, 160 Water Street, Brooklyn

Digital DUMBO July
A celebration of the city's innovation spaces.
Thursday (July 26), 6:30 p.m. @ Dumbo Loft, 155 Water Street, Brooklyn

Queens Tech Meetup 2
With Skillshare, OKFocus, Aereo and Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.
Thursday (July 26), 7 p.m. @ Hunter's Point Plaza, 47-40 21st Street, 10th Floor, Long Island City

Inside Startups Club, Featuring Fitocracy, Sonar, and Vimbly
Featuring speakers Richard Talens (cofounder & CTO, Fitocracy), Jared Cocken (chief product officer, Fitocracy), Brett Martin (founder & CEO, Sonar), and Sam Lundin (founder & CEO, Vimbly).
Thursday (July 26), 7 p.m. @ OMGPOP / Zynga NY Office, 166 Crosby Street, 11th Floor

More events on the horizon...
CrowdFunding Conference on Jul 30 @ NY Hilton
Inside BizDev: How Ad Agencies Can Make Big Brands Love You on Jul 30 @ General Assembly
UWS Startup Breakfast on Jul 31 @ Aroma Espresso Bar
Social Curation Summit on Jul 31 @ New Yorker Hotel
August NY FinTech Startups Meetup feat. Second Market on Aug 01 @ Day Pitney Law Offices
eCommerce Hack Day 2012 on Aug 04 @ Alley NYC
Design for Manufacturing Summit on Sep 20 @ Dumbo Spot

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

The Bing Summer of Doing campaign starts in New York today.

Stay tuned Kickstarter announced via tweet yesterday that, starting this fall, U.K. residents will be able to use the crowdfunding platform to launch their own projects. Currently, although people anywhere can give money to projects on the site, only individuals based in the U.S. can launch projects and receive funding.

Advise away Tout’d, a new digital forum for personalized recommendations, launched last week. As a social media platform and referral space, the app for iOS and Android enables users to ask for advice from friends as well as share recommendations ranging from restaurants and gadgets to professional referrals.

Sell now Join M&A professionals this Thursday at General Assembly for the first Startup Exit event on the East Coast. With a focus on social commerce and online retail and fashion, the evening will feature a fireside chat with Etsy’s Director of Strategic Finance, Carrington Williams, and well as a panel featuring the CEOs of Thrillist, dotBox and OpenSky. Tickets are required.

Success story Xeko, an award winning card game designed to raise awareness of endangered species, has raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter and is fast approaching its launch on mobile and social platforms.

Hackathon The photo editing app Aviary will host its third Photo Hack Day at Dropbox HQ in San Francisco this weekend. It’s free to register and attend, and the first place prize is $7,000. Additional prizes include a “New York Startup immersion” from Aviary, as well as $2500 in Facebook ad credits and free Facebook sweatshirts. There will also be a fireside chat, featuring Aviary CEO Avi Muchnick and Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick.

Just launched: Music Overture, an online community designed to help aspiring musicians network and showcase their talents. Though it would seem that something like this already exists, the creators urge potential users to “think online concert hall.”

Relaunched: Tripl's social travel application, which connected travelers to locals, has pivoted to become a sort of Facebook Timeline for your friends' trips. "Tripl figures out where your friends are traveling by filtering out all the geo data that is attached to photos, checkins, and statuses throughout your social networks and looking for changes in distance... The web app then combines all those data points with additional content about the destination like Wikipedia articles and stock photography," the company said in a press release. Tripl is currently enrolled in the Dreamit Accelerator program.

More social networks Wetradetogether, a social network designed for traders, financial advisors and individual investors, in poised to launch in the U.S. and Europe. The site consolidates features such as real-time streaming of financial data, sentiment indexes, advanced charting and collaborative workspaces to aid individuals and small businesses with independent online trading.

Do something The Bing Summer of Doing campaign—in collaboration with DoSomething.org—kicks off in New York today as Maria Menounos, Karlie Kloos and noted fashion photographer Nigel Barker join volunteers to help restore the Pieces for Peace Mosaic in Harlem’s Jacob H. Schiff Playground.

Personnel shuffles We hear that the app publishing service Onswipe has made some new executive hires, though they’re not saying who yet.

Birthday Shapeways has hit the four-year mark. The company reports that its printed over a million three-dimensional products to date and is currently building its “the factory of the future” in Long Island City. Hey, we’ve been to LIC, and it’s more like back to the future.

Tidal is a marketplace where advertisers and publishers can comparison shop for blog posts to fill content holes and increase their cachet with special audiences. Mashable helpfully sums up the idea as "Unlimited content for publishers, exposure for bloggers." Most writers on Tidal already have their own established blogs; they list themselves in the directory and submit information about their influence and traction. Publishers pay a monthly fee to get blog posts recommended to them and accompanied by social and traffic metrics to help them decide what to syndicate. If a publisher sees a post they like, they can syndicate it immediately.

Bloggers are remunerated in exposure, in theory, and Tidal emphasizes this on its splash page with view counts for posts.

The startup is also announcing a partnership with BobVila.com, a home improvement guru who has already established a small empire of home design, renovation and architecture bloggers on Bob Vila Nation.

#BITCOIN-RUMORS. The mystery of the epic MyBitcoin whodunnit continues, although energy is flagging among the Bitcoin community. Word on the street is, MyBitcoin.com may have some connection to that most underground of ecommerce, the website where you can OMG buy drugs known as the Silk Road, which would give the owners another motive to build the easy-to-use wallet service in order to make it easy to get Bitcoin to spend on weed and mushies. Betabeat called our local Federal Bureau of Investigation today to file a complaint and find out if there was an investigation ongoing. "I'm sorry, I can't help you on this," a press representative said, declining to either confirm or deny whether the FBI was looking into the matter.

THE TIME IS ALWAYS NOW. Is capital drying up? The companies out of DreamIt Ventures--which gave life to one of New York's favorite little revenue-generating ventures, SeatGeek--had a demo day a fraction of the size of TechStars's and the companies have had oh, less success? Raising money? In the wake of the TechStars demo day, Betabeat remembers stories of rounds so full the founders had to subscribe them twice. Only 14 of the 15 DreamIt start-ups presented. "Appbrick and Cognection, not doing so hot," a source says. "Prepfly didn't present." And Pictour found itself scooped by Foursquare's lists feature weeks after their pivot. Then again, some companies are doing well--1DocWay's got all the money they need, we hear. Remember, you can't spell "pivot" without "tip," er, whatever. Talk to us.

THE EVERY-HOUR BODY. Every hour, a bell goes off in the SinglePlatform office, indicating the time to drop and give CEO Wiley Cerelli 20. Well not really, says the start-up's rather buff Chief Fitness Officer, who used to be a division 1 wrestler at Syracuse, the push-ups are optional. Is there a push-up competition in the works between SinglePlatform and the muscle builders at Kohort? We're hearing yes! Fitocracy might want to get in on this.

The meetup doesn't mean Y Combinator is going to open a New York branch the way TechStars (Boulder, CO) and DreamIt (Philly) have, Mr. Graham indicated, it's just an introductory session to recruit more entrepreneurs into the program. If they decide to stay in California, that's cool. If they move back to New York after demo day, that's cool too.

"Going to Silicon Valley for YC doesn't mean moving there permanently," he wrote on the Hacker News forum.  "There are about a dozen YC funded start-ups in NYC. And if ambitious people are willing to go to another city for several years for college or grad school, it doesn't seem like a big stretch for them to go to Silicon Valley for 3 months for YC.

"There's a long tradition of ambitious people traveling to the big center of whatever they're interested in. And while NYC is more of a start-up hub than it used to be, the Valley is still the center. Founders who come here find it an eye-opening experience. So we wouldn't necessarily be doing NYC-based founders a favor by establishing a branch there."

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.

The site is slick and the idea seemed great. But after two months of DreamIt boot camp, which emphasizes market research, the founders decided there wasn't enough need for it. So they decided to pivot--or whatever you want to call it--to a completely different industry: travel. Now Pictour, the start-up aims for a better way to document travel. Co-founder Alejandro Corpeño showed the audience at DreamIt's demo day, which was well attended but had plenty of empty seats--a tour of venture capital firms in New York as an example.

DreamIt founder David Bookspan reminded the audience that many of their successful portfolio companies changed ideas--SeatGeek, arguably the hottest alumnus--started out as a blog before it was a ticket vendor.

Pictour is raising money now, Mr. Corpeño said, as it rounds out a marathon month of coding. "So, we just have fun working together 20 hours a day," he said.

Start your engine(ers):

Image via Barbara Haddock Taylor, Baltimore Sun

Here's a little anecdote to get the day started. Some dudes in Balitmore with a parking app and a panda for their mascot totally left that town and headed to the Big Apple when they landed a spot in the innagural ER Accelerator.

For anyone who's been paying attention, New York is throwing a sort of start-up summer camp this year, with half a dozen accelerators and incubators putting young start-ups through the paces. The L.A. Times, which doesn't even mention ER by name, seems blown away by the idea of a company getting $25,000 and a spot in Times Square.

"Baltimore might have had its own private accelerator in place this summer — Miller and Zilberbaum applied for it — but organizers couldn't pull together the necessary funding," that article intones.

In the last year three accelerator programs, Entrepreneurs Roundtable, DreamIt and Techstars, which was ranked as the #1 program in the nation by the Kauffman foundation, have all launched in NYC. HackNY, Big Apps and Founder Labs are also in the mix. The result is a critical mass where start-ups are drawn to the city even when they fail to win a coveted spot, knowing that a new opportunity might open up soon.

Feeling confused? Not to worry, Betabeat has created a handy guide to picking the right accelerator for your start-up.

Of course, Panda Parking might be equally interested in New York's other natural resource, tons and tons of cars, very limited space and alternate side rules that can only be deciphered by a smartphone.

DreamIt founder David Bookspan, DreamIt New York accelerator director Mark Wachen, accelerator general manager Kerry Rupp and DreamIt Ventures founder Steve Welch put down their pizza for this photo on day one of the DreamIt New York program.

Orientation! Today was the first day of the DreamIt Ventures accelerator's brand new New York program, and entrepreneurs from 12 start-ups gathered around director Mark Wachen this afternoon in the accelerator's three-quarters-of-the-way finished open office on the eleventh floor of a Chelsea elevator building on W. 27th and Broadway. The space is sunny and bright and equipped with wifi, coffee, water, a ping-pong table, clusters of desks, some computers and iPads and not much else. "That's going to be another conference room there," Mr. Wachen indicated a corner with some panes of glass leaning against the wall. "You can also use the stairwell conference room." "Or the Starbucks conference room," the office manager piped up.

The accelerator is still the "beta version," Mr. Wachen told Betabeat later. Keys still had to be copied, partitions had to be put up, and two companies, which by coincidence are also the only female-led companies in the program (today's group had only one girl, an intern for 1DocWay) have still yet to arrive.

The entrepreneurs today got a cursory introduction to New York (check out the Met and Prospect Park, they were told) along with a barrage of signposting about the program. Most of the time the companies will be working on their own, but they'll set up initial milestones for themselves with mentors (each start-up has a dedicated mentor). There will be talks every Tuesday; tomorrow, SeatGeek founders and DreamIt Philly alumni Russ D'Souza and Jack Groetzinger are stopping by, and Fred Wilson and other luminaries will also appear eventually (there's a lot of overlap with TechStars mentors). There will be fireside chats where entrepreneurs can give the organizers feedback on the program, and they're having a happy hour on Thursday.

The entrepreneurs come from New York, Philadelphia, Austin, L.A., Boston (three!) and Honduras, among other cities.

Samir Malik, one of the three co-founders of 1DocWay who quit their jobs at a hospital, Microsoft and an IT company, respectively, managed to recruit three unpaid interns to join his company in New York from St. Louis. The team of six is staying in a four-bedroom in the East Village, he told Betabeat as pizza arrived and a ping-pong tournament got underway. Beer however, Betabeat noticed, is not yet a feature of the DreamIt minimum viable product. We look forward to future iterations.