By Gary Sharma 4/22 9:30am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

sponsor_garys_red_tie_new

Best Tech Events This Week (NY Tech Day, ERA Demo Day, Disrupt Hackathon, #ArtsTech, Brooklyn Tech Meetup, TechDrinkup, BigApps)

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.

It was cool to shake hands with astronaut Ron Garan at the NASA Space Apps Hackathon this weekend! Congrats to NYC SpaceCal and Tiny Sea Bots, who’ll be going on to the global competition, as well as all the other honorees:  Droid Hopper, Chillin’ On Mars, Versioning Goat, Asteroid Mapper, Star Map Sculpture, WhyWeExplore, Spacerac.es and Le Big Blue.

This Thursday is NY Tech Day (a.k.a. the world’s largest startup event). Free mocktails from BuzzTheBar when you walk in! Don’t forget the after-parties, like the Big Data bash with Knewton and Get Acquainted with Acquaintable.

This Friday is the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) Demo Day. Good luck to all! 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 Gary Sharma 9/17/12 8:30am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

sponsor_garys_red_tie

Best Tech Events This Week (Mashable Social Good Summit, ERA Demo Day, Startup Weekend, GoGreen, Design for Manufacturing Summit)

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of Gary’s Guide 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.

iPhone 5 Day is coming, and you know what that means. That’s right–long lines are already starting to form outside Apple stores all over the world as folks clamber to get their hands on the all new slimmer, lighter and faster iPhone 5. A shout-out to Gary’s Guide member (and founder of a new social media startup, Vibe) Hazem Sayed, who is first in line outside the iconic 5th Avenue “Big Glass Cube” Apple Store. Go Hazem!

My friend Dave Lifson (product manager at General Assembly) along with Christina Chaey (associate editor at Fast Company) will be doing a free livestream this Wednesday at 2pm EST, on product management for non-product managers. You’ll learn what it takes to turn your ideas into functional products. And did I mention its free?  Oh, and everyone who registers gets a free copy of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s new e-book, Making Something People Love. So go sign up!

The new Cornell NYC Tech campus has started accepting admission applications for its beta class of computer science students, slated to start January 2013. Deadline is October 1.

And now let’s see what’s going down in the Alley this week… Read More

By Ben Popper 1/09/12 11:42am

Accelerators

startups of the roundtable

Entrepreneurs Roundtable Announces Class for Second Accelerator

The first class to graduate from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator summer 2011 program nabbed funding from venture shops like First Round Capital, ff Venture Capital, High Peaks Venture Partners, Lerer Ventures, Lightbank and RRE Ventures. Today ERA announced its second class, a group of ten young companies, some of whom Betabeat has met before. (Although Dibsie, an interactive shopping catalog, was a finalist on Betabeat’s first original webseries, The Pitch.) You can meet all the new startups and find their websites below. All the companies get a $25,000 investment, office space in Times Square and access to ERA’s group of more than 200 mentors. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 9/23/11 1:00pm

Demo Daze

Steve Gutentag from Sitesimon.

Knights of the Roundtable: ER Accelerator Demos Long, But Compelling

Betabeat moseyed up to Murat Aktihanoglu, the accented managing director of Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, after the program’s demo day this morning in a basement auditorium at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He had the overwhelmed, flushed face of a proud parent. “Oh, it was amazing,” he said, eyes widening. ERA put its ten startups through 1,500 meetings, he had calculated, and all the companies have users and 80 percent have revenue. One of them had just signed up 35 cities and two Dubai landmarks: the biggest mall in the world, which serves 47 million visitors, and the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.  Read More

By Ben Popper 7/06/11 8:45am

Accelerators

Image via Barbara Haddock Taylor, Baltimore Sun

New York’s Tech Accelerator Boom Has Other Cities Running Scared

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. Read More

By Ben Popper 4/08/11 7:31am

Gatherings

beers-cheers-bar-drinks

Dot-Com Daze At The ER Accelerator Happy Hour

“Foursqure, foursquare, foursquare,” declared Volker Detering, founder and president of EventMe! “If I never hear about the company again it will be too soon.”

Pausing, he reconsidered. “Ok, Dennis is a nice guy, and very smart, but I can’t stand to see another photo of him at a party. That’s not tech.” Read More