By Gary Sharma 2/04 10:00am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

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Best Tech Events This Week (Hearst Fashion Hackathon, Social Commerce Summit, NY Tech Meetup, PandoMonthly)

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.

Congrats to the Ravens for winning the Super Bowl! Best of the commercials? That’d be Chrysler’s So God Made A Farmer ad. Beyoncé rocked the half-time show (and flashed the Illuminati sign?). Yes, there was a brief blackout, enough to unleash a torrent of funny tweets. Oreos won the night, social-media wise. And finally, there was Shaq, lip-syncing to Beyoncé’s “Halo.”  Read More

By Ross Barkan 1/09 3:30pm

startup rundown

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Startup News: Kickstarter and IndieGogo Show Off Their Metrics and Middle Schoolers Get Appy

Kickstarted The crowdfunding king released its annual highlights for 2012 this week. And the startups is going about as gangbusters as well, an oversubscribed, blockbuster Kickstarter campaign. In 2012, 2,241,475 people pledged almost $320 million and successfully funded a little over 18,000 projects. That works out to about $606 per minute. Monetization is so much easier when it’s baked into your platform, isn’t it?

Indie No More Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo also released data for 2012. Campaigns raised 20 percent more in last year than they did in 2011 and successful campaigns took an average of 11 days preparing for their launch. Read More