Mr. Shimmerlik. (Photo: NYU Stern)

Last year, the New York City Economic Development Council gave a local business school student a $17,500 grant to fund what was basically the best idea ever: Miniature vending machines, sized to fit snugly in the backseat of a taxi, ready to dispense items that New Yorkers on the go really need.

Well, we know how hard it is to get new technology up and running in a New York City taxi cab.

But fear not. Brian Shimmerlik, the NYU MBA candidate behind the idea, figured taxis weren't the only market for his miniature vending machines, and went on to raise $1 million in seed funding to expand the concept. The result: Vengo, a touchscreen, credit card only vending machine that debuted yesterday at an East Village bar. According to the New York Post, the first machine is vending gum, mouthwash, Old Spice cologne. Coming soon: condoms.

“The purpose is to update the vending machine of the ’80s,” Mr. Shimmerlik told the Post. “They’ve become extinct.”

Meanwhile, the Long Island City-based company is looking to place 10,000 machines throughout the city, in such varied locales as office buildings (cell phone chargers, anyone), doctor's offices and eventually—taxi cabs.

According to TechCrunch, it's a question of engineering a machine that operates dependably in a moving vehicle, at which point, some combination of energy drinks, headache medication and condoms, would sell pretty well, we think.

We'll use this as an artist's rendering. (Photo: flickr.com/lac-bac)

Silicon Alley Smackdown One of the many tech events on rain delay because of Hurricane Sandy was the Big Apple Smackdown ping pong tournament, whose guest list included an impressive number of familiar names from the New York tech scene. (Betabeat is one of the media sponsors, so we may be a little biased.) Among the techno-athletes scheduled to play was Gilt Groupe CEO--and soon-to-be Gilt Groupe chairman--Kevin Ryan. Apparently, we missed quite a show.

The tournament was scheduled for Sunday, "and I played on Friday and on Sunday just to get ready for it!" Mr. Ryan told Betabeat. Really? "Oh yeah, because I won a tournament about a month ago." That was an invitation-only affair for ping pong ringers at the Hamptons manse of ABC Carpet & Home's Ken Pilot. "You had to put $100 into the pot and the winner got two-thirds of the pot, so I was pretty excited about that," Mr. Ryan enthused.

Mad that Sandy ruined your chance to see him action? You can drown your sorrows at Appular's F#@K SANDY event this coming Thursday and throw one back for a good cause.

Make It or Break It Start-Ups: Silicon Valley glamazon Kim Taylor finally has a name for her soon-to-launch startup, and being the gymnast that she is, she's named it after a move from Yelena Shushunova’s floor routine. The former NBA dancer will launch Shonova this winter, targeting the "millennial luxury fashion market," because you can never have too many websites dedicated to selling expensive clothes to young professional women.

LOLfamous Speaking of Bravo, it appears that I Can Has Cheezburger founder Ben Huh is starstruck by himself. Following the premiere of his new Bravo show, LOLwork, Mr. Huh tweeted a link to his freshly-minted IMDB profile with the caption "So...this happened." Don't let the fame get to your head!

And the techno's so loud USV ringleader and hometown hero Fred Wilson is wheels up and L.A.-bound today. However, his wife--Gotham Gal and investor-in-her-own-right Joanne Wilson--booked the tickets, and so he's not flying his preferred airline. Instead, he's flying Virgin, which is not his preferred airline and for a very specific reason: "I find flying on Virgin like going to a nightclub because of the lighting and I avoid it as a result." We always suspected Mr. Wilson was more of an indie music club kinda guy, and this cinches it.

"Executive scent" It seems that, after several years of "sifting through the crap," Team Thrillist has finally found the platonic ideal of brochandising. Behold:

Via Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer's Instagram.

So saucy Betabeat hates to clutch her collective pearls, but my goodness! Who knew the crowd at AllThingsD were quite so naughty? (Okay, we had an inkling.) Earlier this week, ATD doyenne Kara Swisher tweeted out the link to a colleague's story, which had the headline, "Meet the Man Behind Those Hot Pink Mustache Rides." Catalyst Group CEO Nick Gould immediately gave that the side-eye, noting that he "Can't help wondering if @lizgannes is aware of the off-color meaning of the term "mustache ride." Ms. Swisher didn't miss a beat: "i mean I ASSUME she is. I am." Duly noted.

Digging up history The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View, California, is kind of like mecca for tech geeks. Contained within its hallowed walls are artifacts that tell the history of computers and videogames. Among those artifacts, apparently, is a copy of Windows 1.0, originally owned by Digg founder Kevin Rose. "My copy of Windows 1.0 on display!" Mr. Rose wrote in a caption for the below photo. A nerd's dream come true.

(Photo: Instagram)

$$$ in you inbox

65 percent of women are the CFOs in their household, meaning they make the principal financial decisions. When serial entrpreneur Amanda Steinberg was looking to create an email business, she fixated on improving women's financial smarts, something she had struggled with as a new mother buying a new home. And so DailyWorth, a sort of DailyCandy for money, was born.

The company has just raised $2 million from a group of angel investors led by Joanne Wilson and Stocktwits founder Howard Lindzon. Other investors include 500 Startups Dave McClure, TechStars Dave Cohen, networking artiste Peter Shankman and Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures. That brings its total funding to just over $3 million. "Amanda is an experienced entrepreneur and web developer. She's got a great set of skills and is tapping into a big market," said Ms. Wilson.

DailyWorth now has over 200,000 subscribers. "I've started 6 businesses, some of which lasted six weeks, some six years," said Ms. Steinberg. "Nothing I've done has worked like this. I spent a decade as an engineer building VC backed companies for other people, and I saw what made a company fail. I wanted to simplify, and the Daily Candy model just works really, really well." Andrew Russell, formerly of Pilot Group, who has invested in email companies like Daily Candy and Thrillist, is an independent board member at DailyWorth.

The convergence of women, finance and careers is quite a hot market in New York right now. The Daily Muse (no relation) has been seeing big traffic growth as it heads to Y Combinator. And Abrams Media, apparently discovering that people were not as interested in super rich jerks as they imagined, rebranded Mogulite as Jane Dough, a site aimed at women in business with the terrible tagline, "the business new we knead".

The biggest player in the space, at least in terms of cash raised, is LearnVest, which has piled up $24.5 million for its personal finance tool aimed at women that teaches user to tackle life events like getting out of debt, budgeting for a wedding, buying your first stock, or applying for a student loan. Today that company announced it was launching a new service offering a year of financial planning with email and phone support.

Who's afraid of the big bad web?

A new fashion start-up launching in September has secured backing from some of the biggest names in angel investing on the East and West coasts. Edition01 has raised around $500,000 from David Tisch, Ken Lerer and Ron Conway's SV Angel to build an e-commerce site focusing on capsule collections: limited edition runs of products by designers like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Narciso Rodriguez. Additional investors include Kal Vepuri, High Line Venture Partners, the Sagrera family, Sterling Equities, Joanne Wilson and Alex Zubillaga.

"Sites like Gilt have created a great business selling items with a limited time period. We are aiming to do a similar thing by having a very limited inventory," says co-founder Rishi Khanna. "The idea to build a best in breed capsule sale site that leverages social commerce and online ordering."

Traditionally, says co-founder Jessica Wilpon Kamel, who created Edition01 with co-founder Estefania Lacayo in October of 2010, high-end fashion designers have been afraid of the internet. "Even today many of them are going in the opposite direction, pulling their merchandise offline because they are afraid it will dilute their brand. We want to show that doesn't have to be the case."

The start-up had been looking to raise a little north of $1 million, but found an early revenue stream through a partnership with Salam International, which secured them a licensing deal for a sponsored pop-up store in high-end fashion mall in Doha, Quatar. The focus now is on making a big splash with the September debut and giving customers a high-end shopping experience online that matches up with the designer brands.

There is a burgeoning network, says Ms. Kamel, for fashion entrepreneurs to connect with venture capitalists who traditionally have focused on the web. Through Ben Lerer and friends at Gilt the team from Edition01 was able to take meetings with numerous New York investors and eventually secure a round from a very diverse group. While Betabeat doesn't have an informed opinion on whether or not this start-up will succeed (we don't know Donna Karen from Don King), the overlap of fashion and technology is certainly one strength that will help New York to compete with Silicon Valley in the coming decade.

To the rescue comes Nestio, the very first start-up to present at TechStars' Demo Day in April. The NYC real estate bookmarking site just secured itself the entire $750,000 it was aiming for, besting the $100,000 it had "soft-circled." Angel investors for the seed funding round, led by NY-based Quotidian Ventures, include Gotham Gal Joanne Wilson, Barbarian Group's Rick Webb, Betaworks' Josh Auerbach, and TechStars New York's David Tisch. The start-up aims to make it "easier to find a place to live” by organizing apartment listings so you can compare price/bedroom/location side-by-side either online or via its streamlined apps.

Although AG Beat reports that the company can input listings from both Craigslist and Streeteasy, Betabeat got a notification saying "Oh sorry, right now we're only parsing listings from NYC Craigslist. Adding support for more sites soon!" when we tried to add a Streeteasy link. In any case, users can copy and paste a URL or add a bookmarklet to populate their list (and let friends view potential new homes via Facebook Connect.) Nestio also allows users, like say potential roommates, to edit listings, add comments, and collaborate in realtime. TechCrunch reports that Nestio will be using the funding to build out its development team and add features "that will provide deeper context and transparency to apartment listings," along with expanding to other cities.

With competitors like Apartments.com, Padmapper.com, and unfortunately-named (sorry, guys!) Hotpads.com, already in the same market, the best thing Nestio has going for it are mobile functionality--a huge plus when you're shlepping from apartment to apartment--as well as the ability to supplement listings services like Zillow and Trulia rather than attempting to compete with their extensive, established inventories.

Considering the rate at which a good Craiglist find goes off the market, what we'd really love to see is realtime deletion of apartments that can no longer be had, perhaps with a sadface emoticon to show you care?

The Wall Street Journal has a big spread by Katherine Rosman on the Wilson family, cataloging the clan's digital lives. Jessica and Emily each have two tumblrs. Josh only has one, but he's got two Xboxes to make up for it.

In a house where both parents are prolific seed stage investors in tech, extracurricular activites focus on building a healthy online presence and becoming comfortable as an early adopter of new services.

"I would tell her that it was going to be the next big thing," says Mr. Wilson, about encouraging his daughter to use Twitter.

At first she refused out of simple teenage rebellion. But now that's she's in college, Jessica has changed her tune, and often asks her father for a reblog or retweet.

"I use the same rule with my kids and entrepreneurs: If I think the thing they want me to post is consistent with the online brand I've developed and the audience I've cultivated, then I'll do it," Wilson told WSJ's Katherine Rosman. After he pointed people to Jessica's first Tumblr, 14,000 other users reblogged and 2,100 people started following Jessica's Tumblr.

Privacy can become an issue. When Joanne Wilson, aka Gotham Gal, blogged about a recipe her daughter had just whipped up, young Emily became upset. "I want to be able to do the things I do in my life, then if I want to share it, I can, it's my choice," she told Rosman, who seems to have a knack for great quotes.

Amdist all this, the Wilson's still keep a lot of older traditions. The family eats dinner together five nights a week and Josh, the avid gamer, still is not allowed to have a TV in his room. So he just downloads his favorite shows to his laptop instead.

Jackie Snow for The New York Observer

On a spring morning back in 2008, Lockhart Steele, the precocious prepster who helped Gawker Media turn a snarky take on current events into an online juggernaut, sat down for breakfast at Pastis. He was meeting with Joanne Wilson, one of the investors in his new company, Curbed Media, which focused on residential real estate.

"She's telling me about how everything is going so well," said Mr. Steel. "And I'm thinking, uh oh, the other shoe is about to drop."

Ms. Wilson, wife of local venture capitalist Fred Wilson, had made her first angel investment in Curbed, and as the pair sipped coffee, she pushed Mr. Steele to consider the challenges the future might hold. His miniature empire was expanding quickly but still not profitable, and the tremors that would crumple the financial markets were already reverberating through real estate. “She asked me if I was familiar with Jerry Colonna and would I consider going to see him,” Mr. Steele recalled.

Mr. Steele was aware of Mr. Colonna, a former venture capitalist who had recently embarked on a new career as a business and life coach, serving entrepreneurs and CEOs, but the Curbed founder took a dim view of self-help. “In my head I’m thinking, no fucking way,” he remembered. "I’m an upright New Englander, just naturally averse to any kind of New Age crap.”

At Ms. Wilson’s insistence, Mr. Steele agreed to give it a shot. Entering Mr. Colonna’s office in the Flatiron District, Mr. Steele couldn’t decide what bothered him more—the Buddhist altar or the Yankees memorabilia (he was a Red Sox fan, after all). “Jerry started out asking me how I was feeling, how things were with my body,” he recalled. “And I’m thinking, It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, I should be at work … ”

- -

“I see myself as sort of an emotional consigliere,” Mr. Colonna told Betabeat recently, sitting in his office on Broadway. “I like to have the deep conversations with people that really dig into their problems.” He was dressed a bit like Steve Jobs: blue jeans, white Nikes, a blue turtleneck and wire-frame glasses. He spoke with a soothing, monklike calm—a style that has proved surprisingly popular among high-strung local techies.

Mr. Colonna’s touchy-feely ethos makes him something of an outlier in the city’s competitive, high-stress tech scene. Under the “recommended reading” section of his website, Mr. Colonna touts such titles as Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living and When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Uncertain Times. A post about a recent trip to Tibet includes a lyric from the Tracy Chapman song, “Changes”: If you knew that you would die today / Saw the face of God and love / Would you change? / Would you change?

That sentiment stands in sharp contrast to the city’s predominant start-up culture, which romanticizes sleepless work weeks, solitary struggle and scrappy resolve in the face of failure.“You’ve either started a company or you haven’t,” Chris Dixon, founder of local start-up Hunch and a well respected angel investor, wrote on his blog recently, in what might stand as a stirring manifesto of the Founderist ethos. “‘Started’ doesn’t mean joining as an early employee, or investing or advising or helping out. It means starting with no money, no help, no one who believes in you … and building an organization from a borrowed cubicle with credit card debt and nowhere to sleep except the office...It means lying awake at night worrying about running out of cash and having a constant knot in your stomach during the day fearing you’ll disappoint the few people who believed in you and validate your smug doubters.”

Founders, in this construction, are digital-age martyrs, Red Bull-chugging dreamers who sacrifice personal friendships and physical well-being so that bold new ideas can make their way into the world.

During the first dot-com boom, Mr. Colonna was a founder himself. His venture capital firm, Flatiron Partners, which he stared with Fred Wilson, was the first in town to specifically fund early-stage internet companies, including Geocities, which sold to Yahoo for $3.7 billion in 1999 at the height of the Web 1.0 bubble.

Despite racking up some very impressive returns, however, the fund was dissolved following the crash of 2001, as the tech industry violently imploded. Some of Flatiron’s most high-profile portfolio companies—Kozmo, Urban Box Office, Scout ElectroMedia—were among the biggest casualties.

Mr. Colonna went to work at JP Morgan Partners, one of Flatiron’s principle backers, but he felt lost there. “I became depressed, suicidally so, thinking about where my life would go,” he said.

In under a year, he’d decided to resign, telling colleagues he was going to work on a novel about a man having an existential crisis.

On Mr. Colonna’s personal blog, the now-shuttered Madeleines, readers could follow his spiritual evolution in real-time as he discovered Buddhism and then sought certification as a business coach through the Open Center. There’s a touch of Jack Handy to some of his language, as Mr. Colonna grapples with the process of his reinvention. After leaving JP Morgan Partners, he wrote of telling some new acquaintances about how he used to be a venture capitalist. “But I really wanted to say, ‘I’m still important. I’m still smart.’”

There are now more than 50 clients on Mr. Colonna’s roster, and many more on the waiting list. They come for his unique mix of tactical acumen and emotional insight. He offers sessions in person at his Broadway office, as well as via phone and video chat with clients as far away as China. Fees are on a sliding scale.

Sitting on Mr. Colonna’s office couch during that first session back in 2008, Mr. Steele deflected the coach’s questions with a practiced vagueness honed at countless New York cocktail parties. “Jerry looked at me and said, ‘No, what’s really on your mind?’”

The truth? Mr. Steele had been stewing over his next round of fund-raising. He wanted to return to his original investors, whom he liked and trusted, but knew they wouldn’t want the valuation to rise if they backed him again. His employees, meanwhile, would be unhappy if the new round of funds didn’t raise the valuation of the company, and with it their stock options. The fretful disclosure poured out of him.

“Jerry didn’t even blink,” he recalled. “‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s called the inside round problem.’ He spent the next half an hour dissecting it, and when I left that day, I felt like someone had lifted a hundred pounds from my shoulders.”

“When I first started, it was like a secret club,” Mr. Steele said. “Now it feels kind of like half the downtown tech scene has been to see Jerry.”

“Jerry is like Barbara Walters,” Joanne Wilson noted. “Get him one-on-one with anyone and he can make them cry.”

As Betabeat got up to leave our interview with Mr. Colonna, we received a free sample of his services. He pointed at the large duffel bag we had brought along to the interview. “Travelling?” he asked.

It was actually a gym bag, we explained. Betabeat had taken up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

“You see, I love that!” Mr. Colonna exclaimed, sitting forward. “It’s so vital to have a passion outside of your work. You’ve just launched a new site, that’s like a start-up. When you create a new business, there is a narcissistic impulse to connect your self-worth to your company.”

The Observer took a seat on the couch again, next to a stuffed Yoda doll Mr. Colonna had received as a gift from a client. Our mood, we told him, was squarely pegged to the performance of The Observer’s newly launched tech site, Betabeat.

“How has your stomach been feeling?” Mr. Colonna wanted to know.

In fact, for the past few days, our stomach had not been good, we admitted, dumbstruck. Not good at all.

“It’s not X-ray vision, I’ve seen this a thousand times,” Mr. Colonna declared. “Oops, we’re having a session now.” He laughed.

“Look I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do,” he said. “You could be an investment banker or you could be Mother Teresa, but if you let work take over your life, you’ll be miserable. To be an entrepreneur takes a single-minded focus, but to do that without an awareness of its cost is a tragedy.”