(screencap)

Back in November, Livestream partnered with Tumblr for a "live-GIFing" of the final presidential debate. Seems the experiment was successful enough for a return engagement: The company's bountiful stream of coverage tonight from Times Square will include not just the usual interviews and musical performances, but also GIFs. Glorious GIFs!

This officially solidifies 2012's place in the Internet history books as the year even your 80-year-old nana learned what "those little moving pictures" were.

Livestream has handled the ball drop's official feed (produced by Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment) for the last four years, but the GIFs are new. The results will be cross-posted to Gifwich, the site built by Tumblr for the debate festivities. To illustrate what to expect, a Livestream spokesperson provided this magnificent moving snapshot of our mayor cha-cha-chaing with Lady Gaga at last year's broadcast:

The show starts at 5:55 EST this evening and will run until 12:15 p.m., hosted by one Allison Hagendorf of Fuse TV and the CW. The feed is here; if you bookmark it now, perhaps you can avoid the mistake last year by this reporter, when a bit of Googling accidentally turned up a video from the 2010 festivities, rather than the live ball drop. (File under: When time-shifting goes terribly wrong.)

Besides the GIFs, Livestream also partnered with Toshiba to create a free app (both iOS and Android versions are available) where you can watch the event. The app will also let users submit photos they'd like to see on Toshbia's ginormo Times Square screen.

Betabeat encourages everyone to send Snapchat-style photos of their wooly-sock-clad feet, just to remind everyone freezing their butts off on 42nd and Broadway what they could've done instead.

(Photo: DeviantArt)

2012 was quite a year for the New York tech community. Several NYC startups scored monster exits, while others raised millions to up their chances of scoring a ping pong table for the office. Whether or not that hotly debated bubble bursts, we imagine 2013 will be another exciting year for NYC's tech set. Here are some New Year's resolutions from some of the NYC tech community's boldest names.

Rachel Haot, NYC Chief Digital Officer

1.      Cook more meals at home (FreshDirect and BlueApron)

2.      Shop local (local goods on Etsy: http://on.nyc.gov/ZPpbIp)

3.      Read more books (both physical and digital: all three NYC public library systems now offer e-books)

4.      Volunteer more often (http://www.nycservice.org/#s)

5.      Learn a new skill – like middle eastern cooking or how to use a letterpress.

Ryder Ripps, Cofounder of OkFocus

Work more, vroom bye haters.

Mallory Blair, Cofounder of Small Girls PR

Identifying our year's wins and losses and using that information to create defined roles for new team members to hire in the first quarter. Then the rest of 2013 is  about running the business instead of being the business.

Cindy Gallop, Founder of Make Love Not Porn

1. To champion and help every entrepreneur who wants to change the world through sex....This is the one place with enormous potential for innovation, disruption, and colossal financial returns, that the tech world refuses to go. I want to help drive more open-mindedness in the tech community around startups to do with sex.

2. To identify and use anything that is the future of money and payments. This resolution is born out of the frustrations and difficulties we've had setting up our payments infrastructure for MakeLoveNotPorn.tv.

Those difficulties led us to spend a lot of time and effort researching and talking to fintech startups, with the result that I am now passionate about working with and using anyone/thing inventing the future of money, finance and payments, both in an MLNPTV context and also a personal context.

Paul Berry, Cofounder of RebelMouse

My resolution is to keep focused and clever and build the fundamental culture for RebelMouse to grow from.

Christina DiRusso, PR Manager at Livestream

More: Reading, Engineering (currently learning to be a Livestream Encoding Engineer), Entertaining in, and exploring, my new Brooklyn hood, and Reality-TV watching. Less: Emailing, English (honing my Italian skills), Gchatting with my dad.

Josh Miller, Cofounder of Branch

Figure out how to get my (non-techie) roommates to be addicted to Branch, and learn how to rap so I can complement A-Flock's beat boxing (one of our engineers).

Dave Winer, Software Developer and Writer

My resolution for the New Year is: I will do what I can to make tech writing more literate. (Ed. Note: Read more about Mr. Winer's resolution here.)

Ricky Robinett, Hacker at Ordr.in

Be the first hacker in XXL.

Jason Baptiste, Cofounder of OnSwipe

On a personal level, I really want to get back into writing and blogging.  It's why I started Onswipe and lead to my book coming out.  On a professional level?  It's growing Onswipe in a revenue generating machine.  It's an aggressive goal and year, but we have the team + traction to do it.

Jose Mejia, Editorial Director at Huge

One of my resolutions, which I think a lot of people can relate to if they're honest with themselves, is to stop using work/being busy as an easy excuse for what are really just basic character flaws that I need to fix. If I can avoid issuing  "Sorry I'm running late, something came up at work" texts like they're stock in the Shitty Friend IPO, it'll be a good year.

Alex Taub, Biz Dev Builder at Dwolla

My New Years resolution is to be faster and better at creating relevant pop culture twitter parody accounts- a la @invisibleobama

Suri Ratnatunga, Community Lead at Sidetour

To take no cabs in 2013 unless I'm stranded/drunk in Brooklyn.

Crystal Fawn, Community Engagement at Atavist

To read all the books that Stanley Kubrick based his films on.

Taylor Lorenz, Social Media Specialist at McGarryBowen

Stop and think before including emoji in every text message.

Nitasha Tiku, Editor of Betabeat

Make friends based on charger compatibility.

The #SandyCam awaits the action. (Photo: Screenshot)

The wind is already whipping and New Yorkers, having bought up all the bottled water and discount Halloween candy they could find, are ready to hole up in their apartment for the next two days. It's not like you can hop on the ACE and go check out the scene at the waterfront, since the subway is shut down and all.

Luckily for anyone seeking a little vicarious storm-chasing, there's Livestream. The startup has installed a camera on the roof of its Chelsea HQ and will be broadcasting the storm's transit across downtown on what they've dubbed #SandyCam.

"We just decided to scramble everybody, and they'll be working and locking in with food and maybe even sleeping in the office Monday and Tuesday," Livestream CEO Max Haot told Betabeat. Now that's dedication.

By "everybody," he means a skeleton production crew of about five people, who'll be responsible for the feed. The rest of the company's New York employees will be working from home. For his part, Mr. Haot is coordinating the efforts from afar, as he is currently stuck in Las Vegas. "I'll be safe, but without my wife," he said.

The motivation behind this last-minute effort, which wasn't even conceived until Sunday morning? "Basically, we didn't see any good coverage of [Sandy] in the media that's really, like, very interactive, simple, and 24/7," Mr. Haot explained.

Going on infrastructure alone, Livestream was well positioned to provide just that: "Our office happens to be in one of the most connected buildings, both for video fiber and also in terms of power," he said, explaining they've got backup generators on the roof in case of a total blackout. (Hurricane party at 111 Eighth Avenue?)

At the moment, the stream is merely a placid view of downtown, with a NOAA warning on endless loop and a stream of chats. But once the storm really gets going sometime later this afternoon, the excitement will ramp up accordingly. In addition to audio ("so people can really hear the noise and the sounds of the wind"), Livestream will be aggregating the best user-generated footage shot on their remote streaming mobile apps. The company is also dispatching citizen journalist Tim Poole with a specially equipped Jeep and team to shoot photos and live footage across the city, "as long as it's safe."

"That could get quite interesting, to weave that in, instead of just the static camera," added Mr. Haot.

There's a good chance the page will attract quite a few eyeballs as the weather plays out. Even with a very basic setup for last year's Hurricane Irene, said Mr. Haot, "we reached about 100,000 uniques and 30,000 concurrents during the evening, and obviously that was editorially not very compelling and not as big as this." The stream and the entire page are also embeddable, for maximum distribution.

"It could get very interesting in terms of crowd-sourced live news coverage," he said.

Well, it's not the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore being buffeted about in a blue anorak, but it'll certainly do in a pinch.

A sample.

Monday night, Betabeat headed downtown for a new twist on presidential debate punditry. Rather than merely wisecracking, drinking or even live-blogging, Internet types assembled for something new this election cycle: a “live GIF off” of the proceedings, arranged by Tumblr and Livestream.

Our destination was 111 8th Avenue, most famously Google’s New York HQ but also the home to Livestream, our hosts for the evening. Normally an office, the space had been transformed into a multimedia hub, with screens scattered throughout, streaming feeds from both the debate and (so meta) the event itself.

Footage from Florida showed politicians pressing the flesh even as nearby techies milled about, clustering in small knots and yelling to be heard over the music. Moving through the crowd we spotted big-time tech journalist Ben Parr, as well as the city’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot. Getting the setup ready required moving the desks of Livestream’s 75 or so employees.

“We have a lot of staff who are not very happy about it,” joked Livestream CEO (and newlywed husband to Rachel) Max Haot.

Tumblr’s Liba Rubenstein, who’s responsible for building the site’s community of politicos, explained that the concept came about as her team brainstormed ideas for something different they could do around the debates. Given the popularity of GIFs on the social microblogging site, the idea stuck. The intention is to “help bring this content to a really wide audience and help people engage with something that’s more interesting and multifaceted than just watching a news network.”

Gif maestro. (Photo: via Livestream)

To prepare for the proceedings, Tumblr built GIFwich, a new blog specially designed to serve as a hub for this kind of live event coverage. Now that it's there, the company can conveniently host similar events in the future.

Ms. Rubenstein explained that the six bloggers picked to headline the event—including Bobby Finger and Mark Portilla, one half of a duo that goes by Mr. GIF—were power users, with significant followings and a flair for the visual. “None of them are real unknowns,” she explained over the sound of the LCD Soundsystem song “North American Scum.” “We know their work, we trust them.”

While attendees lined up for the all-American buffet, the GIF makers gathered at a table in the center of the room, prepping for the main event. Once underway, the livestream cut from laptop to laptop, an animation taking shape on each screen. Now moderator Bob Schieffer surrounded by flashing BOCA RATONs, now Barack Obama engulfed in a curtain of images of the first lady.

As the party the debate ended, Betabeat snagged Tumblr editorial director Christopher Price (better known to the Internet at large as topherchris), who’d been GIFing away all night.

He introduced us to his fellow correspondent, blogger Lacey Micallef. Asked what brought her to the event, she explained she has a popular Tumblr and “all I do is make GIFs and animate, pixel art, that kind of shit.” (She then apologized for swearing.) “It’s like a big event,” she explained, before turning to Mr. Price. “Nobody else was doing it, right?”

“We’re not saying in-depth political reporting doesn’t have a place,” Mr. Price added. “This is just  this little bonus to follow along with as you’re watching it on TV.”

(Photo: wikipedia.org)

Game Over? There seems to be a mass exodus at Zynga. It was reported yesterday that Wilson Kriegel, the former chief revenue officer of Omgpop, has now left the company. In the last 30 days, the company has lost its COO, CCO, and two vice presidents. Maybe it's time for them to "draw something" different, like a new management plan.

A New Hope? In much better Zynga news, the company has partnered with Food Network's Robert Irvine to help beef up its Chefville game. Mr. Irvine has introduced a series of challenges to help improve the game where you run your own restaurant. "I couldn't be more honored to have an avatar of myself and Restaurant: Impossible be a part of ChefVille," Robert Irvine said in a press release. "As we lend insight to players on what it takes to create their dream restaurant while earning my approval."

Do It Live Livestream, the live video streaming service, announced full access to its suite of live video and live blogging tools. The suite includes encoding software for Mac and PC, ad-free event pages and mobile broadcasting to the web from their Livestream for Producers iPhone app. No ads during a broadcast? Perhaps they've been inspired by Occupy Wall Street's Ustream'er Tim Pool.

Oh You Fancy Huh? Just in time for Christmas shoppers who like to get stuff done early, Fancy has just launched a group gifting platform that allows users to create a gift, invite others to contribute to it, then sends the gift to the recipient. They've also announced a partnership with American Express to help designers like Prabal Gurung sell their goods on Fancy, while giving buyers rewards like cash back for big purchases.

Droid BFF's Sonar, the friend-finding app with the cute submarine mascot, just launched a version for Android. Along with the Android release, Sonar is adding six more language options to the app. The startup also slipped in a version of the android mascot (Andy Roid) into their app to chat with new users.

Tha Envelope Plz The Webby Awards have announced some new judges for this year's ceremony including Rachel Sterne and David Karp. Other new influencers on the panel include OK Go's lead singer Damien Kulash and Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale. Sounds viral enough to us.

Not Soup In case you weren't subscribed to enough luxury-lifestyle magazines, now there's DuJour. They already have three million subscribers through a glitzy partnership with Gilt Groupe. Their site is pretty glamorous and should trigger a consumerist impulse or two.

Get The Artists Rich Louis C.K.'s novel idea of independently selling tickets to his comedy shows has sparked a new venture called Artful.ly Open Source. It allows creators to sell tickets or accept donations without going through the big ticket companies or any expensive vendors. Quick, test it out before Dane Cook makes it uncool.

Ride or Die The team from Dwolla, the app that lets you send and receive money to other users, captured their ride in a special 1920's vehicle that was part of a promotion for HBO's Boardwalk Empire. The group told a passerby to download Uber in order to book his own ride in the car. We hope there was some sort of commission?

Bach To Relevance 92nd Street Y is attempting to rebrand Johann Sebastian Bach through an interactive keyboard website. Each key has a different video that shows you something about Bach you've never thought of before, like Lady Gaga's connection to the classical man, and cats enjoying Bach.

Our Two Favorite Adjectives Quirky and Fab have teamed up to sell a slew of custom designed iPhone 5 accessories. They have some shiny colorful cases, as well as this wallet/phone case that we're really digging.

Mr. Lodwick, Mr. Watts, and Ms. Cantrell (Photo: Instagram/Mike Bodge)

Love must be in the sticky, humid, sweltering air this season. After three Facebook mafia nuptials in a succession, New York techies are taking their turn at the altar.

The New York Times covered Rachel Sterne's East Hamptons wedding to LiveStream founder and CEO Maxime Haot twice in the past two months, once in a trend story about live-streaming your special day. (Yes, they live-streamed it. No, you couldn't watch without a password.)

However, Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick, perhaps burned by the public's response to previous displays of affection, avoided the paper of record's carefully combed-over Wedding section.

(Photo: Facebook)

Besides, isn't that what Instagram is for?

Earlier this week, Mr. Lodwick used the app to document the wedding ring tattoo he got at Three Kings in Greenpoint, noting that "It felt like they were sawing my finger off with a steak knife." On Saturday, guests tweeted photos of Mr. Lodwick's wedding to dancer and choreographer Robin Cantrell, director of the Indelible Dance Company. Mr. Lodwick directed a number of videos of comedian Reggie Watts, who officiated the ceremony by asking the bride, "Do you promise to accept his eccentricities and reject his bullshit?"

Last December, we broke the news that Mr. Lodwick had raised around $1.5 million from prominent New York investors like Chris Dixon, Lerer Ventures, David Karp, Bre Pettis and David Tisch without an idea for a product. Earlier this month, Mr. Lodwick offered some details about the company's two projects: Debris, which he describes as an IRC with images, and Elevision, a platform that lets users discover and watch films and boasts a rather stunning logo.

Skeptics of Mr. Lodwick's funding-before-idea concept take note. Elepath has already used its "Darwinian framework" model to axe development on an iPhone app called Cult that was supposed to help users make social plans. "It sort of worked, but while we were building it, we saw 30 other apps come out that did the same thing, and not get much traction. And even though Cult was different, it wasn’t different enough to stand out (or even to make US happy)." AMEN.

Ms. Sterne's ceremony concluded with fireworks on the water. Mr. Lodwick offered guests a parting gift of Mast Brothers chocolates wrapped in what appears to be an illustration of the couple naked. Artisanal Brooklyn's version of a tiger-monkey photo booth?

Madeline 4, and her dad Brian Snyder the co-founder of Everything Butt Art demoed their iPad app at last night's NYTM. (Ben Weitzenkorn)

NYU’s Skirball center was at capacity last night as roughly 850 people crowded into the once monthly New York Tech Meetup to celebrate the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, and check out some startup demos.

Last night was also special (and started late) because the meetup was simulcast on Livestream for the first time in many months, so everybody at New Work City and New York General Assembly could join the NYTM remotely.

The big news: NYTM announced two new sponsors: Bloomberg and Nasdaq. Nasdaq has apparently been “shooting awesome video of the tech startups that are being built here.”

Andrew Rasiej, chairman of NYTM hailed the efforts of, by his count, more than 2,000 NYTM members who went down to the offices of senators Schumer and Gillibrand and protested their support of the misguided anti-piracy bill. "We put a human face on a protest that was happening around the world," Mr. Rasiej said. “We proved that people are more important than money.” He said 13,000 people viewed the protest on Livestream and NYTM got 1,500 new members almost immediately. The meetup now has 22,000 members.

Scott Heiferman, co-founder of Meetup.com and NYTM board member gave the “State of the tech union” declaring NYTM as the biggest meetup in the world.” New York still falls behind California's Bay Area in terms of tech meetup membership... but barely.

New York Tech Meetup Blog

Now onto the DEMOS!

To get things going, Madeline, the four year old daughter of Everything Butt Art co-founder and Author (it was a book first) Brian Snyder drew an inguana on an iPad. The socially-integrated app begins a drawing with a butt shape and from there... the possibilities are endless. Everything Butt Art has various characters, a stamp tool and one-step sharing for Facebook, email and Twitter. Despite the cheeky name, Mr. Snyder could report that they've had zero inappropriate content issues.

MyMatchmaker is a new dating site  (this one's different, we swear!) that's could have been the high school love child of Facebook, Paypal and OkCupid if only websites could procreate. The twist on this one is that some users are "matchmakers" who "personally invite you to join their singles group." The idea is a curated pool of eligible hotties that will be more compatible with you than the general site population.

MyMatchmaker has managed to make online dating even safer for the shy, timid and emotionally fragile.  The site's privacy settings allow you to have the messages directed at you sent through your matchmaker first bringing the "I know whose got a crush on yooooou" game into the 21st century. The site is free for now but a "make payment" button makes it easy for you to send your matchmaker cash. For all their trouble.

The co-founders of Scroll Kit showed off their new invention that puts the power of web design into the hands of the masses and allows anyone to "make magazine-style layouts for the web and iPad without knowing how to code."  This method of web layout also prevents designers from getting lost in their divs when they want to do something as simple as move an element from the right to the left. The ability to edit in preview means that something that might have taken five minutes can now be done in five seconds. The company is just now expanding to three people. There is a Scroll Kit Wordpress plugin in beta right now.

Ben Zhuk, the co-founder and head of product at Best Vendor came up and made a bold statement. He wants his new startup to be the "Wikipedia of products" or like the one-stop shopping recommendation engine for work related apps. Each app on Best Vendor has its own page that shows notes, who is using it, and user ratings. The site also lets users to ask each other questions and discuss different apps they like or don't.

PaperLex is not trying to put lawyers out of business as one NYTM member suggested but rather trying to help entrepreneurs, small businesses and freelancers create standard, customizable legal documents such as service agreements. Big league tech and biz magazine "Fast Company" is PaperLex's first media client.

MVF or Most Valuable Follower shows you who to suck up to on Twitter and, as of last night Facebook too. Proprietary code calculates how many followers a user has over how many they follow to determine their worth. Certain users had to be "black listed" including Barack Obama because they skew results.

The guys behind Umami recently launched their new TV Companion iPad app that uses audio fingerprinting technology to pull up complementary information about the show you're watching. Need to know what other movies that one guy has been in? Now there literally IS an app for that.

CartoDB a new geospacial project allows developers and engineers to quickly create custom maps by plugging in data sets that seem to map themselves. Information from the data set can be excluded (among these wifi spots, which ones are free?) and integrated with other data sets (among NYC parks, which ones have wifi? Which ones have free wifi?).

Lenddo is the first crowd-based credit and identity system based on proven micro-finance techniques. Lenddo wants to give more people access to "life improving loans" and rates creditworthiness based on the creditworthiness, practices and reputation of the other people in your Lenddo network. For instance, if you take out a loan and pay it back, it helps your score and the scores of those you are connected to. Although legally Lenddo can't be opened up to the general public in the U.S. just yet, Lenddo Score is being used in Philippines and getting ready to launch in South America.

Zuccotti Park, the Occupy Wall Street protest's headquarters. (flickr.com/shankbone)

On the Saturday that thousands of protesters marched to Times Square, the brass bells of the New York Stock Exchange rang out at noon--signifying the takeover of the trading floor by the New York startup community. Companies like Etsy, Meetup and ZocDoc were handing out t-shirts and branded ping pong balls to fresh-faced engineers in backpacks who circled the screen-filled roundabouts while munching the complimentary sandwiches provided for SA500, a Silicon Alley recruiting event.

The choice of venue could be interpreted as symbolic aggression. New York startups compete fiercely with the finance sector for programmers and MBAs--and while they can’t match Goldman’s salaries, they do make the social argument. Knewton wants to transform education, Sulia wants to reinvent news, and the mobile payments app Venmo wants to replace credit cards. Meetup is “starting a local community revolution”; Etsy’s mission is to “empower people to change the way the global economy works.” The lofty talk of startups is not unlike the rhetoric of the protesters, who are advocating--albeit vaguely--the most radical agenda of any political movement in recent memory.

“I see them as very, very similar,” said Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup.com, who orchestrated a field trip to the protest after a recent board meeting. “Most of the successful startup people are out to make a dent in the universe and change the world in some way, and that's what they're trying to do downtown. I can't speak to the people who are just hanging around for the free pizza, but there are people downtown who are really fired up to see some sort of systemic change in culture.”

But while they’re definitely talking about the protest, many techies aren’t sold. The movement has high engagement (and revenue!) but the brand, the marketing and the roadmap need work.

“It's all about your pitch,” said Reece Pacheco, the co-founder and CEO of the hot video-sharing startup Shelby.tv, who was at the N.Y.S.E. that Saturday scouting for talent. “Right now Occupy Wall Street’s pitch is really bad because no one know what they're really about. You got some people saying ‘yeah, stop spending money, and get the troops out of Iraq,’ and like, ‘free Nelson Mandela!’ They’re all over the place.”

“My view of it is that they have not been utilizing technology to their full advantage,” said Brandon Diamond, founder of the Hacker Union, a collective of New York programmers. “What they should start with is a centralized resource where people can find out what they're protesting. Even a Twitter account.”

“I think the way it's been executed has been really poor,” said Melanie Moore, a former financial analyst who is now on her second web startup, a subscription-based site for fashion essentials. “That list of demands that came out? It was like, Marxist bullshit. It was crazy. Like, ‘we should abolish government.’ Like anarchist ... they've gotten to the point where their brand is very diluted.”

Ms. Moore, who lives on Wall Street and regularly walks past the protest, advocated a pivot. “If I wanted to go about it the right way I would get a group of people together, break off from Occupy Wall Street, call it something else, rebrand it and start the right way, with people who maybe have some connections in Washington.”

Despite criticism from the techie peanut gallery, Occupy Wall Street is nothing if not tech-savvy. (One of the earliest criticisms was the preponderence of Macbooks among the protesters.) The protest has had a near-constant Livestream from the headquarters at Zuccotti Park, which has also broadcast from Times Square and during the now-infamous mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a fixture on geeky forums like Reddit and SomethingAwful; even the Bitcoin community and the hacktivists of Anonymous are into it. The protest has also voted consistently to use open-source software for everything from its website to its accounting, and the still-grassroots funded movement is hip to crowdfunding sites Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, which raised money for tangential projects such as The Occupied Wall Street Journal. There are also more than 200 occupation-related campaigns on the Y Combinator-incubated WePay.com. “It's not a coincidence that much of the success of the #OWS movement comes from their nimble use of technology to organize and get their word out,” the venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote on his blog.

Betabeat happened to be standing at the corner of Zuccotti Park on the second Saturday of the protest, as a march that had resulted in about 80 arrests was returning to the park headquarters. As the much-thinned stream of sign-holders neared, the N.Y.P.D. tensed and started to shoo protesters off the sidewalk and into the park. “Cameras up, cameras up!” one man shouted, needlessly, as the small crowd had already sprouted a halo of smartphones.

Atlantic staffer Conor Friedersdorf, who lives in the redwoods of Northern California, discovered a sign at the New York protest bearing an excerpt from one of his blog posts--alerted to him by a reader on Twitter who had seen it on BoingBoing. The way his words had traveled, transformed and disseminated back to him led to an epiphany: “I now see how Occupy Wall Street is like the internet,” he wrote, adding another layer to the remix by referencing words written by CNN’s Douglas Rushkoff. “I now understand a little better what it means for a protest movement to be without ‘a traditional narrative arc,’ to be ‘the product of the decentralized networked-era culture,’ to be about ‘inclusion and groping toward consensus.’”

The New York tech community would seem to be in a prime position to help the webby movement. The protest has been using Vibe, an anonymized broadcasting app similar to Twitter built by a New York techie. One Meetup engineer organized a small hackathon that produced a few Occupy Wall Street apps including OccupyVotes, a platform for deciding on the specific demands everyone has been clamoring for, which has already collected some 19,000 votes on 64 proposals.

And yet most of the New York tech community, while fascinated by the protest, is keeping Occupy Wall Street at arm’s length. Most of the techies we spoke to had not visited Zuccotti Park. First Round Capital’s Charlie O’Donnell, who has sounded off about the protest on his blog and weekly email newsletter, has merely “biked by it several times,” he said. “I think I’d be too frumpy if I went down there,” said Mr. Diamond, who has stayed away.

Part of the hesitation seems to derive from the self-deterministic nature of founder exceptionalism: entrepreneurs are the ones who quit the comfort of cubicles and health insurance and convention in favor of uncertainty, 80-hour work weeks and the remote possibility of glory. Startups, not protests, are the real mechanism for change, some feel.

“Anger doesn't create wealth or work,” said Jason Kende, a founder who works out of the SoHo coworking space WeWork Labs, where members have been debating the merit and meaning of Occupy Wall Street in an internal email thread. “For me, it's a loud giant arrow pointing to the underlying problems of how we work, how we make wealth, the lack of flexibility or margin for error in our lives, and the enormous gap between relevant talent and real opportunity in our workforce. I think we all want solutions. It's just a question of whether we demand someone else fix everything for us or create real solutions ourselves.”

While the protest against big banks raged outside the stock exchange that Saturday, Mr. Pacheco told Betabeat, the startups inside were seducing Wall Street’s workforce away. “Outside people preaching against capitalism, and then inside there were people who were pro-capitalism but saying ‘don't do it the way they're doing it, come do it with us,’” he said. “I've never really liked the system. But I’ve always known that I've had to play within the system to win, you know what I mean?”

Tech entrepreneurs have plenty of reason to feel conflicted. They’re funded by one-percenters, to start (although some tech VCs seem to recognize a familiar potential in the upstart movement: “#occupywallst proving to be a classic disruptor. dismissed as whiny hippies a few weeks ago now doubling every three days,” tweeted Bryce Roberts, co-founder of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, who flew to New York from San Francisco explicitly to check out the protest). Technological innovations tend to eliminate American jobs; tech companies are also scraped for programmers, which sometimes means outsourcing to Mechanical Turk or a development shop in Estonia.

And of course, for a startup, the ultimate win is an IPO on Wall Street.

“I believe in business, I believe in capitalism, I believe in the free market and the ability of one to say, ‘I'm going to create a business, I should be able to do that the way I want,’” Mr. Pacheco said. “If you make money, you should make money! On the other hand, there's a strong part of me that is always looking out for the social good of the world, and it’s tough to say, ‘oh well, sorry you didn't start a company,’ or ‘sorry you didn't get a job at a bank, you're screwed.’”

But the symptoms of Occupy Wall Street mania are strikingly similar to to the startup fever that’s been going around. Betabeat recently accosted a spokesman for the movement’s finance committee, Tim Hollinger, who had deflated on a park bench after hollering an update at one of the protest’s nighttime assemblies. He was too tired to follow our line of questioning. “I was just going to go home and sleep for a few hours,” he admitted, reminding us of a young type-A founder. Another organizer, Patrick Bruner, the 23-year-old who has taken the lead on the protest’s press relations, told Betabeat his work on the protest will be “the most important thing I ever do,” in an awed voice reminiscent of the esteemed Biz Stone, who once said, “Twitter is not a triumph of tech. It is a triumph of humanity.”

Occupy Wall Street is in many ways, a triumph of Twitter--although the fact that #occupywallstreet has not cracked the trending topics has become a pet cause for a certain subset of activist Twiterati. It’s also a triumph of Facebook, Tumblr, Kickstarter, Livestream, Wordpress, Google Docs and the iPhone, without which it would be considerably impaired. And Occupy Wall Street could end up setting the stage for startups like BankSimple, an online-only bank that proposes to take the pain out of personal finance.

“I think that if you look at a lot of the most exciting startups in the country right now, they are right in line with what's at the heart of Occupy Wall Street,” Mr. Heiferman said. “So if you think about, what is Kickstarter, what is Airbnb, what are things like Meetup, Skillshare--at the heart of it all these things are about creating an economy where people are, they're creating a new economy, creating this people-powered economy as opposed to a top-down corporate economy.”

Many local entrepreneurs don’t seem to see it that way, we noted.

“If any startup can wrangle the attention of the country and the world as fast as Occupy Wall Street has, then I'd love to hear about that startup,” he said. “Like, if you're running a startup that no one's ever heard of, and you're complaining that this movement has gone from nothing to near 100 percent awareness in the developed world, well then, you know …” he trailed off. “You get my point.”

He'd advise Occupy Wall Street to worry about making the jump from early adopters to mainstream users, he said. "One of the seminal Bibles of the startup technlogy world is an old book called Crossing the Chasm, and it talks about how there is an adoption curve," he said. "Plenty of startups that get popular amongst the social media crowd don't make it to Middle America and the moms."

But there’s one question no one’s asked so far: Is Occupy Wall Street a bubble? "I don't think there's a bubble," the sardonic tech pundit Alex Blagg told Betabeat in an email. "In fact, I'm aggressively bullish on Occupy Wall Street. It has all the hallmarks of any real buzzy tech startup: seemingly limitless idealistic potential, great 'anti-establishment' brand positioning, and most importantly, a vague coolness among kids on Tumblr."

He estimated the protest, which had raised about $300,000 as of Tuesday, could get a valuation of more than $6 billion.

The company is now more than 20 employees and growing, hiring for a web designer in New York as well as some positions in Bangalore and L.A. CLARIFICATION: Livestream is 120 employee in four offices (New York, Los Angeles, Bangalore India, Ukraine), including 50 full-time staff in its New York headquarters.

All photos and captions by James Nani.

Livestream CEO Max Haot: It's time to "break the cable model."

New York City-based Livestream, which specializes in streaming events live online, said today that its viewers spend an average of 16 minutes per viewing with different types of streams across the network.

That number suggests that the press conferences, traffic cameras and home-produced TV shows on Livestream are closer to competing with the professionally-produced network shows on Hulu than the cat videos and shorter content on YouTube, where video lengths are closer to three or four minutes.

It also suggests that Livestream is getting closer to competing with cable operators like Time Warner.

"We are like an online cable operator, a destination," Livestream CEO Max Haot told Beet.TV. "The cable operators...all will die."

Livestream's real competition, Haot said, is Ustream, the live streaming site better known for empowering individuals to set up live webcams of themselves DJ-ing in their laundry rooms.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

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