Beer Me Storied New York venture capital firm Lerer Ventures knows its target audience. According to a tweet from Scoutmob cofounder Dave Payne, Lerer is hosting a beer pong tournament for some of the companies it has invested in. "just got invited to a beer pong tourney by one of our venture investors," tweeted Mr. Payne. "that's hard core @lererventures. well done."

Competition at the tournament seems like it will be quite fierce. "hope you've been practicing," responded Northeastern student Scott Edelstein. "i've seen@benjlerer win with his eyes closed."

In fact, here's proof:

(Photo: Twitter)

Twitter Tempest There's no beef like a Twitter beef. Exhibit A: This week's digital bar brawl between erstwhile TechCrunch writer Paul Carr (now EIC of NSFW Corporation) and current TechCrunch writer Ryan Lawler.

The opening salvo came from Mr. Carr: "This is the dumbest thing I've read on TechCrunch all hour," he tweeted, pointing to a post uncritically touting some stats from Airbnb. Told, "at least it wasn't a slideshow," Mr. Carr responded: "it would have been had Airbnb sent a slideshow." It might've stayed there, had Mr. Lawler (the author of the piece) not leapt into the fray and gone nuclear. "I wish I could build a career on my own drunkenness and self loathing," he rejoined. Oh, dear.

The back and forth that ensued was collected by the parody account @NextTechBlog and given the title of, "Utterly Embarrassing Interpersonal Shit-Show In Front Of Everyone." And Start-ups: Silicon Valley star Kim Taylor knew her opening when she saw it: "Season 2 of #SiliconValley: Self important tech reporters argue on twitter like 12 year old girls."

Diwali, D.C. Style LocalResponse founder Nihal Mehta spent some time in Washington D.C. this week. But instead of snapping pics at the Lincoln Memorial or going bar hopping in Adams Morgan like your typical D.C. visitor, Mr. Mehta attended the White House's official Diwali celebration. "current status: in the @whitehouse eating a samosa after mtg the first hindu congresswoman @tulsigabbard after #diwalipuja w/@joebiden," Mr. Mehta tweeted. If that doesn't trigger your FOMO sensibilities, he then followed it up with a photo of Vice President Biden lighting the Diwali Diya. Baller status: unlocked.

(Photo: Twitter)

Interpersonal Fitness Adventures in Timehop: Seven years ago, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley gave all his friends pedometers, "in an attempt to make a poor man's NikeFuel." No word on whether it worked.

Sadface Tumblr ad man Rick Webb shared the below photo--on his Tumblr, natch--depicting a rather deserted-looking Microsoft store. Given that it opened just a few weeks ago, and that the holidays are approaching, shouldn't it be slightly more crowded? Poor Steve Ballmer. "This would be comical if it wasn’t so sad," Mr. Webb offered.

(Photo: Tumblr)

Ayndroids Among Us It seems tech world conscience (and 2012 Tech Insurgent!) Anil Dash had quite the interesting conversation recently. "Odd FB exchange with a founder who says 80% of U.S. are worthless & just take," he tweeted, adding that he "Blocked me when I asked why his homepage doesn't say that." Unfortunately, Mr. Dash didn't reveal the unnamed founder's identity, other than to clarify it wasn't a Facebooker and he'd started "a few companies." Perhaps we'll just dub this mystery man John Galt, which would surely delight him to no end.

As always: Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com We’ve also implemented an anonymous tip box for you covert tipsters out there; you can find it on the top-right corner of our homepage.

The morning after the first snow. (Photo: Flickr/tomasfano)

The CEO's of AppNexus and LocalResponse we're always besties. [PandoDaily]

Alexia Tsotsis breaks down what exactly rubs Valley-ites so wrong about Start-Ups: Silicon Valley: "We’re so snobby we’re above snobbery." [TechCrunch]

Who convinced President Obama to convene with the forever alones on Reddit? His crack team of data crunchers, of course. [Time]

Even a superstorm can't break the internet. [AllThingsD]

We didn't see the Fail Whale once during election night, even as tweets poured by. Twitter VP of infrastructure ops Mazen Rawashdeh credits the company's stellar performance with its backend overhaul from Ruby to Java. [Twitter Blog]

Nihal Mehta, CEO of LocalResponse (twitter.com)

Local startup LocalResponse is apparently growing like a weed. As we've reported before, the platform leverages your social media detritus to deliver hyper-targeted ads. (Translation: You check into a store, and you get a coupon that's actually useful.)

Now, it sounds like that approach is quite literally paying off. According to TechCrunch, CEO Nihal Mehta says the company is within striking distance of profitability, and he expects to cross that particular milestone sometime in Q3. Just in time for Christmas shopping.

The company  has worked with heavy hitters like Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Walgreens and currently boasts a roster of 75 advertisers. What intrigues the blue chip types? “We think that being able to create much more targeted ads based on social can close the gap between mobile versus desktop ad spend,” he told TechCrunch.

He also shared a few wonkier details about the ad network, which is reportedly serving up 7 billion impressions per month. But before we get all, "a million dollars isn't cool," there's a catch:

To be clear, it isn’t actually filling all of that inventory, or even close to 100 percent, as CEO and co-founder Nihal Mehta admits. However, he says that if LocalResponse could fill even half of it, say at a $6 CPM (the rate for each thousand impressions), it would still be a big business.

If only we could withdraw speculative dollars from an ATM machine.

Nihal Mehta, CEO of LocalResponse (twitter.com)

Oversharers, beware: if you've recently tweeted anything embarrassing--say, how much you drank last night--be prepared to confront ads that directly address your tweets. For example: If you're browsing a website even without being logged into its Twitter functionality, you might get served a banner ad about a hangover cure, or deals on Stoli.

It's a new form of big brother-esque hyper-targeted advertising from New York-based startup LocalResponse that, according to a press release, "delivers more relevant ads across all platforms by learning from public consumer intent expressed over public social media channels."

LocalResponse attaches a cookie to your social media accounts, which allows it to track the things you publicly post about on these platforms. Then, when you're surfing another website, it can deliver highly-tailored ads based on this content.

This is great news for advertisers, who have long struggled with the best way to reach their most likely customers, as well as content producers who can charge a higher premium for better targeted ads. Plus, it will only pick up on public social media accounts, so your embarrassing statuses on Facebook are safe, as long as your profile is private.

According to the release:

Through its ad display platform, LocalResponse is able to mine public social media channels to find consumers who have expressed interest in a particular brand or lifestyle associated with the brand. LocalResponse then delivers that brand display ad specifically to those consumers who match the criteria of public intent. For example, a ‘tweet’ from a user saying they are looking to trade in their BMW X5 could result in an Audi Q7 banner ad appearing on that same consumer’s desktop.

And we thought Gmail's ads were creepy.

Any excuse to post photos of @stanleythepuppy

LocalResponse announced some big news today in the way of every startup's favorite word: monetization! (Well, it might be your least favorite if your name rhymes, say, with Shmumblr). The advertising platform, which helps marketers make good on real-time consumer intent by mining mentions and location-enabled check-ins on Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla and the like, is now offering an "analytics and action platform for marketers."

In the past, LocalResponse has managed fly-over state friendly campaigns for clients like Walgreens. Consumers who checked-in to Walgreens on Foursquare or merely tweeted "I'm at Walgreens" or even "I'm going to Walgreens," got a tweet back directly from the store offering promotions and coupons. Click-through rates for that that kind of offering are more than 50 percent, a good 20 times that of other direct response marketing campaigns, says the startup.

The secret sauce of LocalResponse's approach to social media deluge is that the company is able to analyze both implicit and explicit check-ins. "No one is using semantic NLP (natural language parsing) to extract the implicit 'check-in' or presence—in fact we have a patent pending on this process," LocalResponse CEO Nihal Mehta told Betabeat. "Sprout Social, Tweetdeck, SocialFlow all operate on generic mentions, instead of 'presence' like LocalResponse does," he added. Data from Foursquare, who is also trying get in on the ad game, is only two percent of LocalResponse's data set. "The vast majority comes from people mentioning they are at places or doing things on Twitter itself!" he said.

That level of analysis also helps LocalResponse target mobile display ads based on a consumer's intent and even "relevant sentiment." Intuit, another client, used LocalResponse to send TurboTax banner ads to people who kvetched about doing taxes on Twitter. In that case, they improved ten fold on your average online display ad, with a 1 percent click-through.

Betabeat was most intrigued by the company's ability to make use of a "competitive check-in." Does that if you check into Burger King, McDonald's (another LocalResponse client) will send you a coupon?? "If you check into Burger King, we would NOT have McDonald's send you a tweet back. We feel this is spammy to the user," Mr. Mehta assured us by email. "Instead we would retarget that check-in across mobile/web display. In other words, if you publicly check into BK, the next time you go to the web, don't be surprised to see a banner ad for McD's!"

The move towards an analytics dashboard doesn't surprise us.  Last April when LocalResponse was pivoting away from Buzzd, a city guide that used social media to show you what was trending, Mr. Mehta told Betabeat, "Our data is more valuable to local merchants and brands than to the consumer."

So does this mean the dashboard will be a bigger part of the company's long-term revenue strategy? "YES of course," Mr. Mehta responded, emphatically. "And that is why we are launching the Pro Dashboard, where brands and agencies want to see all the data on their customers, across gender/DMA/age/klout/etc. and then utilize the tool to respond back to them on a 1:1 basis."

Expect more advertisers to join the likes of LocalResponse's impressive client list: Audi, Coca-Cola, Dell, Estee Lauder, FedEx, General Electric, General Mills, General Motors, H&M, Hersheys, Kmart, Lowes, McDonald’s, NBC-Universal, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Verizon, and Walgreens.

In the meantime, you can probably catch Mr. Mehta doing "the Stanford swivel" at Soho House or palling around with LocalResponse's inimitable office furball, @stanleythepuppy.

But LocalResponse is embracing that all American consumer. The company announced today they are opening a new office in Chicago and bringing on Todd Hayes, who was the Internet Advertising Bureau's 2010 salesman of the year for the Midwest. Just because you're based in Chelsea doesn't mean you don't know how to sell Pepsi in the flyover states, am I right? 

The company also noted that it had doubled its staff since its recent fund raise. For those playing catch up, LocalResponse is a geo-target advertising platform. It lets stores and brands respond to users who check in through services like foursquare or make their location know on Twitter or Flickr. The idea is to turn check ins into highly targeted, geo-specific advertising inventory. The company says click through rates are tracking above 60 percent for blue chip brands like Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Hershey's. Not bad compared to the less than 1 percent click through on your average internet ad.

Nihal Mehta

Betabeat is pretty sick of "big data" as a buzzword, but the amount of personal information that consumers are throwing up on the web is staggering. Facebook has had some success advertising against this information, Twitter less so.

LocalResponse was born out of the ashes of Buzzd, a city guide that mashed up Foursquare and Twitter to help users find local hotspots. Founder Nihal Mehta learned a valuable lesson in defeat, and this week raised a $5 million round from new investors Cava Capital, Vodafone Ventures, Advancit Capital and Progress Ventures, along with its existing investors

Buzzd was a consumer facing platform, but failed to attract enough users. LocalResponse, by contrast, take the massive amount of public data being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and turns that into ad inventory.

"Our Verizon campaign has been one of the top performers," said Mr. Mehta, who chatted with Betabeat by phone earlier this week. "When we see people tweeting out 'AT&T suck' or 'Singular is killing me' we can respond to that with a tweet from Verizon's account offering them a $100 discount to switch carriers. That's relevant, contextual advertising and the conversion rates have been off the charts."

For now the only insight we have into performance comes from Mr. Mehta himself. But LocalResponse has secured 40 clients and some very big names: Verizon, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Walgreens and more. Several of these companies have run repeated campaigns on the service, a sign that they are seeing a positive return on their investment.

"The click through rates on promoted tweets are still quite low. By comparison our campaign for Walgreens saw a 60% click through rate."

Back in August LocalResponse acquired social TV startup Philo, which added a number of engineers to their team, including their current CTO, Jessica Lowe. The new funding will be used to build our sales and marketing and to deepen the R&D the company is doing on semantic analysis.

The key to keeping their service from being spammy is only sending consumers messages that are highly relevant in terms of time, place and sentiment. LocalResponse is responding to a user's status update, tweet or check in, which gives them a great context to target their add. And because most people have these services set up with push notifications, they don't have to be in the specific app to get the message, they only need to own a smartphone, which often provides a great picture of their location. "SMS is a powerful and ubiquitous service," Mr. Mehta said.

To prove their point, LocalResponse pointed to a campaign Manhattan restaurant Baohaus, which was sending out tweets to promote its business, but seeing little response. When they started running a LocalResponse campaign, they got 40,000 retweets, and 340 people saw their discount offering for every person that sent a tweet.

The service debuted for local merchants and today it announced the second half of its business, a platform that will allow big brands to target users with deals based on this data. “We’re effectively using the “check-in” as a proxy for behavioral and location-based targeting,” says Nihal Mehta, CEO and Co-founder. “There’s finally significant reach and scale in this medium, and we’re excited to connect brands and agencies to it.”

It's also important because LocalResponse is free for small business, but will charge national brands. Kathy Leake, former founder and CFO of Media6Degrees, will lead the branded efforts as President.

LocalResponse is a pivot from the folks at Buzzd, who built a city guide based on the same concept, aggregating data from different services to help users figure out what locations were trending nearby or relevant to them. Rather than compete head on with the consumer facing check in services like Foursquare and Facebook, the company is now trying to monetize that activity by making it useful to the enterprise.

“Our data is more valuable to local merchants and brands than to the consumer,” says Mehta. So for example Webster Hall would use Localresponse to see everyone who was checking in and perhaps offer up a free drink to users who shouted out the concert to friends or public feeds.

In a smart move, LocalResponse went beyond the standard check in services when building out their network of data points. A check in on Foursquare requires me to select a specific venue first, it's explicit about the location. Folks can also attach location data to Twitter posts, but more often users just provide a status update on those two services. So in addition to reading obvious locations, LocalResponse tries to analyze natural language from simple phrases like, “I’m heading to Madison Square Garden!” and extract useful information about where users are.

The danger behind a service like this is that users will get fed up with a flood of push notifications about deals, especially from big brands, which won't be offering as unique a location based experience. So Localresponse has decided not to send more than one message per day from its advertisers and just one message per week from any specific brand or business. The more accurate and timely the offers, the less chance users will begin to experience stalker syndrome.

But your average restaurant owner doesn't have time to learn and monitor multiple location based services. LocalResponse, which launches tonight, aims to provide a simple, out of the box solution for businesses to connect this new breed of consumer.

LocalResponse, is a pivot from the folks at Buzzd, who built a city guide based on the same concept, aggregating data from different services to help users figure out what locations were trending nearby or relevant to them. "Buzzd is doing well, 500k unique users in march, but the team is now 110% focused on growing Localresponse, a much bigger business opportunity," said co-founder and CEO Nihal Mehta. "We're now in advanced discussions to find Buzzd a good home."

Best of luck to Buzzd scoring some new digs. This time the team is putting that aggregate location data to work targeting consumers and rewarding influencers. ""Our data is more valuable to local merchants and brands than to the consumer," says Mehta. So for example Webster Hall would use Localresponse to see everyone who was checking in and perhaps offer up a free drink to users who shouted out the concert to friends or public feeds.

Sometimes this kind of data is explicit. A check in on Foursquare requires me to select a specific venue first. Folks can also check in on Facebook or attach location data to Twitter posts, but more often users just provide a status update on those two services. So in addition to reading obvious locations, LocalResponse tries to analyze natural language from simple phrases like, "I'm heading to Madison Square Garden!" and extract useful information about where users are.

"I have seen a lot of start-ups try to crack this formula," says Matt Meeker, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Dogpatch Labs NY. "But this is one of the few that I have seen that seems like it will actually scale with the growth of these services, and work for local merchants right out of the box."

Localresponse plans to roll out the platform with big brands in the near future, and blue chip names like Coca-cola, Kraft, Nordstrom, American Express and Verizon have signed on to launch loyalty campaigns through Localresponse. It has competition from social media managment services like Social Sprout and the General Assembly based Postling. It will also be interesting to see how things develop with  services that provide the raw material of check in data, like Foursquare for example, which are in many ways competing for the same advertising dollars.

Saving himself for the launch. How quaint.

It's just 19 days until the launch of Localresponse, the newest offering from mobile entrepreneur and investor Nihal Mehta.

He's been hitting the trail, criss crossing the country to rustle up partnerships with big brands. Localresponse is a kind of a pivot for the folks at Buzzed, according to co-founder Michael Muse.

Seems to be working. Today Mehta quipped that four different companies have tried to purchase Localresponse, and the thing hasn't event launched yet.

"4 inbound m&a offers before officially launching @localresponse. not bad!#itsdefinitelyabubble," he tweeted.