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.

Photo-sharing apps may be hot, but what's even sexier are startups that bring home the bacon. That's the basic premise behind 500 Startups' unSEXY, a 1-day conference, which covers verticals such as financial services, communications, email, data, infrastructure and more. It's all about tech startups and companies who are actually doing something incredibly sexy--they’re building scalable, sustainable businesses. So if you're in the Bay Area next week, definitely go check it out!

Speaking of the Bay Area, there are a ton of interesting events coming up there, including TechCrunch's Annual Crunchup, StartupGrind, Teens in Tech Conference, TwilioCon, GigaOm's Mobilize and more. Gary's Guide has an extensive list of upcoming events.

Rumor also has it that there may be a crazy, fun party happening later this week on my b'day on August 5. Stay tuned for more details ;)

And now let's see what shenanigans are happening in the Alley this week...

Inside BizDev: How Ad Agencies Can Make Big Brands Love You
With Christine Cook (advertising partnerships, Flipboard), Trevor Guthrie, (director, Ignition Factory East, OMD) and Shiv Singh (global head of digital, PepsiCo Beverages). Moderated by Anand Chopra-McGowan (General Assembly).
Monday (July 30), 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway, 4th Floor

Social Curation Summit
Speakers include Scott Belsky (CEO, Behance), Sim Blaustein (principal, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments), Sean Flynn (partner, Shasta Ventures), David Honig (founder, Vision Ventures), Elias Roman (CEO, Songza), Steve Rosenbaum (CEO, Magnify) and others.
Tuesday (July 31), 8:30 a.m. @ New Yorker Hotel, 481 Eighth Avenue

Entrepreneurs Roundtable 49
With Jeanne Sullivan, General Partner at Starvest Partners.
Tuesday (July 31), 6 p.m. @ NYU Stern, 44 West 4th Street, Rm 2-60

Future of Fashion–Emerging Startup Series
Presenting companies include Bazaart, Stylyt, Cloth and Swaag. Panelists include Steven Alan (fashion designer), Philippe von Borries, (cofounder, Refinery 29) and Keegan Vance Forte (chief of staff, AOL Ventures).
Tuesday (July 31), 7 p.m. @ Projective Space L.E.S., 72 Allen Street, 3rd Floor

Digital Cocktails-Crowdfunding: New Opportunities, New Risk
Panelists include Slava Rubin (cofounder and CEO, IndieGoGo), Karen Freer Owner (creator, Free Bread), Brian Meece (cofounder, RocketHub), Jerry Spiegel Partner (Frankfurt Kurnit) and Sang Lee (founder, Return on Change and executive board member, National Crowdfunding Association).
Wednesday (Aug. 1), 6 p.m. @ Wix Lounge, 10 West 18th Street

August NY FinTech Startups Meetup feat. Second Market
FinTech founder story and Q&A with Jeff Stewart (Lenddo) and domain expert presentation by Adam Oliveri (Second Market).
Wednesday (Aug. 1), 6:30 p.m. @ Day Pitney Law Offices, 7 Times Sq, #20

BlogHer 2012
Rockstar speaker list including Katie Couric, Martha Stewart, Soledad O'Brien and others.
Thursday (Aug. 2), 8 a.m. @ Hilton, 1335 Avenue of the Americas

IDEA JAM for Developers/Designers
Investor panel includes Erik Nordlander (partner, Google Ventures), Hilary Gosher (partner, Insight Venture Partners) and Lawrence Lenihan (partner, FirstMark Capital).
Thursday (Aug. 2), 6:30 p.m. @ Venue TBD

eCommerce Hack Day 2012
Organized by Dwolla. In parnership with Etsy. With Gumroad, Kiip, Temboo, Terapeak, Twilio, Shopify and others.
Saturday (Aug. 4), 9 a.m. @ Alley NYC, 500 7th Avenue, 17th Fl.

Lowline Fundraiser at Water Mill
Come get the lowdown on the Lowline, the world's first underground park.
Saturday (Aug 4), 6 p.m. @ 675 Flying Point Rd, Water Mill

More events on the horizon...
Investor Feedback Forum on Aug. 9 @ Microsoft
August NY Enterprise Technology Meetup (ft keynote by Jive cofounder Bill Lynch) on Aug. 14 @ Cooley
Startup tours for Developers: Conductor & GetGlue on Aug. 16 @ Conductor
NY Games Conference on Sept. 5 @ Museum of Jewish Heritage
Comedy Hack Day on Sept. 8 @ Pivotal Labs NYC
FinovateFall 2012 on Sept. 12 @ Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
Design for Manufacturing Summit on Sept. 20 @ Dumbo Spot

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! ;)

(twitter.com/cliffdailey)

Airtime, the Sean & Shawn bred startup that launched earlier this week, has slowly grown on us. Our initial reaction was in line with the majority of the Internet's: "Okay, it's Chatroulette without penises." But the more we've used the service, the more its benefits for networking, flirting and stymying boredom have revealed themselves.

But the thing is, since the site hasn't really hit critical mass yet, you tend to run into the same types of people over and over again. They're almost always very nice, but in our experience, they also almost always fall into one of the below five categories.

1. Journalists

Okay, this reporter is part of the problem, but few seem to be as in love with Airtime as the navel-gazing, network-savvy media elite. While the new app has been extensively reported on, few of our Facebook friends who aren't explicitly involved in media or tech seem to have caught on to the trend. We tend to wait to grant an app "phenomenon" status until it has been adopted by our Kardashian-obsessed, text-messages-in-her-sleep 20-year-old sister.

2. Startup Evangelizers

No where has the "everybody's a CEO" meme been more obvious than within the hallowed video chat grounds of Airtime. The vast majority of folks we've bumped into on the service are founder or executive-level startup employees. And, inevitably, when they ask us what we do, we are subjected to an impromptu pitch session on why their company is the Next Big Thing.

3. People You are Purposefully Not Facebook Friends With

Remember that dude you had a short but torrid Thing with back in college, and now sometimes you see each other in line for coffee and you make that unspoken "I'll pretend not to see you if you pretend not to see me" pact? Yeah, you're not Facebook friends with him for a reason, and you sure as hell don't want to run into him on Airtime.

4. The Lost, Lonely Men of the Internet

If this Businessweek piece is to be believed, a whole lot of dudes are looking at Airtime like it's a video chat version of OkCupid. We definitely had the experience of running into some flirty young men--one, in fact, who could barely bridle his joy as he blurted out: "You're a girl!"

5. Famous business leaders/investors/B-list celebrities

We all know Zuck uses it. So do Jessica Alba and Justin Bieber's manager, Scooter Braun, as well as Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley and Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus, who users apparently confuse for each other. Assumedly Olivia Munn, Jim Carrey, Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg and Joel McHale use it too, since they were present for its launch. Personally, we're still waiting for Ryan Gosling to catch on.

Mr. Parker (flickr.com/mager)

Airtime, the super stealth video startup from Napster cofounders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, is launching at a press event this morning at Milk Studios in NYC, and celebrities on Twitter are apparently really, really excited about it. It's perhaps unsurprising, though, considering the company that Shawn & Sean are used to keeping: Airtime's investors include Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am and Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun. But who knew Martha Stewart was so plugged in to the startup scene? Perhaps Nick Bilton was right about tech being the new Hollywood.

We, too, are looking forward to the launch of Airtime, but could Sean & Shawn maybe fix their website first?

UPDATE: Jimmy Fallon is apparently hosting this thing.

No hyphen on mousemade? Okay, lovers, we'll trust you on this one.

If you haven't heard of COLOURlovers, you're probably not a design fiend. Judging by its traffic growth over the past seven years, however, it's built a pretty loyal following among its one million right-brained registered members. The Y Combinator grad also counts community-building experts, like Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress and Alexis Ohanian from Reddit, as angel investors. They joined Founder Collective, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups and others in a $1 million seed round last March.

Today on the company's blog, "Chief Lover" Darius A. Monsef IV (who goes by the name Bubs and founded the site while still working at Microsoft) announced the private beta launch of an Etsy-like exchange called CreativeMarket that will enable its users to share and sell their "mousemade goods" like patterns, shapes, photos, fonts, and gradients. Although the team works remotely, co-founder Aaron Epstein, the brains behind ColorSchemer.com which eventually merged with COLOURlovers, lives right here in New York. "We've been trying to get as many New York people as possible," Mr. Epstein told Betabeat.

Back in December, we spoke to Bubs about the API for CreativeMarket that he and Mr. Epstein were planning to roll out, why he decided to leave Microsoft, how Twitter plays into this, and getting Martha Stewart to blog his wedding cake.

Tell me about the site.

COLOURlovers right now is a creative community. We’ve been inspiring people to share their ideas around color and pattern design for a few years. Really at the core of what we do is making design simple and accessible and that’s really by the tools that we built to simplify content creation even for  non-designers. Unfortunately, sometimes the tools are just complex and the idea of starting from a blank canvas is hard for people to get over. What we’re rolling out is evolving that to be part of not just inspiration, but execution. So helping designers by giving them access to beautiful content and more professional tools.

That's where the CreativeMarket comes in?

We’re adding the marketplace component so that for members that are designing these amazing patterns and shapes, there’s a martket to sell those. The market already exists on other stock content sites. But the bigger vision we have there is that that marketplace can exist within existing designing tools and future designing tools. Right now the process for a designer is you’re using Photoshop and then you need a new font and then you’re off in Google looking for fonts and it’s taking you out of your creative space and it’s kind of a painful process.

Are we talking exclusively about graphic designers here?

There are design tools for every kind of designer. There are pattern tools for a textile designer, there’s CAD for architects. At this point, there’s kind of design software for any kind of designer. So we want to build a marketplace that will connect with designers wherever they are currently designing and give them access to beautiful content to help make their work better.

Like an API?

Yes. We will have a destination property for the marketplace where we'll try to curate the best experience we can, but we’ll also build it as an API layer so that within design software, there will also be an extension for you to access the marketplace. What we would be doing there is enabling in-app purchases for creative content. Basically what Apple has done with iTunes to buy music, we’ll make the same kind of thing happen for creative content. So if you’re a designer and you’re in a certain app, you know where your content is and you can easily get access to it.

So what’s for sale in the marketplace?

The thing we’re adding first is the commercial aspect of members being able to sell the patterns and shapes they’ve created on COLOURlovers. But we really want to make the barrier to entry lower, so anybody can create the content for this marketplace. It starts with patterns and shapes. Probably the next thing we’ll add are things like fonts, brushes, layer styles, elments that you would use for graphic design. As the API rolls out, other developers can specifiy that people that use their apps use these templates and open a mini-marketplace for their users to do that—driven by our platform.

Right now people just go on to share what they’ve built, but they haven’t been able to sell it?

Right. We have a million registered users, but it’s largely an inspiration site. But we built a tool called Themeleon that makes designing your Twitter profile really easy to click-and-drag and 10 million profiles have been designed with that since we’ve had it up.

Are you making any money off of that?

Not on that specific partnership. But it’s an in-kind partnership with Twitter in terms of providing value. We have other tools like that. The next step will be, you might have designed a really awesome combination of colors and patterns into a Twitter profile, you should be able to sell that as a theme and sell that in a theme marketplace. We’ve been trying to set that up by making beautiful tools and getting this amazing user base that we’re now going to empower by letting them sell what they create.

Have you had any revenue before this rollout?

Yes, we generate revenue, from ads and partnerships. But for a long time we generated revenue from our software sales. Aaron built a software called ColourSchemer, a professional color matching software and we have a pattern software, Seamless Studio, which is a vector editor.

You were still at Microsoft when you launched the site?

I was at Microsoft until two years ago, but COLOURlovers the site has existed for seven years. I was just playing with color inspiration at the time. I made it so that members could use a color and basically rate it as "hot or not." I shared it with some friends and they wanted the palettes added. I think in hindsight that’s why the site thrived versus just sort of following off as a goofy thing because the community continued to just share content and share their ideas. So for the first four or five years of its life it was just this side project that grew on its own. And then when I was at Microsoft, I decided it wasn’t he right fit and there was a big opportunity because COLOURlovers was growing.

How did you and Aaron hook up?

Aaron and I had known each other for a few years as competitors in the color space and it just made sense that he’s got a real strong expertise in creating apps and designing awesome platforms and I had this community. We should just merge our companies together and I’ll leave Microsoft and do this fulltime. That happened about two years ago, then we did Y Combinator out in San Francisco. Aaron had just moved to New York and had to abandon his wife and their empty apartment to come live with me for three months.

But there’s still a New York connection?

One of the things we realized recently is that a lot of our partners end up being in New York. We just launched a partnership recently with Martha Stewart. Right now if you’re looking at any color page or pattern, where the colors are listed, traditionally for web colors there’s an RGB match, but now we’re matching to the closest Martha Stewart paint color. Not every color has a match, because there are 280 paint colors and 16 million colors on your computer. But what's important to a lot of paint companies is helping somebody discover something they enjoy and then connecting that to the paint color.

Did you meet Martha?

I met her in the hallway going to a meeting, but we’ve basically been building a relationship with her for the last couple of years. We tweeted something of theirs, that got us an intro, they I guess blogged my wedding cake on their site? So we’ve had a good relationship. A lot of the design world is in New York, so it’s convenient to have parts of our team there.

How much would it cost to get someone to Zaarly us this cake?

The Muellers’ similarities are more than superficial. The twins, who are 27 and stand 5'5", share the same bank account. They share the same calendar. They share the same curriculum vitae. The same sexual orientation (gay), brownstone (Prospect Heights) and taste in boyfriends (“over 30”). They share the same profession, and the same specialty (interactive design). They even, in a manner of speaking, share an identity. Email the Brothers Mueller at their shared account, and the only way to tell which Mueller is responding is by whose name shows up first in the signature: Nate & Kirk versus Kirk & Nate.

“We have this little notation,” said Kirk.

“Some people figured it out,” chimed in Nate, who, along with his brother, seems unburdened by matters of selfhood.

One stutters trying to figure out how to address them. “The Brothers, the Brothers Mueller, or ‘the twins,’ or ‘the boys,’” Kirk said.

In the year and a half since the Brothers got their master degrees from RISD—sharing the podium as commencement speakers in 2010—and moved to New York, they have created iPad apps for Martha Stewart and e-books for Vanity Fair and Bon Appetit. Coming soon are a political website for The New Yorker and an iPad app for Newsweek. Whereas most graphic and user-interface designers tend to hand off the technical work, the brothers do it all, relying on Nate’s speed in programming and Kirk’s facility with design.

Their first media world collaboration, a one-off iPad app for Martha Stewart called Boundless Beauty, won the Society of Publication Designers “Tablet App of the Year” award. Shortly after, Time magazine called it the cover of the year for featuring an interactive time-lapse video of one of Martha’s prize peonies, a 10-hour shoot compressed into 10 seconds. The SPD Award dinner was on a Friday. (“We have these crushed velvet pumps,” said Nate. “Loafers,” Kirk corrected. “And it’s the only time you could wear something like that,” Nate finished.) The following Monday, they got a call from Scott Dadich, Condé Nast’s vice president of digital magazine development, about revamping the company’s e-book operation.

“At this point in media, they have a bit of a lore, like, ‘Oh, the Mueller Brothers are coming!” said Melissa Lafsky, the launch editor for Newsweek’s updated iPad edition, which is slated to debut on Jan. 23, with the Brothers’ help. “When they come into the office, people love it because they’re so striking to look at. Everyone does a double-take because they’re so handsome and well-dressed and there are two of them. They’re a presence. They’re sort of the modern Jewish mother’s dream.”

“When Martha met them, her first question was whether they would appear on The Martha Stewart Show,” seconded Gael Towey, longtime chief creative and editorial director for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Not everything about the duo is as identical as it first appears, however. After the first half hour, it comes into focus that Nate’s face is more of an oval. The bridge of Kirk’s nose is more narrow, his physique more slight. Nate’s voice is deeper and a few decibels more nasal—a blessed discovery you don’t make until the next day. “It’ll be hard to transcribe,” they warned, eyeing The Observer’s digital recorder.

“Our collective identity is what matters,” said Kirk.

“We don’t get offended if people can’t tell us apart,” added Nate.

“Gilbert and George, the art duo, they call themselves ‘living sculptures.’ We like the idea of instead of being ‘living decorative objects,’” explained Kirk, gamely.

Before speaking, the twins tend to turn, birdlike, to face each other, often hesitating until they’ve reached some sort of wordless consensus before offering a response.

For all their attention-getting ensembles, the brothers retain a Midwestern equanimity from a youth spent in the suburbs of Akron. “Because we were originally raised Catholic, we have this running joke that for these twin gay boys in Akron, Ohio, our outlet to ornamentation and beautiful things was going to Mass,” said Kirk, recalling that as altar boys they fought over who got to wear the gold sash.

As budding young artists, they read up on the Aesthetics Movement and admired Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp.

They came out at different times—Nate first, Kirk years later, but never officially to each other. “I guess we always assumed that the other one was going through the same things,” they wrote in an email. “We would have been more surprised to find out the other one was straight.”

Even among unflappable New Yorkers, the Brothers Mueller tend to draw stares. In the subway or the elevator at 4 Times Square, “we get stopped once a week by people who say, ‘Have you been interviewed for a magazine or newspaper?’ and we just go, ‘Nooo,’” Kirk said, demurely shaking his head.

“That’s what’s fun. They see you maybe as objects? So we get people touching us,” said Nate, miming a hand on his arm, “saying, ‘Do you know that you’re twins?!’ It’s great.”

Indeed, the brothers are just as affable fielding questions about their interactive wallpaper, which was on exhibit at the Chelsea Art Museum and featured stylized versions of a viral molecule, appearing and disappearing between delicate rows of damask ("They're STD viruses!" explained Kirk), as they are entertaining questions about fetish play.

Identical twins tend to receive unsolicited queries of a sexual nature, and in 2010, when Bel Ami, the gay porn production company, introduced the world to the Peters twins, muscle-bound teenage Czechs who begat the word “twincest,” such interrogations took a turn for the lurid.

“It used to upset us a little at first,” Kirk said. “But now we’re very playful with it.”

“My favorite is using ambiguous language,” Nate added.

“They’ll ask questions about us, like do we date the same guy or do you sleep with the same guy,” explained Kirk. “So we’ll purposefully answer, like, ‘Not usually,’ or ‘I don’t know,’ at the same time. Nate will say, ‘Not really,’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ It’ll explode their head.”

“And then we walk away,” finished Nate.

Later, they offered a less ambiguous answer by email: “We don’t think there is a need to experiment with something like that when there’s a whole city full of beautiful people.”

As for whether they would date the same man simultaneously, however, they added dryly, “I think it’s the German in us that seeks out efficiency, so what would be more efficient than the both of us dating one person?”

As is befitting a proper wunderkind, sorry wunderkinder, the outside world’s discovery of the Brothers was a matter of happenstance. Martha Stewart was working to develop its first digital issue as part of the early development group for Adobe's new InDesign for the iPad software,  and Ms. Towey contacted RISD president John Maeda.

“The director of the program calls us and says you should probably come down here since they’re looking for iPad people and you’re probably the best iPad people here,” Kirk recalled. The Muellers went to lunch with Ms. Towey and her husband, a fellow designer named Stephen Doyle. “We had a great time and then we looked them up and we were so glad that we didn’t know exactly how big of design powerhouses they are because we would have been nervous wrecks,” Nate said.

“When the brothers walked into the room, I was immediately smitten,” Ms. Towey remembered. “They handed me one résumé, and that did it for me—one résumé. They were clearly smart at marketing themselves. I thought of the Starn twins, and figured that these guys were on their way to stardom.”

Not only did the brothers prove adept at the technical side—finding bugs in the software before developers at Adobe even knew they were there, Ms. Towey said—they made a number of critical design suggestions. Along with other team members, they insisted the peony should be shuffled to the front of the issue.

“They were going to put it in one of the stories and we said, It should go on the cover,” whispered Nate.

“We should be the first to have an animated cover,” concurred Kirk, adding, “The tools were still being developed. The cover almost didn’t go out the door because of some technical difficulties. But we finally got it out.”

After the success of Boundless Beauty, Condé tapped the brothers to make their e-book process more efficient and keep the branding more in line with their individual titles. “They always try and get us full-time,” said Kirk, who also mentioned helping Mr. Dadich with the beta version of Adobe's software. The Brothers, however, prefer working under the Studio Mercury umbrella, where they also dabble in work for the Guggenheim and the industrial design magazine Core 77.

After setting up e-book production workflows at Conde, “once a title wanted to launch a book, instead of taking a matter of weeks, it took a matter of a week,” said Kirk.

With the New Yorker political website, which is slated to launch this week, the Brothers are employing a Studio Mercury specialty called a “liquid layout,” which easily adjusts from “very large monitors all the way down to the iPad, so it scales seamlessly,” as Nate put it.

It’s easy to see how duo’s cooperative spirit is embraced by publishing design teams, but the world isn’t really built for two separate bodies who want to perceived as one unit. “Our accountant hates us,” Nate admitted.

“If we could, we would get one tax ID number,” Kirk added, wistfully. “And one Social Security number.”

Then he volunteered a mid-century cautionary tale of parents who bucked the standard practice of separating twins to foster individual growth. “The story was that because these twins weren’t separated, they didn’t develop separate identities so they became murderers … and gay,” Kirk said. “Society was saying if you don’t have separate identities—”

“—all this bad stuff can happen,” said Nate.

Although the Brothers have shared a wardrobe since high school, they didn’t start dressing alike until grad school, when, they explained, “we merged our working identity under one name.” That meant a combined Facebook profile and Twitter account, in addition to the email. In their old apartment in Park Slope, they had to institute a morning check-in about what they’d be wearing, to avoid showing up in the exact same ensemble instead of slight variations. The problem was solved with a shared “dressing area” in their Prospect Heights brownstone.

“We often wonder if throughout the majority of the day we think the exact same thoughts,” said Kirk. Or maybe it was Nate.

ntiku@observer.com