Ms. Peyton (Photo: @msg via AmandaPeyton.com)

All that hardware-is-the-new-software talk you've been hearing will soon get an equally avant-garde means of distribution, courtesy of a new venture called Grand St. "We are re-thinking online electronics retail for this new era in hardware," Grand St. cofounder Amanda Peyton, a Y Combinator alum, told Betabeat.

Between the financial model for hardware shifting--with pre-sales on Kickstarter and IndieGoGo or product development through Quirky--not to mention 3D printing and rise of the maker, "The experience of finding and buying new personal technology needs to adapt as well," Ms. Peyton wrote on her blog yesterday, in an introduction to Grand St.

"The biggest players are the same--Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Amazon," Ms. Peyton added. "Given all the above changes, surely this segment would have to shift." As one of her commenters noted, working capital requirements for retail deals is a big drag on getting new hardware to the masses. Presumably Grand St.--a reference to Williamsburg, natch--wants to fix that.

Ms. Peyton, an MBA from MIT, cofounded MessageParty, a since-shuttered location app. Her two cofounders at Grand St. are Betabeat poachable Joe Lallouz and his partner-in-crime Aaron Henshaw, both developers from the dearly departed Hashable.

What exactly does the trio mean by "personal technology"? A Nike Fuelband, a Makerbot, your very own hipster cooking device? "Personal technology is anything in your life with an on button," Ms. Peyton explained by email. "We would definitely be open to selling all three, though we are planning to focus on more independent producers in the beginning."

Ironically, a big part of this emerging push towards hardware has been facilitated by software, Ms. Peyton explained on her blog. She elaborated on that in an email to Betabeat, pointing to, "software/hardware combos like the Jambox, which can be customized from the web, or the Lark which tracks your sleep and gives you insight via iPhone app."

Customizing those iPhones and Android devices you can't seem to put down will play a big role in this sector, Ms. Peyton predicted. "This creates a huge demand for the right kind of customer service that can educate consumers on these new devices."

While the "gadget-obsessed web nerds," go about building out Grand St., early adopters can visit the placeholder site for a chance to win cash, credit, or a donation to charity playing a game called Snake. We're pretty sure you can beat Betabeat's score, a big, fat "0."

"I mean, Google is freakin' massive, and they've almost had no effect on the community," Hacker Union head and 10gen engineer Brandon Diamond told us by Gchat. "They're trying to get out there, but they seem to be awful insular. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook is the same way... it will probably help more than it hurts. Fb obviously isn't banking on the 'tremendous number of hackers living in NYC.' Instead, I think they believe they'll be able to woo many new hackers with the added bonus of being in a cool city. It's a boon."

As to whether the new office will lure back some of the talent Facebook poached in the form of Drop.io, Hot Potato, Daytum and Mail Rank, but survey says no. "I don't suspect? Highly doubt it, actually," says a source, regarding the Hot Potatoes.
CC FAIL. "Note to all: Don't CC the current CEO on an email that speaks to replacing the current CEO. #idiot," tweeted Zelkova Ventures' Jay Levy before Thanksgiving. Crappy way to find out you've been terminated, we suppose, but it turns out the CEO was in the clear. Apparently a rogue board member was musing a little too freely on email and indiscreetly copied the founder on an email about firing him. "The rest of the board had 110% confidence in him and asked that board member to remove himself from the board," said a source familiar with the matter. "Him being the CEO... CEO staying and is going to continue to grow the company into a force in the industry."

WHITHER THE PARTY? Last week, Betabeat interviewed MessageParty founder and Y Combinator graduate Amanda Peyton for a story about East versus West. We casually dropped by the site and noticed it was a bit of a deadzone; Ms. Peyton herself hadn't posted in three months, the Twitter account hasn't tweeted since August, and the last newsletter went out in June. Yikes, we thought, remembering MessageParty's April pivot. Has the startup bitten the dust? "We are actively considering a few options for the future of the product, though it won't stay in its current state for much longer," Ms. Peyton said in an email.

SEAN PARKER, MAN ABOUT TOWN. Lolol:

He said, 'Google my name and Lindsay Lohan. You'll see that a year ago there's an article written that says she had me kicked out of Bungalow 8.' He said, 'I don't think she had me kicked out... I want to know who [did].' "Lerner, who knows Lohan socially, agreed to look into the matter. It turns out it wasn't the Mean Girl but her ex, DJ Samantha Ronson. Satisfied, [Sean] Parker restored Lerner's profile in just six hours.

STAYING TRUE TO STEREOTYPES. Tumblr's John Maloney has purchased a new bicycle, which according to engineer Matt Hackett "is attracting quite a crowd. Bikes are flames to moths here in Tumblr HQ." The hipster startup has a room full of the the things.

ALL YOUR PARTIES ARE BELONG TO US. Send Betabeat your holiday party tips.

(flickr.com/usnationalarchives)

Underlit bars and blaring techno set the scene at the Park Avenue Armory earlier this month, when a who’s who of New York’s tech scene gathered in the cavernous block-length building for the sort of startup event that bore little resemblance to the usual beer, pizza and Powerpoint office gathering. No, this was a fashion show; a nerdy fashion show, to be sure, but one with glamour and theatrics. Raise Cache, a fundraiser for the apprentice developer program HackNY, tapped local tech personalities to walk the runway outfitted in glasses from local e-prescriber Warby Parker, slacks from e-tailor Bonobos and accessories from e-jeweler Bauble Bar. Larger-than-life cartoon avatars lorded over the crowd from the DJ booth as amateur DJs spun tracks using Union Square-based streaming music startup Turntable.fm. Founders and VCs milled about in gowns, coattails, pinstriped vests, glittery tights and cowboy hats. A recording of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has been pumping his pom-poms for the New York tech scene of late, boomed out at the close of the show: “Now more than ever, [New York] is the place for to be for tech soirees!”

That seems to be the consensus among a contingent of New York founders who made the pilgramge to the tech mecca of Silicon Valley but have returned to be part of an up-and-coming scene, as well as for the nightlife, the restaurants, and the higher baseline average peer attractiveness. “There's a lot more good-looking people in New York,” one founder told Betabeat. “Don't quote me about that, but if it's something you want to work that into the story, there's definitely something there.”

In the past, incubator programs in Silicon Valley contributed to a techie brain drain from East to West. Paul Graham, the architect of the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator, insists Silicon Valley is the best place to start a company, and often counsels his startup acolytes to set up shop nearby. The vast majority of the Y Combinator alumni network is in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View and San Francisco. Tales of New York-based founders like Matt Mireles, a Columbia graduate and uber-hustler founder of a video transcription startup, shipped out to the Valley when they found themselves struggling in New York are common. “But if you're a schmoe like me and you've got a big, world-changing dream, NYC is not the best place for you,” Mr. Mireles wrote in a heavy-hearted blog post about the move in February 2010. “The odds are already stacked against you. Being outside the Valley just stacks them higher.”

Whatever the reason, a passel of companies have recently boomeranged back to the city after a season on the far shore. The longtime tech mantra of ‘go West, young founder” is being revised for the simple reason that New York’s tech scene is up-and-coming, more social and more fun. Recent Y Combinator grads Codecademy, The Fridge, MessageParty, Hirehive and Tutorspree all moved back the New York within the past 18 months. Sam Rosen, plucked from Flatiron’s General Assembly for the Mountain View accelerator 500 Startups by superangel Dave McClure, returned after the program ended.  “My friends in New York City—one would be in marketing, my good friend was a producer at MTV, other friends are lawyers. Whereas in the Valley you go to the party and everyone is in tech,” he told Betabeat in January. “It’s not like I’m tired of talking about my company, but it’s all we talk about.” Josh Weinstein, founder of the Facebook competitor CollegeOnly who later pivoted to interactive web television with a startup called YouAre.TV, ventured out to the Valley to work with a cofounder and be closer to investor Peter Thiel. In September, he returned—mostly because the cofounder bailed on him, but partly because he felt “isolated,” he said.

Amanda Peyton, MIT business school graduate and proud owner of a 212 cell phone number, moved out to Menlo Park in the summer of 2010 to participate in Y Combinator with her cofounders of the mobile blogging platform MessageParty. “It reminded me of Westchester, where I grew up,” she told Betabeat. “We had a lot of space where we lived, and the grocery store was really big and nice and things like that.” At the end of the summer, she and her roommates found out they had been living in the three-bedroom house that Lisa Brennan Jobs, Steve Jobs’s daughter, grew up in. The house was also next to Sand Hill Road, where all the big VC firms are, but there were only two places to eat within walking distance: Safeway, and a well-loved bar called the Dutch Goose.

At the end of the program, Ms. Peyton started talking to friends and colleagues about where to go next. “I had two arguments for going back to New York,” she said. “One was more of a macro trends argument about how there's so many industries in New York that are going through truly fundamental shifts... but then I was talking to one guy, and he was like, why don't you just admit that the reason you want to move back to New York is because you want to live in New York? And I was like: you're totally right. I just want to.”

Ms. Peyton and her team are now ensconced in the former Williamsburg coworking space The Makery (currently transforming into the office of conversation-logger Bnter). “There's just more stuff to do in New York,” she said. “There's more places to eat, more people to hang out with. I just learned how to work smarter. Yeah I have cut down the hours a little bit, but I don't feel like I'm any less productive. I just don't feel like I'm only working.”

Same Same, but Different! 15 Parallels Between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley [SLIDESHOW] >>

Beyond the pizza and the social scene, New York’s startup support network is booming. There are more tech companies starting, more investors scouting for tech companies, more rockstar startups—Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter, Tumblr, to name a few—and more developers teaching themselves the lightweight coding skills that power much of the consumer internet. There have also been some high-profile exits, including GroupMe’s $85 million sale to Skype and Hunch’s $80 million acquisition by eBay, both in the last six months.

New York also embodies a camaraderie and enthusiasm that derives from being a relatively unproven startup hub still forging an identity.

RRE Ventures principal Tom Loverro, who recently moved back to New York after four years at a startup in Silicon Valley and a stint in Chicago, was impressed by the Raise Cache techie fashion show. “The New York Tech Scene has not only arrived, but it is different and it is defining its own trajectory,” he wrote in a blog post. “It is characteristically and unabashedly New York. The event itself was a fashion show. It was young and full of 21-35 year old urbanites.”

Kirill Sheynkman, who heads up the U.S. arm of RTP Ventures, a $750 $700 million fund based in Russia, was more cynical. “It’s great to have that attitude, but it’s [like] a high school football team,” he said. “What was the line from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? ‘San Dimas High School football rules!’”

Mr. Sheynkman spent most of his career in Silicon Valley as a former entrepreneur in residence at Sequoia Capital and venture partner at Greycroft before he moved to New York and became enamored of the city.

Traditionally there have been three reasons for starting a company in the Valley, he said. “For a long time the VCs in the Valley would only invest in local companies. That has changed,” he said. ”The old saying of, ‘I'm not going to invest anything unless I can drive to the board meeting’ … was in the days before we had Skype and iChat and Go To Meeting. Now you have weekly status meetings on video and they're just as great as being there. It was a little bit of an attitude. ‘You have to come to us and not us come to you.’”

The second argument is that when a company gets started, the top priority is hiring the right people. While there is more techie talent in Silicon Valley, he said, there is also a higher concentration of startups and significantly more established tech companies to suck that talent up. “Prices are higher in the Valley than they are in New York,” he said. “Although New York isn't cheap in terms of hiring people.”

The third argument is that there is a more active tech scene in the Valley, he said. “In terms of meeting people and hanging out, New York is much better. It's in the nature of the city to go out there and network and be social.” He pointed to Meetup.com, a ten-year-old New York-based startup that serves up tech rendezvous on every topic from Javascript to Hadoop to Twitter etiquette. “It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous,” he said. “There's a meeting every night somewhere.”

Indeed, the number of recurring tech events on Meetup.com has wildly accelerated: Startup Lunch, 193 members; Dumbo Tech Breakfast, 783 members; UWS Startup Meetup, 240 members; the New York Technology Bathhouse Meetup, 31 members; the Wall Street to Startups Meetup, 98 members.

And yet, “there's still a lot of learning that I think New York has to do,” Mr. Sheynkman said.  “A lot of the companies are in love with doing a startup for the sake of doing a startup. They're MBAs that think instead of a career at Goldman, we're going to do a startup company!” We imagined him rolling his eyes on the other end of the line. “You know, you actually might want to do your thing at Goldman Sachs, it might actually be better for you.”

By way of disclaimer, he added: “I'm a New Yorker, I'm never leaving Manhattan. I love the city. Let’s make sure we mention that.“

“I get the impression that there tend to be proportionally more folks in New York that are trying to start companies but have no fucking clue what they're doing,” Fitocracy CEO Brian Wang told Betabeat by Gchat. He and his cofounder, Dick Talens, are subletting their apartment in Clinton Hill while they complete a session at 500 Startups. “Granted, I don't think I have a fucking clue either.”

At any rate, he plans to head back east when the program is over. “We're pretty set on returning to New York,” he said. “Both Dick and I enjoy New York City as a place to live immensely. Honestly, that's 95 percent of the reason. The other five percent for me, is probably the hope and expectation that the New York City scene will continue to grow and mature and that we can call ourselves an important part of that.”

Same Same, but Different! 15 Parallels Between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley [SLIDESHOW] >>

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article identified Tom Loverro as a partner at RRE Ventures; that is incorrect. He is a principal. Betabeat regrets the error.

Panorama by @UrgentCareer

Wednesday night's New York Tech Meetup came in three minutes under the two hour limit, which was amazing considering there were 11 demos, a hack of the month, several announcements and a speech by new managing director Jessica Lawrence on the agenda, interspersed with midi-rendered Weezer songs that the 800 or so audience members mumbled along to under their breaths in the red seats of NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. 

There was no Livestream, which will surely be one of the common complaints that will be directed at its new managing director, who was introduced midway through the event by Chairman Andrew Rasiej. The New York Tech Meetup has been run entirely by volunteers until now, he reminded the audience. "People ask, 'How come you aren't doing this? How come you aren't doing that?' Well the reason is because we all have day jobs," he said.

The organization received more than 40 applications for the position, he said.

Ms. Lawrence then got on stage, fresh from a TechCrunch interview, to present herself to members as the organization's first paid staffer. She introduced herself as the former organizer of a slow-moving Girl Scout organization who attended her first NYTM just two months ago. "I was literally on a plane, one way ticket in hand, L.A. to New York, when I registered for New York Tech Meetup," she told the audience. She gave out her email address, asked members to invite her to their work spaces and pledged to learn how to code.

Other announcements included Sanford Dickert's Collabracode project, a six week program for intermediate and advanced hackers to hone their skills; the NYC Startup Job Fair, happening Friday; and Code for a Cure, a hackathon to aid cancer research presented by NY Hacker.

Demo highlights:

BIGGEST PIVOT. Y Combinator alum MessageParty relaunched from being a GroupMe competitor to being a Foursquare competitor. The new MessageParty is location-based blogging, co-founder Amanda Peyton explained, which uses rich media to create a place page with more personality and context than Foursquare tips or a Yelp page. The pitch intrigued some members of the audience, who had several questions for Ms. Peyton (Will negative content be censored? No, and Is it possible to look at the page for a place remotely? It will be) and tweeted approvingly.

HACKIEST HACK. The Lemonade Stand, an app designed to replace the "for sale" section of Craigslist produced during the New York Startup Bus hackathon and still going strong with at least three committed team members. They're bootstrapping the project and hope to have a stable Android app by next month. Co-founder Jon Gottfried did some live coding, which frightened director Nate Westheimer and the audience but ultimately impressed.

CONTEST. Readability, arguably the purdiest and most advanced of all the demo'ing start-ups, announced an A.P.I. contest. $5,000 to the winner, $2,500 for the runner-up and $1,000 for third place. The hacks are due May 15.

SWAG. Runens made a good case for how running apps should be built with an intuitive, graphical interface and an emphasis on the social side of exercise. The audience was bubbling with questions. Do they save GPS data? Yes. Will it work for a treadmill? No plans for that, because the emphasis is on linking up with other runners. Will they make a version for cyclists? Probably, but they're focusing on runners first.

AWW. MeeGenius is an app for digital books for kids. Personalize a book with your kid's name, record your voice for the nights you can't be around, or have the book read itself to your child in a computerized voice that resonates from the depths of the uncanny valley. The audience lurved it. It'd be perfect for military families, someone suggested.

Other demos included: Corkboard.me, an internet corkboard; Ex.Fm, the browser extension that remembers the location of every music file you find in the course of regular browsing; Addieu, an app for instantly plugging new acquaintances into your social networks; ImUp4, an app that predicts social plans and encourages friends to join; Atavist, a digital publishing platform; BrainScape, a web and mobile app for flashcard-based learning; and AskLocal, the first presenter, which Betabeat regretfully admits we missed. We heard it's an iPhone app for sending messages to locations rather than people.