Okay. (Photo: screencap)

Hey, did we ever profess concern that the tech scene might be getting a little too bro'd out, selling its dorky soul for Teslas and trend pieces about Bitcoin millionaires? We'd like to retract that complaint after what happened last night at New York Tech Meetup. An a cappella group of eight techies, calling themselves NYC Sharp, "demoed." (After the ringleader said their name, one guy made a little hashtag with his fingers.)

That's right: Silicon Alley now has its very own Rockapella.

In matchy-matchy shades of purple, they snapped away and sang a cover of "You and I" -- with all the lyrics replaced to be wooing / stalking an investor, rather than a lover. Sample lyrics: "You've got everything I'm looking for in a VC, I'd give my firstborn child if you'd invest in me." Oh, and also: "There's only three men I'm gonna serve my whole life, it's my daddy, my investor, and Jesus Christ."

The whole song closes with, "This time I'm not leaving without you."

Do we need to have a little chat about boundaries, guys? Because this is how restraining orders happen.

You can see the whole performance about six minutes into this recording, plus here is video evidence, in the form of a Vine:

NYC# rocks the house with a plaintive ode to VC investors #NYTM #nyc vine.co/v/b2Xnrintne5

— Rich Kelley (@rpmkel) May 7, 2013

Anyway, IBM then showed a movie made with single atoms. This is the future, guys.

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.

So, as y’all know, SXSW (or, as I like to call it, Sundance for Geeks) is now just two weeks away. That's right, people: Time to start planning how you gonna be partying it up and taking Austin by storm! :) To make your life easier (the better to gorge on all those mouth-watering Nuclear Tacos and drool-inducing Salt Lick BBQs) I’ve put together The ULTIMATE Guide to SXSW Interactive 2012 Parties (185 and counting)! And of course, it comes with my special commentary and notes to help you make sense of all the madness. You’re welcome.

Now, of course, as any SXSW veteran can attest, the seemingly endless parade of parties, panels and people can quickly become overwhelming. So to make your life even easier, I’ve compiled a list of the 16 most-awesome-must-attend-unmissable parties that are bound to give all your friends at home a giant pile of FOMO!

Yes, I’ll be at SXSW, attending every last one of those panels ‘n parties (or well, as many as humanly possible, even for me). So if you’re interested in sponsoring my Red Tie for SXSW and putting your company logo on there, you’d best hurry up and give me a holler at gary [at] garysguide.com.

And now, without further ado, ladies ‘n gentleman, the 16 SXSW parties you really, really, reaaalllly don’t wanna miss ... ;)

CafePress SXSW Shindig
County Line BBQ and libations will abound as CafePress celebrates the launch of MyInstaCard. Participants get an exclusive T-shirt as a collector's item.
Friday (Mar. 8), 4 p.m. @ Bourbon Girl, 212 E. 6th Street

SXSW Food & Tech Cocktails
Serving up authentic Oaxacan appetizers and cocktails throughout the evening.
Friday (Mar. 8), 4:30 p.m. @ El Naranjo, 85 Rainey Street

SXspredfast Bash
Three floors of bars, networking with the biggest brands in social, bowling and a special guest DJ!
Friday (Mar. 8), 6 p.m. @ Speakeasy, 412 Congress Avenue

4th Annual Ignite Social Media Party
Tasty BBQ sandwiches, drinks, two floors, one big party--kick back downstairs or chill on the rooftop deck of Molotov!
Friday (Mar. 8), 7 p.m. @ Molotov, 719 W. 6th Street

#FEED Powered By Twitter
Five nighttime parties, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (DJ set), interactive social media art exhibits, juice cleanses, spinning, and yoga on the rooftop!
Friday (Mar. 8) to Tuesday (Mar. 12) 7 p.m. @ AMOA Arthouse @ Jones Center, 700 Congress Avenue

Carnival Fun at #ConduitCorner!
Free beer and delectable fair fare from L.A.’s famous WickedKitchen, plus carnival games, a charity dunking booth, a celebrity balloon wrangler and more!
Friday (Mar. 8) to Wednesday (Mar. 13) @ Conduit Corner, E. 7th Street and N. Congress Avenue

Beauty Bar X 2013
Free manicures + open bar (mimosas, bellinis & custom cocktails) + scrumptious light fare + tech-luxe gift bags. Whats not to like?!
Saturday (Mar. 9), 10 a.m. @ Vince Young Steakhouse, 301 San Jacinto Blvd

Salesforce Rooftop VIP Party
Memorable experiences including developer events, happy hours and a VIP party Saturday night featuring live entertainment.
Saturday (Mar. 9), 6 p.m. @ Salesforce Lounge, 5th & Brazos

Made In NY & American Express VIP Cocktails & Conversation
Join friends from American Express, NY Tech Meetup, Made In NY and others for a lively cocktail party following the days’ sessions.
Saturday (Mar. 9), 6 p.m. @ AMOA Arthouse @ Jones Center, 700 Congress Avenue

Wall Street Journal Pool Party!
The Wall Street Journal invites you to hang out pool side! Featuring live music by CC Adcock, Denny Freeman and Will Sexton. (By Invite Only)
Sunday (Mar. 10), 3 p.m. @ Ashton Austin, 101 Colorado Street

Open Bar with Aereo
Drinks and demos and find out why Aereo is the coolest thing to happen to television since the remote.
Sunday (Mar. 10), 4 p.m. @ Old School Bar & Grill, 401 E. 6th Street

Open Web SXSW Pool Party
Pool party-inspired bites, DJ Johnny Bravo, door prizes. Plus one lucky attendee will win a five-day, four-night resort package to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico!
Sunday (Mar. 10), 5 p.m.

4th Annual Wiley SXSW Author Party
Three hours of free food and drinks in appreciation of amazing authors and supportive readers.
Sunday (Mar. 10), 7 p.m. @ Hangar Lounge, 318 Colorado Street

SXSW Party Hosted by MoPub, Metamarkets, & Prolific Interactive
DJ Duo AndrewAndrew spinning on their iPads, Franklin BBQ, great cocktails and a raffle! Transit from the convention center provided on an Austin Trolley.
Sunday (Mar. 10), 8 p.m. @ Icenhaeurs, 83 Rainey Street

Mashable MashBash
A bowling alley, breathtaking rooftop view of Austin, internationally renowned DJ Mick Boogie, plenty of fun surprises and more!
Sunday (Mar. 10), 9 p.m. @ Speakeasy, 412 Congress Avenue

Rovio (Angry Birds) Pool Party
There will be music and BBQ! And no doubt the Mighty Eagle will be there. Rovio may be showcasing something new at the event! (By Invite Only)
Monday (Mar. 11), 6 p.m. @ Ashton Austin, 101 Colorado Street

And finally, don't forget - What Happens At SXSW... Is Gonna Be All Over Twitter ;)

(Photo: Flickr, imaginecup)

Earlier this week, Betabeat reported on New York Tech Meetup's plans to host a series of candidates forums ahead of the upcoming citywide elections, as the local tech community seeks to reshape the city in the image of its own fast-Internet, open-data, science-in-schools algorithmic fantasy.

As we noted, plans for the forums followed news that the board of NYTM was set to approve a slate of proposals to mayoral candidates (and to those running for those public advocate and comptroller), which would then be presented for feedback to NYTM's rank-and-file.

Consider the slate presented. Under the modest heading of "Help Us Make NYC the Best City for Tech in the World!," NYTM laid out its agenda. You can read its seven proposals below, and NYTM members can offer input here.

It appears to be a broad slate, offering political hopefuls a safe way to commit to New York's future as a center of innovation.

At a glance, the firmest proposal seems like NYTM's call for the creation of a deputy mayor for technology innovation, a proposal that gives way to a pet fantasy of our own: that Mayor Michael Bloomberg finds an office in the next administration, and continues to run the city from behind the new titular head, a la Vladimir Putin.

In the unlikelihood of that outcome, we're sure there are plenty of excellent candidates.

1. Make New York City the most wired city on earth by providing every New Yorker and every New York business regardless of location access to the fastest broadband networks at the lowest cost.

2. Reinvent the education system to allow every child, young adult, and all New Yorkers to develop the skills necessary to thrive in a 21st century economy.

3. Make New York City the clear choice for entrepreneurs, software engineers, and other technically skilled professionals to start a business and build a career by making it easy to find partners, financing, office space and housing, employees, and access to markets.

4. Support the appointment of a Deputy Mayor for Technology Innovation with an appropriate budget charged with the responsibility of reinventing New York City government with a 21st century framework.

5. Make New York City’s system for civic participation the most open, transparent, accountable, participatory, and innovative in the world.

6. Make New York City the most citizen-connected community on earth, where its people connect with each other to unleash a powerful 21st century economy: selling to each other, renting to each other, funding each other, sharing with each other, coworking with each other, meeting up with each other, and hiring each other.

7. Support public policies that would ensure that technology and the opportunities available to the tech community can reach all New York’s citizens, and help solve issues related to healthcare, human rights and justice, gender equality, transportation, the environment, and other issues of fundamental importance to all New Yorkers.

(Photo: "Alexander Torrenegra)

For many in the New York City startup community, it's been nice having Mayor Michael Bloomberg around. Not only does the third-term mayor double as the city's most successful tech entrepreneur, Mr. Bloomberg has championed policies aimed at turning New York into a hotbed of innovation.

With Mr. Bloomberg's time in office coming to a close, and no candidate stepping boldly into his loafers, the New York Tech Meetup revealed plans to host a series of candidates forums in the months leading up to this year’s mayoral election.

It's all part of the tech community attempt to claim a larger role in the political sphere as startups lose their best ally in City Hall, NYTM executive director Jessica Lawrence told Betabeat.

News of the forums, which have not been finalized, comes after The Wall Street Journal reported that NYTM is drafting proposals to educate would-be officials on issues that that the tech community considers paramount.

"Our main goal is to make sure our issues are part of the dialogue," Ms. Lawrence told us. "It's something that’s incredibly important if the city is to be a center for innovation, that the people elected to office listen to what those of us in the tech community have to say, and pay attention to that expertise."

According to Ms. Lawrence, NYTM has been gathering input on its proposals for at least six months, but the organization's efforts to play a greater political role date back to its efforts to defeat SOPA and PIPA in 2011, during which NYTM aimed to join the national debate on the anti-piracy laws.

Beyond NYTM's efforts, the New York tech community has been increasingly feeling its political oats. The city's tech community helped raise money for President Barack Obama's reelection campaign. In 2010, congressional candidate Reshma Saujani built her campaign around an innovation and entrepreneurship platform, drawing support from tech luminaries such as Jack Dorsey, of Twitter and Square and Facebook’s Chris Hughes.

“I think we've seen with Bloomberg how important it is to have a mayor who understands the role that tech plays in the local economy," Ms. Lawrence said. "Because of that we've been able to make significant progress in establishing New York as center of innovation.”

To continue the strides that the city's tech sector has made under Mayor Bloomberg, NYTM is expected to emphasize greater access to high-speed Internet and public data, as well a greater emphasis on math and science education in the city's public schools, when it presents its proposals to candidates for the offices of mayor and public advocate.

A preliminary version of the slate will be discussed by the NYTM board at a meeting tonight. Assuming passage, the slate would be presented for comment to the organization's 29,000 members, then finalized in the weeks and months to come.

“It’s going to be a combination of trying to be representative of the community, and what the community needs are without giving the candidates too many issues to deal with,” Ms. Lawrence said.

While it's too early to say precisely what shape the forums might take, Ms. Lawrence anticipated large gatherings that would allow the candidates and the tech community to get to know each other better.

"As we look at the city's economy, its systems for responding to disaster, or the traditional systems of making data available or awarding contracts—they’re all being changed by technology," Ms. Lawrence said. “It's not going backwards anytime soon. It's important that we start having conversations about how tech is impacting the city's economics and infrastructure.”

There's more: it can tweet indie rock lyrics or your feelings on the new microbrew you just discovered. It can upload Twitter pics of the sexy 20-somethings you met on your journey through the Gotham night. What happens if one of your friends is at the party CouchCachet selects for you? Not going to happen, because the app uses a Foursquare parameter that lets you search for locations your friends have never visited. And if all your friends start using the service? "This is fine, we have robots talking to robots," Mr. Fountain said. "This is the future."

On the other hand, who needs friends. Unsure whether the cute guy you just met is ignoring you, or just really busy? Post the specifics to dating advice service HeTexted, and let 40 strangers break the bad news. Make that hundreds of strangers. At the prodding of HeTexted cofounder Carrie Henderson-McDermott, an audience member named Victoria recounted a scenario: She'd met a guy at a party, he asked her out, then texted days later to say he'd come down with something. By an overwhelming show of hands, the audience agreed: Sorry, Victoria, he's just not that into you.

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer, Fred Wilson and Gollum have in common? They all showed up in RunGold CEO Vivian Rosenthal's demo. The company earned notice in 2011 when it helped shoe seller Airwalk create something called an invisible pop-up store in Washington Square Park. Now it's using its augmented reality chops to help users create and share images with branded content. Photo-bombs away!

Also virtual, these days: your medical care. At least, if you work for Tumblr, Percolate or another company buying employee health plans from Sherpaa. Companies pay $1,000 to $4,000 per employee; in non-emergency cases, employees enter their symptoms over Sherpaa's online platform; doctors are on call 24-7 to dole out advice and certain treatments, and route patients to the appropriate specialists. How does the company suss out drug-seeking behavior, an audience member asked? Sherpaa doesn't prescribe narcotics, founder Jay Parkinson said. "If you're overdosing on amoxicillin—well, I've never actually seen that."

In the end, all anyone wanted to talk about was the legos. After 10 startups had demonstrated their projects at last night’s New York Tech Meetup, and after a bit of grumbling that the price of admission no longer included a free drink at the after party, meeting-goers and presenters alike turned their attention to the product that had lit up the evening. Literally.

“I call them legos on steroids,” said Adrian Sanders, who’d demonstrated his iPhone storytelling app, Backspac.es earlier in the evening.

They weren’t legos, they were littleBits, electronic modules that snap together with magnets. At the most basic level, the two inch-long rectangles click together to form a circuit, giving dabblers a simple way to light a bulb or honk a horn at the press of a button. But littleBits can do more than the most basic electronics class exercises. More advanced functions make use of sound receptors and revolving parts. The startup’s demonstration included a model that illuminated the image of a horse around its base when the audience clapped—a functionality the audience used to delay the Q&A with intermittent rounds of applause.

“The idea was to make it easier for developers and designers who don’t have the electrical engineering know-how a way to bring their ideas to life,” Jordi Borras, an industrial designer at the company, told us. “It turns out that everyone wants them for kids.”

We think we know what we’ll be buying our nieces and nephews for Christmas.

LittleBits wasn’t the only hardware project to earn raves. Tech manufacturer MPOWERD showed off the Luci, a low-cost collapsible lantern that presenter Jill Van Den Brule intended for countries where electricity isn’t a given, making third-world streets a little bit safer and easing dependence on kerosene lamps. It’s a noble project that could change the lives of the world’s poor. It’s also a cool enough gadget to serve as a low-cost conversation piece until the next hurricane hits New York.

In another Sandy-themed presentation. Mr. Sanders said Backspac.es, an iPhone app that lets users create stories in a vertical scroll of photos and text, had found use with volunteers who wanted to share their experiences helping out in the storm’s hardest hit areas. The startup takes its name from the empty space between photos, akin to the white space between comic book frames that illustrators have been using to create narrative tension for ages. “In comic books, they call that space the gutter,” Mr. Sanders told us during the after party. “But I was like, We’re not calling this 'Gutter.'”

Betterment, an online banking site, was also hit with meeting-goers. That might have been because founder and CEO Jon Stein played to the crowd: “We’ve done TechCrunch, we’ve done Finovate, all of that garbage,” he said at the start of his demo. “This is the big stage, we’re really proud to be here.”

Or maybe they were impressed with the way Betterment helps users manage their money. With a few clicks of the site’s dashboard, Mr. Stein showed how Betterment can help users hit saving goals, not simply tracking progress towards the amount needed for a down payment or luxury vacation, but automating the task of budgeting and transferring funds to meet those goals.

The company is a registered broker-dealer, Mr. Stein told us after his presentation, and hopes to compete with the Vanguards and Charles Schwaabs of the world. By the time we got home, we wondered why users would want to move money around their investment portfolio with the drag of a mouse—we should choose our advisers for their ability to manage our money, not the quality of their user interface, shouldn’t we? We’ll have to ask Mr. Stein about it another time.

Hakim El Hattab, lead interactive developer at Qwiki, showed off his side project rvl.io, a browser-based presentation platform that led one audience member to offer a Mr. El Hattab a job during the Q&A. “I’m not even sure he realizes how big it could be,” went the after-party chatter. “It could be a Prezi-killer.”

Less exciting, for us anyway, was Pling, a push-to-voice messaging app online that presenters Hashem Bajwa and Robert Spychala said would make it easier for companies to distribute voice messages across groups. Great—that much easier for our bosses to tell us to get our butts into work on the day after Christmas.

Maybe the most intriguing presentation was by the guys from Hacker Union, a “collective of builders working to sustain and grow a hacker culture” that grew out of the NYHacker listserve and was created by the team at HuffPost Labs. Co-founder Brandon Diamond drew laughs when he explained how the collective could help hackers new in town “meet bros” and “mack on ladies.”

What perked out ears up? When an audience member asked why the group had chosen the word “union.” “We’re not ignorant of the implications,” answered Jon Gottfried, developer evangelist at Twilio and webmaster for Hacker Union. “But it's not our focus at the moment."

When we asked Mr. Gottfried about the potential for an International Brotherhood of Hackers later in the evening, he said it wasn't an unreasonable notion. "First we have to build a community."

Mr. Westheimer

Serial entrepreneur Nate Westheimer is something of a renaissance technologist.

Picturelife, the photo startup he cofounded with OMGPOP founder Charles Forman, recently raised a $4 million round led by Spark Capital. Picturelife's concept is timely: the service focuses on backing up, storing, and accessing all of your photos from the cloud. That got the attention of a number of other notable investors, including Crunchfund, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, Highline Venture Partners, Betaworks, David Karp, SV Angel, and Chris Dixon. Mr. Forman put some of the "way more" than $22 million he earned from OMGPOP's sale to Zynga and former Zynga GM Nabeel Hyatt, a partner at Spark, joined Picturelife's board.

But that venture is hardly enough to keep the prolific Mr. Westheimer, who once penned a sweat lodge manifesto about teaching himself to code, fully occupied. He's also an advisor at Flybridge Capital and has been executive director of  New York Tech Meetup since 2008. (Coincidentally, the last time we made a list of "Insurgents" to watch--all the way back in 2008!--Mr. Westheimer made the cut.)

Today, Mr. Westheimer reached out to announce that he is launching a "small seed fund" called Red Bud Partners that will invest in the New York tech community that he actively helped grow. The fund, which will have an average investment size of $25,000, has already made one as-yet-undisclosed deal, he said.

On his blog, Innonate, Mr. Westheimer explained that the fund, which he launched with his father Dick, will focus on "networked technology."

This idea comes from my observation over the past few years that “information technology” and “web technology” no longer describe everything that’s interesting. “Networked Technology” encompass not only incredible new web and mobile technology, but also the array of new hardware projects which are springing up showing great promise to change the world we live in. We want to invest in all of it.

By email, Mr. Westheimer clarified that the fund "has absolutely no affect on Picturelife being my 24/7 100% job and life," he said. "Now I just have a vehicle to make investments in companies I come in contact with during the course of Picturelife and everything else I do."

Was anyone really worried Mr. Westheimer couldn't multitask? Oh ye of little faith.

Jeanne Pinder (left), the founder and CEO of Clear Health Costs and Jessica Lawrence, managing director of NYTM.

“How different is this room right now, in terms of the percentages of women versus men?” Jessica Lawrence, the managing director of New York Tech Meetup asked the audience at the second Change the Ratio and NYTM Women’s Demo night on Tuesday. She had a point. The crowd gathered at Facebook's Midtown offices to watch women-run founders demo their startups was diverse in terms of age, race, and ethnicity, yet predominately female.

Ms. Lawrence kicked off the evening by confessing that, even as the event’s organizer and a former Girl Scouts CEO, she had mixed feelings about the self-selecting event. “In some ways," she said, "having a whole separate stage just for women sometimes kind of defeats the purpose."

However, Ms. Lawrence went on to explain that in her year and a half of work at NYTM, she has had an extremely difficult time getting female-founded companies to apply to demo. “I couldn’t believe it was because there were no female founded startups in the city, so I decided to do an experiment and put out a call for Women’s Demo Night,” she explained. “And low and behold, 37 female founded startups applied."

“They were all hiding, and now I know who they are and where to find them, so I can invite them to demo at NYTM,” Ms. Lawrence said. The end goal "is to get the ratio to the point where we don’t have to have Women’s Demo Night because half the people demoing at NYTM are women.”

Ms. Lawrence described the event's atmosphere as more “intimate” than a typical NYTM. The rules for demos were also more welcoming—presenters had a loosely-timed five minutes rather than three, and early stage companies were welcome to include Powerpoints and screenshots if their pitches weren’t yet flawless. Attendees grazed on spreads of cheese and cookies, while others looked longingly at Facebook's ping pong table and mini basketball setup.

The demos were as diverse as their founders, featuring everything from Upswing.me, a platform designed to connect black and ethnic women with hair stylists specializing in curly hair (a huge market) to Continuum Fashion, a combination design lab and fashion label that uses 3D and advanced digital printing technology to change the way consumers approach apparel.

“Fashion is about so much more than just buying,” said Continuum cofounder Mary Huang. Along with a pair of her company's 3D-printed shoes, Ms. Huang was also wearing a dress designed using a photo a friend took in Barcelona made by a company called Constrvct--an interactive brand featured on Continuum. “We don’t want to be a site where you just order things,” she added, explaining that all of the user-created designs on Constrvct are public in order to encourage “a creative space for fashion design.”

The night also featured demos from two different gift-giving Facebook apps, Gift Simple and Gift Hit, as well as Fun Org, an event-finding app that launches Wednesday in New York and San Francisco.

But most impressive presentation of the night came from Jeanne Pinder, the founder and CEO of Clear Health Costs, a startup dedicated to increasing the transparency of the healthcare industry. “The problem we’re trying to solve is that nobody has any idea what stuff costs in healthcare,” said Ms. Pinder, who worked at the New York Times for over 20 years before receiving multiple grants to launch Clear Health Costs.

The site, which is currently in beta, uses crowdsourcing as well as a number of other journalistic techniques to gather information about what patients are paying for health care procedures all over the New York City area. “We’re finding that prices vary by a factor of 10,” she noted.

As an example of the type of data she's gathering, Ms. Pinder drew upon an effort to use crowdsourcing to determine the variation in the cost of birth control prescriptions throughout the city. On the site, users can share information about how much they paid for certain procedures and prescriptions, and where. “People are really excited about sharing things,” she said somewhat dryly, going on to reveal results which showed that in Park Slope one can buy birth control for just $17, though two blocks away the same prescription costs $50. The price range for a cardio stress test is even more striking, with procedures varying anywhere from $150 to $1,790.

“The idea is to tell patients where they can get their services, and at what price,” Ms. Pinder said before announcing that the team has finished collecting comprehensive data for the New York area and is currently working expanded into another city.

Mr. Kanojia (Photo: informitv.com)

New York Tech Meetup heroes Aereo released a new deal today geared towards those who want to try the broadcast TV streaming service without actually having to commit. Paging NYC dudes under 30! (Ba dum tsch.)

The new feature, called "Try for Free," allows users to access Aereo for one hour daily without ever having to sign up or input their credit card info. So if you start watching a program on Aereo at 3 p.m., you'll have access to the service until 4 p.m. You won't be able to DVR anything, though.

Try for Free is a rather ingenious ploy, staged to pull in new users who may hit their hourly usage max and opt to go for one of the paid plans. It also broadens Aereo's reach, pulling in new users who were maybe skeptical about the service at first, but who are willing to try it for free. And, as AllThingsD Peter Kafka pointed out, think about how useful it could be for people interested in catching a bit of a football game come Fall.

“We know that one size does not fit all, that’s why we’ve designed our new pricing structure to work for a wide variety of lifestyles,” said Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia in a press release.  “Whether you want a day pass to watch the ‘big game’ on your mobile device or an annual membership that provides you with 40 hours of DVR storage, we have a plan that works for you. Our pricing is designed to work with the consumer – not against them.”

And, as if you needed any more reason to move to New York, it's still only available to people based in NYC. Sorry, Valley.

At the Meetup. (flickr.com/alextorrenegra)

Sick of the last New York Tech Meetup ticket selling out just before you have a chance to get your hands on it? Well, good news if you absolutely must attend every demo: The organization has just announced the launch of a beta-stage annual membership.

In an email sent to members earlier this afternoon (available here in blog form), the NYTM team points out that, while tickets have been $10 since 2008, those big demo nights aren't exactly getting any cheaper to host:

We haven’t changed the price despite increases in venue rental and overall production costs, or to cover our expenses in becoming a non-profit organization, hiring our first employee, introducing monthly simulcasting, launching the Made in NY program, and a whole host of other projects we’ve implemented to do what we can to support the growing NY tech community.

While raising ticket prices overall would be one way to "help us build our organizational capacity," the NYTM team would like to keep the gatherings equally affordable for scrappy student startup founders and the wealthy angel investors who'd like to find them.

Hence the memberships, which promise a guaranteed seat at each meetup--or at least, they're kinda guaranteed. There'll be an early ticketing process for members, who'll have two weeks to pay up before their tickets are released for wider purchase. But buying a membership isn't the same thing as pre-purchasing tickets, nor are the tickets included in the price of the membership.

Members also get access to exclusive events and a chance to provide feedback on the membership itself.

There are only 200 slots up for grabs, and the process by which NYTM has elected to make the tickets available is interesting. The first 100 invites will go to NYTM members who've attended 15 or more meetups; then there'll be a second 100-ticket lottery for NYTM members who haven't been to as many demo nights but are still enthusiastic enough to cough up the cash. Sounds to us like it might be a little complicated balancing the loyalty of the long-timers and the needs of the hordes of newcomers.

Nor is this exactly free or even ultra-cheap--it'll set you back $300. Plus, NYTM is asking that everyone "pledge to give something back to the community." Qualifying examples include volunteering to advise a nonprofit on digital strategy or hosting office hours.

While this is certainly an opportunity for the ultra-devoted, we can't imagine that blocking off 200 seats a month will make it any easier for the average startup enthusiast to get his hands on a ticket.