Mr. Bloomberg. (Twitter)

Time Warner Still Sucks On Friday, Mayor Bloomberg made a big move toward ing promise to expand broadband in New York. He launched ConnectNYC, a contest for small businesses that will award free fiber cable wiring (overall value of up to $12 million) to 240 local businesses across the five boroughs over the next two years. But will it make slow cashiers go faster?

All Your Dwollas Belong To Us Dwolla, the way to pay people via smartphone, just rolled out a cool feature called MassPay. It allows you to pay up to 2,000 people at once, which is great for business owners or degenerate gamblers who have a lot of friends. Payments under 10 dollars are free, while anything higher than that requires a small fee of 25 cents per transaction. Parking Panda, VHX and Major League Gaming have all pledged to start using the service immediately.

Finna FinTech Startup Weekend is teaming up with the FinTech Innovation Lab and the NYC FinTech Startups meetup to put on the first ever FinTech Startup Weekend. It's set to take place on November 2 to 4 at Alley NYC. Throughout the weekend, there will be mentors, including VCs, lawyers and designers, stopping by to give teams advice on what they're doing.

Nick Gavronsky, an OpenFin employee who helps run Startup Weekend with Frank Denbow, spoke to Betabeat and said that he was surprised by the response the event is getting. "We've noticed over the last year or so that FinTech is growing and there's a need for engagement and bringing that community together--as well as around enterprise in general," Mr. Gavronsky said.

FinTech weekend, he said, is "not really like a hackathon, it’s more for first-time people” who want to start building something.

Costumes for a Cause! WeWork is organizing a Halloween party this coming Monday, October 29th benefiting Charity: Water that cofounder Matt Shampine promises will be a "crazy" good time, including "a lot of surprises and five hours of open bar." Better yet, you can feel good while throwing them back: WeWork will be matching everyone's donations to the event. WeWork generously offered Betabeat readers a 15 percent discount off the ticket price, which starts at a $35 donation. Just enter the discount code "betabeat" when you RSVP. While you figure out your binders of women vs. bayonets costume choice, here's a video WeWork put together to get you in the party mood.

Sexy Canadians Songza, the music streaming app that has a playlist for every mood, just reached 1 million users in Canada. To celebrate, we're going to listen to the "cold" playlist. The Songza team used its data and found that Canadians and Americans both chose "Mellow" more than any other mood. Americans' next most popular category was "Happy," while Canadians' second choice was "Sexual." The sexual playlist only works correctly if you're sleeping with Canada's finest export, Ryan Gosling.

Group Talk IRL Group messaging service GroupMe just launched a new service called Experiences. It lets you meet up and plan adventures with your groups and even helps you split the bill. The first round of experiences include a brunch at one of Todd English's restaurant and a zombie survival practice on Halloween. Sounds spooky enough for us.

Chatroulette With a Purpose Onswipe held its hackathon this weekend, and the overall winner created something really awesome. BlahBlahLearning is a language learning platform that works over video chat. A pair of speakers who are each learning the other’s native tongue are given five minutes to speak in one language, then five minutes to speak in the other. Take some notes, Airtime, these guys have the right idea.

Man Starts Blog internet gadfly Rex Sorgatz has just launched a personal project called Viewsource. He's posting one YouTube video a day and sharing his thoughts about it. The site has a really pretty layout, and Mr. Sorgatz's commentary is pretty spot-on. This one about Michael Richards is a pretty good read.

You Owe Us One Foursquare is hiring a PR director. If you get this job and you first found out about it through Betabeat, then you have to give us exclusives for the entirety of your career. It's only fair.

Publicidad Jun Group, the opt-in video advertising platform, has announced that it has new capabilities to specifically target the much-coveted Hispanic audience on the web. Jun Group says that it can now prescreen users to determine if they’re Hispanic and/or native Spanish speakers. In total, the company provides ads to 10 million Hispanic or Spanish-speaking users.

Advertise More, Save the World Pontiflex, another advertising platform, just released a new tool called AdLeads that helps nonprofits advertise themselves to prospective donors. The best part about the service is that organizations only have to pay when a person actually signs up to hear from them. They never waste money on wasted clicks or impressions.

College Admissions Suck Applying to college is the worst process in the world, but luckily things just got a bit easier thanks to Unigo. The site gives a free 15-minute private consultation to set you up with a plan, and then users can subscribe to Unigo's online college counseling services. If your child's guidance counselor is a total idiot, then this looks like a good option for you.

Webcam + Curiousity =

If you hop over to vyou.com/new today you can see what the video Q&A site has been working on over the past few months. They are taking off the "beta" label and upgrading their look and functionality.

The service is launching a new design aimed at the tablet crowd, with a series of vertical columns you can swipe through. VYou's chief marketing officer & evangelist extraordinaire Rex Sorgatz says the site design should now feel natural for iPad natives.

The service is also introducing a sort of Tumblr re-blog feature with the "re-ask", which aims to spread questions across a wider network of users. Instead of having users submit questions directly to one another, the site now allows for open questions, more along the line of a Quora thread, which anybody can answer or share. Users can also comment on the questions without recording their own video response, which VYou hopes will up engagement.

The user who posed a question is now embedded in the same space as the video answer, making it simpler to track the conversation going on.  And VYou amped up its discovery to let users better search for topics, users and branded channels from Daily Candy, Nickelodeon and NBC.

While a lot of these changes are focused on making VYou more engaging for the average user, Mr. Sorgatz says the site sees its business opportunities as a platform powering video Q&A for other sites. "Let's say you're on CNN reading about healthcare, there might be a prompt to record your response through VYou, and that footage becomes part of their overall coverage."

TURNTABLE SPINOFFS. Also apparently associated with New Work City, an official site vending Turntable merch has a splash page up at shopturntable.com; no store yet, but here's a peak. The site is endorsed by TT, as we understand, unlike rolling.fm--which looks like one of those straight-up knock-off situations.

WALKBACKS. Gawker made some changes to its redesign last week--"a little less boxed-in," as Nick Denton tweeted--giving readers the ability to opt out of the two-pane configuration which many found intolerable at first. Gawker has been tweaking the redesign since its debut earlier this year and subsequent pageview nosedive, and pageviews are climbing back up. Bad news for digerati Rex Sorgatz, who put his money where his mouth was back in February in a public bet with Mr. Denton: "I’m on the record that I think the redesigns will fail. And I’m now officially opening the betting pool. I think Denton is going to be forced to pull back on this," he wrote. "I keep getting traffic alerts telling me that @gawker sites are breaking records. That traffic bet with @nicknotned is looking silly now," Tony Haile tweeted this morning, and he's a man who should know--he's the general manager at Chartbeat.

"Having to give up on your company sucks for a month or two and it hurts forever, but it is not failure – if these teams are absorbed back into the world of cubicles and are allowed to return to the jobs they walked away from in the first place, that will be failure, and failure at the community level. When you meet the founder of  a failed business, reach out your hand, pick them up and do everything you can to keep them involved in our community... because our community depends on it."

Mr. Barnes’s plea reminded us of a reoccurring theme we’d heard while reporting on New York’s geek gap. In "Raiders of the Last Nerd," this week’s feature on tech recruiting, Kinda Sorta Media’s Rex Sorgatz offered Betabeat an ominous-sounding take on the struggle to hire local talent, “If you want a CTO, you have to go to, like, Tel Aviv.” But we didn’t have the space in the paper to really delve into why.

In his experience, Mr. Sorgatz said it wasn’t so much that New York was short on rockstar coders. Rather, it’s a side effect of the entrepreneurial bug gone viral. “People now run four-person companies where they may have otherwise led a five-person tech team in a twenty-person company.” (Is this a good time to say we told ya so? No? Okay, just checking.)

As evidence of this epidemic of Markus Zuckerbergius, Mr. Sorgatz offered up a recent incident between a “prominent start-up in town” and TechStars, a high-profile start-up accelerator. The prominent start-up got upset after TechStars convinced a recruit they wanted to hire for a top product position to launch his own company instead.

Charlie O’Donnell, who works with Mr. Barnes at First Round, noted the same phenomenon. “There’s more of a displacement than there is a shortage. If you just looked at all of the available appetite for developers, then you could say, yeah, there’s more money in ideas chasing after good people,” he told Betabeat, adding “But not all those ideas are good ideas.” Mr. O’Donnell, who now spends a third of his time helping start-ups in First Round’s portfolio staff-up, didn’t seem to think it was a lost cause. “To me the fact there’s anybody left working as a developer for Fox News over in Midtown, tells me there’s still work left to be done.”

The flip side of start-up fever, of course, is that not all of those wanna-be Zucks are going to make it. “There are a lot of people working for companies that are going sideways, companies where the writing’s on the wall,” said Mr. O’Donnell. Skeptics about the value of getting paid in equity, take note. “That’s the nature of the seed and angel stage market, not all of them are going to make it to a Series A. That’s where most of them drop off, because it’s the most risky point.” This also happens to be the point where Mr. Barnes is hoping founders who did make it past the valley of death will swoop in with job offers to keep the lost souls from wandering back to the corporate world.

Mr. Sorgatz offered a similar vision of the future. “It’s impossible that the rate of success stays as high as it has been, and many of these start-ups are going to have to decide if they are going to be viable companies, and I suspect a lot of them will not be. I would not call it the bubble bursting, but there will be a shift in the talent.”

It’s a cyclical process, explained Mr. O’Donnell. That’s why you’ve seen so many acquisition hires from start-ups launched a year-and-a-half ago. (Like Brooklyn’s Sam Lessin, whose start-up Drop.io was purchased by Facebook in October... mainly to acquire Mr. Lessin). “It’s saying, ‘Listen, we’ll put a little money in your pocket and make you feel good about that little product you started. Don’t feel bad you ended on a zero.’”

So next time you hear about a start-up with a questionable concept or execution, think of it less as a doomed-to-failure, and more as a rising talent pool for your own (no doubt rock solid) idea keeping you up at night.