Mr. Ludwin (Twitter)

The Twitter game Fame launched just a few weeks ago, but it appears the game's 15 minutes of fame are already up. In a tweet sent yesterday, the team announced that Twitter planned to shut down the game because it violates its Terms of Service agreement.

As we reported in March, the Fame game gave us all a chance to feel like Lady Gaga for a day. Sign up to play, and you're immediately entered into a lottery with a new winner daily. When your name is drawn, all Fame players automatically follow you, and you get a chance to prove why they should continue to follow you once your turn is over. But no longer--apparently the game violated the "spirit" of Twitter's Terms of Service.

"It was always a question mark about what Twitter would do," RRE Ventures principal and Fame cofounder Adam Ludwin told Betabeat via phone. "I have a lot of respect for the guys at Twitter and they gave us an extension, they gave us ideas about ways to change the app to conform more with what they viewed as in line with the spirit of their terms."

Though they did not find Twitter's request at all unreasonable, the Fame team decided that the solutions Twitter offered would have changed the nature of the game so fundamentally that they'd rather not have the game on Twitter at all, he said.

"When we developed Fame we read the Terms of Service very carefully and came to the conclusion that we weren't violating specific rules," said Mr. Ludwin. "Twitter did highlight rules they thought we were violating. [They believe] users of Twitter need to make their own decisions about who to follow. Our argument was that by playing Fame, users are opting in and signifying their intent to follow--not a specific person, but they’re deciding, yeah we want to follow that person. We tried to resolve it with them and we couldn't. It was essentially a disagreement over the spirit of those terms."

Mr. Ludwin thinks that this issue highlights what is going to continue to be a growing tension between platforms and developers. "As platforms gain more and more scale, devs are going to find that they will butt heads with those platforms," he said.

For the Fame team, the game was always more of a social experiment than anything. "We learned a lot and we got a lot out of it," said Mr. Ludwin. "It was great that they let us go for 19 days, but at the end we just didn’t see eye to eye."

But Fame fans, don't get too upset: Mr. Ludwin assured us that the team is looking to launch the game on other platforms, so your 15 minutes might not be up just yet.

via itsasickness.com

A week after we wondered whether Dumbo has hit maximum capacity--cobblestone streets, now in limited supply!--venture capitalists have arrived to big ups the borough.

Will Porteous, general partner at Manhattan-based RRE Ventures, tells peHUB that Brooklyn may just be the best place to launch, pointing out that eight RRE portfolio companies call Brooklyn home. Err, make that "were." Drop.io and Hot Potato were acquired (or acqui-hired, depending on who you ask) by Facebook in 2010, but that still leaves HowAboutWe, MakerBot, Pontiflex, and more for serious street cred.

Brooklyn Bridge Ventures founder Charlie O'Donnell, formerly of First Round Capital, does Mr. Porteous one better, wondering if Facebook will even be able to make devs happy from its stodgy Midtown perch. Estimating that "50 percent of people who work at venture-backed startups live in Brooklyn,” Mr. O'Donnell thinks the exodus has already begun.

So what's all the fuss about? According to peHUB, Mr. Porteous seems particularly taken with Brooklyn's creativity-inducing environs--and the sunbeams--going as far as claiming it's better for humans, basically.

“Software development and entrepreneurship are creative endeavors, and Brooklyn is synonymous with creativity,” says Porteous. More, he notes, “The quality of life is incredibly high in Brooklyn, relative to what it costs to live [in Manhattan]. Certain kinds of basic, human needs are abundantly met over there” including “just the light alone.”

Mr. O'Donnell, meanwhile, pegs it as more to the growing pains of New York tech:

“I was 25 or so” when the scene in New York began taking off again in 2005, explains O’Donnell. “But my peers are now in their early 30s. People are doing the marriage and kids thing, and they’re moving into South Brooklyn, Prospect Park, Cobble Hill, Carol Gardens. [The neighborhoods] are far more affordable [than Manhattan], and they’re places that are conducive to family life, as opposed to [Manhattan], where you’re falling over each other to get your kids into private schools.”

Look, we are all for headlines like "A VC Portfolio Grows In Brooklyn." We moved to Brooklyn five years ago and we're never looking back. Having an office closer to where you live also sounds like nice work, if you can get it. But let's not pretend that Brooklyn is any more preternaturally creative (we hear some very nice books, movies, code, etc. have come out of Manhattan as well), humane, or even immune to rising rents or the excruciating New York pressure of scrambling to get your kid into a good (public) school. As long as we can avoid overselling it, we're good. Otherwise, you know, it's a slippery slope from here to "Portlandia."

Mr. Ludwin. (Twitter)

Adam Ludwin, a two-time entrepreneur and now a principal at RRE Ventures, is a fame monster, in that he's looking for Lady Gaga-level fame. But he wants to share it with you, too. The affable Mr. Ludwin, along with Big Human developers Rus Yusupov and Dominik Hofmann, created a Twitter-based fame game that we predict will soon have all your followers spamming your timeline for invites.

Fame, the game, is brilliant in its simplicity. The goal is to make everyone as Twitter famous as Lady Gaga, for a day. This is accomplished via a mass follower agreement: sign up to play, and you're entered into a lottery that selects a new winner every day. On the day you win, everyone else playing will automatically follow you for 24 hours. Right now that's a 976-follower boost and a chance to convince everyone to keep you. Long Island Radio deejay Astra, today's winner, saw her follower count go from 5,000 to 5,172.

The scheme reminds us of the spamsters who would create follower rings in earlier days of Twitter. You'd join the group, which sometimes cost a fee, and you'd automatically be followed by everyone else for instant social juice.

The app was Mr. Ludwin's idea. He coded in high school and college, but turned over the development to Big Human because "I'm way too rusty now to build something fast or scalable enough, plus I have a day job."

Fame took a month to build, Mr. Ludwin said, and launched at noon today. Between a Business Insider pickup and a viral marketing twist, we suspect it will soon have many more players. You can tweet a link and get ten entries for the lottery and five entries for every person who tweets your link—who could resist?

Now that the former entrepreneur has had a taste of viral growth, we're wondering how long it'll be before Mr. Ludwin is seduced by the allure of Startupland. "I enjoy helping others start companies more than anything else," he wrote in an email. And what will he do if he wins? "Plug my favorite companies of course!"

No actual footballs were harmed in making of this startup

This is our second funding scoop of the day. Who wants to make it a hat trick?

Numberfire is a New York startup company taking an algorithmic approach to crunching data, helping fantasy sports nuts find the best players at the lowest prices. Founder and CEO Nik Bonaddio got his first $100,000 in seed capital from Regis Philbin, after starring in an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Nothing against Regis, but the company has now put together a slightly more tech savvy group of investors. Numberfire, a graduate of the recent ER Accelerator program, has raised a $650,000 seed round from investors that include RRE Ventures, Pennyblack's Eliot Durbin and TechStars David Tisch.

That number will eventually rise to $750,000, but the startup closed on part of the round as they grow aggressively.

The young company has a number of big partnerships. They powered the football playoff predictions for ESPN and wrote a weekly column for the sports giant, along with weekly blog posts for Sports Illustrated. They have also developed a relationship with the fast growing SB Nation, who's player prediction widget is powered by Numberfire.

"Our predictions for football this year beat Yahoo, ESPN and CBS, so we feel really good about our methodology," Co-foudner and COO Sean Weinstock told Betabeat (you can see the proof here). "We've got 20,000 registered users now and are planning to expand to basketball and baseball in the coming months."

8 weeks ago the startup caught flack in the blogosphere for predicting three teams from the AFC North would make the NFL playoffs. Low and behold, it happened. "We like to put our money where our mouth is," Weinstock says.

A familiar avatar on the Gidsy homepage!

Update: As our esteemed commenters pointed out, we forgot about Vayable! Our bad.

When Betabeat first heard about SideTour, the TechStars startup serving up "authentic experiences" led by "interesting" people (say, Zen tea sessions from a Buddhist monk), we have to admit, our response was: fun idea! Smart dudes! But how big is the market of people who would actually sign up? Apparently bigger than we imagined, which might be why investors and mentors seemed so smitten with the startup.

Now, TechNewsDaily is reporting that a startup called Gidsy out of Berlin's white hot startup scene has opened in New York City to play in SideTour's home turf. Gidsy, which bills itself as an "authentic marketplace for tours, activity, and local events" opened in New York yesterday after launching in Berlin last week.

And it already has some support from the Silicon Alley natives. Investor and entrepreneur Mark Birch is hosting a Chinatown Dumpling Tour currently featured on the Gidsy homepage. (N.B.: After Demo Day, Betabeat suggested a similar tour, but in Flushing, to SideTour co-founder Mark Webster. Get on the 7 train, people! It's where all the good food is hiding.)

Both companies allow users to submit a unique potential tour or activity based on their expertise that is then sold on the startup's website.

At least according to Crunchbase, Gidsy has yet to acquire funding. Sidetour, on the other hand, raised $1.5 million from RRE and Foundry Group and appears to be putting its focus on getting traction in New York before trying to scale to other cities. In such a new niche, Gidsy's entry into the New York scene is, more than anything, proof that the market exists.

Winter commeth? Via Zokuga's Flickr

The National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters issued their third quarter survey today for money raised by venture capital funds and the results seem to show a downward trend, perhaps slouching towards that startup winter we've been warned about.

According to the report, 52 U.S. VC funds raised $1.72 billion in Q3--the lowest dollar amount raised since Q3 2003. The report says, "This level marks a 53 percent decrease by dollar commitments and a 4 percent decline by number of funds compared to the third quarter of 2010, which saw 53 funds raise $3.5 billion during the period."

Just 16 percent of that $1.72 billion was raised for funds based in New York. NVCA sent Betabeat a breakdown that showed $278.64 million raised by seven different local funds, with the largest amount going to RRE. That's a big drop from the $2.866 billion raised by New York-based funds in Q1, 2011 and notable 40.3 percent drop from the $463.73 million raised by New York funds in Q2.

Firms                           Money Raised (USD Millions) in Q3

Raine Partners            72.50

RRE Ventures           137.40

Level Equity              9.94

Thrive Capital          40.00

City Light Capital    0.83

New World Capital Group   16.89

BHV VC                   1.08

Keep in mind, however, that doesn't include brand new players on the scene like NY-based early stages funds from Trigger Media Group and Tribeca Venture Partners or Union Square Ventures new $150 million to $200 million fund. Nor does it take into account the New York offices of outside VCs, like say, the $750 million global fund from RTP, whose managing partner Kirill Sheynkman just opened up shop in NYC.

Disclosure.

The Nodejitsu team is building a platform that takes advantage of the buzz around node.js, a relatively new technology that's rapidly gaining popularity with developers. RRE Ventures and First Round Capital also participated, after Mr. Robbins was introduced to investors there through contacts at General Assembly.

If Node.js is as essential as Mr. Robbins, his co-founders and their investors believe, Nodejitsu could be looking at a major market and therefore a major exit. (Heroku sold to Salesforce.com for more than $200 million, for example.)

Nodejitsu is selling the picks and shovels in the current app goldrush--by letting Nodejitsu take care of the backend support, developers have time to focus on writing code. Nodejitsu is a cloud-hosting platform--similar to Heroku for Ruby or Google App Engine--that makes it easy for developers using node.js to host and scale their apps. It also acts as a marketplace for apps built with Node.js.

The company has had 2,600 beta testers eager to start using the early version, but Nodejitsu couldn't afford to let them in. Now Nodejitsu is able to sponsor conferences and hire more developers, and the beta testers will start to see invites show up in their inboxes.

"Having the gun off my back is nice," Mr. Robbins said.

Nodejitsu has a team of technologists: Charlie Robbins, who was recruited out of college to work at Microsoft; Marak Squires, one of the most active JavaScript  programmers in New York; and Paolo Fragomeni, who spends his free time doing research for MIT. The investors they worked with were more technical, he said, but they were mostly interested in the strength of the technology the team has built (Mr. Robbins doesn't have a count for how many lines of code they've written, but he estimates they have something like 2,000 unit tests).

"They saw the technical merit in what we're building and how things are changing. The technology is what I've been pitching," he said. "It wasn't so much a market play. People are starting to build more on Node.js because it's superior and it solves these problems that have always existed. I/O has been done wrong for the last 30 years," he said, referring to the fact that Node.js allows servers to react to specific events.

Nodejitsu is hiring senior JavaScript developers in New York who have experience with Node.js and they're also looking for interns.

Nodejitsu was founded in April 2010, almost exactly a year ago. Betabeat gave Mr. Robbins and Mr. Squires the third degree a few months ago, before funding had been secured, and got their thoughts on JavaScript, Node.js and building a start-up.

All curious users get at this point is the name, a landing page and a chance to "stake your claim" on "a new frontier" which Mr. Davis says is relatedto social media. The landgrab is on for good handles, and you can follow Kohort on Twitter.

Before creating Kohort, Mr. Davis was at DFJ Gotham with a focus on IT. He's an investor in companies like AdStruc, Sailthru, Medialets and Yipit.

Erick Schonfeld broke the news, and also notes that Mr. Davis founded a number of VC community groups at universities around town.