Stacy London of What Not to Wear has a new startup called Style For Hire. (Source: Phil Plait via Wikipedia)

SHUTTER. Luminance is not your average photography conference. Instead of focusing on the latest gear, this two-day program will bring together experts at the forefront of the technology we use to create, manipulate and share our images. Among the speakers are Behance founder Scott Belsky, Hipstamatic cofounder Lucas Allen Buick, Google's Chris Chabot, Pulitzer prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson, Tumblr CEO president John Maloney, Facebook Photos engineer Srinivas Narayanan and the School of Visual Art's David Ross. All speakers will present a 20-minute TED-style lecture.

TOE, HEEL, TOE, HEEL. What Not to Wear's Stacy London is the cofounder of a just-launched site that aims to connect personal stylists with the stylistically clueless. Style For Hire stylists will perform a "closet audit," provide personal shopping services or create new outfits out of clothes a customer already has—that's called closet shopping. Now women who aren't lucky enough to be on the show can still have their closets—and lack of fashion sense—torn apart, but without the benefit of a judgmental, national audience.

FREE LUNCH. Rickshaw Dumplings, Mexicue and Wafels & Dinges are giving away food tomorrow to all Fondu users. Download the the micro-reviewing platform for restaurants, create an account and head to West 4th and Greene Street from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to get your grub on. Sorry to all you Android or yet-to-adopt-a-smartphone users out there—Fondu is only available on iOS.

INCUBATE. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a program that provides startup with access to seed capital, mentors and coworking space, is taking applications until April 29th. Brooklyn Beta's summer camp for designer-developer teams is also taking applications through May 31. The 12-week program fosters connections between talented  people, invests $25,000 in participating companies and has advisors from top companies like Kickstarter, Airbnb, Union Square Ventures, Etsy and many others.

HACK 'ROUND THE CLOCK. ZocDoc HQ  will be the launching point for April 24th's 10gen 24-hour hackathon. The event, which begins at 568 Broadway at 6 p.m., will focus on working with MongoDB. Hack away until breakfast the next day at 9 a.m. and then hack your way to the post-awards afterparty at Von Bar.

DEVBOOTCAMP. DevBootcamp is a 10-week program that brings non-programmers up to basic programming level via an intensive curriculum. It's in San Francisco, but the organizers invite national and international students to apply. Participants include an aerospace engineer, a kid "straight out of highschool," a math teacher and finance grads, making for a veritable DevBreakfastClub. "The spring cohort finished two weeks ago, 7 out of the 16 looking for jobs have so far had job offers," DevBootcamp's Lachy Groom wrote in an email. "Almost everyone has had an exceptional amount of interviews (I think the average might be 8 each). We're expecting a very high job rate within the next few weeks."

NETWORK. Entrepreneur Week, an event that brings established entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors together to foster opportunities and relationships, began on Monday and will continue through tomorrow. Tickets are still available for some of the week-ending talks and events. Check 'em out here.

BLOG WAVE. Tidal, a company that provides tools to bloggers and publishers to help them share and be shared on similar blogs, just announced its 250,000 post milestone and three new partnerships. Tidal is loading up the Sony Music Popmarket Backstage site with reviews, photos, users and content creators eager to promote and share. Neighborhoodies, a T-shirt and hoodie company, is moving from textiles to terabytes as Tidal breathes life into their site with style posts, restaurant write ups and travel tips all focused on NYC. Finally, Seatgeek, a third party tickets site, is getting the Tidal treatment as well, as members talk about tour dates and their favorite and most anticipated shows.

NET-WORKS. Things just got a little bit faster on Staten Island. AT&T recently announced the expansion of their 4G LTE network which means mobile internet could be up to 10 times faster on those devices.

LUNCH MONEY. Education startup 2tor has obtained a $10 million line of credit from Comerica Bank.

COLLIDE. Kaleidoscope, a new way to shop for street fashion by browsing a mix of submitted and professional photos, is now on iOS.

MOMMA. Shapeways, a platform for creating and sharing 3D designs, is holding a Mother's Day make-a-thon. Participants can turn any flat two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional plastic or metal work of art. For Mother's Day, it certainly beats a stale store-bought card. Order by April 22 for metal and April 29 for plastic to get those gifts in time for dia de los madres.

JOBS. Bitly needs a new sales research associate. Acclivity is looking for a UI/UX designer and Python back end developer. Send a snazzy email. What's Watched has an opening for a sales director with three years of experience. Email Burr. News.me would like new senior iOS  and Python engineers. Torsh needs a technical cofounder and chief architect to develop web and mobile apps.

The philanthropic collabo is being facilitated by DonorsChoose.org.  Mr. Ohanian told Betabeat that he will soon be joining the startup's advisory board. "WOO for NY startups," he emailed. Since this is for a good cause, we'll refrain from asking him to step away from the pom-poms. Anyone who makes a donation of $10 or more towards physical education projects in New York City schools is eligible to win the tickets. The initiative, which did a soft launch last Friday, has already raised $1,561. Deadline for donations is next Monday at midnight.

Mr. Ohanian initially claimed to be the world's biggest Jeremy Lin fan, but backed down after some gentle prodding. "I haven't seen him play live (hence the idea for the contest!) and I accept that I may not in fact be his biggest fan," Mr. Ohanian admitted. "But I adore him because he's a validation of the geek's worldview: ignore expectation, follow the data. I then realized my social enterprise, breadpig.com (a Newman's Own for Nerds) made total sense to organize the fundraiser and asked Seatgeek (they were 110% stoked!)."

This isn't the first time Mr. Ohanian's gotten personally involved in a DonorsChoose fundraising initiative. Reddit broke records by raising more than $100,000 for Stephen Colbert's "Restoring Truthiness" rally, a rejoinder to Glenn Beck, and helped raise more than $620,000 towards history and civics projects. Breadpig has also pimped out collaborators for the greater good. Of course, nothing as personal as that time Mr. Ohanian got his own facial hair involved.

Mr. Lawrence.

TiqIQ, the Times Square-based aggregator for live event ticketing, just announced a funding raise today: $1.7 million led by Contour Venture Partners, with Inovia Capital participating. The site, which has six employees in New York and another nine in Tel Aviv, was started in 2009. Until now, it's been chugging along on angel investment and the revenue it's now generating from partnerships with 1,000 publishers including SBNation, the Washington Post and New York Post, which CEO Jesse Lawrence says comes out to between $2 and $5 million. 

"We're the no. 1 aggregator in terms of reach and usage," Mr. Lawrence said, citing TicketNews.com, a trade site for news about the ticketing industry.

But TiqIQ is primarily a behind-the-scenes sort of startup, which is why it's less visible than sites like SeatGeek, which recently launched an events recommendation feature in addition to its slick ticket search engine. "We haven't focused on a destination site," Mr. Lawrence, an IAC vet, told Betabeat. "We've been more focused on our publishing platform."

But you may be hearing more about TiqIQ as the company spends its fresh $1.7 million on product development and bolsters its offerings for music events (sports is dominant right now).

The company's tech team is based in Tel Aviv, Mr. Lawrence said, because it's less expensive to pay developers there. But the salary gap is shrinking, he said, "but talent pool remains exceptional," citing the tech training Israelis get in the army. "It's gotten a little less meaningful but there's still a good cost advantage to tech development in Israel."

TiqIQ’s platform generated almost five million visits in November, the company said in a press release.

Yo La Tengo and Jeff Mangum. Sounds about right.

We give you the heads up on SeatGeek's stealth project Columbus back in October. The service, which recommends sports and concerts to users, kind of like a Pandora for live events, launched today to the public.

"There are three distinct changes we made in response to user feedback from the beta," says SeatGeek co-founder Russel D'Souza. "First off, since SeatGeek helps people find the best price for tickets on the secondary market, Columbus only consisted the secondary ticket markets, so that left out a lot of first run, Ticketmaster only type events, which we have now added." Since we mostly stick to mainstream artists, this is key.

Number two, the artist recommendations. "When you initially added artists we only had currently touring artists, now you can add artists who have ceased touring or even ceased to exist." That's pretty important, considering a lot of our taste comes from long dead musicians. Hunch and Last.Fm help with this taste data, says Mr. D'Souza.

Lastly, importance. "It wasn't clear which recommendations were really really strong and which ones just might be a decent match, so now they are color coded to tell you how important, so now we can put more events on the calendar." Like, is this a once in a lifetime must not miss concert, or just something fun to do with an empty Saturday?

(flickr.com/donnierobot)

Betabeat was working this morning and not looking for Knicks tickets on company time when we wandered over to SeatGeek, the hometown sports tickets aggregator, and typed in a search for NBA games. In the event you haven't heard: NBA players and team owners recently announced a tentative agreement to restart the season on December 25 after a long contract negotiation stalemate ended. Imagine our surprise when we saw what appeared to be a normal season.

Thursday
Dec 15
7:00 PM
Philadelphia 76ers at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $67

Saturday
Dec 17
7:30 PM
Los Angeles Clippers at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $155

Sunday
Dec 18
6:00 PM
Los Angeles Lakers at New Jersey Nets
Prudential Center – Newark, NJ
tickets from $105

Monday
Dec 19
7:30 PM
Memphis Grizzlies at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $92

Wednesday
Dec 21
7:30 PM
Boston Celtics at New Jersey Nets
Prudential Center – Newark, NJ
tickets from $44

Wednesday
Dec 21
7:30 PM
Utah Jazz at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $103

Sunday
Dec 25
12:00 PM
Boston Celtics at New York Knicks
Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
tickets from $200

Were SeatGeek's site partners trying to con users into buying tickets for games that didn't exist? We called up CEO Russell D'Souza.

"The NBA is going to release the schedule, but the deal has to get ratified first," he said. "What we have now on our site is the old schedule. It's possible a lot of those games will remain unchanged, but I would wait a day or two before buying tickets."

But! Why are the games listed for sale at all? we wondered. We'd gotten all the way to a payment screen. These sites were trying to sell us nonexistent tickets!

"You'd get your money back," Mr. D'Souza explained. "The policy that all our partners have is that if it's canceled, you get a full refund. It was so unclear when the season was going to occur... but we should remove those events now, and in a couple days we'll have the new NBA schedule."

SeatGeek monitors tickets sites and pulls events into its system, aggregating and filtering tickets by price and comparing deals in order to come up with a Deal Score which lets you know how excited (geeked?) you should be about the price.

Get out of my head!

Ticketing site SeatGeek has been on a tear recently, announcing big traffic growth and a partnership with Yahoo. Now the startup is taking the  rich data set it built up selling tickets for sporting events and concerts and branching out to recommendations, creating a service called "Columbus" to help users find games and concerts they didn't know about but might enjoy.

The company uses collaborative filtering to match users with events they might like. So for example, the team at SeatGeek saw that Nets and Knicks fans were also very likely to be interested in college basketball when it came to town. "The system matches a "this" with a "that". Then we figure out which "this" is relevant to a particular user," said Adam Cohen, a Seatgeek engineer working on Columbus. "We look at your behavior on the site, your Facebook if you connect it, and the preferences you input into our system."

SeatGeek has tons of data on sports. On the music side, where they have less proprietary data, they are drawing on an API from Last.fm to help flush out the connections between more obscure acts. "We know a ton about Lady Gaga, but when it comes to the more obscure indie acts, we like to supplement with data from Last.fm," Mr. Cohen told Betabeat.

It was a big decision to create this new project and dedicate resources to it while SeatGeek is still young. "In many ways, launching Columbus felt like building another startup," said SeatGeek co-founder Russell D'Souza. "However, we're focused on not just being a transaction engine where users go to buy tickets. We want to move further up the funnel and provide a sticky experience when users go to plan events.It meshes perfectly with SeatGeek. Once users find the events they are interested in, they can take advantage of our best-in-class metasearch engine."

Betabeat has heard a number of VCs talking recently about how ripe the calendar space is for disruption, so this seems like a market to watch.

The first 20 users to email bpopper@observer.com with the subject line "Land Ho" can get access to the private Columbus beta, so holler.

SeatGeek's Space at General Assembly, image by Dan Frommer

This is a guest post from SeatGeek co-founder Russell D'Souza.

Prior to moving offices in early June, SeatGeek worked first out of Soho Haven (now Projective Space) and then at General Assembly, two shared office spaces in New York. In the early days of SeatGeek, shared office space was a complete no-brainer, but what was much less clear was when to “graduate” to our own office space. Since many startups have been asking us about this of late, I thought we’d break down some of the criteria we evaluated when making this decision.

Cost

Here in New York, there are a bunch of different pricing structures for shared office space. Some places charge by the desk, others have a membership fee, and others charge for larger, multi-user tables. In almost all cases, shared office space for a tiny startup is far cheaper than a short-term lease. However, at about 12 employees, a dedicated lease became comparable to the cost of upscale shared space like General Assembly.

Company culture

The most successful startups have a distinctive culture. As you can tell by our company name, we’re pretty into data and we have a particular obsession about our company’s performance metrics. In fact, you can’t turn a corner in our office without seeing a poster or television screen displaying PR scores, server response time, or traffic. In a communal office space, we couldn’t share this level of sensitive detail since we had no control over who comes through the door. Since moving office space, we could be more transparent about SeatGeek’s metrics to everyone’s benefit.

Flexibility in growth

Shared office spaces often cap the size of individual teams to prevent exposure to one large tenant. We were nervous that this cap could have a subconscious effect on how we approached growth. We’re always looking to hire talented folks and never want to limit our aspirations based on office space limitations. Our new office can fit over twenty people comfortably. We’re a little over half that today but it’s reassuring that we can scale up quickly.

Dedicated amenities

Shared office space means sharing amenities like the fridge and cabinets. As a result, it’s infeasible to have a full suite of food and drinks options for your team, which means that folks waste time and money purchasing lunches and snacks at the nearest deli. At SeatGeek HQ our pantry and fridge is always stocked and this yields a happier and more productive team.

Given all the positives of our own space, why do I say that shared office space is a no-brainer for most early-stage companies? Shared office spaces take care of administrative hassles like hiring cleaners and purchasing office furniture, allowing early-stage startups to focus on building a product and getting traction. Importantly, shared office spaces offer an immediate network of entrepreneurs. We’ve done partnerships with neighboring startups, gotten product feedback, and received key introductions to investors. There’s a deep camaraderie you build with neighboring startups and some of my closest friends in the startup community have come because we worked a few feet away.

It was certainly tough to sever our immediate connection with other startups when we moved to our office. However, by the time we left, we had a strong network in New York’s tech scene and it didn’t feel as if staying in a shared office space was worth compromising on the benefits listed above. For those interested in checking out our new space or if you have specific questions, please don’t hesitate to us directly at hi@seatgeek.com.

Startup guys love pizza, cramped quarters and all nighters

Working at SeatGeek is sort of like joining a team of ninja killers. To enter the fold, you must prove yourself worthy.

When the startup was looking to hire a backend developer, for example, they received hundreds of bad applications for the few open slots. So they devised a challenge that would eliminate posers.

"All applicants must now submit their resume by solving a puzzle: they must hack into our backend jobs admin panel."

This trial by fire worked so well, the SeatGeek team decided to apply it to non-coding position as well. The startup recently lost their director of communications, Ben Kessler, aka the Kessinator, aka Kesstronic 9000.

Instead of wading through resumes and CVs, the SeatGeek team devised a new challenge:

Our PR strategy uses the mountain of ticketing data we’ve collected over the past few years. Whenever a big story in sports or music breaks, we try to quantify fan sentiment through ticket prices. Reporters love this data; we get 3-4 press mentions per week. Examples of how we utilize our data are available on our blog and press page.

If this is a role that interests you, here’s how to apply using WorkAtSeatGeek.com:

• Email write@seatgeek.com with your resume attached
• The email address will auto-respond with instructions on how to access a ticketing dataset
• One you receive the data, use it to write a blog post of up to 300 words with a graph or chart. It’s unlikely that all the data-points in the dataset will be relevant the story you choose.
• Post your article on workatseatgeek.com. You can easily create an account by going tohttp://workatseatgeek.com/wp-login.php?action=register For obvious reasons, we will only display the handle you choose and never your full name or email address

Readers will vote on the most compelling posts by sharing them on Google Plus, Twitter, and Facebook. We encourage applicants to accumulate these social shares by actively promoting their pieces. In fact, the strongest applicants will probably be able to get legitimate press coverage. Just as we focus on engineers that solve our developer challenge, we’ll focus our interviews on the handful of writers with the best-written and most-shared articles.

Allright all you social media savants, info graphic rockstars and marketing mavens, time to put your money where you mouth is and get some press pickup.

Betabeat eats interns who breathe marketing for breakfast

Felix Delgado really wants to be an intern at SeatGeek, and why not? The General Assembly graduate is crushing it, having recently signed a big partnership with Yahoo Sports and outpacing their older, better funded rivals.

Assuming that it would be a crowded field, Mr. Delgado crafted a custom ticket stub. The front is a custom message to the founders with a QR code linking back to a FAQ page on Mr. Delgado's website, wherein he asks (and answers!) questions about why he is perfect for the position at SeatGeek. The back is his resume.

"Over achiever of the year," tweeted out SeatGeek's Ben Kessler.

The FAQ in all it's glory:

Are you interested in Marketing?

Interested? No. I love Marketing. The thought of marketing a product that customers will enjoy is exciting and inspiring.

Are you eager to learn more about Marketing?

Yes, I am very eager to learn more about Marketing. My goal is to master it. I feel an internship at SeatGeek will set me on the path to achieve that goal.

Are you interested in web startups?

I eat and breathe startups. I have a two-year subscription to Inc. and visit Techcrunch, Mashable, Techmeme, and Hackernews about five times a day.

Tell me something about yourself.

That is not a question.

OK… What can you tell me about yourself?

I love Marketing, technology, baseball, and the internet-not necessarily in that order. I recently began helping two small businesses with their marketing strategies. One of the businesses is a balloon décor company and the other is a sound production company. I am hoping that I can work with SeatGeek to expand my marketing skills, while also assisting them in becoming a nationally recognized brand.

Image via BusinessWeek

According to the most recent report from Comscore, ticketing is now the most popular category of website in the United States, ahead of fashion, toys and consumer goods. And New York is home to one of the fastest growing ticket sites, SeatGeek, which this week announced a major partnership with Yahoo Sports.

Yahoo is the second largest internet destination, ranking only behind Google in terms of traffic to its network of sites. So how did a small, two year old start-up score prime position on one of the web's biggest networks in the web's largest and fastest growing market?

"The credit goes to Yahoo for taking a chance and working with a relatively unknown start-up," says SeatGeek co-founder Russell D'Souza. "They saw we had a great user experience and analytics that helped fans to find the best seats at the best prices. And the result has been great for both us. Our traffic has certainly grown as a result."

SeatGeek's has seen it's traffic double in the last nine months, and attracts more visitors than its older, better funded rival in Palo Alto, FanSnap, which is two years older, and has raised roughly six times more capital. "We are getting very close to profitablity, and I don't really think I see the advantage of raising another round," says Mr. D'Souza. "I think a lot of our success comes from having the mentality of an underdog."

SeatGeek gets a commission every time it sends a user to a secondary market where they purchase a ticket. It also recently rolled out a self serve ad platform. Right now revenue is about 75-25 between tickets and ads. "We would like to see that get a little closer to the Kayak model, which is 50-50," says Mr. D'Souza.