Photo by Malone & Company / Big Omaha via Silicon Prairie News

Earlier this week, Betabeat shlepped out to LaGuardia and took a plane and then another plane to Nebraska. We could tell things were gonna be different when the view from the window seat was tract after tract of pastoral green and brown instead of the Lite Brites that usually greet us descending into Queens. Then our shuttle driver from the airport invited us over for a home-cooked meal. We could get used to Central Time!

We are here, of course, for Big Omaha, an intimate startup conference that people like to describe as "how SXSW used to be," i.e. before the marketers descended, Jay-Z showed up, and the suits started ruining everything. Attendance is capped at 650 and batches of tickets sell out within minutes.

The conference is put on by good folks from Silicon Prairie, a pioneering blog about the Midwest's very own Startupland. There are no funding announcements at Big Omaha, precious little in the way of branded swag, and few formalities, although convention has it that everyone stands up and cheers when you take the stage. Did we mention how polite everyone is? We've already hugged two strangers. Be warned, it will probably happen again.

So far we ran into SecondLife's Philip Rosedale in a hotel lounge (and possibly scared him off by enthusing, "I know you!") Between the California tan, Anime haircut, and polar blue eyes, he looked like he had been sent to Omaha from a not too distant future--where they still wear colorful cowboy shirts. BoaHaus bad boy Eddie Huang tipped us off to how the Midwest does snacking differently.

Later, we accosted Turntable.fm's Seth Goldstein by breakfast coffee stand and reminded him about that time we stalked him at the Ace Hotel. After that we interrupted Square cofounder Jim Mckelvey, who just finished telling the story of how his side career glass-blowing led the idea behind Square, as he was trying to eat lunch. Meeting people is easy!

By far the most amusing presentation of yesterday morning came from Thrillist and Lerer Ventures Ben Lerer whose first slide featured his Twitter handle and the words, "…because I don't have a lot of followers. . . And its embarrassing." Guys, let's help @BenjLerer out! "The story begins many, many years ago when I was a young, plump boy," Mr. Lerer told the crowd about his short-lived tennis career and days as a B-minus coed underachiever. The entrepreneurial streak started early in that one, however. "I did make incredible fake IDs," Mr. Lerer said, flashing a sample of the one he made for himself at UPenn. "I actually looked like that first of all, which is so upsetting, but quality work, quality product." Betabeat concurs.

Mark Ecko, who spoke at last year's big Omaha, was milling about a cocktail hour hosted by Omaha Steaks. Jordan Lampe from Dwolla, the innovative online payments company, told us how meeting Mr. Ecko at the conference last year led to an investment from his venture capital firm, Artists & Instigators. Zaarly founder Bo Fishback experienced the same happy coincidence last year. We chatted with Dwolla's "genius" dev Brandon Weber, who got heckled for the mammoth size of his laptop in the blogger's lounge earlier. "You're trying to write email, I'm changing the world!" was his belated retort.

After that, we met the lovely Sarah Prevette from BetaKit, who sold her company Sprouter to PostMedia Network last October. Rather than the old advertising route, Ms. Pervette is also exploring leveraging her team's expertise in emerging tech to clue in Fortune 500 companies. We gave her some advice about her impending trip to India: beware the brownouts and invest in some airy Jane Goodall shirts.

Our last stop for the evening was the official after-party where we saw Skillshare cofounder Mike Karnjanaprakorn and Raptor Ventures's William Peng, fellow New Yorkers who both worked at Hot Potato, which Facebook acquired in 2010. The three of us looked on as an enterprising evangelist for Shopify whipped out his accordian to play some pop hits. Know any rap, Mr. Karnjanaprakorn asked? And the dude obliged with rather cheery rendition of "Cop Killer."

Here's our favorite revelations from yesterday's esteemed panelists:

The Nuclear Winter Is Coming 

Seth Goldstein, a serial entrepreneur and veteran of Flatiron Partners, the New York VC firm that suffered mightily in the dotcom bust, has more perspective on the current bubble talk than most. Mr. Goldstein delivered his speech in 140-character aphorisms. No. 8 was "Raise money when you can, not when you have to."  Mr. Goldstein talked about meeting 19-year-old Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia in Turntable.fm room. Mr. Lavingia, a former designer for Pinterest, just raised $7 million for Gumroad, which aims to make selling as easy as sharing. But not because he needed to; the company is only spending $25,000 to $30,000 a month. But Mr. Goldstein came on as an investor and then "Kleiner perkiness says, 'Hey here's $7 million,'" in which case you should say yes. "If we do go through a nuclear winter, which we will, it might wait until Facebook goes public," said Mr. Goldstein, you better raise while you can. "All these incubators and incubators of incubators are going to hit a wall."

I Can't Believe You Asked Me That!

The GOOG's interview process has nothing on the yesterday's Big Omaha speakers. With the idea that job interviews naturally veer towards exaggerations and untruths, Square's Jim McKelvey said, "I explain to them that I'm no good at detecting lies ... but I will eventually find them and I'm really good at firing people," if it's not a good fit. Philip Rosedale asks, "What is the one thing your friends will say about you that you would disagree with?" Mr. Rosedale's friends would say he's happy, but he says, "I want to be cool and maybe a little bit scary." His presentation on the future of work for freakily ingenius, if that counts. He also asks interviewees to, "Take me on a trip, walk through your front foor with me," and describe what you see. And then the items you mention reveal your priorities "Do you see how subtle that is? Because you can't lie," said Mr. Rosedale. Hmm, seems pretty easy not to mention that pile of clothes in the corner. Mr. Lerer and Fuck Cancer's Yael Cohen both revealed that any job offer comes with a warning about they are are "assholes" and an encouragement not to take the gig, with the idea of weeding out the weaklings. Too bad they didn't discuss how often that works.

Underachieving Pays Off

Did you know that Ben Lerer worked for hotelier Andre Balázs after college? We didn't! Mr. Lerer told the audience that with his Ivy League degree, he expected to easily slide in at the top of the world. "Where's the keys to all the hotels that I'm now running," he asked his boss. Not so fast, said Mr. Balázs, explaining that before you could be a good general manager, you had to learn how to be a good assistant general manager and so on and so forth down the line. "He kicked me out of the corporate office to be a bus boy and a bar back for the summer. I was not super stoked about that," Mr. Lerer admitted. Eventually, he convinced Mr. Balázs to make him the Food & Beverage manager, but before he was ready.  "I hated it because I was super insecure. I knew everyone who was under me all had more experience."

But there's a moral to this sad tale. Sitting on a roof one day, it occurred to Mr. Lerer that he might as well as do what he knows. "It turned out that being an incredible underachiever for a long period of time," had its benefits. He took his expertise in "eating a lot," "buying clothes," and "trying to hook up with girls," and formed Thrillist.

Zen and the Art of Stillness

All that innovating can come at a price to your sanity if you can find some stillness amid the chaos. Mr. Rosedale said he "counts to a very large number each day." He stops and starts and tries to keep his place with goal of reaching 10,000 before he sleeps. "That is crazy!" the moderator yelped. Mr. McKelvey, who had the idea for a mobile payments like Square when he realized a talented fellow glassblower was living out of his car uses the concentration required to shape glass properly, which requires that you, "Make your final move at the last possible second." He also flies small planes. "It's not that difficult to fly a plane, but you can't screw it up!" said Mr. McKelvey. And what of Mr. Lerer? "All you guys have such good answers," he told the crowd. "I, like, have a beer and fall asleep on my sofa." Apparently some people could relate. It got a big applause.

We only wish we'd gotten to Omaha a little earlier. Last week, the city played hosted to Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholders meeting and from the brochure still resting in our hotel room. We missed a visit to a fine jewelers as well as dinner at one of Warren's favorite steakhouses. Now, if you'll excuse us, we're off to hear Ms.  Prevette's talk!

That's Betabeat alone on the dance floor with the lame avatar.

It's possible Betabeat's "Summer Jamz" tag for Turntable.fm posts may have proved portentous. After looking at the site's traffic and search trends, Digital Music News wonders, "Has the fickle internet already chewed this site up, spit it out, and moved onto something else?"

It echoes what a norms friend and former TTFM enthusiast said to us over coffee last weekend, "Remember when everyone was excited about Turntable.fm?!" She has since moved on to Spotify.

The tech press is just as eager to roast a failure as it to crown a startup prince (not us, of course, no never). But while the data is unverified, a unique visitor count from Compete.com, ranking data from Alexa and Google search trend data all show a markedly similar downward-sloping curve after a steep spike in June and July.

Last week, just before Turntable.fm was going to showcased at the Raise Cache fundraiser, co-founder Billy Chasen told Betabeat that the service was streaming as many as a 1 million tracks a day. Around the same time, co-founder Seth Goldstein told VatorNews, "We have a passionate core of 20,000 to 40,000 users, who use the service 10-20 hours a month."

Digital Music News posits several reasons for what looks like a traffic dive:

" . . . there are factors inhibiting growth.  Like international licensing, or lack therof.  Currently, Turntable.fm is flatly illegal outside of the US, given the absence of DMCA protections. "We had to shut off international access very early on, because the DMCA provisions don't support international access," Goldstein continued. "And early on, Japan, Brazil, and some of these other countries were huge consumers."

However, as the post points out, even if TTFM can get major label licensing, "big licenses cost big money, and investors rarely see a big return on those investments."

A Betabeat tipster, who wondered by Turntable.fm seemed "so empty" despite its 1 million daily plays, pointed us to Turntable.fm's AppData listing, where the source recommended, "You should get the 90+ day view for even more reverse hockey stick fun.  Maybe there is a technical reason for this. If so what is it?"

via AppData

Betabeat has reached out to Mr. Chasen for comment about what, if any, significance he sees in their numbers,  whether they are accurate, and whether they can grow off a core base of users alone. We'll update the post when we hear back.

The tipster also had a theory: namely that the problem lies with user's unfamiliarity with DJ-ing, pointing out that even Mr. Chasen found it "a little intimidating." Said the tipster:

This is a great quote. It's intimidating because there is more to DJing that queuing tracks, actually.  Is this going to be more of the mormon bartender problem?

The source was referring to Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski's recent, incisive post on the social graph, where he wrote, "Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender."

On Digital Music News, the commenters seemed of two minds about the apparent slump, with @fingertipsmusic calling Turntable.fm "a cautionary tale for an industry immune to cautionary tales," while @bsstoner defended its chances, "Too much early hype, it's still a killer product."

If you fancy yourself a turn-around expert, head over to Quora. No one's attempted to answer the "How will turntable.fm make money?" question since August.

No, not that kind of bear.

Now that Turntable.fm courts celebrities as investors, it's fair game for the likes of The Hollywood Reporter, which had an interesting interview with co-founder Seth Goldstein over the weekend. In it, Mr. Goldstein discusses monetization (with engaged users it'll come naturally) and how DCMA-compliant listening makes for a passive experience ("it's primarily read-only").

As an early investor in the taxonomic trailblazers behind Delicious, Mr. Goldstein also had some telling observations about how TTFM users have scrapped traditional genres for a different approach to categorization.

We also noticed that the conventional notion of [genres] is a relic of a bygone day. The most interesting rooms on Turntable.fm is the mashup room, where the only theme that ties people together is the fact that people have to mash up two songs. There's things like ocean rooms, where you can play anything you want so long that it has something to do with an ocean. There was a Hurricane Irene room where one guy played "Hurricane" by Bob Dylan, and another girl played "Here Comes The Rain Again." One of my favorites is there's an "orange bear indie room" where the only caveat is that you have to wear the avatar of the orange bear. It's interesting to see how people categorize things themselves and create communities around their own categorization schemes. I was one of the original investors in a company called Del.i.cious, and the whole point was that peole would tag things however they wanted to. Whereas Yahoo would call it "sports" website, the user would tag it a baseball website or a Red Sox website. So I think we're seeing how powerful it is when users are given the opportunity to organize their own music.

We hope new Delicious owners, YouTube's Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, are taking note. But as the failure for #occupywallst (or #occupywallstreet or #ows) to crack Twitter's trending topics has shown, too many tags isn't always a good thing.

In a room of bobbing avatars, "Radiohead" takes on new meaning.

While the legal paperwork is still being finished, Betabeat has learned from multiple sources that Union Square Venture is the big new investor in Turntable.fm.

Betabeat was the first to report the company was raising significant funds. It was later reported by Business Insider that the round had closed, which was not true at the time, and technically is still not the case. We have been told that BI was essentially correct on the numbers, which were reported as a $7.5 million round at a $37.5 million valuation.

TechCrunch was the first to report that Turntable was choosing between USV, Kleiner Perkins and Accel. The choice of USV over West Coast heavyweights like Kleiner Perkins and Accel makes a lot of sense. Both Kleiner and Accel have deep ties with Facebook, which is reportedly building its own music service, so there is a potential for conflict of interest. USV, by contrast, has deep ties with Twitter, which is Turntable.fm's most powerful distribution platform.

Turntable was less concerned about the amount of money than with finding a VC who could connect them to the best talent, and USV is undoubtedly one of the best connected and most visible firms on the East Coast. They also specialize in companies with highly-engaged networks of users and a somewhat murky path to revenue. UPDATE: as Scott Rafer and Rafat Ali both pointed out, Turntable.fm co-founder Seth Goldstein was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Fred Wilson's first VC firm, Flatiron Partners, and the two have been close ever since.

Things are still in flux and it's possible some music industry folks will be joining in on this round, along with original investors in Stickybits like First Round Capital, Polaris, Lowercase, Mitch Kapor and Chris Sacca.

Over the last few weeks, Turntable has secured licenses with ASCAP and BMI, which covers most of the performance rights needed when streaming music, although deals with SESAC and EMI still need to be worked out.

But one major question remains. Will Turntable.fm be able to qualify as a non-interactive streaming radio service, afforded DMCA protection by the Copyright Act of 1998? If it does, then all it needs are these relatively inexpensive performance rights. If, on the other hand, Turntable.fm is labeled an interactive streaming service like Spotify, then it would need to go about securing the rights from all the record labels, a much more daunting and expensive task.

Pivot Prof. Billy Chasen

There is no more overused and reviled word in the world of tech start-ups than pivot. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot.

It seems to capture the manic energy of the current tech industry, in which an idea can get millions in funding before building a product and, if the users never materialize, or the business model never emerges amidst all hype, simply change their direction and try something new.

No company better epitomizes this idea of second chances than Turntable.fm, a social music site, born out of the ashes of a failed venture called Stickybits. Founders Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein raised almost $2 million for Stickybits and worked on the project for about a year. The idea was to leave little stickers on physical objects that contained links to stories, photos and video on the web. Big brands like Pepsi thought it was a great idea. Users, not so much.

With little momentum and cash running low, they decided to pull a monster pivot. Turntable.fm, which launched a little over one month ago, has already attracted over 300,000 users and the interest of top tier investors on the east and west coast. Suddenly a team that was running low on funds is being courted for a fresh infusion of $5-10 million at a $40 million valuation, Betabeat has learned from multiple sources.

Exclusive: Turntable.fm's #1 Spinner, DJ Woooooo, Shares his Secrets

Update: Fred Wilson, Kleiner Perkins and Accel in Bidding War Over Turntable.fm

“Pivoting is sort of unique to the tech world,” said Kevin Ryan, probably New York’s most successful serial entrepreneur. Doubleclick, the ad serving platform Ryan founded during the dot-com boom, was eventually purchased by Google for $3 billion, and remains New York’s biggest exit. “Most people don’t realize this, but that company was actually a pivot,” says Ryan, leaning back deeply into a leather chair at the offices of his largest current company, Gilt Groupe.

“We were an ad sales network, a media company, and maybe ten percent was dedicated to tech for ad serving. What we saw was that the majority of the company was not growing or producing like the sliver focused on tech. So we sold off 90 percent of the company, something like 600 employees.” He stops and take a big sip of diet Pepsi. “As far as pivots go, that was a double backflip with a twist, because we had already taken the company public, and while tech folks understand the pivot, hedge fun managers do not. People thought we were crazy at the time, but Doubleclick wouldn’t be powering Google today if we hadn’t made that change.”

Pivoting isn’t unique to the East Coast, but New York is the first tech center to institutionalize the pivot as strategy for creating internet companies. Betaworks, where Billy Chasen cut his teeth as an entrepreneur, began with a simple maxim. 100 days and $100,000 to get a company into beta, a working product that can be released to users for feedback. “If you can shrink the cycle between idea, scrawling on a napkin, and testing with users, that is the most important piece of the puzzle,” said betaworks CEO John Borthwick, seated in front of a green chalkboard, pushing his bushy hair out of his eyes.

“What that means simply is you want to get to market as fast as possible, test and trail and then pivot if need be. Because the moment you get into the process of fundraising you begin to lock yourself up, both literally with investors, and psychologically, that I am going to build a business around X. Because my experience is, once people actually start to use your product, that X can turn into Y very quickly.”

As one of the co-founders of betaworks, Mr. Chasen built a product called Firef.ly based on the 100 days $100,000 model. It began as a way for web site owners to see how users were mousing around their site. But seeing what people were doing in real time didn’t help publishers learn much. So when this failed to catch on, Firef.ly pulled a quick pivot, adding a feature that let users visiting the same web page chat with one another. Problem was, users ended up talking about Firef.ly, instead of browsing the site. So the team at betaworks changed direction again.

“It’s most aptly described as a 180 degree pivot, because we sort of turned the product on its head,” said Mr. Borthwick. Instead of showing exactly what users were doing, or letting them interact, betaworks created a product that showed website owners exactly how many people were on their site, where they were coming from and what they were reading. That product, renamed Chartbeat, now has thousands of clients around the globe and millions in annual revenue.

It’s successes like that which have made changing ones mind and abandoning the original project a strategy without a stigma in the New York tech scene. Howard Morgan, the partner at First Round Capital who led the $1.6 million Series A in Stickybits, recently declared, “When we fund a company, we hope that we have picked the combination of a great entrepreneur and his/her team, along with a great product in a large available market. But sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way we all expected. Perhaps we need to modify the old adage to 'If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then pivot, don’t be a foolish slave to the first idea.'” Knowing that Chasen had pulled off an acrobatic pivot of Chartbeat’s caliber was part of the reason First Round backed him in the first place.

Chris Dixon, who recently pivoted his new startup Hunch from a consumer facing taste engine to a platform for businesses who want to offer recommendations, thinks most entrepreneurs don’t pull the trigger fast enough. “The most common mistake is to pivot too late. You have sunk costs. You get sort of married to your project. I find a sign of a mature entrepreneurs is someone who can throw away original hypothesis, and some of the dreams around that. That is a difficult thing to do.” It’s the language of romance applied to a labor of love. Some entrepreneurs learn to settle for good enough, some keep chasing after that elusive Mr. Right idea.

Back when Billy Chasen was still working on Stickybits, he sat down with Mr. Dixon for an interview on TechCrunch TV. Talk turned quickly to the merit of pivots and how Stickybits was refocusing itself. ““If your not willing to fail fast, not willing to figure out what’s working and what’s not, you’re going to have to do something like completely shut down and start over or ditch the project entirely,” said Mr. Chasen, who ended up doing just that with his move to Turntable.fm.

The two entrepreneurs, handsome and casually dressed, chatted on stools inside the Stickybits office. “It’s a tough trade-off, because on the one hand its important to be iterative and listen to the market, on the other hand some of the greatest companies were formed by very stubborn people,” said Dixon.

“You kinda doubt yourself sometimes, because you had this vision for something, you’re like, how stubborn will I be, because you know there are people who are stubborn and then time proves them...” said Mr. Chasen, looking a little abashed, before Mr. Dixon cut him off, throwing up his hands in agreement.

“Steve Jobs is an example, he doesn’t listen to the market at all, just decides what its gonna be!”

The stubborn success of Silicon Valley visionaries like Mr. Jobs haunts the agile New York entrepreneur. With all the emphasis on capturing user feedback and moving to where the market seems ripe, local techies have yet to build a true titan on the scale of Apple, Facebook or Google.

“I don’t know if I would have done the same thing as Mark Zuckerberg, with introducing the news feed,” said Mr. Chasen. “When they first did that everyone cried privacy—‘This is an infringement, this is horrible this isn’t what I signed up for.’ He said, 'you’ll get used to it and you’ll like it.'”

The streaming music service Pandora recently filed for its IPO, giving hope to a young company like Turntable.fm that a big payday awaits at the end of a tough road. But Pandora was unprofitable for the better part of a decade before finally coming into its own with the emergence of mobile apps. Things would have turned out very differently if founder Tim Westergren had been a student of the pivot, instead of stubborn perseverance.

Having executed its graceful pivot, Turntable.fm seems well situated. Investors are looking to cut the company fat checks, and Facebook is sweating about the platform’s viral growth while struggling to get its own social music app launched with Spotify. But a little further down the road—if, say, the users stop signing up in droves, or the major labels start sending out their lawyers—Mr. Chasen will face a stark choice. Should he dig a little deeper and push on despite the challenges, or keep on running and gunning, moving to meet the market and every so often stumbling into success.

For the average entrepreneur, the best strategy for success is to fail, to learn and to change. But what if, like Jobs or Zuckerberg, the rest of the world just doesn’t understand, and the only way to make it big, really big, is to just ignore what the market is telling you, and follow your gut instead. The central paradox of the pivot is this: how do you know if you’re a visionary?

Blowin' up: Turntable.com.

Today, a start-up is putting Turntable.fm to the test. Mashable reports 1band1brand, a site for indie music and fashion brands, is hosting a Turntable room shortly with "trivia contests, giveaways, artist DJs (Eastern Conference Champions and Kopecky Family Band) and open mic spots for participating users."

It's scary how fast Turntable.fm blew up. At the beginning of the month, invites went out to a small batch of early adopters, who used Facebook to spread it to their friends, and somehow it got picked up by a music blog in Germany, and then it was all over Twitter, and then the co-founders had to stop signing up new users for a while due to the unanticipated windfall. And that was just the beginning:

Developers started building hacks and apps for Turntable (the latest is the Turntable Dashboard, which shows what's playing in all rooms with more than 20 people) About two weeks after its public launch, Turntable announced it was hiring and started iterating on features.

They've got the users. They've got the hype. But legal threats from the still-entrenched music industry threaten the sustainability of a hyper-popular site in the absence of a revenue stream, so co-founders Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein better be thinking beyond just making something cool.

Turntable sends some referrals to iTunes, but it's widely agreed that the biggest potential for money-makin' is in hosting music events online--like when Diplo ambushed the System Addict - Idle Warship room--as a marketing tool.

Turntable is in the opposite situation of the barcode-based social network Stickybits, the first incarnation of the company, which racked up a slew of early partnerships with Pepsi, Campbell's Soup and Lipton Brisk Tea, but never caught on with users. "It was a great idea, but didn’t gain traction, possibly because it was ahead of its time. So Billy directed his software team in a totally different direction, into the music world," explains Philip Chasen, antiques dealer and grandfather of Turntable.fm, in a post about the site's growing pains.

Stickybits: Customers but no users. Turntable: Users but no customers (yet). Man, internet start-ups are hard, aren't they?

Inside the lobby we spotted angel investor Chris Sacca, the "gatekeeper" of private shares in Twitter, right away by his leonine mane of hair. We tried to introduce ourselves, but a gentleman in a baseball cap and windbreaker with his back to us was in the middle of wowing a crowd gathered around him with a card trick. After it was over, the magician moved on, deck in hand, to entertain the couch to our right. "Have you met my friend David?" asked Mr. Sacca, as he walked by. "That's David Blaine," Mr. Sacca added, once the illusionist was out of earshot. Yeah, we recognized the face.

"My mind is blown," said Turntable.fm co-founder Seth Goldstein, still reeling from the trick, "I really was thinking of the three." As soon as we identified ourselves, Mr. Goldstein politely towed the company line, "We're not talking." But he couldn't help acknowledging the addictive concept that he and his co-founders had pivoted into with Turntable.fm--a radio station where users "DJ" in different rooms while users vote the songs lame or awesome and chat in a sidebar. "We really hit on something big."

Before we headed for the exit, Mr. Goldstein, who lives in the Bay Area, told Betabeat he's been coming to New York every couple of weeks. A few feet away, Mr. Blaine was shuffling his deck. Around 1am, Mr. Sacca tweeted: "Wrapping up three hours of @davidblaine blowing minds in the Ace Hotel lobby. I'm going to have nightmares about the nine of diamonds." Clearly, we left too soon.

"The graph plotting the @mentions of turntable.fm over time just has a classic hockey stick shape to it," Doug Williams, biz dev at Twitter, tweeted at TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsias regarding the site. Turntable.fm is a browser-based and soon-to-be mobile app that's basically a radio station where a few users "DJ" while other listeners vote on song choices and talk in a chat room sidebar.

"Screenshots or it didn't happen," Ms. Tsotsias responded.

Mr. Williams declined to give out the stats, of course. But we ran a semantic tweet analysis using the social media analytics tool ViralHeat and found some fun stuff from the past week:

-Mr. Williams is the most "influential" tweeter who's talked about Turntable.fm.

-Twitter users are mentioning the phrase "turntable.fm" an average of 71 times a day; 72.69 percent of tweets had links in them.

-64.26 percent of tweets had positive associations; 26.10 percent had neutral associations, and 9.64 percent were negative.

-Chris Young, Chicagoan start-up enthusiast, is Turntable.fm's most tweet-happy fan. ("Really?" he tweeted when we told him. "I didn't realize I was so vocal about it."

Turntable.fm's founders remain secretive about the start-up and won't grant Betabeat an interview. It's a three-person company: co-founder Seth Goldstein in the Bay Area, Billy Chasen and iPhone developer Yang Yang in the Union Square Area (plus Mr. Goldstein's dad, who we hear is lending a hand) but Turntable.fm is about to double in size, hiring for two developers and a designer.

We bet that means the entrepreneurs have raised some money on top of the $1.9 million they got for their original idea, StickyBits. But the Turntable.fm backlash may have begun. "It's like a sugar high," one developer who has worked for music start-ups in the city told Betabeat, saying he was addicted to the service for a few days but then dropped it because the experience described by Om Malik as the "alive web" was too demanding of his attention. That's the same thing venture capitalist Adam D'Augelli described in a blog post: "I was burned out.  I couldn’t keep up with the pace of engaging in the product and living my actual life.  The real-time nature of the product required constant attention, which I couldn’t provide and I needed to go back to normalcy."

At the same time, Turntable.fm is obviously on fire--most high-profile tech companies have rooms on the site and there are tweets about it in multiple languages. Better hope it doesn't burn too hot.

Nooob

The folks at addictive music service turntable.fm are struggling right now just to keep the site up and running as its viral growth continues to surge. But co-founder Billy Chasen sent out an email last night with a few interesting updates.

One of the more addictive features on the service is the ability to follow a DJ and be alerted whenever they hit the decks. But so far there is no way to keep track of the songs you discover  and award points to for being awesome.

"We have a lot of exciting features on our roadmap, so expect to see new things getting rolled out over the next few weeks," wrote Chasen. "Our biggest request right now are for multiple queues and tracking what you awesome. We are already logging everything you awesome, so you'll see them soon."

The service is hunting for three open positions: a backend developer proficient in python with the war wounds to prove they been through scaling hell before, a javascript ninja for the frontend and a designer with animination experience to craft new avatars and extra virtual goodies.

On the scaling side, Turntable.fm is also going to have to deal with the cost of licensing music. Right now the service uses MediaNet, which charges around $.002 per listener, who is enjoying a serendiptious play, and and 10 cents for the DJ, who counts as an on demand play.

Frank Denbow from Songsicle also works with MediaNet and says it appears Turntable.fm is focused on creating a DMCA compliant Internet Radio site. That would put some basic ground rules in place:

1) May not see ahead in a playlist past the currently playing song

2) May only play or pause the list

3) 3 songs per artist per hour, maximum

4) 4 songs from a single album in three consecutive hours, maximum

5) Users may skip ahead only 6 times per hour