JackThreads Gets an iPads App

SoundCloud Drifts to NY The orange-and-white audio platform announced the opening of offices in New York this week, declaring that they find the city "similar to Berlin" in that it’s "not trying to replicate what’s going on in The Valley." SoundCloud has also taken on Dan Gerber, the former National Director of Strategic Partnerships at Pandora, in order to look after brand revenues following his work at The Grammys. No word if he’ll organize Taylor Swift-style digs at rivals Spotify and Songza.

Aereo Reveals New Pricing Structure Controversial live TV streaming company Aereo unveiled a new payment plan for customers that allows access to most features for as little as $8 an hour. The purveyors of tiny antennas said the pricing plan "requires no long-term commitment and eliminates the previous annual and day plans," referring to it as "streamlined." The move is accompanied by a commitment to offer full service amenities free for the first month commencing May 15. Aereo's CEO stated that, "We looked at our data and it was clear, consumers want a more simple approach to pricing," mentioning nothing about undercutting the network giants they’ve so angered.

SideTour Adds BlackJack Wiz Experience maestros SideTour let slip that one of their own employees, a veteran card counter and Blackjack player, has started offering tours of his own. The staff member, Brian Cotlove, "spent six years making a career playing blackjack in casinos around the world." Perhaps a trip to Atlantic City is in order for the SideTour team?

BitPay Expands The BitCoin world’s PayPal has grown with the inclusion of Bitcoin core-developer Jeff Garzik and CFO Bryan Krohn. As BitCoin prepares to be used in up to 50,000 stores, the payment site says that Mr. Garzik’s new position will "allow him to work full-time on Bitcoin, BitPay, and related open-source projects to benefit the Bitcoin community."

Fiverr Hires Former Cuban Council Co-Founder Following the buzz around Google’s acquisition of legendary design firm Cuban Council, it can now be revealed that co-founder Michael Schmidt has made the move to Fiverr, the online services marketplace. Schmidt, who was responsible for Evernote, Bad Religion and the Rdio app, amongst other things, will now be their new front end architect, building and managing the Fiverr design team.

Pheed Launches Android App Feisty young social media upstart Pheed, used by the likes of Miley Cyrus, continues to vie for the big leagues with the launch of an Android app. The site, which is essentially a mashup of every other social media, believes it will "double in size over the next couple of months due to the new Android market," according to CEO O.D. Kobo.

(Photo: DeviantArt)

2012 was quite a year for the New York tech community. Several NYC startups scored monster exits, while others raised millions to up their chances of scoring a ping pong table for the office. Whether or not that hotly debated bubble bursts, we imagine 2013 will be another exciting year for NYC's tech set. Here are some New Year's resolutions from some of the NYC tech community's boldest names.

Rachel Haot, NYC Chief Digital Officer

1.      Cook more meals at home (FreshDirect and BlueApron)

2.      Shop local (local goods on Etsy: http://on.nyc.gov/ZPpbIp)

3.      Read more books (both physical and digital: all three NYC public library systems now offer e-books)

4.      Volunteer more often (http://www.nycservice.org/#s)

5.      Learn a new skill – like middle eastern cooking or how to use a letterpress.

Ryder Ripps, Cofounder of OkFocus

Work more, vroom bye haters.

Mallory Blair, Cofounder of Small Girls PR

Identifying our year's wins and losses and using that information to create defined roles for new team members to hire in the first quarter. Then the rest of 2013 is  about running the business instead of being the business.

Cindy Gallop, Founder of Make Love Not Porn

1. To champion and help every entrepreneur who wants to change the world through sex....This is the one place with enormous potential for innovation, disruption, and colossal financial returns, that the tech world refuses to go. I want to help drive more open-mindedness in the tech community around startups to do with sex.

2. To identify and use anything that is the future of money and payments. This resolution is born out of the frustrations and difficulties we've had setting up our payments infrastructure for MakeLoveNotPorn.tv.

Those difficulties led us to spend a lot of time and effort researching and talking to fintech startups, with the result that I am now passionate about working with and using anyone/thing inventing the future of money, finance and payments, both in an MLNPTV context and also a personal context.

Paul Berry, Cofounder of RebelMouse

My resolution is to keep focused and clever and build the fundamental culture for RebelMouse to grow from.

Christina DiRusso, PR Manager at Livestream

More: Reading, Engineering (currently learning to be a Livestream Encoding Engineer), Entertaining in, and exploring, my new Brooklyn hood, and Reality-TV watching. Less: Emailing, English (honing my Italian skills), Gchatting with my dad.

Josh Miller, Cofounder of Branch

Figure out how to get my (non-techie) roommates to be addicted to Branch, and learn how to rap so I can complement A-Flock's beat boxing (one of our engineers).

Dave Winer, Software Developer and Writer

My resolution for the New Year is: I will do what I can to make tech writing more literate. (Ed. Note: Read more about Mr. Winer's resolution here.)

Ricky Robinett, Hacker at Ordr.in

Be the first hacker in XXL.

Jason Baptiste, Cofounder of OnSwipe

On a personal level, I really want to get back into writing and blogging.  It's why I started Onswipe and lead to my book coming out.  On a professional level?  It's growing Onswipe in a revenue generating machine.  It's an aggressive goal and year, but we have the team + traction to do it.

Jose Mejia, Editorial Director at Huge

One of my resolutions, which I think a lot of people can relate to if they're honest with themselves, is to stop using work/being busy as an easy excuse for what are really just basic character flaws that I need to fix. If I can avoid issuing  "Sorry I'm running late, something came up at work" texts like they're stock in the Shitty Friend IPO, it'll be a good year.

Alex Taub, Biz Dev Builder at Dwolla

My New Years resolution is to be faster and better at creating relevant pop culture twitter parody accounts- a la @invisibleobama

Suri Ratnatunga, Community Lead at Sidetour

To take no cabs in 2013 unless I'm stranded/drunk in Brooklyn.

Crystal Fawn, Community Engagement at Atavist

To read all the books that Stanley Kubrick based his films on.

Taylor Lorenz, Social Media Specialist at McGarryBowen

Stop and think before including emoji in every text message.

Nitasha Tiku, Editor of Betabeat

Make friends based on charger compatibility.

Scary sky

With mass transit closed and dangerous storm surges set to wallop the city, New York startups aren't messing around when it comes to hurricane prep. Most, like Usablenet, Kickstarter, HowAboutWe and SideTour, are urging employees to work from home due to the closure of the MTA system.

"We have a simple rule of thumb that if the subways are shut down, the office is closed and people can work from home," Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told Betabeat over email. "A few of us are actually crashing here over the weekend - myself and a few engineers. We built the place to be like a home, so it's a great place to be stuck for a few days :)."

"For those that are staying here, we have ample food, beverage, and entertainment. More iPads than flashlights," he added.

Hey, we're sure there's a flashlight app.

"The offices are closed; we're working from home," a developer at Etsy told Betabeat. "We put the Brits on point for Ops, though, in case the power goes out."

Many startups are also thanking their lucky stars that their data centers are out of the line of the storm. "Usablenet's platform is cloud-based and none of its U.S. data-centers are likely to be affected," a rep for the company told Betabeat.

"We're on Amazon Web Services, but we're in different data centers for redundancy," Mr. Baptiste said. "We're not worried about downtime."

Of course, startups with businesses that revolve around reliable delivery services are rolling out massive contingency plans to combat the bad weather and get the goods to their customers on time. H. BLOOM, a subscription flower service that delivers luxurious bouquets monthly to homes and corporations, is well-versed in the weather troubles heaped upon delivery startups.

"Unlike a lot of other technology businesses in New York, a pretty big component of our business is dependent on touching tangible products, receiving it, making something beautiful out of it and then actually delivering it, so there’s no question that a situation like this has an impact on the business," said Sonu Panda, COO of H. BLOOM. "The thing that is comforting to us is having external things impacting our operations is a regular occurrence. We have a bit of a scale--like if President Obama visits the U.N. and eastern Manhattan is turned into a traffic mess, that has an impact. This is a much more significant event and requires a lot more preparation, but in general we’re sort of used to these fire drills."

Mr. Panda

"We got through hurricane Irene just fine," he added.

By beefing up operations workers and having them start their shifts earlier, H. BLOOM intends to fulfill all delivery requests tomorrow. "We’ve got teams that will be getting in as early as 3:30 a.m. tomorrow morning to be able to facilitate deliveries before the storm hits New York," Mr. Panda said. "So the expectation is that everyone will be as delighted as they normally would be. In the instances in which deliveries can’t be done, we’ll be communicating early and often about what our alternative plans are."

Seamless, the popular food delivery service that keeps many New Yorkers from starving on a daily basis, is also working hard to ensure that users not only receive their orders in a timely fashion, but that they also know what to expect when ordering delivery in inclement weather. Likewise, the company is working with those restaurants who request it to close down their ordering service on Seamless during the storm.

"We have the ability to customize neighborhood delivery times so that our customers are able to see most of the times with relatively accurate estimates," Seamless' VP of marketing, Ryan Scott, told Betabeat. "It’s not always perfect just because of the thousands of restaurants we have across the country, but we do our best to look at the neighborhoods that are going to be mostly impacted and use those data points to come up with a plan of attack."

Mr. Scott said that users ordering in areas affected by the storm will also soon see a message crop up when they navigate to Seamless, letting them know about possible delivery delays.

We wondered if the site had seen any spikes in service over the past few days as New Yorkers brace for the storm, but Mr. Scott said that data wasn't available yet. "Without seeing the data until tomorrow I wouldn’t know if tonight produced some sort of a record number, but I'm sure it will be a good day," he added.

Of course, Seamless also urges you delivery lovers to tip your deliveryman well--it's probably not very fun to brave a superstorm just to bring you some pizza.

Jon Carin rocks (Photo: wikipedia.org)

Brain Boost This morning, Braintree, a Chicago-based online payments company announced, a $35 million series B round of funding. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). By investing in Braintree, new investors join Accel Partners and others and the company’s total funding is now set at $70 million.

Braintree acquired the beloved bill splitting app, Venmo, back in August and has kept it independent so far. Braintree allows businesses to accept payments from costumers, but Venmo allows consumers to make payments to anyone. It's a natural fit for both parties.

Braintree's client list includes fast-growing startups like Uber, Fab.com, Airbnb, who use it, "through periods of rapid growth without disruption to their ability to accept payments," the company said in an email to Betabeat. They also name-checked competitors like Stripe and PayPal, noting that one "big difference is that merchants receive their funds typically in two days with Braintree, vs. seven days with Stripe."

Be A Fellow The New York City Economic Development Corporation is now accepting nominations for its third class of “NYC Venture Fellows.” Previous fellows of the program include Foursquare, Etsy, and Warby Parker. Winners will be set up with mentors like Ben Lerer and the President of MTV, Stephen Friedman, to guide them through the next stage of their business and to connect them to powerful insiders. Submissions are being accepted now and the deadline is November 30, 2012.

Trippy Ted Talk TEDxSiliconAlley 2012, will be held on December 3rd, at Terminal 5. "How to Create a Mind" author Ray Kurzweil will be headlining the event and thhere will be keynotes by Makerbot founder Bre Pettis and philosopher Francessca Ferrando. Pink Floyd keyboardist Jon Carin will perform some of his music live, which is sure to make this the first TED Talk that makes people want to spark up a joint.

Side Piece SideTour, the company that sends you on fun group adventures, has now expanded its efforts to Chicago. CEO and co-founder Vipin Goyal told VentureBeat that the company is now booking three SideTours a day and plans to launch their service in Washington D.C. by the end of the year. Private chef dinners and small group art tours are ready for the masses!

Buy Everything Now Landlord is a new game that uses Foursquare to let you "buy" any location that your adventurous checking-in heart desires. Owners of property get rent paid to them based off of the number of checkins to the venue, so that they can buy more property and expand their empire. We're going to rush out to Staten Island and buy out the entire island, so then we can come back to Manhattan and rule the world.

We Love Those Lady Pilgrims Hacksgiving, the Thanksgiving themed Hackathon, will take place on November 9-10^th. Technology and design firm, The Control Group, is putting the event with Hack'n Jill and it will be the first hackathon with NY Tech Meetup that has at least 50 percent females in attendance. You can register on Hack'n Jill's website. Startups in search of tech talent should try to cop a ticket, these ladies can code.

A Personal Assistant With Your Pepsi? Pepsi is partnering with TaskRabbit to bring an extra hour of the day to drinkers of their new soda, Pepsi Next. Over the next four weeks, the two companies are giving 200 people a dedicated TaskRabbit for one hour to tackle errands of their choosing. This can include waiting in line for something, cooking dinner, or a bunch of other really helpful things. TaskRabbits show up with a can of soda for you too which is a bonus if you're thirsty. All it takes to enter is a simple registration.

Like For Old Ladies, But Better If you're into planning your shopping trips from home snagging deals while you shop, Shopkick already had you covered. But if you're into browsing Sunday circulars, then the app's newest update will make you happy too. The app just got a complete redesign that now features themed lookbooks that resemble glossy coupon circulars. They should just partner with TLC and make "Extreme Shopkicking" already.

Watch Those Tweets Fly HootSuite just launched a new product for their Enterprise clients. It's called the HootSuite Command Center and it functions like a virtual situation room for all of your company's social media efforts. So ChartBeat for the Twitter and Facebook set? Every social media manager in New York just swooned.

Look Here Cheap Bros Buystand, a startup which uses a name-your-price model for active lifestyle goods, launches in beta today. Customers browse merchandise from from brands like Burton, Vans, and Puma, and then name what they want to pay. Buystand sets up the customer with a retailer willing to pay that price. Instead of using wholesale markdowns, the company gets to have sales on customers terms. Mark October 17th in your calendars as the days that outdoor bros started saving money.

Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Dorsey. (Photo: nycgov.tumblr.com)

Earlier today, Betabeat ventured downtown for a tech-world double whammy: Not just Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but also Google chairman Eric Schmidt were scheduled to speak. The pair were stopping by the joint headquarters of Boxee and Sidetour for a quick check-up on the state of New York tech.

After a barrage of stats illustrating New York's rise to tech superstardom--for example, between 2007 and 2010, the number of employees at New York City digital media companies has grown 74 percent--Mayor Bloomberg segued into the news, such as it was.

On the heels of a nighttime cab ride testing Square technology with CEO Jack Dorsey, he'd just come from a morning meeting where he'd convened leaders--from Valley heavy hitters like Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to Alley stalwarts like Union Square Ventures ringleader Fred Wilson--for a roundtable dubbed "Keeping the Edge," focused on the areas of infrastructure, education, and innovation.

"But we know that leadership can't be taken for granted--we made that mistake before and we're not going to make that again." Hence the necessity of the conference. "If we want to keep our competitive advantage in both New York City and in America, we have to bring together  the best ideas from the people who know the industry best."

That also explained the presence of Mr. Schmidt, who spent much of the press conference leaning against the wall next to the mayor, Arthur Fonzarelli-style, and drinking a fully caloric Coca Cola classic. Tut tut, Mr. Schmidt--don't you know we're in the midst of a war on obesity?

"It was a vibrant discussion," Bloomberg informed us all. And while he's the number-one cheerleader of the New York tech scene, he admitted that "from the East Coast to the West Coast, tech companies are facing similar challenges and opportunities, and we're all in this together." In short, everybody's got to pull together if Team America is going to remain on top.

Then out came the barbs: "Now, unfortunately, not much is being done in Washington to ensure that." There are things that can be done at the local level, however--"We know it because we've done it," said Mayor Bloomberg.

But he wasn't done negging Washington, later going on to elaborate, "Washington is spending all their time talking about tax rates. Here in New York City, we are spending all our time trying to help people get businesses started."

Nonetheless, "every day brings more good news," he added, mentioning this morning's announcement from Square that the company is acquiring Soho-based design firm 80/20. As for that cab ride, "the driver was happy--the driver pointed out that with this technology he seems to get bigger tips."

"I can't tell you how easy it was," Mayor Bloomberg added.

Square's New York office is going to be awfully convenient when the city's existing contract with Verifone expires in a few months--a legal barrier which the mayor as good as admitted was the last thing standing between seeing some new technologies in the back of yellow cabs.

After Boxee CEO Avner Ronen briefly thanked the mayor for stopping by "our modest office," Mr. Schmidt stepped up to the podium and turned the urban boosterism on high: "In order to believe in the future of America you have to believe in innovation, and when you study innovation now, you understand that innovation occurs in cities." That, however, typically requires the right alchemical elements: money, the right people and the right leader--we're sure you can guess who he was referring to there.

"What we see over and over again is a commitment to make New York City a viable alternative to Silicon Valley and a place where true innovation occurs for the global good," he added. Here's hoping, anyway. And with that, Mr. Schmidt returned to his station at the wall.

But he wasn't entirely done--a cheeky CNET reporter attempted to sneak in a question regarding the state of Google Maps and its uncertain future on the iPhone. Mr. Schmidt, however, demurred. "This is the mayor's forum," he said.

But back in the day, those first 23 companies were all the rage. Like shiny new toys, they were exciting and fascinating. There was even a reality television show about them. So even though their three-month, highly-competitive startup accelerator program has ended, these companies are still around. They didn’t just vanish into thin air. (Well, some of them did).

But all of this begs the question, where are these companies now? How have they fared in the big, bad world? Did they flop? Or surpass expectations?

We didn’t know, so we decided to find out. And it turns out that we weren’t the only ones who were curious about what these companies have been up to.

“When we launched, everything was a concern,” managing director David Tisch told Betabeat in an email. “We were new, a startup.” New York City, he said, brought a unique set of challenges and advantages to these first two classes, but you never how things might turn out. So, Mr. Tisch, what’s the verdict? Have the first 23 New York City companies done TechStars proud?

“The progress shown so far is very promising,” Mr. Tisch said, “and I expect a few very big companies to emerge. There are some early standouts who have shown progress on the product side, revenue side, and team side.”

In the last year, about half of the companies raised over a million dollars in funding from investors (in addition to TechStars's initial $18,000 in each company) and only two companies failed. A third company, FriendsList, also failed, but its two cofounders shifted gears and transformed into another company, Timehop, a popular app that has since raised $1.1 million.

“I think the quality of the people we funded stands out to me,” Mr. Tisch added. “[And] as I look back at the companies from our first two classes at TechStars NYC, I am confident we have funded some amazing teams who are building big businesses.” -Jess Schiewe

(Source: Warby Parker)

PERFECT TEN. Last Wednesday Time Inc. brought together editors from many of their news properties to bestow upon us the "10 NYC Startups to Watch." Only in the startup picking game since lat year's Internet Week, Time Inc. has already picked winners like GroupMe, which was purchased by Skype for a supposed $85 milion.

The startups that made the cut for 2012 are Adaptly, a social advertising platform; Art.sy, the Pandora of art; Codeacademy, an interactive self-paced tool to learn to code; Enterproid, a mobile platform to segregate work from personal information on a single mobile device; Fab—you already know what Fab does; Fancy Hands, a provider of virtual personal assistants; Loosecubes, a matchmaker for workers and workspaces SideTour; a community marketplace for booking and hosting adventures, Stamped; a five-star-only mobile rating app and Truth Art Beauty; an online platform where users can custom-create skincare blends.

FOUNDER POWER. This Friday Women 2.0 is hosting their New York Founder Friday at 16 East 34th Street. Featured founders Cheryl Yeoh of CityPockets and Eloise Bune of GraciousEloise will begin speaking at 7 p.m. but the event will kick off at 6 p.m. with an introduction by Matt Wolfrom of Makovsky and Company, the event's sponsor. Founder Friday is free, and open to people of all genders, unlike the LOL-inducing "Jews against the Internet" rally, which is $10 and closed to women. Unfortunately, Founder Friday is already at capacity. Add your name to the wait list and cross your fingers.

RALLY IN THE ALLEY. The Association for a Better New York Foundation and Mayor Bloomberg honored the city's technology leaders in Union Square last Thursday including Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley, Greycroft's Alan Patricof, ideeli CEO Paul Hurley and NYTM cofounder Dawn Barber. The Lew Rudin Founder's Award went to New York City deputy mayor for economic development Robert Steel.

MEDIUM MAYHEM. Shelby.tv sat squarely at the intersection of social media and video and last week they began making strides to kick to competition down the block. At The Next Web 2012, cofounder Reece Pacheco unveiled Shelby GT, currently operating in private beta. "Rolls," a tool for organization, curation and the sharing of videos by way of tweets, Facebook posts and other social platforms, make up the centerpiece of this latest social video iteration. Request a private beta invitation to the virtual viewing party here.

DESIGNBOX. Last week LayerVault, an online, unlimited storage space for design files, underwent a redesign adding color extraction and an ability to measure mockups. The "Github for designers" has also introduced "Wormhole," a way to search art files visually by highlighting different design components. That recent shell-out for CS5 might feel a little worse now.

CLOTHES BUY YOU. New York fashion ecommerce company Ruby Ribbon got a $3 million go ahead from Trinity Ventures to launch, sell and market a fashion line "exclusively through social commerce." The company plans to connect to customers on a highly personal level through a national network of stylists who will introduce customers to Ruby Ribbon products at private social functions and in their homes. Ruby Ribbon has been operating stealthily, without so much as a landing page, until today.

PURCHASEST. Ever come across something on Pinterest that you wanted to buy? Well now you can! Sort of. The Fancy wants to treat your eyeballs like a lady while and your wallet like... well pretty much how everyone else treats your wallet. "Everything you see on the site is for sale, or can be for sale, in a function that operates like Groupon in reverse," a press release said. "If someone posts something that develops a huge following -- merchants can come online to sell that item and meet the demand." Fancy just hit half a million users and has big name backers like Square's Jack Dorsey and Facebook's Chris Hughes.

WARBY DARKER. Online prescription eyewear retailer Warby Parker just launched a new line of snazzy prescription sunglasses. At $120 they're a little pricier than their non-polarized counterparts.

COMMUTE. Spotify is on the hunt for a senior product manager with at least five years of experience to drive user revenue. App management platform Appboy wants to add a developer to its small team to provide the server backend for mobile client SDKs and the developer dashboard.

SideTour has more than 80 offerings in New York, the only city it's available in, ranging from graffiti tours to tequila tastings. "We're focused much more on quality than quantity, and that's received a lot of awesome feedback from our users," Mr Goyal said in an email. "Part of the amazing experience on SideTour is not having to sift through hundreds of experiences!"

Anyone can host a tour, with SideTour's approval. Among the new features: A highly-requested reservation system that will let users request a special date, usually for a group activity. The new SideTour also tracks your "experiences," as they're called, and shows you the names of all the SideTourists who joined you. Users who went on the same tour together can message each other through SideTour. (SideTour added this because users were collecting each others' email addresses in the "kumbaya" moment that follows a particularly moving experience.) And of course the team built their own reservation and alerts system to replace the Wordpress/Eventbrite/Excel system employees had been using on the back end.

"It's the next evolution of our product based on what we've learned over the last six months," Mr. Goyal told Betabeat. "It's definitely in the early innings here."

HIRING. As activity marketplace SideTour prepares to leave the TechStars offices for greener pastures this Friday, the startup has officially started hiring for a lead engineer and "host development manager." Business Insider is looking for a biz dev intern.

FREE PIZZA. Foursquare competitor SCVNGR is still at large; the company had several holiday-themed promotions and badges. Founder Seth Priebastch launched LevelUp, a mobile payments app complementary to SCVNGR, in October. Now LevelUp is announcing its first brand partner: Villa Pizza, which will offer $10 of free pizza in Times Square New Year's Eve.

SYNERGY. Fab.com has started selling Makerbots! "Fab.com will be selling two MakerBot 'Thing-O-Matic' products at two price different price points, one being the kit and one that is already assembled." The sale is on today and tomorrow.

MEETUPS. East Village Techies on Thursday; Android developers tonight and Dumbo Tech Breakfast Friday.

THIRD PARTIES. Public service announcement: there is a new Hype Machine app from Boston."We @ Dirty Water Labs in Boston have recently released our second music application is called 'uberHype' - social music discovery app built on The Hype Machine music platform. If you like reading music blogs and discovering new artists through that medium then this app should be the one."

THE RETURN OF THE SILICON VALLEY DIASPORA CONTINUES. Qwiki comes back, back, from Cali, Cali.

STARTUP BUS. There will be 12 regions up for the Startup Bus hackathon competition this year, and only those with popular support will participate. Last we heard, New York (which tied for first place with San Francisco last year) was in 13th place for the qualifying round—just shy of making it into the competition.

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.