Draw Something (originally the edgier "Draw My Thing").

With $ZNGA raking it in and SNAP Interactive's booming stock price, why anyone would ever do a startup for something other than social gaming is beyond us. Soho-based OMGPOP just had another hit with "Draw Something," an app that hit a million iPhone and Android downloads in only 10 days, as the company told TechCrunch.

The game has at least $10,000 in revenue per day, CEO Dan Porter told the blog, due to ads and premium upgrades.

OMGPOP, started by Charles Forman of Valleywag fame as iminlikewithyou, raised more than $10 million last year and reportedly brushed off acquisition offers. Draw Something is its second blockbuster mobile game (the first was Puppy World). Mr. Forman, however, has shifted his attention from the addictive gaming startup to a stealth photo storage startup with NY Tech Meetup's Nate Westheimer.

Meanwhile, OMGPOP has its eye on the (virtual) prize. "We want to be the #1 competitor to Zynga with friends and eventually pass them," Mr. Porter said. OMG, IPO?

Every startup's gotta start somewhere (National Archief | flickr.com)

KNOWLEDGE. Max Stoller, the developer of Don't Eat At, an app that uses city data to warn Foursquare users when they've checked into a restaurant that's run afoul of city health inspectors, has found another cool way to use that same data set. Mr. Stoller and fellow crafty hacker Tal Safran created freshplac.es, a bi-weekly email of new drinking and dining sports near you. "We found that by analyzing the restaurant inspections data set for new records, we can identify brand new bars/restaurants, often before news publications get to them." (Techies! Stop scooping us newsies!) Sign up but please, don't forget about us!

EBOOK BINDING. Vook, the self publishing ebook tool from serial entrepreneur Brad Inman, just spent the past three months with 500 beta testers as they completely reengineered their platform. They've eliminated 200 bugs and added 31 brand new features including easier file conversion, and real time title rendering and even easier electronic distribution to Barnes & Noble and Amazon with the push of a button.

MIC CHECK. The winner of  last week's Investor's Feedback forum were Nihal Parthasarathi for CourseHorse, an online app that helps users find classes that interest them in New York City. The two other winners were Rob Caucci for SpaceSplitter, an online tool designed to make living with roommates less stressful and Julian Barnes of Body Local, the one-stop shop for classes, news, advice, a local directory and marketplace for everything to do with keeping fit. The next Investor Feedback Forum is March 8.

TRISTE NOTICIA. The guy behind the group emailing service Fiesta have announced the end of the party. In a blog post, cofounder Mike Dirolf said after thirteen months he's "lost the enthusiasm that is necessary to continue to work tirelessly on solving the problem" of group communication online. The website will remain active until March 1 so current users can login to collect their information. After that, the servers will be shutdown, emails will no longer be receivable and all personal data will be deleted.

MAKE FRIENDS. Tonight the NY Enterprise Technology Meetup will feature demos from Revolution Analytics, Thrupoint, Infragistics, and CB Insights. The meetup runs from 7-9. RSVP and pay $5 if you want to know where.

DESAYUNO. Hubitat wants to show you the benefits of reinventing the wheel over breakfast this Thursday at their HQ. RSVP here for $15 or pay $20 when you arrive.

WORK AND PLAY. Projective Space, the "community-centered coworking space for tech startups and entrepreneurs" is kicking off the opening of their brand new space by partnering with fundraising platform IndieGoGo for a "HUGE DANCE PARTY!" The bash is Thursday night at the new PS space at 72 Allen St. in the Lower East Side. RSVP and say hello to Reyka and Sailor Jerry for us.

ADOPT EARLY. Check out the new "powerful publishing optimization technology" from Betaworks.

INNOVATE.  Snap Interactive needs a Javascript expert.
Conductor is looking for a technical recruiter
HealthPrize wants a new project manager
Foursquare, HealthPrize, Conductor and Rent the Runway are looking for interns.

Snap Interactive and Hotlist have teamed up to produce a calendar featuring 12 New York startups. Birchbox to LearnVest, from ZocDoc to Livestream, the calendar features some of the hottest-burning stars in the Alley firmament.

"The calendar is the brainchild of Clifford Lerner, president and CEO of SNAP Interactive, and Chris Mirabile, co-founder and CEO of Hotlist," says a press release. "The entrepreneurs hand-picked the twelve companies featured in Only In The Alley, believing they all represent shining examples of what NYC is capable of."

The idea is to give the calendar to people living in the Bay Area, we gather.

The calendar startup babe lineup:

• Birchbox
• Classtivity
• ConsumerBell
• Hotlist
• LearnVest
• Livestream
• Plum Benefits
• SNAP Interactive
• Thrillist
• Xtify
• Yipit
• ZocDoc

The calendar will debut on Friday, December 16th at the Ainsworth in Midtown, NYC. The website will go live simultaneously. Meanwhile, Betabeat is working on our own boostery calendar; just need to whittle down the 30-some Startup Office Dogs to the cutest 12.

Snap Interactive CEO Cliff Lerner - image via We Are NY Tech

There is a conventional wisdom among web startups building social services for consumers. Build the product first, focus on perfecting it for your users, get as big as possible, then figure out how to monetize. It's the story behind Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare.

But what if you went about things from the opposite direction. Snap Interactive has their holiday party last night at their offices in the west 30s. There flagship product is Are You Interested, a dating app that began life as one of the first apps on the new Facebook platform back in 2007.

"I won't lie to you, user experience, design, those have not been our focus. We optimized for revenue and growth. Now we have those thing on cruise control, we can start to work backwards on building a great product." said Cliff Lerner, Snap's CEO. 

The other unique thing about the company? They aren't VC backed, in fact they are already public, as a penny stock. The company actually went public in 2006, a year before they launched Are You Interested on Facebook.

Being public means quarterly statements, and Snap just reported record third quarter revenue of $5.09 million, a 198 percent increase over the same time last year. This is partly thanks to Facebook's launch of its apps platform on mobile in October, which helped Snap to a 30 percent increase in daily logins.

"At first, not having raised venture was hurting us, because it made it tough to get covered in the tech press or expand rapidly," said Mr. Lerner. "But now, being a public company is really helping. The hiring environment in New York is so competitive, being able to offer developers stock in a public company that they can easily trade has become a big weapon for our HR."

At a time when startup employees seed Zynga clawing back stock options and shares in recent IPOs like Groupon plummeting, the opportunity to have stable, liquid equity in a public company is increasingly attractive

Betabeat covered Snap back in January, when the Goldman Sachs sale of Facebook sent Snap's stock rocketing up an astonishing 1000%. They followed this with an $8.5 million private placement, and have actually increased their amount of available capital since. They moved into a bigger office and have been hiring like mad.

Why haven't we been covering this company more closely? To be honest, we were snobs. It seemed to us like a spammy Facebook app and the poor design was a kind of a turn off. They aren't connected to the startup scene or any big name local investors.

But after spending time with their developers last night, we're interested to see if they really can engineer a meaningful startup in reverse. "We have always tried to align ourselves with Facebook. So at first that meant virality. Then later it meant the news feed. Now it means the timeline, telling a story, focusing on the depth of data," said Mr. Lerner. "We got here by focusing on that extra ten cents, by trying to get that user to come back tomorrow. Now we care less about that. We want to make sure the user is coming back, not tomorrow, but in six months."

New Work City.

HIP LIKE HP. New Work City just signed its newest sponsor: HP. "This is really great for us, as their support will play a huge part in helping us make ongoing improvements to the space and community. To consummate the relationship, we're hosting an event on December 5th. I'll have more details next week. In the meantime, come play with some new gadgets and help us help HP make printing suck less!"

FITOCRACY PUSH. "Fitness is something that people tend to take very seriously so it should be no surprise that when they embark on the quest to better bodies, they want their chosen tools to be the best they can be. Since the beginning, one of the most often requested features for Fitocracy has been a way to visualize your workout progress over time. And so it is with incredible excitement that we announce the official release of Graphs on Fitocracy."THE BIGGEST SALE IN INTERNET HISTORY. This is how you know Fab.com has made it. "Get Dealy has launched as 'Fab.com for Digital Goods.' We're really excited about launching our new platform, a daily flash sales site for digital goods, such as software, resources for designers and developers, courses and tutorials."

HATCHED. "Just wanted to give you the heads up that Hatch is officially out their private beta as of this past Tuesday, designed by Hard Candy Shell to make organizing activity plans fun, easy and seamless.

NOW EMERGING FROM BETA. "EZBZ is a New York-based startup that goes beyond  reviews by connecting area consumers with top-rated local business products and services.  EZBZ is built on a real-time open bidding platform driven by text message queries to compensate for the relatively poor Web infrastructure that typical local small businesses have, providing a mobile functionality that’s also convenient for consumers."

HIRINGS. Signpost needs a chief of staff. "As the 'Chief of Staff' you’ll be doing a combination of accounting, HR, stocking the fridge, and anything else we need help on." Wildfire Interactive seeks a senior account executive and Thrillist needs a web apps developer (work with the talented Michael Smith!) while meanwhile Rent the Runway is hiring for a software engineer, Linux engineer. SNAP Interactive needs a MySQL dev.

HEALTH TECH. Startup Health partners with New York eHealth Collaborative, "a public-private partnership that serves as a focal point for health care stakeholders to build consensus on state health IT policy priorities. We established the StartUp Health Pavilion at the NYeC Digital Health Conference to showcase some of the leading early stage health and wellness companies in the greater NY area at the event.  We have one spot left so if you are interested in this great opportunity to show off your offering to more than 500 HIT stakeholders and decision makers across the region, be sure to reach out to us!"

(flickr.com/photos/ericwahlforss/)

STARTUP WEEKEND. Startup Weekend is now an affiliate of the Kauffman Foundation, the same entity that funds AngelList. "While Startup Weekend will continue to operate autonomously, becoming a Kauffman affiliate will allow the organization to increase its geographical reach, conduct more frequent events, and build long-term sustainability. Startup Weekend events bring entrepreneurs and supporters together and teaches them how to share ideas, form teams, build products and launch companies, all during a 54-hour crash-course weekend."

MORE STARTUP WEEKEND. "As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2011, a weeklong celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship, Startup Weekend events will take place in more than 50 [UPDATED --ed.] 20 U.S. cities, fostering new companies that change industries and create jobs. Two of these hosts will be in New York City and New Jersey." GEW takes place from Nov. 14 to 20.

RAISE CACHE FOR HACKNY. The highly-anticipated fundraiser is coming up. "Raise Cache has brought together more than 75 companies, from the hottest start ups, to the biggest corporations, to create a once in a lifetime event that highlights the power of our community and the passion of our city. On November 17th, we will bring together more than 1,000 members of New York tech, fashion, media, and arts under the roof of the State Armory to raise $100,000 in cache for hackNY."

THRILLIST APP. Thrillist Rewards NY will be available to download for free on iPhone and Android devices on Thursday (Nov. 10th). "Users will receive mobile notifications of new Thrillist Rewards in New York, each week, as soon as they become available, and can quickly, easily and securely purchase the Rewards through the app. Rewards can be redeemed by simply presenting a voucher built within the app to a participating merchant – no schlubby printed coupons required."

SECOND SCREENS. NYC-based Umami debuted an app yesterday, "a significant new second screen TV app for the iPad ... The app also serves as a scaleable publishing platform for TV programmers, with National Geographic Channel first on board."

LOCAL LAUNCH: CAPSULE. "Remember The Fridge? We learned about them just a week before they were acqui-hired but our product is vaguely familiar even though we're going at it from a different angle. Capsule is sorta like an Evite or Facebook Group... the way espresso is sorta like a cup of coffee. We're making it easier for people to share photos and memories in private groups centered around events rather than individuals (experience graph vs social graph). We're in private beta but here's a quick tour: http://bit.ly/v36QlN."

WHO'S HIRING? Want to work at SportsPickle.com? College Humor is looking for a PHP/MySQL engineer.

11/11/11. That's the date of the next Silicon Alley Talent Fair. So far 70 companies have signed up to meet job seekers at the Altman Building in the Flatiron. 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

CAPITAL FACTORY DEMOS. The Austin incubator is having a demo night tonight.

STARTUP BUS UNCONFERENCE. A six hour intensive workshop for entrepreneurs who like to think fast, and under pressure. Saturday, Nov. 19.

STARTUP PARTIES. This time it's Gojee, the recipe-suggester, on Saturday at WeWork; and SNAP Interactive kicking off the holiday party season with an office-warmer near Penn Station on December 1. With ping pong.

General Assembly

FITOCRACY GOES FREEMIUM. Fitocracy, now a year old, just announced a subscription plan for $4.99 a month. Subscribers get unlockable titles, the ability to copy workouts, greater visibility in the stream and early access to new features.

YOUNG NYTM. Tonight's New York Tech Meetup will feature the annual spotlight on demos from college students and faculty. Here's the lineup: BodyJam, Commons, Grafighters, Codecademy, Lewis Dots, PlayPower, Hacker League, LoCreep, AdRunner, MidiPHON, Bluefin Labs, Upod, Imaginary Marching Band. At the 92nd Street Y. But if you go you will miss Ben Lerer talking about the story of Thrillist at General Assembly.

OH SNAP. "SNAP Interactive, a fast-growing NYC-based social media company, is proud to announce the appointment of Jon Pedersen, Sr. as Chief Financial Officer. Pedersen brings more than 15 years of corporate finance, SEC reporting, strategic planning and management experience to SNAP, having most recently served as Senior Vice President-Controller of Warner Music Group.  This is the first significant addition to the management team since SNAP was founded in 2005, increasing the company’s headcount to 32 employees, representing a 100 percent increase since last year."

BUY LOCAL. Fiesta founder Mike Dirolf is launching a new feature for his easy email listmaker, called Fiesta Custom. "It's basically a simple way for anyone to get a version of Fiesta for their own domain name. So far in beta it has proven useful for companies that need to create a lot of dynamic lists and want their own branding on the lists. We also expect it to see a lot of use in tandem with our API which is still in private beta now."

COMPETITION. The Verge, a technology-focused news blog launched by former editors of Engadget, launches officially (party Thursday!) Out of the box: Japanese supercomputers, robots, an interview with John Gruber. It's... so pretty...

XX IN TECH. "Angel investing bootcamp mobilizes women to invest US$105k in woman-led for-profit social venture! The Pipeline Fellowship trains women philanthropists to become angel investors through education, mentoring, and practice." The fellowship announced a new investment and the launch of its alumni network, Pipeline Angels.

GOING CORPORATE. General Assembly partners with American Express to host a two-day hackathon this weekend, Nov. 5th and 6th, for "small business." "The Hackathon is a kick-off event for an ongoing releationship between American Express OPEN and General Assembly, one that will aim to leverage assets of both organizations to bring new, creative approaches to educating small businesses and prepping them for success. American Express OPEN’s interest in General Assembly is the latest example of the company working with the New York startup community to innovate on behalf of small businesses."

NIGHT OWLS. New Work City's late night coworking experiment continues every Tuesday. "Join us as we crack open some beers, crank up the Turntable.fm room, and work the night away," invites the newsletter.

But the label waffled a little:

At the same time Century Media also believes that Spotify is a great tool to discover new music and is in the process of reintroducing their bands to Spotify by way of putting up samplers of the artists. This way, fans can still discover the great music released by the label.

Physical sales are dropping drastically in all countries where Spotify is active. Artists are depending on their income from selling music and it is our job to support them to do so. Since the artists need to sell their music to continue their creativity, Spotify is a problem for them. This is about survival, nothing less and it is time that fans and consumers realize that for artists it is essential to sell music to keep their heads above water.

Obviously it is ultimately up to the music fan and consumer, how they access their music, whether it is buying, streaming or stealing. There needs to be awareness though, that how you will consume your music has direct consequences for the artists, who we are all trying to support.

OH SNAP. New York-based Facebook game-maker Snap Interactive is proud of its quarterly results, announcing revenues of more than $4.82 million. "This represents nine consecutive quarters of revenue growth for the NYC-based start-up, with a stock price that has gone up more than 600 percent in the past 12 months."

START-UP MEETUP FUN TIMES. "Me and a coworker are beginning to organize a techie basketball meetup," writes Zeve Salman, the organizer of NY Tech Ballers, which already has 53 ballers. "The goal is to eventually have enough people from different startups to have it be a company league kind of thing (such as Foursquare .vs. Meetup). For those who are the only players from a specific company, we will mesh them on a team together. It'll be a great networking opportunity, and a awesome way to stay in shape and not get fat."

SUPPORT GROUPS. A free social network specifically for people suffering with cancer called IHadCancer built specifically for those suffering with the disease, either directly or indirectly, has launched. The founder's story is here.

MINUS IS PLUS A MIL. "File sharing tech startup Minus announced it has raised $1 million in investment capital from IDG Capital Partners, allowing the company to continue to grow its easy to use, universal file sharing platform."

TOUT. Behind on Gmail integration. But announcing iPhone app. (Sorry kids, it's not free.) Local record-keeping-for-networking start-up Hashable should have bought Tout when it had the chance.

LOCAL RESPONSE, POST-PIVOT, EATS A START-UP. The check-in aggregating advertising platform LocalResponse, formerly Buzzd, has made an acquisition: DFJ Gotham-backed Philo, working in a tangent space: TV check-ins. We like it.

OBLIGATORY HACKATHON. Startup Weekend, at General Assembly, is this weekend.

MARKETS. SecondMarket is looking for SysOps engineer.

Up until recently, Snap was a conservative business, relying on its quarterly profits to slowly expand its staff. But when news broke that Goldman Sachs had invested in Facebook at a $50 million valuation, shares of Snap Interactive rose more than 1,000 percent. That allowed Snap to raise $8.5 million through a private placement of stock, providing the funds for an ambitious plan to expand its small team into a global dating empire.

The brainchild of brothers Darrell and Cliff Lerner, Snap was founded in 2005 as a standalone dating site. But in 2007, when Facebook opened its platform for independent developers to create apps, the brothers changed course. They raised $550,000 from friends and family and switched their focus to their Facebook dating app, AreYouInterested.

"It was the Wild West days, just wide open, but still no one gave us much of chance," says Darrell. Snap was competing with established players like Match.com and social dating startups like Zoosk, which raised $40 million venture capital funding. "It was very important to us that we maintain our independence and control," says Darrell. "Even if it meant we had to watch every dime we spent."

AreYouInterested now boasts 14 million active monthly users, more than twice as many as Zoosk, while Match.com has fewer than 5,000 monthly users on its Facebook app. Snap says it is adding more than 50,000 new users a day and has seen its revenue grow 230% since 2009, when it switched from advertising to subscription, reporting $2.7-2.8 million in revenue during the last quarter of 2010.

The company was able to grow so quickly at first because there were few controls on viral marketing —a.k.a. spam invites— in the early days of Facebook apps. That has put it in a unique position. "No new player in the space is going to be able to replicate that with all the restrictions Facebook has in place now," says David Evans, who runs the industry watchdog website, Online Dating Insider. Interestingly, Snap has continued to add users, while major social games like Farmville have seen their numbers decline since spam bans went into effect.

Like Facebook itself, international markets are the next big target for Snap. "We have seen great growth in Europe but with just nine programmers couldn't afford to target our efforts," says Cliff. "Now we're going to be creating unique version of the service in local languages and integrating with the local payment platforms that are popular in each country."

"We've always had to operate very lean, so this recent funding was a real game changer for us," says Darrell. "We're no Zynga yet, but expect us to use this capital to expand AreYouInterested in a big way and begin to work on some new offerings as well."

bpopper at observer dot com - @benpopper

Well, are you?

In the wake of Goldman Sachs monster investment in Facebook, shares of New York startup Snap Interactive rose an astonishing 1000%.

The company is capitalizing by raising funds, selling $8.5 million in securities to institutional investors through a private placement.

Snap Interactive is tied to Facebook through AreYouInterested, one of the top dating apps on the social network, with around 15 million active users.

According to Snap, its revenues have grown over 200% since 2009, with seven straight quarters of gains.

The company plans to use the funds to hire more staff and expand its marketing efforts.

bpopper at observer dot com - @benpopper