The Real Nerd Prom 

Who Doesn't Want To Take More Pics? If all the apps out right now aren't filling your photo-taking habit, start up company Wander's new app Days may be for you. Days, which was released last week for iPhone, aims to create a digital photo journal, where all your pictures are uploaded and categorized by day, with the hope that its users will take pictures of their entire day and not just what they're eating for dinner.

Mobile Gift Delivery Are you ever running late and wish you had more time to select the perfect gift for your significant other? Online floral service H. Bloom is here to help, with their new mobile gifting app released yesterday, which will help its users send a variety of gifts no matter where they are. The H.Bloom app offers a "curated selection of the highest quality chocolates, cupcakes, candles and macarons, as well as H.Bloom’s own luxury floral arrangements." The app is currently available on the Apple App Store, and is launching in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Dallas.

Songza Updates Music curator, streaming app and party playlist savior Songza yesterday released its most recent update, version 3.0, which supplies some new features and shortcuts to the award winning service. Version 3.o cleans up the user interface, while also allowing users quicker access to playlists with a long tap on the home screen or by shaking your phone. Other improvements include better audio quality and new search tools and new artist playlist options.

New Inno/vators NYU-Poly announced on Monday the winners of its Inno/Vention competition, which challenged students to create and pitch a buisness or startup that solves real world problems. The winner, Ex-Vivo Dynamics, is a new technology for patients who suffer blood transfusion iron overload, which pulls free iron from blood, reducing the number of blood transfusions that patients need. The runner-up, HuddleUp, is a crowdsourcing platform that lets users buy group rate tickets without having to find a group.

Mr. Bloomberg. (Twitter)

Time Warner Still Sucks On Friday, Mayor Bloomberg made a big move toward ing promise to expand broadband in New York. He launched ConnectNYC, a contest for small businesses that will award free fiber cable wiring (overall value of up to $12 million) to 240 local businesses across the five boroughs over the next two years. But will it make slow cashiers go faster?

All Your Dwollas Belong To Us Dwolla, the way to pay people via smartphone, just rolled out a cool feature called MassPay. It allows you to pay up to 2,000 people at once, which is great for business owners or degenerate gamblers who have a lot of friends. Payments under 10 dollars are free, while anything higher than that requires a small fee of 25 cents per transaction. Parking Panda, VHX and Major League Gaming have all pledged to start using the service immediately.

Finna FinTech Startup Weekend is teaming up with the FinTech Innovation Lab and the NYC FinTech Startups meetup to put on the first ever FinTech Startup Weekend. It's set to take place on November 2 to 4 at Alley NYC. Throughout the weekend, there will be mentors, including VCs, lawyers and designers, stopping by to give teams advice on what they're doing.

Nick Gavronsky, an OpenFin employee who helps run Startup Weekend with Frank Denbow, spoke to Betabeat and said that he was surprised by the response the event is getting. "We've noticed over the last year or so that FinTech is growing and there's a need for engagement and bringing that community together--as well as around enterprise in general," Mr. Gavronsky said.

FinTech weekend, he said, is "not really like a hackathon, it’s more for first-time people” who want to start building something.

Costumes for a Cause! WeWork is organizing a Halloween party this coming Monday, October 29th benefiting Charity: Water that cofounder Matt Shampine promises will be a "crazy" good time, including "a lot of surprises and five hours of open bar." Better yet, you can feel good while throwing them back: WeWork will be matching everyone's donations to the event. WeWork generously offered Betabeat readers a 15 percent discount off the ticket price, which starts at a $35 donation. Just enter the discount code "betabeat" when you RSVP. While you figure out your binders of women vs. bayonets costume choice, here's a video WeWork put together to get you in the party mood.

Sexy Canadians Songza, the music streaming app that has a playlist for every mood, just reached 1 million users in Canada. To celebrate, we're going to listen to the "cold" playlist. The Songza team used its data and found that Canadians and Americans both chose "Mellow" more than any other mood. Americans' next most popular category was "Happy," while Canadians' second choice was "Sexual." The sexual playlist only works correctly if you're sleeping with Canada's finest export, Ryan Gosling.

Group Talk IRL Group messaging service GroupMe just launched a new service called Experiences. It lets you meet up and plan adventures with your groups and even helps you split the bill. The first round of experiences include a brunch at one of Todd English's restaurant and a zombie survival practice on Halloween. Sounds spooky enough for us.

Chatroulette With a Purpose Onswipe held its hackathon this weekend, and the overall winner created something really awesome. BlahBlahLearning is a language learning platform that works over video chat. A pair of speakers who are each learning the other’s native tongue are given five minutes to speak in one language, then five minutes to speak in the other. Take some notes, Airtime, these guys have the right idea.

Man Starts Blog internet gadfly Rex Sorgatz has just launched a personal project called Viewsource. He's posting one YouTube video a day and sharing his thoughts about it. The site has a really pretty layout, and Mr. Sorgatz's commentary is pretty spot-on. This one about Michael Richards is a pretty good read.

You Owe Us One Foursquare is hiring a PR director. If you get this job and you first found out about it through Betabeat, then you have to give us exclusives for the entirety of your career. It's only fair.

Publicidad Jun Group, the opt-in video advertising platform, has announced that it has new capabilities to specifically target the much-coveted Hispanic audience on the web. Jun Group says that it can now prescreen users to determine if they’re Hispanic and/or native Spanish speakers. In total, the company provides ads to 10 million Hispanic or Spanish-speaking users.

Advertise More, Save the World Pontiflex, another advertising platform, just released a new tool called AdLeads that helps nonprofits advertise themselves to prospective donors. The best part about the service is that organizations only have to pay when a person actually signs up to hear from them. They never waste money on wasted clicks or impressions.

College Admissions Suck Applying to college is the worst process in the world, but luckily things just got a bit easier thanks to Unigo. The site gives a free 15-minute private consultation to set you up with a plan, and then users can subscribe to Unigo's online college counseling services. If your child's guidance counselor is a total idiot, then this looks like a good option for you.

In illustrious company. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Time has just released a list of its 50 favorite websites. The metrics? All the selections are something the editors find "useful, entertaining, innovative or just plain addictive." The result is a list that happens to be something of New York tech who's who. Among the honorees: 

• Squarespace
• If This Then That
• Aereo
• Songza
• CodeAcademy
• BuzzFeed
• ZocDoc
• Digg
• LooseCubes

However, before anyone starts emailing his mom, it's worth noting that Timedeliberately works to include sites that "aren't yet household names." Someday, kids. Someday.

Also on the list: Outlook.com. With all due respect, suddenly we're questioning the methodology, here.

Queens Tech Meetup Rooftop Reception

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian stood at the front of a large room at the Hunters Point Plaza Penthouse in Long Island City, and looked out over the rows of tables set up for various startups based in the borough that, let’s be honest, doesn’t always have the best rep in the city.

“The New York tech community is just starting. There’s so much awesome stuff happening in all of New York City,” he said. “The only issue I’ve got is there’s a lot of it going on right around here.” He pointed to a map of Manhattan.

Speakers and guests alike welcomed the idea of Queens becoming a new hub for digital startup companies at last night’s inaugural Queens Tech Meetup. The crowded venue, which featured a rooftop deck looking out over an impressive view of the Manhattan skyline, attracted young professionals in the tech field who exchanged business cards constantly throughout the night.

Elias Roman, co-founder of Songza, a streaming music play list service, was equally enthused about the budding tech community in Queens. “After we got our first company funded, we moved the whole team to Long Island City and we could not be happier,” he said.

The Queens Tech Meetup is hosted by Coalition for Queens, a nonprofit focused on developing the local tech community. New York’s tech startups are concentrated heavily in Union Square and Flatiron, with Facebook and Twitter on the Upper West Side and a few hip hubs in Soho (Thrillist, Kickstarter), the West Village (Betaworks) and even Chinatown, where a few companies are clustered in a ratty building they call the “Silicon Sweatshop.” Brooklyn has got the startup bug, with hubs popping up in Dumbo and Williamsburg. Even Hoboken is making a name for itself with the New Jersey Tech Meetup, which now has almost 2,000 members.

Long Island City, primarily known for the Citi tower and, according to Wikipedia, it’s “rapid and ongoing gentrification,” is not generally thought of as a tech startup scene.

“This is a great location, I don’t know why this hasn’t become a more popular area,” said Michael Hillmeyer, an Ozone Park, Queens native and technology software developer. He came to the event because it seemed interesting and he has faith in the potential for Queens, and especially Long Island City, to build up in the next few years.

Marleen Vogelaar, COO of Shapeways, a 3-D printing company that is in the process of moving its production site to Long Island City, also presented, bringing along some 3D-printed jewelry pieces, a tiny espresso cup and an iPhone case.“When I came off the subway here from Manhattan for the first time, I just gravitated to Long Island City,” she said. “It’s a good fit for our company; it’s both an industrial and artistic community, it suits us.”

Brief Q&A sessions with each of the presenters followed the presentations. The remainder of the night consisted of demos by each of the companies that attended the meetup.

Jukay Hsu, founder of Coalition for Queens and the QTM event planner said he was happy with the event’s first turnout; he said he had to change the original venue of the event in order to fit more people. But he still hopes to see a bigger presence in the future.

“This is our first event and we had to expand our guest list multiple times,” he said. “That’s a really great indication of how big this can get and I hope this meetup continues to grow as we host more of them.”

Imagine the Internet is a vast hotel. (It probably looks a lot like the impossible hotel in The Shining, with hallways to nowhere and windows where they shouldn't be.) You're a guest in this Internet Hotel for the evening; you've just arrived from New York on the red-eye and you're exhausted. You need something to pep you up - perhaps some music. But you're too tired, disoriented and indecisive to pick, so you head for the concierge. "Excuse me, you look like you know your way around. Can you please just tell me what I should listen to right now?"

Songza, the Long Island City-based streaming music startup featured at Facebook's f8 developer conference in September, has been building a massive database of playlists across genres and for a range of occasions. The site has more than 100,000 searchable playlists, from "Aggressive Dubstep" to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," submitted by msuic experts and users. But if you're not sure if you want to hear something funky or something fresh, Songza's new Music Concierge feature can do that for you.

Music Concierge, which debuted today, will now be the central feature on Songza. First, give Songza some context. Are you working or studying? Still waking up? Taking the day off? Pick a genre and the site will serve up three playlists based on that, the time of day and the device you're using. If you're logged in, Songza also knows something about your tastes based on your listening habits and your friends' favorite tracks and uses that intelligence to make suggestions. You can also see what's been trending for the last three hours. Betabeat tried it this morning. "It's Monday morning," Songza said. We decided we were Feeling Confident and Looking Good, and picked the genre as "baller." We are now chair dancing to Nicki Minaj's "Starships." It's not what we thought we wanted to listen to, but it's not not what we wanted to listen to. Starships were meant to flyyyyy... You're probably right, Music Concierge.

It's Songza's move from "pull curation" to "push curation," CEO Elias Roman, who prefers energetic music, music for cardio workouts and dance pop, told Betabeat by phone last week. Later this year, Songza will make a push for a voice-activated version to be integrated into car computer systems, so you can bark your music selection the way you'd yell at the GPS. "ROAD TRIP. I SAID, ROAD. TRIP. ROAD TRIP! Dammit, Songza!"

You'll still be able to search for playlists, Mr. Roman said, but the concierge is really the main product.

Songza started out as a searchable database of streamable tunes, back in 2008 when it "rocked the college scene." But Songza today is a very different company.

A little backstory. In 2006, a group of seniors at Brown University had a pretty good idea for a website where you could buy music priced according to demand. Long Island-based Amie Street was born. Songs on Amie Street started out free and incrementally ticked up to $.99 depending on how many times they were downloaded. Even Mike Arrington loved it. Meanwhile, nearby Songza was building the Google for music; Amie Street acquired Songza in 2009. The next year, Amie Street was bought and basically shut down by Amazon, one of Amie Street's investors. Amie Street's cofounders left to focus on Songza. "We said, the new thing was going to be streaming," Mr. Roman told Betabeat.

Now, it's now the second coming of Songza. Amie Street's cofounders now call themselves Songza's cofounders. (Songza's original cofounders, Aza Raskin of Mozilla Fame and serial Chicago entrepreneur Scott Robbin, both left.) They raised an undisclosed seven-figure financing from Amazon, Deep Fork Capital and individual investors. The product relaunched in 2011. The company has nine full-time employees and 25 music experts.

Mr. Roman, who grew up in Queens, is trying to keep the company lean by working out of the affordable Long Island City. "Not yet a lot of startups out here," he said, although there are lots of small, new companies. "It's not quite Dumbo yet." Before they raised funding, the company was "five guys living in a house on Hicksville, Long Island," he said. And to think, now they've got their own concierge.

Songza Playlists

As a child, Betabeat used to lovingly curate the A and B sides of a 60 minutes cassette tape for each of our gift-giving relatives on Christmas. Since then, the mix tape has evolved into an element of the socially networked cloud, where we drag and drop mixes for friends on Spotify with a single click.

But there are plenty of occasions when Betabeat is pressed for time and hoping to find the suite of songs that will add just the right feeling to the gathering. So we were intrigued by Songza, a Long Island City startup which opens to the public tonight with a mobile app, web site, and the promise of better playlist discovery and development.

Songza doesn't ask users to start with their own collection. "You don't upload, front load, or side load your own tracks," says Songza co-founder and CEO Elias Roman. "We have fourteen million tracks in our collection, so we are a lot closer to Spotify than Pandora."

Users can search for playlists by artist, genre, mood or even event. Typing in BBQ, for example, pulls up a dozen playlists geared towards country BBQ, reggae sunshine or classic rock-rager.

The real challenge for Songza will be differentiating itself from larger, better-funded streaming services like Spotify. "You can't whip up an emergency Christmas mix in fifteen seconds on Spotify," says Roman. But typing "Christmas mix" into Spotify does pull up Spanish X-mas, Rocking Christmas Times and many others.

The Songza team just closed a seven figure round of financing led by Deep Fork Capital, has more than 100,000 users from their private beta and already have a successful music service under their belt, having built the indie music market Amie Street while still at Brown.

There are already 75,000 playlists created by people on Songza, so hopefully the human touch will be what separates them from the pack.