(Screencap: YouTube)

Google announced a campaign this morning that would allow non-developers to score a pair of Google Glass by tweeting a missive about what you'd do with the specs along with the hashtag #ifihadglass. The whole thing quickly devolved into a bunch of bad Twitter jokes. But techies, it seems, are pretty desperate to get their hands on Glass.

First, we have tech writer Jason Kincaid, who made a music video about how badly he wants Glass. If he doesn't win, at least now the Internet knows what a magical singing voice he has.

Business Insider writer Nich Carlson wants to use it to make "better, experience based slideshows." NEW MEDIA JACKPOT.

https://twitter.com/nichcarlson/status/304213322637660162

There were the suckups:

https://twitter.com/ajt/status/304233891315732481

https://twitter.com/nickbilton/status/304282064851726336

The impossibly topical entries:

https://twitter.com/spencerchen/status/304260383093452800

https://twitter.com/spencerchen/status/304289259341369344

https://twitter.com/alexismadrigal/status/304279568301301760

The geniuses:

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/304299102353649664

https://twitter.com/BarryTheArtGuy/status/304312879283322881

The humblebraggers:

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/304308390925049856

https://twitter.com/Natkinns/status/304313587592224768

And of course, the doubters.

https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/304300046164324352

https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/304304671449808898

https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/304281088258359296

As for Betabeat, we made the completely rational and reasonable offer of our left kidney, but are still waiting for a response from Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google/Babies.

(Photo: Instagram/Mazy)

Airbnb Is a Belieber Early this week, CEO Brian Chesky tweeted out a photo of Justin Bieber, whose startup cred apparently extends to Airbnb renter. The Instagram shot was taken by Mazy Kazerooni, cofounder of #DominateFund, Ben Parr's still hush-hush, celebrity-focused micro-VC. Gee, wonder who their LPs are?

Friday flashback This week the revamped Digg got an unexpected celebrity thumbs-up: Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit fame (infamy?) tweeted at developer Robert Tolar Haining, "I love Digg. Great job and beautiful interface." "Why thank you sir!" Mr. Haining replied, because what else are you going to say when Fred Durst compliments your UI?

Curtain's up This week, Facebook sibling/musical theater devotee Randi Zuckerberg attended and spoke at TedXBroadway. More importantly: She got to meet Lt. Sulu himself, George Takei:

With @georgetakei at #TEDxBroadway! He was so great talking about theater & social media, I don't even have to speak! twitter.com/randizuckerber…

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) January 28, 2013

Not even gonna front like we aren't jealous.

Devastating It seems Monday was a rough day in the Business Insider office. We speak not of Henry Blodget's regaling the Internet with tales of his air travels, nor of the site's tussle with the Awl over the nature of parody. No, we speak of the fallout from Sunday's episode "Downton Abbey." "Still kinda shaken by last night’s Downton," tweeted deputy editor Joseph Weisenthal. "Sybil?" Mr. Blodget responded with understanding and sympathy, before adding that it had been "brutal."

It's hard but we'll all get through this somehow, just like the Granthams. Stiff upper lip!

Panty Drop Off Softbank principle and devilishly stylish VC Nikhil Kalghatgi got a little surprise in the mail this week. Turns out some silly prankster decided to send him "3.9 kg of panties." Though he declined to reveal just how many pairs of panties equal 3.9 kg, he invited one lucky user to DM him on "Thonger, the all panties Twitter." Sassy.

(Photo: Twitter)

It's all Greek to me I don't think that word means what you think it means.

(Screenshot: Twitter)

The Coworker Is Right WeWork resident Asi Lang guessed the right price on stage with Drew Carey, while his fellow coworkers watched on TV from 175 Varick Street. Between this and all the Foursquare questions on "Jeopardy," game shows seem to have a Silicon Alley bias.

Oh you fancy huh Appcelerator head of partnerships and occasional Betabeat columnist Spencer Chen has some sick Super Bowl plans. Too bad TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler has better ones. Suddenly we feel gloriously populist for our plans to watch it in our PJs on a normal-sized TV.

(Photo: Tumblr)

Boom.

Dear 20 or so religious recap followers,

You probably noticed that I took last week’s episode off. I could give you a list of reasons: it was really busy at work, I was trying to wind down for Thanksgiving, and catching the West Coast feed starting at 10 p.m. Pacific is a bitch. But ultimately, I just didn’t feel like watching it. The first two episodes left me narcoleptic and an unopened Xbox game seemed like more fun.

But Nitasha, Betabeat’s editor, convinced me to give it one last try. Well, I’m glad I did. I managed to stay awake for the entire episode! And it was definitely the most authentic of the season. It may have helped that I was getting texts from Gabe Rivera, founder of the famous tech news aggregator Techmeme, that my startup and I made an appearance in this week’s show. (Gabe was in NYC at the time and claims that he was just “flipping” through the channels). My favorite subject was going to be on . . . me!

Recap: This week opened up with Hermione kickboxing with her trainer pretending the punching bag was Sarah’s face. Ben does some crunches. Kim goes to hottie Dwight for advice on quitting her job (Sorry, but Jay is still cuter). Sarah brags. Kim quits. Kim cries. Kim drinks some wine. Ben and Hermione get rejected by another VC. Kim parties. David, Ben, and Hermione head to a tech party. Hermione freaks. Hermione cries. Hermione drinks. Hermione throws a drink. Wrap!

How Real? Once again, I'll generously start them off at 100% real Silicon Valley. Last time I tried this, the show scored a miserable 10% (blame Sarah Austin.)

“Minimum Viable Product” +20%

Kim, the former NBA cheerleader, mentions to Dwight that she wants to quit her cushy job at Ampush and launch her own startup to initially build a “minimum viable product”. Mind blown. This is real techy, product management shit! Product managers refer to it as “MVP,” which loosely translates to building products with a limited features set in order to get traction and meaningful feedback from early adopters. So either Kim (1) has actually spent some time on product launches or (2) she reads way too much TechCrunch. Either way, respect.

Sarah Austin -50%

Ladies and gentleman, we have our Snooki. Sarah is still very tanned and still kind of a dumdum, but it’s pretty innocuous. She does these video interviews--sorry, lifecasts--with somewhat famous startup CEOs in a real folksy-how-do-I-turn-my-iPhone-on kinda way. It worked! I’m convinced she knows nothing about startups and tech! Then she goes and says, “I’m one of the original bloggers of Silicon Valley.” I think what Sarah meant was that she had a Blogger account and owned a Flip camera in 2007? I mean, c’mon, the Valley gave birth to tech blogging greats like Michael Arrington, MG “Fucking!” Siegler, Rip Emerson, and many others. She caps it off by proclaiming that she’s the White Oprah of the Valley. I better just move on before I bang my head into my brand new iPad mini. #humblebrag

Dwight’s Apartment +20%

This brogrammer lives in a pigsty. There’s like dirty sandals, unwashed dishes, probably a used condom all just laying about his one bedroom apartment. Later it comes out that Dwight lives in Sunnyvale, which is effectively BFE to the San Francisco tech set. But it is about half the price to rent there and it’s easier to tap older engineering talent that are likely to stick around. For a first time entrepreneur? Legit.

Kim’s $1M in Equity -15%

Someone’s been told a lie here. There’s no way in hell she’s walking away from $1 million in shares. I have no insights into their cap table or funding line, but unless she owns like 30% of the company, it doesn’t add, especially given the space that Ampush Media is in. At last count there’s like 4,000,000 of these Facebook ad optimization companies running amok in the Valley with little liquidation options on the horizon for these guys. Sorry, Kim. You’re still cute though!

Quoting Steve Jobs (Kim) -5%

Kim finally quits her job and gathers some friends to celebrate at popular SF club Harlot. Looking pretty inebriated, she mutters to Dwight how happy she’s leaving do her own thing because, “She’s been wasting her time living someone else’s life.” Shaking my head…it’s a Steve Jobs quote from a commencement address that he delivered at Stanford in 2005. Girl, that's just tacky.

My Debut +40%

You’ve had to endure three episodes to finally (finally!) see yours truly in a scene. I was working the door at a huge networking party that I threw during Apple’s WWDC. I don’t want to brag, but I fucking killed it. Totally legitimized the show over night. However, I instructed them not to shoot me from my right side. I will be talking to Randi Zuckerberg about that.

Appcelerator +10%

This is the amazing mobile startup that I work at. Total legit! Buy some of their software? #GratuitousPlug #AlwaysBeHustlin’

Tally

For episode 4, we get a record-setting final score of 120% real Silicon Valley! Granted it was mostly buoyed by the appearance of my awesome startup, my CEO (Jeff Haynie), and myself. But I think it's a sign of good things to come. In all seriousness, I think the folks in the Valley should be rooting for the show to be a hit. If it isn’t, this will likely be the last startup show for a mainstream audience that you will see greenlit for a while. And that’s a loss for all of us that call this wonderful place our home. [Ed note: Sorry, Best Coasters, it looks like New York is already on the hook for sloppy seconds.]

Season 1 . . . Episode 2 . . . no end in sight . . . I’m not sure how much more I can take.

Now that the dust has settled from the PR, subsequent Valley backlash, promos, more backlash, and last week’s premiere, we actually get to see what we have here with Bravo’s "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley." Basically, it's formulaic reality show.

The genre's hooks and tricks are well established, they just happen to be filmed in Silicon Valley with cast members that are, well, made for TV. I think for many here, there was still some hope that the show would offer a national audience an insider's look into the motion and the madness in which the Valley operates. Not so much.

Back in 2001, there was a great startup documentary called "Startup.com." It would have been such a worthwhile endeavor if the producers aspired to create something like that. Instead we’re left with what venture capitalist Ron Palmeri of MkII Ventures calls, “The Housewives of Silicon Valley.”

However, I will say these characters are kind of lovable. (Emphasis on “kind of.”) I even tried to make fun of Sarah Austin on Twitter, but I don’t think she got the joke:

@spencerchen @p_kassie hahahaha no she's the one who meets me in the morning and brings hot coffee lol#siliconvalley

— Sarah Austin (@sarahaustin) November 13, 2012

(Noteworthy here is that whatever was written about the Valley’s disdain towards the cast members was misguided. It’s the idea of a startup reality show that Valley folks disliked, not the people involved.)

Anyways, enough about what could have been and more about that Sony Vaio.

Recap: Ben Way and Hermione Way return to The Villa dejected after being turned down by VC Dave McClure. They start screaming. Um, okay. Kim Taylor is pissing and moaning about work because she’s been there for two years and the cofounder is thinking about bringing in someone more senior to handle sales. This is her first startup job after being a NBA cheerleader, so you know, why wouldn’t she be considered for the Chief Revenue Officer role? Sarah is talking about “Lifecasting” again. I don’t even… oh hey, pool party! David Murray made an “Oedipus” reference to siblings Ben and Hermione during the pool party. Awk!

Friends of the cast finally get some airtime here. I guess all that hard work lingering around the cast members finally paid off! Sarah hosts some VC pitch event. She’s wearing a cute, burgundy dress . . . her tan looks awesome? Totes. Hermione vists Sarah at the Four Seasons to extend an olive branch in the shape of a homemade tiara. Sarah dismisses the hope that she and Hermione will be friends anytime soon. Whatevs. David and new hottie Jay Holanda go play in the park together. Ben and Hermione pitch Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC. Denied! Hermione elects not to sleep underneath the VC’s conference table this time. Smart girl, she’s learning! David and new hottie Jay play Magic and do some brogrammer bonding. Sarah and Jay go on a date, but Sarah ruins it by ‘lifecasting’ it. The end.

How Real? Once again, giving the show the benefit of the doubt we’ll start them off at 100% real Silicon Valley. Last week the show scored a respectable 60% real Valley. Let’s see how they do this week . . .

Getting Rejected By VCs - 10%

After VC Dave McClure shot down their first pitch, Hermione slumps back to The Villa physically tired and emotionally exhausted. There’s quite a bit of drama’ing it up here. Getting rejected, especially at the seed rounds, is quite common for first-time founders. While the constant rejection can take a horrible toll on your ego and self-confidence, founders in the Valley tend to have thicker skin. Being better prepared helps. They certainly don’t scream from the Villatop every time a VC says no. I know one founder that pitched 50 Valley VCs before getting funded. I didn’t even know there were 50 VCs in the Valley.

Lifecasting -30%

Kassandra, Sarah’s assistant, asks Sarah if she’s going to Lifecast her date with Jay. Sarah responds that she’s going to because it’s the way for her audience to get to know the ‘real’ Sarah Austin. At this point, I feel it’s my moral obligation to educate the world that we in the Valley have no idea what the hell she is talking about. I’m pretty sure that Sarah means she tweets and Instagrams. If so, yeah, we do do that.

The Pool Scene at the Four Seasons - 20%

I don’t know where to start. There’s a poodle, spray tans, pretty flowers, and a lengthy conversation about feelings and being BFFs. No. No. No! Whatever free time startup people have (and it’s very little) are spent grabbing a quick meal, a few Fernets, and being generally exhausted. We don’t have enough time to have feelings here in the Valley. 

Sony VAIO -10%

Ben is seen pitching Jeff Clavier with a Sony VAIO. I’ve heard of these things and I’ve seen them on BestBuy’s site before. I’ve just never seen one in the wild here in the Valley. The Valley is MacBook Air country or if you’re a designer or developer, you’re on a MacBook Pro. Maybe it’s a product placement deal?

Tweeting About Your Date -20%

Sarah meets Jay at his place for their long-awaited date and she starts secretly live tweeting the big event. Here’s another thing that Valley types just don’t do. Between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Socialcam, Tumblr, etc…there’s already an abundance of sharing for the tech set throughout the working day. If there’s one last bastion of privacy that we all hold dear, it’s with our love lives. At the most, we make those posts #PathOnly (yes, that’s actually a thing).

Zzzzz

For episode 2, we get a final score of 10% real Silicon Valley. Worse is that the Valley’s interest in this show is sliding like Groupon stock. It just has not been that entertaining. It neither gives you enough of real startup life, nor is it an entertaining reality show. For anecdotal evidence, take a look at the photo I snapped of my girlfriend Amy White during the show. She heads up marketing for Highland Capital Partners and loves Jersey Shore. If Bravo’s Silicon Valley can’t capture her interest, I’m not holding out hope for the rest of the season.

Spencer Chen is head of partnerships at @appcelerator (and Betabeat’s 86th most entertaining Tech Twitterer!) Follow him@SpencerChen.

Last night marked the much-feared premiere of Bravo's "Start-Ups: Silicon Alley"--a bikini clad-allegory about the startup world's penchant for self-aggrandizing that vacillates somewhere between a light-hearted brother-sister romcom and "True Life: I Have No Fucking Clue How to Pitch a VC." It's your standard Andy Cohen clubhouse fare with the life cycle of an early stage company as a plot device.

But it's hard for Betabeat, sitting pretty in New York City, to assess what, exactly, the show gets right and wrong about Valley culture. Is the primary mode of socialization really costume parties? Can you get humans to deliver room service to your dog just by saying "social media" three times? Thus we enlisted a native Spencer Chen to separate the real from the fake, borrowing from the recap format pioneered by chroniclers of that other cinéma véritée classic, "Gossip Girl."

"YOLO." Drink!

Last night my girlfriend and I hosted a viewing party for the premiere of Bravo’s latest reality show, "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley." (Yes, startups is spelled with a hyphen and mixed caps and that alone should have been a signal of things to come). It’s definitely one of the more polarizing things to hit the Valley recently because this time, it’s personal. Danny Trinh, a well-known product designer for Path, captured the general sentiment:

Now I know what the residents of Jersey Shore must feel like.

— Danny Trinh (@dtrinh) October 9, 2012

Most people in the Valley are very proud to be part of a thriving ecosystem that they helped nurture and build, hence the unease about being misrepresented in mass media. So we thought we'd invite 30 of our startup friends to our house in the Lower Haight to rubberneck the disaster.

Valley get-togethers are known for their high-flake factor. You’re lucky to get 50% of the people that say they’re going to show up to actually show up. This was not the case last night . . . everyone wanted to see what happens when our industry hit the spotlight. We had a nice cross-section in attendance--from senior staffers at TechCrunch, AllThingsD, Bloomberg, CNET to founders of well-known startups to VCs to early employees of companies such as Box, Foursquare, and Twitter, as well as your humble hosts: my girlfriend heads up marketing for Boston-based VC firm Highland Capital partners and I head up business development for a well-funded mobile enterprise startup, Appcelerator.

Suffice to say, not much was going to get past this crowd. So, how did the show do in eyes of the Valley?

Recap: The first episode was merely the setup introducing the cast members with clichéd proclamations like, “It’s a gold rush," "The Valley is where dreams come true”, “You only live once!” (YOLO: drink.) There’s a number of unintended comical moments, mostly when Sarah Austin is moving her lips, but the premiere ends on a high note with a cameo from the always entertaining and very frank venture capitalist Dave McClure.

How Real? Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, start with a perfect score of 100% real and go from there!

Street Cred -20%

If you’re looking for established Valley personalities or any deep insiders, there’s none among the cast. I’m not just talking about personal cachet or individual fame, but actual projects or associations that actual Valley folks can identify with. The startup scene around here is highly integrated and relatively small . . . we’re all a couple connections removed from most folks, with the exception of these cast members.

Morgan Missen, a former top recruiter for Foursquare and Twitter, had the line of the night: “I escorted Hermione Way out of a party once and other than that I haven’t heard of any of these guys.”

Let the games begin.

Sarah Austin -30%

Okay, seriously, what the fuck? If there is one cast member that’s clearly here to fan the flames, it’s Sarah Austin. She's the one every Valley person was afraid would be mistaken for the real thing, but looks to be a pure Hollywood creation, despite being born and raised in the Bay Area. She’s a “Lifecaster”, whatever that is (read: not a real startup job). She’s constantly spray tanning and it takes her fours hours to get ready for a launch party. It was very interesting that the Four Seasons in Palo Alto lets her stay there for free in exchange for her social media promotion. Must be those $10,000 tweets of hers. Sarah makes tech PR chicks around here look like the next Marissa Mayer. If you haven’t figured it out by now, nothing about her life actually happens in the Valley.

The Toga Party -15%

NO. Just no. Have you ever seen startup guys? They’re pasty as hell and the last thing they like to do is dress up as Roman Gladiators from the Castro. I’ve been invited to all of one costume party all year in the Valley. Maybe. Also, if the Valley were ever going to dress up, the folks here are way too dialed-in to pop culture to do something as hackneyed as a college toga party. See TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler who shaved his head to be Walter White from "Breaking Bad." So badass. So Valley.

Dwight Crow and David Murray +10%

Based on the teasers, Dwight Crow definitely was the guy you wanted to hate coming into the show, but our group was starting to have a soft spot for him. Firstly, he actually looks like a developer. He also has the prototypical co-founder in the Valley, i.e. someone that actually looks Asian (or at least part Asian, we’ll take what we can get from this show). Also, a solid whiteboard session is what separates the real Valley folks from the fakers and you just can’t fake a good whiteboard sesh. Dwight seems to have decent skills there and even the content on the whiteboards looked technically legit. We’ll throw David Murray into the mix here too as a positive for the show; he was also filmed with actual developer tools on his screen rather than having a Facebook page up the entire time like the cast member in the ad sales industry, Kim Taylor.

Dave McClure +15%

Yup, that’s pretty legit there. Bravo stayed true to one of the real personalities in the VC community with the investor and founder of 500 Startups. The producer are self-aware enough to zoom in on Dave’s reaction to Hermione and Ben’s pitch. His WTF look that followed this nonsensical pitch was priceless: “So our product will enable people to see their life expectancy in real life.” Huh? However, the Valley is full of far out ideas that sound dumb when you say them out loud, so this is pretty true to life.

Tallying it up, we get a final score of 60% real Silicon Valley for Episode 1. Not bad considering the rending of garments that preceded the premiere. But ultimately, we all walked away feeling let down. It was disappointing to realize the show was, well, really boring as far as televised drama. But we haven't given up yet. Hell, we have at least 5 more of episodes to see if Sarah Austin is going to completely implode. Stay tuned  . . .

Spencer Chen is head of partnerships at @appcelerator (and Betabeat's 86th most entertaining Tech Twitterer!) Follow him @SpencerChen.