This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of Gary's Guide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Hi folks,

The Worldwide Investor Network (WIN) is organizing a first-of-its-kind two-day event on November 13 and 14, bringing together global ecosystem in which 10 top overseas accelerator graduates and exceptional startups will be engaging and pitching the New York venture community. If interested in applying, here's the link (the deadline is October 18). And for any local entrepreneurs who want to attend, use the promo code "win2012" for 30 percent off (valid until October 31).

The good folks at Taap.it are providing startup founders with free iPhone 5 cases custom engraved with their names and those of their startups. Nice! Interested? Go sign up here.

The NYC Next Idea business plan competition, now in its fourth year, is open for applications. Cash prize is $35,000, and the deadline for registration is November 9. Ideas pitched last year included smart vending machines in NYC taxis, intelligent clothes-sizing applications, and real-time marketing analytics platforms.

If you're a fan of robots, you don't wanna miss two awesome upcoming events -- The Future is Robotics + Software this Thursday (it's going to be all about robot operating systems and flying robots) and the Software Engineers Job Fair next Tuesday (which is going to have robots on patrol taking pictures!).

This Friday, October 19, is the agency edition of Walkabout NYC, where you get to go around and check out some of New York's top digital agencies such as Fueled (kickass offices!), Carrot Creative, Area 17, Campfire, Mint Digital, Attention and others. It's free, but spots are limited so make sure to RSVP soon.

It's also Social Week, and a bunch of events are part of it including PivotCon, NY Beta, BlogHer, Mobile Gaming Summit and Glimpse.

And now let's see whats going down in the Alley this week...

Reinventing Engineering Education in the 21st Century
Panelists include Jason Goodman (founder and CEO, 3rd Ward Brooklyn), Debra Sterling (founder and CEO, GoldieBlox), Max Whitney (NYC Resistor) and moderated by Daniel Pianko (partner, University Ventures).
Monday (Oct. 15), 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway, 4th Floor

Entrepreneurs Roundtable 52
With Akihiko Okamoto (CEO of Recruit Incubation Partners)
Tuesday (Oct. 16), 6 p.m. @ NYU Stern Room 2-60, 44 West 4th Street

EdTech Titans of Industry
A discussion with Jose Ferreira (CEO, Knewton), Greg Gunn (entrepreneur in residence, City Light Capital and cofounder, Wireless Generation), Harold Levy (MD, Palm Ventures) and Laurie Racine (founder and MD, Startl).
Tuesday (Oct. 16), 6 p.m. @ Knewton, 100 5th Avenue

Future of Fashion Emerging Startup Series #3
Presenting companies include Perch, D'Marie, ClothesHorse and HandShake. Panelists include Christina Mercando (VP of product, Hunch / eBay) and Veronika Sonsev (CEO and founder, InSparq and cofounder, Women in Wireless)
Tuesday (Oct 16), 7 p.m. @ Projective Space - L.E.S. , 72 Allen Street, 3rd Floor

October Grow Hack Meetup
Detailed growth hacking case study and demo from Patrick Ambron (cofounder and CEO, Brandyourself.com).
Tuesday (Oct 16), 7 p.m. @ AlleyNYC, 500 7th Ave, 17th Floor

Google StreetView Behind the Scenes
A look at some of the challenges and a peek at the Google Street View project from behind the scenes with Luc Vincent (engineering director, Google).
Wednesday (Oct. 17), 5:30 p.m. @ Google NYC, 111 8th Avenue

October NY Enterprise Technology Meetup
Demos by SevOne, AnyPresence, EidoSearch, GoodData, and StoryDesk.
Wednesday (Oct. 17), 6:30 p.m. @ Cooley, 1114 Avenue of the Americas

Queens Tech Meetup 4
Featuring Dean Daniel Huttenlocher (founding dean, CornellNYC) and Greg Pass (founding entrepreneurial officer, CornellNYC and former CTO, Twitter). CornellNYC is a $2 billion project to build an engineering campus on Roosevelt Island and expected to create up to 120,000 tech jobs. Meet two of the guys driving the bus.
Wednesday (Oct. 17), 7 p.m. @ See Exhibition Space, 25-25 44th Drive, Long Island City

The Business of Food E-Commerce
Demos by Ordrin, Blue Apron, Chop Chop Go and Farmigo.
Wednesday (Oct. 17), 7 p.m. @ 4food, 286 Madison Avenue

TimesOpen 2012: Bigger Data and Smarter Scaling
Speakers include Andrew Montalenti (CTO, Parse.ly), James Boehmer (manager search technology, New York Times) and Allan Beaufour (CTO, Chartbeat).
Wednesday (Oct. 17), 7 p.m. @ The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, 15th Floor

Glimpse: the Social Discovery Conference
Panelists include Greg Tseng (Tagged), Brett Martin (Sonar), Jared Hecht (GroupMe), Brian Schechter (HowAboutWe), Anna Thomas (LooseCubes) and others.
Thursday (Oct. 18), 6 p.m. @ Bloomberg Headquarters, 731 Lexington Avenue

MeetMoi + Social Exposure Media Present: The Venetian Masquerade Ball
A seductive celebration of the fall, new beginnings and new people. Venetian inspired cocktails, gift bags and an alluring surprise.
Thursday (Oct. 18), 8 p.m. @ Parlor New York, 286 Spring Street

Mobile Gaming Summit 2012 NY
With Chieh Huang (Zynga), Nihal Mehta (Eniac Ventures), Adam Ludwin (RRE), Alex Betancur (JumpRamp Games) and others.
Friday (Oct. 19), 9 a.m. @ Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place

Ladies Who Code Conference
Keynotes include Molly Holzschlag (Open Web Evangelist), Vanessa Hurst (Developers for Good), Emma Persky (Google), Tracy Pesin (Bit.ly) and others.
Saturday (Oct 20), 10 a.m. @ Bloomberg, 731 Lexington Avenue

More events on the horizon...

Future of Web Design (FOWD) NYC on Oct 22 @ New World Stages
New York Software Engineers (NYSE) Job Fair on Oct 23 @ AlleyNYC
Apple vs. Samsung: What The Case Means to Software Development and UX Design on Oct 23 @ Morgan Stanley
Legal Essentials for Startups: Organizing the Entity on Oct 25 @ Anchin
Protect Your Code | IP Law + Founders Experiences on Oct 25 @ AlleyNYC
All Things D: Dive Into Mobile on Oct 29 @ The Ritz-Carlton Battery Park
#Startupfix at Culturefix - Oct 30 on Oct 30 @ Culturefix
Daniweb Presents: Publishers meet Advertisers Cocktail Mixer on Nov 07 @ Highland Park
Funding The Best In Global Innovation on Nov 13 @ SNR Denton
AngelHack Fall 2012 New York City on Nov 17 @ The AlleyNYC

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! ;)

Columbus Circle as seen from CityMaps

WICKA WICKA. Turntable.fm is in the big leagues now as the young music based social platform signs deals with Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner, TechCrunch reports. Turntable has over one million users now and a new mobile app since September.

HIPSTARTER. San Francisco based Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform with offices in Soho that competes with Kickstarter, announced the perfection of their "gogofactor," a proprietary algorithm that ranks projects based on popularity and viability. This makes Indiegogo the only crowdfunding platform with this type of merit-based ranking functionality. Your move, Kickstarter.

TAP TAP WHO'S THERE? After wandering around like a lost child in the woods for a bit, Taap.it is back with a newly stated purpose and redone app. Taap.it, originally touted as a hyper-local, mobile-first version of Craigslist, has Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare integration to bring users information about local events and businesses. Users can also follow friends, hunt for deals, make wish lists and compete in weekly contests.

MONEY. Knodes, the company on a mission to make social network data accessible and meaningful, just announced a $250 thousand Knodes Fund for the "best products, websites and applications built on the Knodes platform." Companies who want a chunk of that change should apply here beginning May 1.

SCHOOL OF TECH. General Electric teamed up with Skillshare and debuted their new "GE Works" campaign last week at SXSW. The "GE Garages," which look more like train cars or truck trailers sans wheels, invited participants to make an iPhone case, play with a laser cutter, cold saw and 3D printer. Sexy stuff. Excuse us while we wipe the steam from our glasses. The garages will be appearing in Houston Cincinnati and San Francisco soon.

SEARCH DOJO. Q-Sensei, a German-American "multi-dimensional" search engine that organizes data sets based on various descriptions, correlations and metadata simultaneously, is laying down offices in Downtown Brooklyn. The startup, which raised $2.5 million in seed funding in 2009, serves enterprise clients that need to search the oodles of data on the Internet, in private networks, on private computers and hand-held devices. Q-Sensei also has an API that lets businesses to build their own search apps.

JETSET. Wanderfly, a site for sharing and finding travel recommendations, just went live with a refreshed site and already won best design at last week's LAUNCH in San Francisco. We must admit, it looks good.

THERE'S A MAP FOR THAT. CityMaps just re-emerged from its NYC beta cocoon and went live in San Francisco and Austin for the first time. The maps sort of look like the "clients" page of a big name ad shop but despite the harsh logo-on-white scheme, the site has a ton of useful features such as Foursquare integration with tips, photos and check-ins, integration with daily deal sites and tweets from businesses—like a digital sidewalk sandwich board. A brand new iPhone app rounds out CityMaps' big changes.

WORK IT! OMGPOP needs a mobile QA tester to test mobile games and log bugs. Every boy's dream. Apply here. ZocDoc wants a software engineer and Table Tennisseur with OOP language experience who is driven by an "unknown force to change healthcare for the better." Applications go right here. Lean Startup Machine is looking for a workshop coordinator, web engineer and a "sales or sponsorship hacker." Find job descriptions and apply here.