At the Meetup. (flickr.com/alextorrenegra)

MEET 'N GREET Monday, June 5, is this month's New York Tech Meetup. Presenters range from Fitocracy to Loosecubes. If you haven't bought tickets, you've got one more chance: There's one batch left, and they go on sale Friday.

MORNING, SUNSHINE News.me has just revamped its morning email, ramping up the "daily briefing" angle. Not only has the company redesigned the whole thing, News.me's editor will be pick three big stories to summarize every morning. Also added: stuff you missed and an image. Because images are snazzy.

SALE SALE SALE For all the pinatics out there: social commerce platform Lyst has debuted a tool that'll allow you to receive an instant sale alert whenever something on your Pinterest boards goes on sale. In addition, Lyst will notify users who pin an item from a store whether that item can be had elsewhere.

GROWING UP We hear that NYC's Lean Startup Meetup just shot past 2,500 members.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER The Startup Genome, a.k.a. the source of those crazy stats regarding New York's high rate of female founders, has launched the Investor Compass, a dashboard allowing users to centralize data about the startups they're working with. It's designed to help investors, advisors, and other interested parties make better decisions, leveraging the 17,000-startup database the organization has already built. For more details, check the company blog.

MOVING ON UP On the heels of launching their new search platform for homebuyers, RealDirect.com is moving into its own new home. The online real estate brokerage is settling into new digs on 21st St. Presumably the new office has plenty of space for all the planned hires: The company just hired three new agents and plans to staff up further, with new people to cover new areas in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

SUNSHINE AND SHOPPING The folks at Tip or Skip, an app billed as enabling "window shopping from anywhere," are organizing a "Tip Crawl" on June 3 at the Brooklyn Flea. Attendees will use the app to snap pics of their best finds.

DIGITAL ATTIC Persnickety about your private pics? None too sure about Facebook's ever-shifting settings? Last week you got a new storage option. That would be miLifemap, a digital storage locker designed to offer families a private place to keep everything important. Though we must confess, we are of the generation that thinks half the fun of having fun is showing off.

GET A JOB GameChanger needs a VP of Marketing. Details are here. Canvas needs a senior Javascript developer. For more, check out this ad. Turntable.fm needs a lead designer. Learn more on their jobs page.

Turntable should become available in countries outside the U.S. sometime in the next few months, Mr. Chasen said. "We'll slowly turn on countries because they all have different specific requirements on what we have to do to actually play music in them."

The direct partnerships with labels carry other perks, he said. Previously, Turntable was streaming music according to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which comes with some restrictions. You can only skip songs a certain number of times, for example, and can't see what the next song will be. By negotiating directly with labels, Turntable was able to get around those restrictions. Features that take advantage of the new freedoms are coming soon, Mr. Chasen said.

Turntable was without a doubt the most-hyped startup to emerge from New York in the last year as music lovers discovered it and shared it with their friends. Was it demoralizing when some of that hype died down?

Turntable still gets a fair amount of hype, Mr. Chasen said, "usually around when we release things" or make announcements. "There was definitely a moment where we came out and everyone needed to see what we were," he said. "Obviously a lot of that traffic isn't going to be our core audience."

Turntable has found its true fans now, he said, and has been growing sustainably week-over-week since January. Mr. Chasen is, as ever, totally not worried about competition from Facebook, where Spotify integration and the new chat feature Listen With threaten to chip away users from Turntable. "We're integrated with Facebook," he said. "We've always been excited to work with them. They want to help anything that is potentially social find its audience online."

The startup continues to score high profile partnerships, including helping out with an event for the Grammys. "We got invited to go to the Grammys. That's not something every startup gets," Mr. Chasen said. At SXSW, Turntable partnered with Intel and Pepsi and hosted a party with Flying Lotus on Saturday. But Thursday is the big blowout: Questlove, A-Trak and Diplo at a 2,000-person venue.

The company is up to 12 employees in its Union Square office, but hopes to find a few new employees—and a new office—in the next month or two.

Turntable.fm + SXSW +Avatar DJ + Pepsi + Intel from Turntable.fm on Vimeo.

DJ Woo on the ones and twos

Licensing deals with Sony, EMI, Warner, and Universal make Turntable.fm makes "less dangerous," but is it still rock 'n roll? [VentureBeat]

Homeless men and women defend the company that turned them into Wifi hotspots [Digits]

Zynga tries to manage a price dip from employees selling shares with a secondary offering. Good luck with that, guys. [TechCrunch]

Before Goldman Sachs sucked up all the air, there was "Why I Left Google" [JW on Tech]

AT&T settles lawsuit for slowing down a dude's "unlimited" data. A victory for datakind. [Associated Press]

Startups don't wanna rely on Facebook no mo, mo, mo. [Wall Street Journal]

Tim Armstrong takes a look at Yahoo, considers becoming a patent troll [AllThingsD]

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.

Mr. Chau.

This morning Betabeat learned that Rolling.fm co-founder and former Googler Tim Zhou had joined Tumblr. It has also come to light that another Rolling cofounder and Xoogler, Thomas Chau, has joined another prominent New York startup: Squarespace. "We liked Thomas's strong entrepreneurial spirit (take risks and run fast) along with his perfect Squarespace DNA of product design sensibility coupled with engineering awesomeness," Squarespace SVP Jesse Hertzberg wrote in an email. Squarespace, if you're not familiar, is a website builder and hosting platform (that is often likened to Tumblr, as it happens) founded in 2003. Now we just need to suss out what has become of the third Rolling co-founder, Xoogler Nhon Ma...

Indeed, Rolling.fm does not resolve and the last tweet was on November 19. Rolling's precursor, a social deals site called Tenka.com, is also not resolving.

The Facebook app had about 200 daily active users a month ago; now it has none, according to AppData. There's evidence that Rolling was active until at least Dec. 15, when the producer duo Dada Life premiered a remix there; Bnet interviewed the startup on Dec. 8.

Tim Zhou, Rolling's chief product officer, did not respond to an email request for comment. At present, the mysterious disappearance of Rolling.fm would appear to be due to three possible reasons:

1. Forgot to renew domain*
2. Cease and desist notice from scary record label
3. Failed to gain enough traction or funding, cofounders gave up on it (even Turntable's traffic has been slipping)

*A reader points out that the domain expires in 2012, so this explanation is unlikely.

Rolling.fm caught some flak from the internet when it launched in the wake of Turntable.fm's extreme success. The founders admitted they duped the idea, but appealed to the internet's tradition of innovation. (Even Steve Jobs subscribed to the doctrine of "good artists copy, great artists steal.")

The cofounders had pivoted from Tenka, a deals site that raised from seed investors including StubHub's Jeff Fluhr, Great Oaks Venture Capital's Ben Lin and Raj Sandhu, formerly of the Soros Fund. The site was available outside the U.S., unlike Turntable, which let them grab some easy users.

The cofounders switched to building Rolling in May, they said, which would mean Rolling had about a seven month run before giving up the ghost. But the co-founders put the startup on AngelList about nine months ago. We'll update as we learn more.

Being a good DJ means making hard decisions

Betabeat covered the rise of Turntable.fm this summer and the pivot/restart founder Billy Chasen made from his previous company Stickybits. During the most recent episode of Founder Stories, he told Chris Dixon about how he came to make this hard decision and break the news to his investors and employees.

"I was looking at the health of the company, just a dozen different metrics, how are users liking it, where is the product at, and everything was just kind of a mediocre success. So I wasn't as excited going in, I was like, can I really see myself doing this for another year."

The big problem with StickyBits, said Mr. Chasen, was that it never found a way to get traction among users. "I had this huge missed connection how I thought things would run with brands. I thought we would deliver this awesome app that brands would use and they deliver the crowd. But really brands wanted to test it, and asked us to bring the crowd. So it was a Catch-22."

Turntable was the top idea on his list of companies Mr. Chasen thought would try to build at some point in his life. But he admits the decision to completely change course was still terrifying. "Knowing what the signs are and how to recognize them, so you don't become a walking dead startup, is really important.

Check out the full episode for some more cool insights.

Turntable.fm experienced big growth during its first months after launching this summer and rode that wave to a nice round of funding. But their traffic seems to have dipped recently, indicating they are on the trough of the Gartner hype cycle.

The path forward is slow—organic growth, not driven by media hype or celebrity sign ups. And the Inaugural Mashtival, a mashup festival happening on Turntable this week, seems like a good example of passionate users who will help the site grow.

Nicolas Gutierrez and Aaron Ho met while spinning mashups on Turntable. They have never met in the real world and in fact are from two different continents (ssshhhh, Turntable is supposed to be U.S. only), but they found themselves thrust into the role of club promoters.

They tended to the music, the conversation and the DJ queue. Soon, high profile mashup artists began reaching out to them, and they used the space to highlight new tracks and help emerging names get their names out. "We have had the like of 3LAU, Kap Slap, Basic Physics, Yoni, DJ Trademark, and DJ DiBella come In and play their music," Mr. Gutierrez told Betabeat over Skype.

The festival will take place this Wednesday across three rooms: Mashup 1, 2 and the VIP, which is reserved for artists. "This whole thing kind of snowballed. Each room functions as a 'stage' and each stage will have certain artists playing on the decks," said Mr. Gutierrez.

As a online hotbed for mashup music lovers, the boys have also created a sort of laboratory for testing new material. "Ya, a lot of the time an artist will be halfway done with a song and will come in just come in to preview it and get feedback.  I have seen some people totally love the song as is and the artist doesn't change much.  I have also seen a song totally be put on the back burner as the feedback wasn't that good."

That's Betabeat alone on the dance floor with the lame avatar.

It's possible Betabeat's "Summer Jamz" tag for Turntable.fm posts may have proved portentous. After looking at the site's traffic and search trends, Digital Music News wonders, "Has the fickle internet already chewed this site up, spit it out, and moved onto something else?"

It echoes what a norms friend and former TTFM enthusiast said to us over coffee last weekend, "Remember when everyone was excited about Turntable.fm?!" She has since moved on to Spotify.

The tech press is just as eager to roast a failure as it to crown a startup prince (not us, of course, no never). But while the data is unverified, a unique visitor count from Compete.com, ranking data from Alexa and Google search trend data all show a markedly similar downward-sloping curve after a steep spike in June and July.

Last week, just before Turntable.fm was going to showcased at the Raise Cache fundraiser, co-founder Billy Chasen told Betabeat that the service was streaming as many as a 1 million tracks a day. Around the same time, co-founder Seth Goldstein told VatorNews, "We have a passionate core of 20,000 to 40,000 users, who use the service 10-20 hours a month."

Digital Music News posits several reasons for what looks like a traffic dive:

" . . . there are factors inhibiting growth.  Like international licensing, or lack therof.  Currently, Turntable.fm is flatly illegal outside of the US, given the absence of DMCA protections. "We had to shut off international access very early on, because the DMCA provisions don't support international access," Goldstein continued. "And early on, Japan, Brazil, and some of these other countries were huge consumers."

However, as the post points out, even if TTFM can get major label licensing, "big licenses cost big money, and investors rarely see a big return on those investments."

A Betabeat tipster, who wondered by Turntable.fm seemed "so empty" despite its 1 million daily plays, pointed us to Turntable.fm's AppData listing, where the source recommended, "You should get the 90+ day view for even more reverse hockey stick fun.  Maybe there is a technical reason for this. If so what is it?"

via AppData

Betabeat has reached out to Mr. Chasen for comment about what, if any, significance he sees in their numbers,  whether they are accurate, and whether they can grow off a core base of users alone. We'll update the post when we hear back.

The tipster also had a theory: namely that the problem lies with user's unfamiliarity with DJ-ing, pointing out that even Mr. Chasen found it "a little intimidating." Said the tipster:

This is a great quote. It's intimidating because there is more to DJing that queuing tracks, actually.  Is this going to be more of the mormon bartender problem?

The source was referring to Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski's recent, incisive post on the social graph, where he wrote, "Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender."

On Digital Music News, the commenters seemed of two minds about the apparent slump, with @fingertipsmusic calling Turntable.fm "a cautionary tale for an industry immune to cautionary tales," while @bsstoner defended its chances, "Too much early hype, it's still a killer product."

If you fancy yourself a turn-around expert, head over to Quora. No one's attempted to answer the "How will turntable.fm make money?" question since August.

Internet rock stars

Silicon Alley is buzzing for tonight's fashionable tech fete, the runway party to Raise Cache for HackNY. The DJs for tonight's event will rocking the house via Turntable.fm, which bestowed special avatars on Fred Wilson, Andy Weissman, Dennis Crowley, Dave Goldberg and Lauren Leto.

Betabeat chatted with Turntable.fm co-founder Billy Chasen, who will also be spinning tonight. "To be honest, I've never really been a DJ in real life," Mr. Chasen said. "It's a little intimidating."

Online, however, he has no such hang ups. "When I am DJing on Turntable.fm and a whole room is listening to what I want them to, people pressing the awesome button, that's just a powerful feeling."

Turntable.fm is now up to ten employees and streaming as many as 1 million tracks per day, said Mr. Chasen, who spends his work day in techno rooms, but relaxes at home with some indie chill vibes.

The offline success of Turntable.fm has been a pleasant surprise. "It's great to see an event like Raise Cache doing things in the New York tech scene with our product. We just let this stuff happen organically." The rapper Wale, for example, is using Turntable.fm as the opening act on his tour, letting his fans in concert and at home DJ the set before his performance.

The next challenge in perfecting the Turntable.fm product is figuring out a better way to get new users involved. "Once Twitter started suggesting people for new users to follow they found engagement jumped way up. We are working on ways to help our new users connect with the DJs they might enjoy following," Mr. Chasen said.

Like his early projects, Firef.ly and Chartbeat, Turntable.fm is about interacting with a community of web users in real time. "We believe in our bones that music is inherently social, and that a lot of that got lost when you're just plugged into iTunes with your headphones on. People are reacting to Turntable because they are finding that social element again, even when they are stuck at their computer."