Sometimes regulation puts the brakes on innovation, and car-focused startups have learned this more than most. Now car-sharing startup RelayRides has suspended its service in New York City after the New York state’s Department of Financial Services served it with a cease-and-desist letter.

RelayRides is a peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace in which people offer their cars for daily or weekly rentals, and it recently acquired competitor Wheelz. But the Department of Financial Services says RelayRides has been operating in violation of New York insurance laws and is “putting the public at risk” with inadequate insurance coverage.

So RelayRides has shut down in New York until further notice. The company writes in a blog post:

We are actively working with the Department to address these concerns. While we’re cooperating with the Department on these changes, we will be suspending activities that it considers non-compliant.

Effective Thursday, May 16, and until further notice, renters will no longer be able to make reservations for New York vehicles. Likewise, owner vehicles listed in New York will no longer be available. Trips already in progress in NY will not be affected by this change.

New York City has become a battleground for taxi, car-sharing, and ride-sharing applications. Just a few weeks ago, the CEOs of ride-sharing service SideCar and taxi-hailing app Hailo slugged it out onstage about New York’s rigid regulations.

Broken down car warning sign via SteveWoods/Shutterstock

Exciting public-data-search startup Enigma has won TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Battlefield amid strong competition.

New York-based Enigma just launched yesterday. It likes to peg itself as “Google for public data.” It charges a subscription to let organizations search public data much easier than they ever could before. By ‘public data’, the company means any data that’s open to public record — anything from home purchase transactions to government spending contracts to patent and SEC filings — that hasn’t been easily accessible to date.

Enigma has used a combination of web crawling and outreach to government agencies to pull together a database of billions of public records across more than 100,000 datasets.

“Currently, the world of public data is much like the world that existed on the Internet before search engines became available in the 1990s,” Enigma co-founder Marc DaCosta told VentureBeat yesterday. “Because there is no infrastructure to search and discover public data, huge sources of real important insight and knowledge about how companies, people, and places interact in the world is hidden from view.”

Engima faced stiff competition in Startup Battlefield finals. Here were the other six finalists from it had to compete with:

Floored

Floored offers a surprisingly awesome service: 3D real-estate modeling.

Floored helps businesses map commercial spaces in 3D by piecing together photography and computer models. You can add furniture to uncompleted spaces to get a better feel for what the place would look like for your company.

One recent project the company tackled was modeling floors of 1 World Trade Center, which hasn’t been completed yet. So it’s a good way to get a  feel for a potential office space you want to move into or a home you might want to purchase.

Glide

Glide is a fun new service that lets you stream video of yourself from iOS and Android phones. It also lets you watch recorded video calls later that are stored in the cloud.

Video chats can be one-on-one or with groups.

Handle

Handle offers a “priority engine” that claims to raise the bar on productivity with tools that combat email inbox overload and help you organize your time wisely.

“This is not just about getting your email down to zero,” Handle CEO Shawn Carolan told VentureBeat. “This is about finding and keeping your priorities straight and spending time on the things that matter. We all have one life to live one day at a time. There is work and there is your personal life, and all of your priorities need to be considered in one place to make decisions.”

HealthyOut

HealthyOut has iPhone and Android apps that helps users eat better or lose weight.

First you choose your preferences for what kinds of food you like. Then HealthyOut combs through many food menus in New York City and makes healthy selections that can be delivered to you Monday through Friday, becoming a personal nutritionist of sorts.

SupplyShift

SupplyShift offers a service to companies that helps manage supplier communications and gives you a better understanding of your supply chain’s environmental impact.

“The market situation changed radically in the last three years, and sustainability is becoming a key part of corporate strategy, but corporations and the government do not have the tools to address that need,” SupplyShift CEO Alexander Gershenson told TechCrunch. “SupplyShift takes care of that.”

Zenefits

Zenefits is a free service that claims to help small businesses with employee benefits and payroll.

For example, when a small business hires a new employee, Zenefits says it will do the following things:

• Get the employee to sign their agreements online.
• Collect the employee’s personal, bank, and tax info.
• Add the employee to your payroll and benefits.
• Fill out, file, and store everything online.

Zenefits also helps with the paperwork of letting employees go and helps employees with life events like getting married or having children. The service makes money by taking commissions from insurance companies that it gets quotes from.

Top photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Transportation startups are a hot thing now, with Uber, Hailo, SideCar, Lyft, and others getting a lot of attention and controversy. But this space is a battleground with regulators attempting to stop innovation and some startups getting more favorable treatment than others.

The CEOs of ride-sharing service SideCar and taxi-hailing app Hailo showed that tension in a combative panel today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

SideCar CEO Sunil Paul (pictured, right) took a lot of shots throughout the conversation. His biggest target was New York City’s Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). He said the TLC is using its power to protect taxis and apps that coordinate with the industry like Hailo and Uber.

“The TLC protects the taxi industry, and I don’t think anyone can deny that fact,” Paul said. “SideCar driver shifts are voluntarily and payment is voluntary. It is the regulation of taxis that is an illegal restraint of trade.”

Paul is understandably frustrated. This past weekend, New York City police targeted SideCar drivers in a sting operation. In a blog post, the company wrote that a SideCar driver named Sandra was interrogated by police and her new car was impounded.

“People are being treated like criminals for doing something that might threaten the taxi industry,” Paul said. “Sharing is not a crime. We want to make sharing possible in New York.”

By comparison, Hailo and Uber have just received approval from the TLC to operate e-hailing taxi services in NYC. With a few taps on your smartphone, you can now have a taxi come pick you up wherever you are in the city.

Hailo CEO Jay Bregman said he was happy about the development. He took the jabs from Paul quietly but finally responded when he’d had enough. Bregman said his company was part of a “broadening” taxi industry that has begun to innovate.

He said his service had paid out “millions” to taxi drivers in cities where Hailo already operates. He praised taxi drivers for embracing innovation. Paul said he didn’t have a problem with drivers, but with governments.

“Taxi drivers are great, but they are protected by a monopoly,” Paul said.

Hailo has only been operating in cities around the world for 14 months, so Bregman also said he was pleased that it only took that amount of time before the TLC approved his service.

“You can be disruptive without being abrasive,” Bregman said.

Paul shrugged off Bregman’s comment, saying, “If you want to be disruptive, you have to be willing to piss people off.”

At the end of the panel, the two did eventually hug, but it’s understandable why they are so at odds at the moment.

Check out the conversation in full below:

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

New York City police are starting to get more tech savvy. Recently, the NYPD created a task force to stop the theft of iOS devices and created a strict social media policy for cops.

Now the NYPD is taking another step toward tech relevancy by distributing customized Android phones to police officers, the New York Times reports. These phones can’t make or receive calls, but they can access criminal records and all sorts of other data, including people with open warrants, arrest records, apartments with high incident reports, registered gun owners, DMV records, and criminal mug shots.

Having access to police records on the go can help officers make better decisions when they are patrolling and can help them identify suspects easier. Officer Tom Donaldson, for example, sometimes canvasses the Lincoln Houses on Park Avenue and uses records on his phone to decide where he should be strolling.

“You can see that in this one 14-story building there are thousands and thousands of records,” Officer Donaldson told the Times. “If I see that in the last month, there have been six arrests on the seventh floor for drug trafficking, maybe I want to hang out on the seventh floor for a while.”

Starting with a rollout last summer, about 400 of these phones have been given to police officers to date. The phones are much easier to use than the laptops that are installed in 2,500 patrol cars around the city. Internet access on these laptops can be sluggish, and officers have to use multiple passwords to access different databases. Plus, the phones are usually more helpful than talking with a dispatcher.

“Our dispatcher will tell us if they have a warrant or not but it’s a simple yes or no answer,” said Officer Donaldson said. “I don’t know if the guy is wanted for murder or for not paying a parking summons. We rarely know. Now we know.”

NYPD image via Dave Hosford/Flickr

This is the latest in a series of VentureBeat stories about startup culture. This week, our reporter spent time with ZocDoc in New York, a stark contrast to several San Francisco startups we’ve covered.

New York City health startup ZocDoc is best known for helping Americans easily book doctor appointments online. That simple premise helps attract more than 2.5 million unique visitors to ZocDoc’s web and mobile apps each month.

ZocDoc’s appointment booking service (and extras like online check-in) is in more than 35 major metropolitan areas, and it covers 40 percent of the U.S. population. It doesn’t reveal its number of bookings or the number of doctors using the service, but a cursory look at listings in cities like Chicago or Boston shows hundreds of medical professionals, who each pay $300 a month to use ZocDoc.

But there’s a lot more happening inside ZocDoc that’s helping the company push forward. ZocDoc promotes a specific culture to attract the best employees and enable those workers to do their jobs effectively.

In the picture below, you can see the seven values ZocDoc focuses on promoting: “patients first, great people, speak up, own it, us before me, work hard, make work fun.”

“Health care is the biggest problem facing our generation,” CEO and founder Cyrus Massoumi told me. “To change that is very ambitious. … To accomplish it, we try to have ‘humble ambition’ or ‘hum-bition.’ And that permeates everything we do.”

After touring the office and talking with several ZocDoc employees, including Massoumi, I noticed a few ways that ZocDoc is creatively approaching problems like growing pains and subordinate employees. Here’s what I took away from the visit.

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

The values ZocDoc emphasizes.

Great people

Recruiting has become one of ZocDoc’s the most pressing issues. ZocDoc has more than 400 employees in offices in New York, Phoenix, and India, and it plans to keep hiring like crazy to keep on growing. On top of revenue ZocDoc generates from its customers (doctors), it’s also tapping the $95 million in funding it has raised from DST Global, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, and others to keep the engines pumping. Its newest office is in the Phoenix area and the company claims it will hire more than 60 more people for that office alone before the end of 2013.

ZocDoc’s space in New York has gotten crowded enough that employees are now flooding over into the fourth floor of its SoHo-based building. (It also shares that building with other major NYC startups Foursquare and Thrillist.)

“We’ve been in the same space for three years, and we started out with a quarter of this floor,” Karsten Vagner, ZocDoc’s director of people and its third employee, told me.

A hallway in the New York ZocDoc office contains a row of seven rooms, all dedicated for interviewing new employees in person, by phone, or via Skype. When I viewed the office, the rooms were nearly empty, but multiple employees said that was unusual and on the majority of weekdays applicants fill most or all of the rooms.

Massoumi says he chiefly looks for people that will care about fostering the community of his workers, and he’s willing to look anywhere for these employees.

He uses a story to show how serious is about this. Early in ZocDoc’s history — about three years ago — he was visiting Chicago for business. At a pizza restaurant, Massoumi liked the waitress that was helping his group so much that he asked her to interview with ZocDoc. Massoumi said that she put customers first and dealt with their problems more effectively than most waitresses he’d ever seen, so he had to see if she’d come work for the company as its office manager.

“We hire for intrinsics over experience,” Massoumi said. “We need them to share our values more than anything else. … Every employee we have is better than the average employee.”

She is still ZocDoc’s office manager in New York.

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Mike from Monsters Inc. with a ZocDoc hat.

Speak up

Clearly, ZocDoc is trying hard to recruit and fill a lot of key roles. But to get those employees on board, Massoumi believes you have to give those recruits an unusual incentive: the freedom to tell bosses — sometimes loudly — that they are wrong.

“If you want the best people, you have empower them to speak their minds,” Massoumi said. “You can speak your mind here without your job being in jeopardy.”

The call to “speak up” is so prominent that people are criticized if they ever admit later to thinking another approach would have been better but did not say anything.

“Part of your job is to say what’s wrong,” Vagner said. “I don’t want people on my team who just nod along.”

Additionally, employees are able to book time with Massoumi to discuss issues or ideas. That’s made his schedule a bit hellish (it took more than two weeks for me to get him on the phone), but he cares about his employees’ thoughts enough that he’d rather be busy than not have the time to talk to them. “Office hours” sessions vary between 15 minutes up to two hours.

Massoumi also has an initiative to do lunch once a week with the newest New York employees. “I need to know every member of my team,” Massoumi said.

Staying lean

While employees speak their minds about things, something that they don’t question is the operation’s leanness. Even with the $95 million in funding, the company still acts like an early-stage startup.

ZocDoc makes employees share hotel rooms, pushes the boundaries of its office spaces, and only buys used furniture.

Massoumi illustrates this by telling me about the chair he has for guests in his office. The chair’s nickname is “Bouncy” and has a broken piece that makes it sink when people sit down in it.

“It’s been broken for four years,” Massoumi said. “It used to surprise people, but I think they’ve come to appreciate it.”

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Diet Coke cans stacked in a hallway.

Soda love

Outside of pushing values, another thing that seems to be helping fuel ZocDoc’s growth is the staff’s love of soda. Like many startups, caffeine helps drive employees who work long hours, but there seems to be a special affinity for the stuff; it’s a guilty pleasure among employees driven to make other people’s lives more healthy.

While water and coffee are the most popular employee drinks, the office is also well stocked on soda. When I toured the office, empty Diet Coke cans were stacked at the end of one hallway. I found it humorous that one of the most prominent health-tech startups consumes so much soda, and I pointed that out to Massoumi. (Admittedly, I’m a soda addict myself, so I wasn’t trying to judge.)

“We’re a health startup, I know, and we do our best to reflect a healthy lifestyle,” Massoumi said. “We do have one member of our exec team who drinks a lot of Diet Coke, but I haven’t had a drink of soda in 10 years.”

The company also offers beer and wine to employees on Fridays.

‘Unlimited vacation’

Finally, the last thing I took away from speaking with ZocDoc employees was the sense that they could actually take time off without getting a hard time from management. Startups have such a fierce mentality that taking time off can be a negative — and taking too much time off could get you fired.

“I think unlimited vacation is unusual, but it’s also valuable,” Massoumi said. “It taps into ownership. It’s our job at ZocDoc to improve health care in America, and our people understand that.”

ZocDoc head of communications Allison Braley took two-and-a-half week break in Sri Lanka when she started, senior PR manager Jessica Aptman just took a 10-day vacation to Taiwan, and Vagner said he recently took a two-week vacation to Fiji.

“I worked a lot to make sure everything was covered,” Vagner said. “There’s a clear expectation that you do your job and do it well. We believe taking time off doesn’t have to interfere with that.”

Check out more photos of ZocDoc’s office below.

All photos by Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Big data and analytics startup Sociocast recently shifted its focus from enterprises to small and medium-sized businesses, but the move has already paid off with it serving more than 700 million calls from its flagship Prediction API in just a month.

“One of the biggest challenges with targeting enterprise is that sales cycles are very long, and it was hard to get traction,” Sociocast CEO Albert Azout told VentureBeat. “But our new shift aligns better with the market. A lot of companies out there want smarter data now, and we can help with that.”

Sociocast’s Prediction API does exactly what you think it does — it helps companies make actionable predictions based on their data. Specifically, it can help give predictions in two categories: 1) Entities (number of users, devices, cookies, social media IDs, and so on) and 2) Clustering (grouping together various entities).

Azout said the majority of its customers use the API for advertising and audience targeting, but there are also businesses using it to serve media recommendations. Pricing starts at $39 per month for tiny developers and goes up to $4,999 per month for demanding big data users.

Sociocast announced last month that it had raised $1 million in new funding and would move its Prediction API to a self-service model tailored to small and medium-sized businesses. 42 new customers have been signed up since that time, and Azout expects the company will have 150 customers by the end of Q2. The company also plans to continue building out features on top of the Prediction API, including churn and anomaly detection.

“We’re one of the only prediction companies trying to convince developers to embed our solution into their products,” Azout said. “And the trajectory of the business is to eventually offer it as a virtual appliance behind the firewall.”

New York-based Sociocast was founded in 2010 and has attracted nearly $6 million in funding to date. Customers using the Prediction API include Quicken Loans, StyleCaster, Are You a Human, and FlxOne.

Fortune teller photo via Everett Collection/Shutterstock

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Ever had to collect thousands of applications and whittle them down to find the best hundred candidates? Universities and businesses do it all the time, and it’s not an easy task.

New York and Cleveland-based DecisionDesk wants to change that. The company takes the application and selection process into the cloud, promising to make the lives of administrators a lot less stressful. And it just raised $1.75 million in new funding to keep innovating.

Here’s how it used to work: Let’s say you are a music program for a major university. You get hundreds (or maybe thousands) of video auditions when students are applying to your program. Employees at the college have to review all of these materials to select the right candidates. But most of the software used to process these materials is on-premise, so the review process is not easy to manage among remote and traveling employees.

DecisionDesk skirts all of those conventions by streamlining the process and offering its software in the cloud, making it accessible from any browser and on mobile devices through HTML5. On the back-end, everything runs on Amazon Web Services. To date, the company has processed more than 56,000 applicants, more than 200,000 files, and about 100,000 reviews.

“This opportunity presented itself when we looked at the legacy providers in the market,” DecisionDesk CEO John Knific told VentureBeat. “Some of these services aren’t even online and require you to locally store content. People are still sending DVDs and cassette tapes to these programs.”

Not only does DecisionDesk’s software streamline the application process, but it also does advanced filtering. This way, if a candidate has a major red flag (like they don’t actually play an instrument), they can be taken out of the reviewing process faster.

“We’re allowing the entire application and decision-making process happen in one product,” Knific said. “There’s big savings in time and money.”

Knific said the average amount of time saved on each application is two hours. The company’s biggest clients have as many as 5,000 applicants for a single program, which means up to 10,000 hours can be saved with each batch of applicants.

DecisionDesk is already working with a number of universities and prestigious programs, including the University of Michigan, University of Southern California, Northwestern University, Carnegie Hall, and the Fulbright Scholars Program. But much like hot research startup Qualtrics, DecisionDesk is building its roots in academia and then plans to branch out to bigger companies.

“We’d like to disrupt other areas that focus on tryouts and auditions,” Knific said. “In theory, we could replace casting agencies. We’d also like to get into HR.”

To help with its mission of making the application process easier, the company has raised new funds, which come in two parts. DecisionDesk took $1 million in capital from angel investors in Ohio and New York, led by North Coast Angel Fund. DecisionDesk also scored a $750,000 loan from the state of Ohio, called an “Innovation Ohio Fund Loan.” Combined with $400,000 in prior seed funds, the company has raised $2.15 million in funding to date.

The new funding will go toward expanding its 15-employee team and working on with new products. The company says it is discussing future funding with several VC firms.

Check out the video below for more.

Square CEO and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey is already an incredibly successful entrepreneur and businessman. But he has more ambitions — including that he wants to be mayor of New York City one day.

“What I love about New York is the electricity I feel right away … there’s people everywhere … it’s chaos,” Dorsey said in a 60 Minutes interview last night. “It’s kind of like being caught in a car during a thunderstorm. So New York feels very much to me like that.”

On the segment, Dorsey also admitted a few other interesting tidbits about his life, including that he does not have a desk (he just carries an iPad around with him) and that he had a speech impediment when he was growing up.

Watch the full 60 Minutes segment below.

Jack Dorsey photo via david_shankbone/Flickr

Bitly CEO Peter Stern has resigned from the link-shortening startup to “pursue other interests,” according to a super short blog post from the company today.

Bitly used to be a relatively hot startup poised to own URL shortening and analytics associated with web links, but it has lost some steam in the past six months due to Twitter offering its own analytics and link shortening. Bitly launched more detailed “link insights” back in February to help show businesses and individuals if a link was doing particularly well in real time and show the “life” of a link. But moves like that clearly weren’t enough to keep Stern in his job.

“Peter has been a key leader and contributor to the company,” Bitly board member Sam Mandel said in a statement. “In particular he has been instrumental in transforming Bitly into a successful business while growing its unparalleled data set. We are very happy that he will remain a shareholder and supporter.”

New York-based Bitly has raised $28.5 million to date from the likes of O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, RRE Ventures, Khosla Ventures, AOL Ventures, and Betaworks. The company closed a $15 million round of funding back in July 2012.

How do you remake payphones for the modern age? That was the challenge New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a few months ago with the Reinvent Payphones initiative, which was meant to crowdsource ways to upgrade the city’s 11,000 payphones.

Now the entries are in, and the city has announced the five final prototypes, ranging from a beautiful reinvention of the traditional phone booth, to a sensor-equipped unit that can record environmental conditions.

While none of these designs will actually be used to replace the city’s payphones, they will serve to inspire what NYC actually adopts. “We thought the best way to get the most energy and best solutions is to approach the folks who are going to use it,” Rahul Merchant, head of NYC’s IT department, said at the prototype unveiling last night (via WNYC).

The prototypes were judged and given awards based on the following criteria:

• Connectivity: Ability to connect New Yorkers and enable communication, including for safety and emergency purposes.
• Creativity: Originality, innovation, and quality of idea.
• Visual Design: Including visual appeal and user experience
• Functionality: Flexibility, versatility, scalability, accessibility, and sustainability.
• Community Impact: Support of local residents, businesses, and cultural institutions.

The city will also announce a sixth prize, “Popular Choice,” based on votes from the Reinvent Payphones Facebook page. Voting ends at 5:00 p.m. Eastern on March 14, and the winner will be announced on March 15.

Best Creativity: Loop by FXFOWLE

My personal favorite design, Loop, morphs the traditional stand-up phone booth into something that’s multifunctional and unique, making it perfectly suited for city life.

The existing condition of the city-wide payphone system has created a latent opportunity to rethink the relationship between a more technologically-relevant, new payphone design and the city’s vibrant public space. The NYC Loop will serve as an access point to the latest technology while simultaneously supporting the public spaces that make NYC a unique place in which to live, visit and do business.

Best Visual Design: Beacon by Frog Design

Frog is a powerhouse design firm, so it’s no surprise that it ended up with the best-looking design.

Gently rising out of the sidewalk and topping out at nearly 12 feet, BEACON is a slender concrete and stainless steel structure enclosing a stack of indestructible LED matrix screens, similar to those found on Times Square billboards.

Best Connectivity: NYFi by Sage and Coombe Architects

More of a public information kiosk than a payphone, NYFi shows us how it may be more useful to consolidate services everyone uses today — buying metro cards, accessing information about local businesses, Wi-Fi — than replicating archaic technology.

Reinventing the Payphone is not only about a sleeker design or a digital display, it is about radically re-imagining a public amenity: how it will be used, and what it will provide.  Unlike today’s payphone, the NYFi is an interactive portal to public information, goods, and services, a hub for free wireless internet access, and an open infrastructure for future applications.

Best Community Impact (Tie):

NYC I/O by Control Group and Titan

This design aims to create a data network using the city’s cellphones while also adding new functionality like paying for parking tickets and metro cards.

By updating the payphone with a modern array of sensors and displays to create a foundational input/output system for an open, urban-scale computing platform, we can allow New York City to respond to and serve the people. Through open access to real time data and a distribution platform for community, civic, arts and commercial apps and messaging, we can create a safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable city.

Windchimes by NYU ITP, Cooper Union, Parsons

Another design that isn’t too constrained by the idea of a payphone, Windchimes is an interesting attempt to add more sensors throughout NYC.

Windchimes are environmental sensor stations that talk through payphones.  They can plug directly into existing technologies and communication infrastructure, making them low cost and immediately deployable. We imagined New York City’s existing 11,000 payphones as a distributed sensor network providing real-time and hyper-local records of the city’s rain levels, pollution, and other environmental conditions.

Best Functionality: Smart Sidewalks

by Syracuse University, UC Davis, Parsons, Rama Chorpash Design LLC, Cheng+Snyder

Why stop at the phone booth? Smart Sidewalks’ design is incredibly thin and extends right into the city’s sidewalks.

This proposal is driven by two competing aims: the desire to pack as much function into a single device as possible and the opposite urge: to reduce the literal and figurative footprint of the phone.

Streaming TV startup Aereo has expanded its coverage area to include parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania — the first major step in a larger rollout that will likely attract more consumers.

New York-based Aereo puts out HDTV broadcasts from major channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW, and others) on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. On top of watching channels on other devices, it offers a DVR feature so you can record up to 40 hours of video and watch it whenever you want. The service costs $1 per day, $8 per month, or $80 per year. Essentially, if you don’t have a TV but still want to watch broadcast stations as they airs, Aereo could be your friend.

The company announced back in January that it would be expanding to 22 new markets in 2013, including big cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Miami. But with today’s announcement, it looks like Aereo will still be focusing on New York and areas surrounding it in the short term.

To make sure New Yorkers and people in the NYC area know what Aereo can offer, the company will start a new advertising blitz. It promises to market its service on “NYC billboards, phone kiosks, and at key city transit points, including waterways, commuter trains, and PATH transit hubs.”

“Today, consumers are tethered to expensive and outdated technology that limits how, when, and where they can enjoy their own television programming,” Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia said in a statement. “Aereo’s technology now lets us provide simplicity, ease of use and rational pricing –- three things that have all but disappeared for the consumer. We believe that consumers deserve better and we’re committed to delivering on that promise.”

Aereo has raised $63 million to date from investors including Highland Capital Partners, IAC, First Round Capital, and High Line Venture Partners.

Check out the new coverage map below to see what counties Aereo now serves.

With blizzard Nemo bearing down on the East Coast, Mother Nature is showing once again that consumer technology is on her hit list.

Topping that list is Microsoft, which intended to show off the Surface Pro at a launch event in New York City today. Mother Nature, however, had other plans.

“Surface Pro launch activities in NYC have been cancelled due to weather; our best wishes for everyone impacted by the blizzard,” Microsoft said in a statement.

A similar fate befell Google in October, when Superstorm Sandy forced the company to cancel the press event for its Nexus 10 tablet and Nexus 4 smartphone.

So, does Mother Nature have it in for the gadget companies of the world? Probably not. But both the Google and Microsoft event do have something else in common — New York City. As the biggest city in the world, New York is an obvious target for big product unveilings, but it’s clearly also a target for rather inconvenient storms.

Perhaps Microsoft and Google should learn from Apple and host all their big events in California, far from the cold, damp mess known as the East Coast. They’d certainly have to cancel fewer events that way.

London-based taxi app Hailo confirmed today that investors pumped $30.6 million into the company. It has set its eyes on a New York City launch this quarter, but will have to face big names like Uber once there.

We reported in December that Hailo took on the second round of funding, valuing the company at $140 million. The round was, as reported, led by Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, with participation from Virgin founder and billionaire Richard Branson, and Japanese telecommunications provider KDDI. Hailo will also be launching soon in Tokyo.

The funding round sets up Hailo as a main competitor for Uber in New York City, where the company offers its town car service, as well as Uberx, a lower-priced “regular” cab service. Hailo also took on a $17 million round of funding in March from Accel Partners. At the time, Hailo chief executive Jay Bregman told VentureBeat that Uber “is a fantastic service for the one percent of people who can afford it.” But the new Uberx product may make for bigger competition in the New York market.

Bergman went on to explain that Hailo is much different than its competitors because it attempts to build a community out of its taxi cab drivers who support the app. While many apps are focus on the customer’s functionality, Hailo claims to put more emphasis on the drivers. It provides tools like communication with other cabbies, setting financial goals, and sharing traffic information with each other. A happy cabbie is a happy passenger?

Hailo brought on $20 million in funding prior to this round. Investors include Accel Partners, Wellington Partners, and Atomico Ventures. The company also brought on former Starbucks vice president Tom Barr to run its operations.

Yellow cab image via Shutterstock

Japanese electronics behemoth Sony has agreed to sell its New York City-based U.S. headquarters for $1.1 billion to a group of investors led by the Chetrit Group, Bloomberg reports.

Sony has struggled in recent years to make a dent in the electronics world like it used to, losing much ground to companies such as Samsung, Apple, and LG. Sony has lost ground in televisions and has yet to introduce its gaming console to succeed the PlayStation 3. (That could be announced as early as May.) On top of this, Sony has accrued losses the past four years and plans to slowly cut 10,000 jobs, so selling some assets seems like a decent idea.

“It makes sense for Sony, as it’s no longer a cash-rich company,” Keita Wakabayashi, an analyst at Mito Securities in Tokyo, told Bloomberg. “What matters is whether the company can use these proceeds to develop more attractive products.”

Sony expects the sale of the building to generate about $770 million, after transaction fees. The company, including units like Sony Music Entertainment, plans to stay in the building for up to three years after the sale is complete.

Sony building NYC via Christian Steen/Flickr

Google is bringing  Wi-Fi to the people of New York City — or at least some of them.

Echoing what its done with the area around its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, the search giant plans to infuse the area around its Chelsea offices with glorious and free Internet access. The coverage will extend from Gansevoort St. to 19th St., from 8th Ave. to the West Side Highway, Google announced.

The installation will be a big help not only to Google’s employees but also to the countless students, tourists, and average New Yorkers who pass through the area each day.

Google has been heavily pushing similar programs in New York City for a while now, having offered free Wi-Fi to  New York City subway stations as a part of its ongoing partnership with wireless hotspot provider Boingo.

The big question with the latest development, however, is where Google plans to take it next. Could Google Wi-Fi one day blanket the entirety of New York City? We can only hope so, and so, too, can the city’s mayor.

“New York is determined to become the world’s leading digital city, and universal access to high-speed Internet is one the core building blocks of that vision. Thanks to Google, free WiFi across this part of Chelsea takes us another step closer to that goal,”  Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement.

With more than 11,000 payphones that need to be replaced by October 2014, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is tapping into the local tech community to come up with radical new payphone ideas.

Today at the New York Tech Meetup, NYC’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot announced Reinvent Payphones, an initiative to collect virtual and physical prototypes for new payphones from the public.

“We want to invite your prototypes and help build something that could potentially impact the future of payphone infrastructure in NYC,” Haot said.

“We need to replace them, reinvent them, bring these things into the 21st century,” Bloomberg said in a cheeky pre-recorded video conversation with Haot.

In a world increasingly dominated by smartphones and tablets, it’s certainly easy to ignore the lowly payphone. But with such massive infrastructure already in place for NYC’s payphones, they’re also ripe for a complete revamp.

We’ve already seen the city experiment with touchscreens and Wi-Fi hotspots in payphones, but it seems the Mayor’s office is looking for even crazier ideas. “It doesn’t even have to look like a payphone,” Haot noted.

The city will choose up to 15 prototypes to be shown off at a Demo Day on March 5, 2013. The winner will be selected by a panel of judges, including Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, DoSomething CEO Nancy Lublin, Startup Box CEO Majora Carter, 3rd Ward CEO Jason Goodman, and Beth Novek, founder of the White House Open Government Initiative.

“[Payphones are] technologically the most valuable asset we have in the city, and it’d be wrong of us to replace one payphone with just another payphone,” said NYC’s chief information and innovation officer Rahul Merchant at the tech meetup.

Let’s face it: If you’re not a professional event planner, planning a party or event for a large group of coworkers or friends is not a fun or easy task. If you need catering, a photographer, or a DJ, get ready to contact lots of companies and rip your hair out because people aren’t getting back to you or charging too much.

Enter Fiestah, an online marketplace that promises to connect New York City event planners and all kinds of vendors in a much easier manner than what’s described above. The event planner simply signs into Fiestah’s dashboard, inputs what “items” they need for the event, and then vendors place bids to fill in those needs. If you’re a vendor — such as a baker, DJ, photographer, caterer, food truck, or personal chef — you can look through events in the area and make bids. Fiestah generates revenue by taking a 10 percent cut of each transaction.

One other thing Fiestah provides for both parties: The payment is held in escrow until the vendor completes its task, meaning both sides need to get what they want first. So if a DJ charges $1,000 for an event, Fiestah deposits $900 into the account of the DJ once the event is over.

Fiestah chief operating officer Nurul Yahya (pictured above in the pink shirt) said that she came up with the idea for the startup a few years back. “I had another company prior to this making wedding invitations part time,” Yahya said. “Once I did one wedding, I kept getting more requests. When I was working with these brides, I realized they had a hard time finding a DJ and getting vendors. It was difficult for brides to find companies that would fit their budgets.”

So Yahya teamed up with two friends to found Fiestah — CEO Stefanos Missailidis and chief technology officer Marvin Tam. All three have the pedigree to get a business off the ground. Yahya formerly worked for Goldman Sachs, Accenture, and Barclays in program management, and Missailidis was an IT consultant for Accenture. Tam’s story is a bit crazier — he quit his job as a front-end engineer at Jetsetter to work on Fiestah’s tech full-time and, in turn, he had to move back to his home country of Malaysia because he no longer had a work visa. (Yahya said they hope to get Tam back in New York “soon.”)

Yahya and her co-founders pitched the idea at New York’s Startup Weekend in Nov. 2011, and while it didn’t win, Yahya said there was a lot of positive feedback. She said audience members came up to her and said they wanted to use the service.

And so, the Fiestah team has been hard at work building out the marketplace, introducing themselves to lots of New York businesses, and trying to get traction. The next thing on the company’s long to-do list is to create full merchant profiles with the ability to rate vendors some time in the next few months. And, as it might not surprise startup-world watchers, the next city Fiestah plans to bring its marketplace to is San Francisco.

My first exposure to Fiestah was on the “Startup Bus,” where I met 14 startups that were trying their hand at pitching investors and meeting other young companies in Montreal. Fiestah was one of the most promising startups out of that batch because it serves a clear purpose and could easily work in big cities all over the country.

New York-based Fiestah was founded in February and is currently self-funded. The team said it is in contact with several angel investors and hopes to secure seed funding early next year.

Photo credits: Fiestah

For AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, there’s no place more interesting than New York City.

“We always hear that New York is the city that never sleeps, and if you want to know what you’re doing when you’re not sleeping, come look at our traffic and I’ll tell you what you’re doing, “Stephenson said at a breakfast event this morning sponsored by the Association for a Better New York.

While the rise of the smartphone has meant more cash and customers for AT&T, it’s also meant a lot more network traffic, and in turn, big engineering challenges. This has been especially true for New York City, which Stephenson says has challenged AT&T’s network in unprecedented ways.

“There is an unbelievable concentration of very sophisticated mobile data users in this city,” Stephenson said.

The really interesting thing about that concentration, however, is that it’s mostly vertical. Most New Yorkers live in apartment buildings, after all.

Not only has that forced AT&T to rethink the way it builds its network in the city, but it’s also allowed it to take what it’s learned in New York and apply it to urban areas in China and India.

“This city is a living laboratory for telecom engineers,” Stephenson said.

At the core of AT&T’s future network buildouts are things like Distributed Antenna systems, which are installed inside buildings in an effort to improve and extend connectivity. AT&T plans to spend $14 billion building out its network over the next three years. It’s no small undertaking, but Stephenson is convinced that it will be worth it.

“Wireless networks will be the railroads and highways of the digital age,” he said.

Photo: Ricardo Bilton/VentureBeat

Updated at 10:39 am PT with a response from Loosecubes.

Sad news today in the New York City startup scene: Brooklyn’s Loosecubes will shut down on Friday, the company said in a blog post.

Loosecubes was built up as a “community marketplace for workspaces.” If people had open desks or space in their office, they could list it for other people in need of a place to work. Unfortunately, it appears this wasn’t a service people were clamoring for.

The announcement is somewhat surprising, especially in light of Loosecubes raising $7.8 million in June from New Enterprise Associates and Revolution Ventures. Including seed funds, the company raised about $9 million total.

Read the full blog post announcing the departure below:

The past two and a half years have been such an incredible journey. From a team of two to an incredible company of 16. From a big idea to a community of 25,000+ Loosecubers in over 60 countries around the world. And from a single coworking space to thousands of hosts, from Stockholm to San Diego, who have opened their work environments and minds to a better way of working.

We’ve been amazed to see how the Loosecubes community has grown and embraced a new attitude toward the workplace and the people they work around. We’ve watched Loosecubers launch organic food companies together, hire each other, and attend each others’ weddings. It has been incredible to see just how many partnerships, businesses, and friendships have been formed in our midst.

We’ve learned so much along the way, and are so appreciative of all who have lent their time, feedback, and expertise to making Loosecubes a success. We’re humbled to have had even a small impact on peoples’ ability to do great work.

What this means for our members and hosts:

• Friday, November 16th will be the last day that we will honor reservations booked through Loosecubes.
• Loosecubes reservations booked for any date after November 16th have been cancelled.
• After November 16th, members and hosts will no longer be able to log-in and access our site.
• Member confidentiality is of the utmost importance to us. Rest assured that we would never share or sell your information without your permission.

If you have any questions, please contact hi@loosecubes.com and we’ll do our best to get back to you as soon as possible.

Thank you to all of our members, hosts, colleagues and friends who have spent their workdays with us and supported us along the way.

Keep work loose,
Campbell, Anna and the Loosecubes Team

Anna Thomas, Loosecube’s Chief Happiness Officer, declined to give us more info about why the company shut down so soon after receiving its latest round of funding.

“The information regarding the shutdown on our website and blog is what’s currently available,” Thomas told us via email. “We aren’t speaking with the press at this time, but will certainly follow-up with you directly if we share additional information.”

Empty office photo via Wendt Commons/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular blogging service Tumblr has updated its iPhone app to offer a redesigned dashboard, faster posting, and more detailed notifications.

In June, Tumblr took its first steps toward making the iPhone app work well. Today’s refresh is faster and more responsive than the old version. Tumblr software engineer Bryan Irace describes the app as “completely native,” which is reminiscent of Facebook’s decision to move from an HTML5-heavy mobile app to a mostly native app that worked much better.

In the iTunes store, Tumblr highlights the following additions to the iPhone app:

• Completely redesigned Dashboard — bigger photos and faster post loading.
• Spiffy new notification previews — see exactly which posts were liked, reblogged, or replied to!
• New blog screens with blog portraits and descriptions.
• GIFs play automatically on your Dashboard! Slide your finger across to view frame by frame.
• New gestures — swipe right on any screen to go back to the previous view; long tap photos, links, tags, and post headers for more options.

About a month ago, Tumblr also released an iOS app called Photoset for a single purpose — making and sharing sets of photos.

Unfortunately, Tumblr still hasn’t created a native iPad app yet. Let’s hope that will come next.

Photo credit: Tumblr

Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on the Eastern Seaboard as I write this. It’s got New York City right in front of it.

The National Weather Service is forecasting torrential rains, power outages, and widespread flooding. The storm will pick up this evening, and vent with full fury beginning tomorrow morning. The New York City transit is preparing to shut down.

Here’s why “Frankenstorm,” as residents are calling it, is not flustering New York City’s tech entrepreneurs.

In the past, extreme weather conditions like these have halted business: Mom-and-Pop stores close their doors, and large corporations issue warnings to employees to stay at home. However, through the adoption of cloud-based management systems, social enterprise tools and robust servers, tech founders are finding ways to surge ahead.

The vibe in the city is a mixture of anxious and couldn’t-care-less,” said Kathryn Minshew, cofounder of the digital media startup geared toward professional women, The Daily Muse. “A lot of people who’d previously experienced Hurricane Irene were very lackadaisical up until today, but are now starting to take this more seriously.”

With competitors down, it’s a boost in business

For H.Bloom, the flower delivery startup, these “fire drills” as cofounder Sonu Panda refers to hurricanes Irene and Sandy, are par for the course.

Panda (on the right, featured with cofounder Bryan Burkhart), who is currently in Manhattan preparing the disaster plan, needs to balance safety with the company’s customer satisfaction guarantee.

“We’re not a digital media startup where everyone can just work from home until the whole thing blows over,” he said. Although many of the operations staff will remain at home, for those that are engaged in the processing, design, loading and delivery of the flowers, it’s business as usual.

By leveraging the latest cloud-based, geo-location technologies to monitor the weather and the movement of trucks up and down the coast, the company will continue to deliver for as long as it can, far surpassing expectations. If a shipment of flowers cannot be delivered, its customer relationship management (CRM) system will automatically notify customers to expect a delay.

“During Hurricane Irene, we were delivering when the U.S. postal service was shut down,” said Panda.

If anything, the storm is a marketing boost for the startup, and an opportunity to showcase its technological prowess.

Hooray! More time to code

For small teams, it’s an opportunity to hunker down and devote time to product. “We’re using this time to sneak in a few extra hours of productivity when no-one is looking,” said cofounder Jana Trantow of JoinFun.

For companies based in Brooklyn, an evacuation zone, technical types are already congregating in the nearest safe haven.

“Three of our engineers live together and plan to work for the next three days, iterating on any feedback we receive,” said Reuben Doetsch, cofounder of Brooklyn-based startup, Sportaneous. To prepare for the storm, Doetsh told me he bought them all the essentials: “bedding, flashlights, and a generator so we can still code.”

With face-to-face meetings cancelled, entrepreneurs view this as an opportunity to get things done.

“We actually built our office to be a lot like an apartment, so myself and a few others are crashing there for a couple of days,” recalled Jason L. Baptiste, CEO of New York startup, OnSwipe. “I see the hurricane as an opportunity to be heads down and get a lot of work done over the next couple of days.”

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, a handful of startups went the extra mile by opening offices in perpetually sunny locations. ZocDoc, the New York-based health tech company, opened an office in Pheonix to be geographically isolated and avoid power disruptions.

They have a “business as usual” disaster plan

Not ready to open a second office on the West Coast? New York’s most well-prepared entrepreneurs from startups like Mirror, a Flatiron-based social discovery tool, Tip or Skip, the mobile shopping game, and OMG Foodie shared their finely-tuned disaster relief plans:

• Re-route servers: According to reports, power outages are to be expected! For the tech entrepreneurs that have experienced those dreaded Amazon outages (last week, Reddit, Foursquare and others were down last week due to a performance problem in Northern Virginia), it’s always a smart contingency plan to roll over servers to the West Coast. “That way, at the very least, you’ll have a web presence,” said Doetsch.
• Set guidelines for work at home.  “Productivity matters at every business, especially startups.  If our team has power, they will be working,” said Daniel Mattio, cofounder of Mirror. Mattio plans to remain in the office during the storm to coordinate workflow — he told me that during Hurricane Irene, he communicated with his Pennsylvania-based CTO on Skype (“I was watching his hotel room service get delivered while Irene was raging in the background on my end”) and asked for updates from the staff via GroupMe every three hours.
• Charge your devices and buy a few generators: “We hope to utilize backup generators and tether off our phone as a worse case scenario,” said Gary Reloj, CEO of OMG Foodie. ”I’m home charging every single device I have,” added Julie Fredrickson, CEO of Manhattan-based PlayAPI, who emailed me while stuck on a checkout line at Whole Foods.
• Stock up on food! ”Myself, I’ve stocked up on gallons of water, Korean ramen, and Mac & Cheese,” Reloj advised. The team is finalizing its three-day work plan at the office with a hard-stop at 5pm to ensure that everyone can get home before the MTA shuts down at 7pm ET. Just hours ago, the office of the Manhattan Borough President issued a warning to New Yorkers to purchase plenty of bottled water, granola bars, medications, a first-aid kit, pet care, child care, and other non-perishable food stuffs. Not a native New Yorker? Expect the unexpected. Peter Shankman, founder of HARO, made a food-run to ensure his staff wouldn’t starve. “I’m prepared for Sandy doesn’t mean I have take-out menus. Go shopping tonight and give the delivery guys a break so they don’t have to deliver tomorrow in a hurricane,” he said.

Cancelled tech events

• The Google Android Kick-off Event: As we reported this weekend, Google had planned Monday’s event in an evacuation zone. Learn more here.
• D: Dive Into Mobile: The conference, organized by tech blog AllThingsD, has been postponed until further notice. The conference hotel, the Ritz Carlton, is giving full refunds and waiving cancellation fees.
• The Big Apple Smackdown: VentureBeat’s own Ping Pong and networking event has also been cancelled until the storm blows over.

New Yorkers, you are nothing if not resilient!

We are updating this list as we learn more. 

Top image via Shutterstock

Believe it or not, this week was a win for Microsoft. It released Windows 8 to a huge audience, blowing Apple’s iPad announcements out of the water — quite the undertaking.

Just in case you missed them, we’ve included two of our favorite Windows 8 stories below. And don’t worry, we’ve got something for those of you a little sick of those jewel-toned windows as well.

Should we leave you craving for more awesome tech tales (try not to get drool on your keyboard, laptops are expensive), our Editor’s Picks tag is happy to serve.

Now, let’s get on to the stories you need to read:

Windows 8 stuns, amazes, and sometimes lets us down (review)

It seems like ages ago when Microsoft simultaneously dazzled and puzzled the hell out of the public when it showed off Windows 8 for the first time in June 2011. Since then, we’ve seen Windows 8 evolve and slowly change perceptions about how it works and what devices it’s meant for. Finally, the OS is now available for purchase.

10 New York City startups we’re crazy about

VentureBeat’s been taking a close look at the New York City startup scene. You’ve seen our top New York City technology influencers, but we also want to spotlight the top 10 most interesting startups the city has to offer.

Tips and tricks for getting started with Windows 8

You’ve read all the pre-release coverage and maybe a few reviews, and you’ve decided to take the plunge into Windows 8. You’ve got a freshly upgraded (or new) machine, and that Metro interface is just taunting you with its fancy tiles while you’re struggling to find all the options you’re used to. You click on Internet Explorer and everything looks different. Perhaps you start to wonder how you’re going to survive without a Start button.

How three Dubliners created F.ounders, a ‘Davos for geeks’

You don’t often find U2′s Bono, economist Larry Summers, and Wael Gnomin, the Google marketeer whose Facebook page helped spark the Egyptian revolution, at the same event. You certainly don’t find them being sent on a pub crawl around Dublin. But that’s what happens at F.ounders, an invitation-only gathering of the founders of 150 of the world’s top tech companies and other luminaries.

Game developers say iPad mini will be good for gaming

Game industry executives say that the iPad mini will be good for gaming because it expands the audience to new kinds of players and introduces a device that may be more comfortable in the hands of gamers. By and large, the iPad mini fits into purses and man-bags. That will help it reach a broader audience.

Top image via Shutterstock, Windows 8 images via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat, New York City image via Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat, iPad image via Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

VentureBeat’s been taking a close look at the New York City startup scene. You’ve seen our top New York City technology influencers, but we also want to spotlight the top 10 most interesting startups the city has to offer.

We wanted to look beyond well-established names like Foursquare and Tumblr to find some lesser known startups that VentureBeat’s New York City crew — national editor Devindra Hardawar, cloud lead Sean Ludwig, and contributor Ricardo Bilton —  find especially exciting.

In particular, we wanted to choose startups pursuing radically different things than Silicon Valley and other tech hubs. These picks are uniquely New York in many ways.

VentureBeat has had a New York City office for a while already, but now that our editor-in-chief Matt Marshall is settled in the city, we’re officially launching our East Coast headquarters this week with a private party. If you want to snag an invite, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, then send a tweet to the @VentureBeat Twitter account with the hashtag #vblaunch telling us why you should be there. We’ll choose five winners on the morning of October 24.

Without further ado, here are our top 10:

33Across

It’s hard to make sense of everything happening across the social web — especially for brands and publishers. 33Across’s Brand Graph offers a suite of tools and technology to help major brands, including Fox, Time, and MTV, better push their products and content across social media. The company also bought Tynt earlier this year to offer publishers a better way to track how their content is shared.

“Social is transforming the world. Publishers need to understand the data, actions, and graph around their readers … to understand how all of the data is being shared,” 33Across chief executive Eric Wheeler told us in January.

33Across recently raised $13.1 million in a third round of funding, bringing its total to more than $26 million. Investors include First Round Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Pelion Venture Partners.

By approaching the social web as a “big data” problem, 33Across is tapping into what’s truly meaningful about social media.

Chartbeat

Chartbeat provides publishers and websites with real-time analytics that tell them how popular content is right now. Sites can use this wealth of info to take action like rearrange front-page content, push popular stories to other networks, and more. Sites owned by The New York Times, Starbucks, and the United States Government use the service. (VentureBeat does as well!)

“The big goal is to make everyone feel like a data scientist,” Lauryn Bennett, Chartbeat’s head of brand, told us in April when Chartbeat redesigned. “We want to make sure the people on the front lines of these sites feel like they can understand, react, and predict how to capitalize on their traffic.”

Chartbeat was incubated at Betaworks, which also has its hands in startups like Digg, Bitly, Rap Genius, and Livestar. The company has raised around $13.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Index Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and others. With that backing, we expect big things.

Codecademy

With coders in great demand nowadays, lots of people are scrambling to learn the esoteric art of programming. And that’s where New York-based Codecademy steps in. Launched in 2011, Codecademy helps users learn programming languages like Python, Javascript, and Ruby while motivating them with badges and rewards. It’s the sort of learning only the Internet can enable.

And for co-founder Zach Sims, Codecademy represents the first time programming has been completely democratized.

“It’s available to anyone with a computer and it’s easy to follow. We think creating a new generation of programmers will help to raise employment and the standard of living for those individuals. It’s preparing the world for the future,” Sims told VentureBeat last year.

That’s a compelling argument not only for those who have used Codecademy, but also for those who have opted to invest in it. So far, the company has raised $12.5 million, which is reason enough to suspect that there’s something to its business model.

Kickstarter

If you’ve heard the term crowdfunding, you have Kickstarter to thank for it. Founded in 2009, the site started off as a funding platform for creative projects. But in the past year, we’ve seen several Kickstarter projects raise millions on the service — like the Pebble E-Ink smart watch and the Ouya Android game console — all without giving up any equity to investors. The crowdfunding model is great for tinkerers, but it’s also a fundamental shift for consumers, who can now have a closer relationship with the products they buy. (For some people, funding Kickstarter projects is practically an addiction.)

Kickstarter raised $10 million in funding last year from Union Square Ventures, Zach Klein, Caterina Fake, and others.

Learnvest

For too long, financial planning has been something reserved for the rich. Learnvest is aiming to change all of that with an online service that helps you manage money, as well as subscription plans that give you access to real life Certified Financial Planners. It’s not just another Mint.com — Learnvest connects to your financial accounts to help you keep track of spending, but it also offers helpful visualizations and an easy way to track cash purchases as well. And if you sign up for a premium account, you’ll have a real person holding you accountable.

“I just want to make financial planning really consumable — right now it’s not a consumer product,” Alexa Von Tobel, LearnVest’s founder and CEO, told VentureBeat in an interview in September.

LearnVest has raised around $25 million from Accel Partners, Rose Tech Ventures, Richmond Management, and others.

MakerBot

Born and bred in Brooklyn, MakerBot has established itself as one of the coolest, most interesting companies in 3D printing today.

3D printing is poised to completely shift the way we both consume and create. Instead of buying their kids toys, for example, parents can design and print them in their own homes. 3D printing may also change the way hardware stores like Home Depot do business. After all, what’s the point of maintaining inventory when stores can just print out parts when customers come in and request them?

Fresh off the launch of its latest 3D printer, the Replicator 2, Makerbot’s biggest challenge nowadays is not only making its devices more powerful, but cutting their prices as well. So far, however, the company is focused on the former.

“Before we make 3D printing cheap, we have to make it excellent,” Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis said in September. So far, the company has raised $10 million from Foundry Group, Bezos Expeditions, and others.

An affable visionary, Pettis rose to mainstream stardom last month when he and the Replicator were featured on the cover of Wired. The magazine’s take: The Replicator 2 will change the world.

NumberFire

Love fantasy sports? Meet NumberFire, the startup that uses “big data” to help its users dominate their fantasy sports leagues. The service, led by CEO Nik Bonaddio, provides statistics and recommendations about which players they should have on their teams. At the beginning of this year’s football season, Bonaddio said NumberFire’s revenue was up 800 percent and users up 300 percent year-over-year.

“We generate new recommendations on a daily basis and send them to your inbox,” Bonaddio told us in September. “Whether it’s adding players, dropping players, or initiating trades, you’re covered.”

Bonaddio, a winner of $100,000 on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, used earnings from that show to start NumberFire, and he likes to joke that Regis Philbin was his angel investor. On top of Bonaddio’s money, the company has also raised $650,000 from RRE Ventures, TechStars’ David Tisch, and Pennyblack’s Eliot Durbin.

Thrillist

Few startups nowadays are as tied to New York  as Thrillist.

Founded in 2004, Thrillist began as a small email newsletter tailored to urban males. Today, it generates over $40 million a year and reaches five million people each day.

Business development vice president Shane Rahmani told VentureBeat earlier this year that at the core of this growth is Thrillist’s no-compromise editorial strategy.

“We’ve always had a focus on building a really strong voice and connecting commerce and editorial content. The guys we speak to are an elusive, affluent demographic, and their BS detector is finely tuned,” he said in February.

Thrillist’s biggest news of the year came that same month, when CEO Ben Lerer announced the creation of Thrillist Media Group, a new parent company that combines Thrillist, Thrillist Rewards, and JackThreads. The company has raised $10 million so far from Oak Investment Partners, Lerer Ventures, and Pilot Group.

As with many of Thrillist’s moves, that one was done in an effort to further expand the company’s scope. This means more cash from brands, who are always eager to tap into the sort of cleanly defined male demographics that Thrillist resonates so strongly with.

Yext

Here’s a company doing some truly interesting things around a seemingly mundane topic: online listings for local businesses. Yext started out as a phone transcription service but quickly realized it could help out local businesses more by giving them one place to manage their online identity. Yext lets businesses make sure their information is accurate on 50 online publishers, including Yelp, MapQuest, and Bing.

“Starting a business is a scary proposition, but it’s even scarier to bet a company that’s doing $30 million in revenue this year — and growing — on a totally unproven business model,” Yext CEO and co-founder Howard Lerman told VentureBeat in an interview back in June. “To the credit of my team, they didn’t blink when I said we were doing something else. … I’m not even sure we recognized how crazy it was [at the time].”

Yext recently raised $27 million in a fifth round of funding, bringing its total to more than $65 million from Marker, CrunchFund, Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), WGI Group, and others.

ZocDoc

ZocDoc, a startup that helps people schedule doctor appointments online, first caught our eye back in 2008 when it attracted funding from power players including Khosla Ventures, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Since then, the company has been expanding quickly, attracting lots of capital to reach $95 million in funding, and adding killer new features like ZocDoc Check-In. The startup’s service is available in 31 U.S. metropolitan areas and will soon open a second office in Phoenix to help with customer service and sales.

“Of all the things you have to book in your life, health care services are arguably the most frustrating,” ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi told VentureBeat last year. “Our belief is that for all those people who book services like travel, hotels, or restaurants online, health care is the most important service and should have easy access.”

While ZocDoc’s mission is simple, Massoumi’s words echo loudly. Americans want health care to be easier to manage. ZocDoc can help you find doctors and rate your visits. This increases pressure on doctors to be good with patients and makes it simpler to find the right medical professionals.

While these are the ten companies intriguing us the most in NYC, we’re always on the lookout for new innovations. Let us know in the comments if there are any NYC startups that you find particularly exciting. And stay tuned to VentureBeat, as we bring you the best NYC has to offer.

Top Photo: Devindra Hardawar

A while back we asked for your nominations for New York City’s most influential techie. Now we’re, ready to announce a list of finalists — one of whom we’ll name our top Silicon Alley tech influencer later this month.

The group of finalists all embody the energy and passion that we’re finding so remarkable about New York City’s tech community. We’re highlighting the VCs, entrepreneurs, and community leaders (many are an impressive combination of these categories) that have all made a significant impact in the city.

These individuals are especially important now as New York City is cementing itself as a technology hub. We’ve seen major companies rise up over the past few years, and a concerted effort from Mayor Bloomberg’s office to push digital initiatives. And in a few years, we’ll see additional technology schools from Cornell and NYU, which should generate a healthy supply of engineers to the startups that desperately need them (not to mention sparking another wave of entrepreneurs).

But it all starts with amazing people, like these.

Rachel Haot

Chief Digital Officer, City of New York

Formerly Rachel Sterne (before she married Livestream CEO Max Haot), Haot landed the newly created role of NYC’s Chief Digital Officer after proving her tech savvy as founder of the social news site GroundReport. She also ran her own independent digital strategy firm for several years, and has served as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School (where she taught a course on social media entrepreneurship).

Haot has been a prominent voice in the New York City tech scene for several years now, and these days she’s a constant presence with Mayor Bloomberg whenever he makes a tech-related announcement (most recently at Boxee’s headquarters).  As chief digital officer, she put together a digital road map for NYC and is always working to promote digital initiatives that can help New Yorkers.

Hilary Mason

Chief Scientist, Bitly; Co-founder, HackNY
Bitly is more than just a link shortening service — mostly thanks to the work of one Hilary Mason. As chief data scientist, she dives into the company’s massive trove of data to come up with new products and features. It also wouldn’t be a stretch to call her New York City’s hacker queen. Mason co-founded HackNY, a non-profit that brings together student hackers with startups. And she’s also a member of the hacker collective NYCResistor.

Cyrus Massoumi

Co-founder & CEO, ZocDoc

On paper, ZocDoc sounds like a fairly simple idea: It offers an easy way for you to find and make doctor appointments online. But from that kernel of an idea, Massoumi has built a fast-growing service with more than 1.8 million monthly patients and around $95 million in funding. Now the company is also aiming to rid patients from the chore of filling out paper medical forms. ZocDoc proves that NYC isn’t just a home for media and social startups — even health technology can succeed here.

Nihal Mehta

Co-founder & CEO, LocalResponse
Now on his fifth startup, Mehta may just be the model CEO that every budding NYC entrepreneur aspires to be — and it’s not just because he spends an insane amount of time at work. Mehta’s also dedicated to helping out the community whenever possible: He made a New Year’s resolution to meet a new entrepreneur every day, and failing that he aims to teach classes at NYU, he told the Next Web. Together with some friends, he also co-founded ENIAC Ventures, a seed stage investment firm focusing on mobile.

David Tisch

Co-founder & Former Managing Director, TechStars NYC

When Bloomberg decided to air a reality TV series based on one of TechStars NYC’, it’s not hard to imagine that the energetic (and often foul-mouthed) Tisch was one of the main attractions for the network. Tisch spent two years leading TechStars NYC accelerator program, where helped 36 companies build their businesses. Of those, 34 are still active and have raised more than $50 million.

Tisch is also a managing partner at BoxGroup, an angel investment firm for early stage companies. He’s made investments in more than 40 NYC companies, including Fab, Boxee, and GrouMe. Even though he stepped down from his managing director role at TechStars NYC in August, Tisch remains involved with the group as an investor, mentor, and co-founder.

Nate Westheimer

Entrepreneur, Executive Director, New York Tech Meetup

If there’s one defining gathering for this city’s tech crowd, it’s the more than 28,000 member strong New York Tech Meetup. Since he took over organizing the event in 2008, Westheimer has helped grow its member base from 7,500 members. He’s helped to promote and rally NYC’s techies, while at the same time pursuing his own startups, including AnyClip and PictureLife. He also serves as an advisor to Flybridge Capital Partners.

Fred Wilson

Co-founder/Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures

A longtime venture capitalist and insightful blogger, Wilson has been the most vocal proponents of New York City as a hot spot for building technology companies. At Union Square Ventures he helped to land some notable investments in NYC startups like Tumblr, Foursquare, and Kickstarter (not to mention big West Coast investments in Twitter and Zynga).

He’s also been offering up free advice to entrepreneurs at his personal blog, A VC, since 2003. Though Wilson rarely takes the media spotlight himself, his enduring efforts to help and promote the NYC tech community have made him a legend. (Personal aside: his blog was one of the many forces that drove me to move to New York to cover tech.)

VentureBeat will be hosting a private launch party this week in New York City. Want to snag an invite? If so, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, then send a tweet to the @VentureBeat Twitter account with the hashtag #vblaunch telling us why you should be there. We’ll choose five winners on the morning of October 24.

Who deserves to be the top Silicon Alley influencer? Cast your vote in the poll below, and tell us more in the comments. (VentureBeat will pick the winner, but your votes will be taken into consideration.)

Top photo via Chris Isherwood/Flickr

New York health tech startup ZocDoc will soon open its second office in Phoenix, a city not usually known for attracting startups the way San Francisco, Boston, or Chicago does.

ZocDoc helps digitally connect patients with doctors for all kinds for appointments. As with all things medical, the service needs high-quality customer service and support. This was the thinking behind Phoenix — the city is geographically distant from its NYC headquarters and is isolated from most extreme weather events. When NYC was threatened by Hurricane Irene, ZocDoc had to create a pop-up office in Chicago for customer service in case the HQ lost power or would be without power for days.

“Many companies may look at the Bay Area, where people try to attract engineers, but this is for customer service and sales,” ZocDoc director of communications Allison Braley told us. “We want better customer service coverage and it’s an untapped place in a sense.”

Braley admits that it’s a little strange to see a quickly growing 320-person startup like ZocDoc pick Phoenix for its second office, but the company especially liked the weather and proximity to universities to find talent. Phoenix also offers many emerging private companies to pluck talent from, as listed in the Inc 5000.

“For tech companies of our size, it is a bit unusual, but it made sense for us,” Braley said. “We only have a few employees there now, but we’ll add many more as we scale and grow.”

ZocDoc has raised about $95 million so far, including a large $50 million round last year from DST Global.

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In a move that just about anyone could have predicted, the iconic Newsweek magazine has announced that it will shut down its print operation and embrace the future with its web site, digital magazine, and events businesses.

“We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast,” Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, wrote today. “Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue. Meanwhile, Newsweek will expand its rapidly growing tablet and online presence, as well as its successful global partnerships and events business.”

Two years ago, the writing was already on the digital wall when Newsweek merged with online news startup The Daily Beast. It was a sign that Newsweek couldn’t cut it as a stand-alone magazine and digital property. Of course, Newsweek wasn’t alone in the struggle — a year before that, BusinessWeek, another magazine that summarized the week’s news, was sold by McGraw-Hill to well-off Bloomberg.

The transition to all-digital will likely be tough for Newsweek, as it is with all print-to-digital moves. I saw it first-hand when I worked for PC Magazine, now PCMag. People will lose their jobs. Much less advertising revenue will be generated because web rates are still nowhere near print rates. Some of the quality could drop off with less oversight and editing.

“Newsweek is produced by a gifted and tireless team of professionals who have been offering brilliant work consistently throughout a tough period of ownership transition and media disruption,” Brown wrote. “Regrettably we anticipate staff reductions and the streamlining of our editorial and business operations both here in the U.S. and internationally.”

On the plus side of the transition, Newsweek is no longer on the hook for expensive printing and distribution costs. It also doesn’t have to worry about meeting a late-night Friday deadline to get stories ready for the next week’s magazine (the deadline instead is right now). Another positive is that online ad spend continues to increase rapidly and will soon overtake print’s overall spend.

Newsweek and The Daily Beast have made key digital gains during the past two years. The Daily Beast now attracts more than 15 million unique visitors a month, a 70 percent bump year-over-year. On the tablet side, the company estimates tablet-based users in the U.S. will exceed 70 million by the end of 2012.

“Our business has been increasingly affected by the challenging print advertising environment, while Newsweek’s online and e-reader content has built a rapidly growing audience through the Apple, Kindle, Zinio, and Nook stores as well as on The Daily Beast,” Brown wrote. “Tablet-use has grown rapidly among our readers and with it the opportunity to sustain editorial excellence through swift, easy digital distribution.”

Newsweek was first published in Feb. 1933 and will celebrate its 80th anniversary in just a few months. For a look at Newsweek’s print covers over the years, check out Buzzfeed’s thoughtful collection.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Where’s the tender loving care, New York?

In überdisappointing news for would-be e-hailers, mobile car service startup Uber officially discontinued taxi service in New York today. Embroiled in a tussle with the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), the startup was forced to shutter the offering just a month after launch.

“We did the best we could to get more yellows on the road, but New York’s TLC … put up obstacles and roadblocks in order to squash the effort around e-hail,” Uber cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Uber is the San Francisco-based startup servicing a panoply of metropolitan markets with an entirely mobile way to find, book, and pay for car service. Not content with its livery vehicle play, it branched out by adding cabs to its fleet in places such as Boston and Toronto. Unfortunately for Uber and its New York customers, its e-hail product launched before securing the blessing of the TLC. The taxi commission met the aggressive maneuver with equal hostility.

The Verge sniffed out the shutdown before Kalanick chimed in with official word of the NYC taxi service’s demise. In Uber’s blog post, Kalanick glossed over the legal challenges associated with operating an electronic hail system and instead focused on the startup’s inability to meet customer demand.

“Unfortunately, as many of you have noticed, there haven’t been enough available TAXIs. Demand far out-stripped supply, making you feel pretty lucky when you got a yellow from your iPhone,” he said.

Kalanick left the door open for a return of the taxi service next year, as did the TLC, which notified VentureBeat of its intention to amend city regulations.

“In recent months, as e-hail apps have emerged, TLC has undertaken serious diligence and is moving toward rule changes that will open the market to app developers and other innovators,” TLC commissioner David Yassky said in an emailed statement to VentureBeat. “Those changes cannot legally take place until our existing exclusive contracts expire in February. We are committed to making it as easy as possible to get a safe, legal ride in a New York City taxi, and are excited to see how emerging technology can improve that process. Our taxis have always been on the cutting edge of technological innovation, from GPS systems to credit card readers.”

New Yorkers can continue to use Uber’s mobile application for booking black cars and hybrids.

This post was updated with a statement from the TLC.

Taxi image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

[Update: Uber has confirmed the move into New York City and provided a number of salient details.]

Uber is launching a new taxi cab service in New York City, deviating from its traditional black-car service.

The company confirmed that it will launch Wednesday in the New York Market, catering to cabbies that already exist, unlike its town car service. The market is a huge one. It plans to launch with hundreds of taxis in the area.

Starting Wednesday, Uber is also offering “Free Taxi Week,” for the next week as a result of some regulatory issues brought up by the Taxi & Limousine Commission in a meeting today, according to the company. The issue puts a wrench in Uber’s ability to process credit card payments for rides.

“We believe the TLC wants to resolve this and give NYC consumers the innovation and opportunity that New Yorkers deserve,” said Uber in an email to VentureBeat. “In order to launch Uber Taxi and work cooperatively with the TLC, Uber Taxi will be free for the entire week following its launch. Uber will do everything possible to reach a resolution with the TLC between now and then so that New Yorkers and the TLC can get a taste of the future and embrace it.”

Uber was founded in San Francisco and offers an alternative to taking a cab. The company employs a number of town cars, which wait for a customer to ping them via Uber’s mobile application. The app lets the driver know where the passenger is via GPS and allows them to accept credit card payments. Passengers can see when a driver is near and can load payment information into the app, so they don’t have to fumble with cash at the end of the ride.

The town car business has been very successful in San Francisco, though it is marked up significantly from a regular taxi cab ride. People in the Northern California city, however, are happy to eat the margin given how hard it is to grab a cab. The company has also launched in London and Washington DC as well as New York.

But a city like Manhattan already has a fleet of cabs that are very efficient. While the town cars might be a nice addition to the transportation scene, the yellow cabs are the big market there. To put it in perspective, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission regulates over 50,000 vehicles and over 100,000 drivers.

The new app competes directly with companies like Taxi Magic, Cabulous, GetTaxi, and Hailo that have their own taxi applications. Indeed, Hailo, which has yet to launch its app in The Big Apple, has built up a 2,500 cabbie network.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

September is turning into one crazily crowded month for mobile, with Nokia, Motorola, Amazon, and Apple holding launch events. Now we can add HTC to the list, with a likely Windows Phone 8 event planned for Sept. 19.

HTC sent us and others an invite for the event to “see what’s next.” While the invite does not say Windows Phone 8, that’d be our best guess based on the timing.

The only Windows Phone 8 device that’s been officially announced is Samsung’s new ATIV S. Nokia is set to show off two Windows Phone 8 devices tomorrow at an event in New York City.

Even with these events, Windows Phone 8 isn’t expected to debut until Oct. 29. (We’re crossing our fingers for an earlier release.)

Windows Phone 8 photo: Microsoft

New York City sports analytics startup NumberFire first caught my eye a year ago with its ability to help people dominate their fantasy sports leagues. Now the company is ready to go for this year’s football season with even better features and statistics.

NumberFire blends sports with “big data” by providing statistics and recommendations to its users and to numerous sports publications. While it offers stats on basketball and baseball, the startup’s biggest money maker is fantasy football, which attracts an estimated 27 million Americans each year. It offers stats for both NFL and college football.

To get ready for the new season, NumberFire has not only improved its number-crunching abilities but has also added a new recommendation engine. For example, you can import your fantasy team from Yahoo Sports (the most popular fantasy sports site) into NumberFire and it will make recommendations for which players you should trade. Ideally, with each season, NumberFire’s ability to help its users win their leagues will keep improving.

“We generate new recommendations on a daily basis and send them to your inbox,” NumberFire CEO Nik Bonaddio told me. “Whether it’s adding players, dropping players, or initiating trades, you’re covered. The system can also recommend which players to start on your team and which players to add from the waiver pool.”

NumberFire is going into the football season with revenue up 800 percent and users up 300 percent year-over-year. On top of charging users (there are some free perks too if you don’t want to pay), the company is generating revenue from partner referrals and cross-promotions. The startup has partnerships with big names like just-purchased Bleacher Report, Sports Illustrated, SB Nation, and an unnamed “major broadcast partner.” (Bonaddio previously mentioned partnering with ESPN, so that’s my guess.)

NumberFire raised $750,000 in a seed round earlier this year, with investors including RRE Ventures, Penny Black, and former TechStars managing director David Tisch. NumberFire is also a graduate of the ER Accelerator program. The company has just five full-time employees but is looking for interns.

“Given how small our team is, we’ve got our hands full,” Bonaddio said.

Granted this football season is success, Bonaddio hopes to attract a first round of funding early next year. He also is looking to expand beyond U.S.-based sports, with a major interest in international soccer.

Click on the photo below to see NumberFire’s latest incarnation.

Mizzou football photo via Jim Ross/Flickr