RENAMITY PR & Bruni PR

Silicon Alley is spreading south into the Delaware Valley. Philly's economy isn't just about healthcare/pharma, banks and law firms anymore. Internet companies are sprouting up in Philly and surrounding areas, especially King Of Prussia, faster than timeshares in the Poconos. At the recent TechCrunch 40 and Demo conferences out West, there were numerous Philly based startups rubbing elbows with Silicon Valley venture capitalists and young Net moguls.

To service these new Delaware Valley startups, Bruni PR has entered into a strategic partnership with RENAMITY PR, one of the city's fastest growing PR firms, with clients in a wide range of businesses, including entertainment, food, beverages, consumer goods, and financial services. RENAMITY PR CEO Anthony DiMeo III has a strong track record in marketing to the city's "young affluent", the same demographic group spearheading the economic move into the Net industry. I'd call them the "young affluentials". Can the next Google or YouTube come out of Philly? If it does, Bruni PR and RENAMITY will be there to seize the opportunity.

wixi

wixi, an exciting new media centric social media site, is inviting TechCrunch readers to its beta version. I'm glad I followed up on Arrington's advice today and took wixi for a testdrive. It's amazing. Wixi users get 3GB of free storage that they can use to share photos, videos, and music with their friends and family. While the service is browser-based, Wixi designed the interface to feel like a desktop environment with drag-n-drop functionality. wixi, launched at TechCrunch 40, and I apologize for not including them in my last post about the NYers who generated buzzz there.

TechCrunch 40/ New Yorkers Create Buzz

New York-based startups generated a lot of buzz at the TechCrunch 40 gathering on the West Coast today and yesterday. Clickable, Viewdle, and most of all, Kaltura, got raves views for their demos. Kaltura, a Brooklyn based startup with a unique tech that marries the wiki with video editing collaboration tools, won the coveted "40th company" spot after wooing everyone in the DemoPit. Viewdle has pioneered facial recognition tech that is used in its video search product. Reuters is a big customer. Clickable, a Union Square Venture Fund company, also won rave reviews for its online ad product.
Kudos to Arrington, Calacanis and the other organizers.

Animoto/ NY Tech Meetup

Animoto stole the show last night at the NY Tech Meetup with its amazing, new "do it yourself" music video product. Brad Jefferson, co-founder and CEO, blew away the audience with a music video about the Tech Meetup created in just a few minutes. RobinGood and other prominent bloggers have been raving about Animoto for several wks, and now I can see what the fuss is about. As Robin predicted, this product will replace slideshows in the near future.

CrossCast WiTV demo

CrossCast: the Joost Killer?

Made in Italy 2.0 tech got a big boost last week with the talk about CrossCast, a new video on demand product that some bloggers say is the real "Joost killer". WebTV and Mashable have seen previews and are raving about this new Italian startup from the Lake Como region. I had a chance to ask some of the Joost execs partying at the CrunchGear birthday party here in NYC last week, and they confirmed that Joost is watching CrossCast closely. The new service debuts later this month at a Media Event in Milan. Kudos to the LSVMultimedia group that developed CrossCast. This has to be the most anticipated Italian tech I can remember, and I've been watching the Italian tech/Net scene for some time.

Fotolog Founders Cash In

Congrats to Scott Heiferman and the other Fotolog founders. It's not official yet, but Silicon Alley Insider reports today that Fotolog has been sold to a "major Latin American media company" for $100m or so. Makes sense since Fotolog has huge traffic in Latin America. Alexa ranks it as one of the most popular websites in several nations down there. Now, Scott can ramp up Meetup.com, his other successful startup.

uPlayMe

Silicon Alley's music related startups are garnering major funding these days. A couple wks back it was Amie Street that made the news. Today, another key player that won rave reviews at the NY Tech Meetup several months back is getting a second round of financing, and well-deserved.
uPlayMe (www.uPlayMe.com), developer of a desktop application which automatically connects people through their shared tastes in music, movies, TV shows and other digital content, announced today it has closed a multi-million dollar funding round including investments from Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG), Village Ventures, and other investors.

SelectMinds

Large corporations want to use social networking tools. No big surprise. Many leading "social network in a box" services like Ning, KickApps and others are eyeing the corporate market. A new NY-based player has also jumped in -- SelectMinds.
Flatiron-based SelectMinds has raised $5.5 million in Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, the company said today. SelectMinds sells on-demand corporate social-networking software and networking services to companies like Dow Chemical, Ernst & Young, and JPMorgan Chase. KickApps, also based here in NYC, raised subtantial funding last week.

Web2NewYork

Food, wine, card games and 3-d metro guides were the theme at Tuesday nite's fine Web2NewYork meeting at the Gallery Bar in the Lower East Side here in NYC.
Great presentations by Snooth, a wine rating website, UpNext, a 3-d NYC metro guide, and HeyCosmo, a card game multiplayer site. Danny Moom of UpNext and the Snooth team got rave reviews (even though it was clearly a beerdrinking crowd). A lot of food-related website owners were in the house, including charming Blanca Valbuena of FriendsEAT.com, a hot new Hoboken-based site, and Jenn Beisser of chefsline.com. Compliments to our Meetup organizer Peter Verkooijen.

Gnomedex: Meeting of A-List Minds

Kudos to Chris Pirillo (and his family) for organizing one of the best tech conferences (or unconferences) I've seen in a while. This year's Gnomedex 7 conference featured Bob Steele, Scoble, Calacanis, Kawasaki and others. I watched on the Gnomedex website, which featured a live eventstreaming, (and saved myself a ton of $). Steele, a former CIA agent, spooked the audience with a rant about the NSA and policing of social media in the US. It was a bit chilling, but on target. Meanwhile, Kawasaki, as usual, spoke like a preacher who really energized the audience with his tales of Silicon Valley. My buddy Jason Calancanis fielded some tough questions about Mahalo, his human powered search engine service, but made some fascinating points about the future of search. Also made news by announcing that Mahalo will now feature comparable search results from Google, Yahoo and other "non-human" search engines. Way to go Jason.

NowPublic stays Independent

Hat's off to Len Brody and Mike Tippett, founders of NowPublic.com for raising over $10m in new financing from Rho Ventures, a NY based VC outfit, and, more important, fending off potential "media company" suitors.
NowPublic, the largest "participatory journalism" organization on the planet, has an agreement with AP and other newsgathering orgs to provide "crowdsourced" content and news. My hope is that many of the Media beat reporters in the business media (NYT, WSJ, BW, etc.) that have heard my pitch about this Canadian-based pioneer will now start to pay attention.

Money Still Flows Into Silicon Alley

New York area companies received $446.1 million in venture capital funding in the second quarter, down 19% from the same quarter a year ago, according to a survey released Tuesday.

While the amount of money declined, the 65 venture capital deals was the same number as in the year-ago quarter, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

Amie Street: Supply Meets Demand

What if you could sell something and price it based on its popularity? The ultimate matching of demand and supply. Economists should study Amie Street.
Kudos to the folks at Amazon for investing in one of the hottest music websites.
The key to Amie Street isn't just the indy music available on the site, but the so-called REC system.
"The REC system drives the site's music discovery process. The price of a song is determined by how many times it is purchased, and Amie Street pays customers for discovering and recommending great music. For example, if a user "RECs" a song when it costs 0 cents, and the song grows to 98 cents, the user receives 98 cents for RECing that song." Will Amazon start selling books by indy publishers and writers based on the REC system. Time will tell.

Trusted Opinion & Netflix

In the world of Trusted Opinion, we are all movie critics. Check this site out before going to the movies or buying a DVD. I've been playing movie critic for several months on this site and find it invaluable.
From today's Mashable:

"Trusted Opinion, the free online community that lets you create a personal recommendation circle of friends, has integrated Netflix queuing into its system.

You can now get Netflix queuing directly from DVD review pages within the Netflix recommendation network. This essentially combines the TrustedIOpinion system with your existing Netflix account. Access the top rated movie and DVD releases based on your circle of friends, figure out which movie you’d like to see next, and add it to your Netflix queue." Kudos to this Palo Alto CA-based startup.

PR: The Exodus of the Young

Crain's New York Business says it is a good time to be in PR in NYC, "where demand for tech-savvy PR professionals is reaching levels not seen since the dot-com frenzy of the late '90s.

Companies are devoting more money to PR rather than advertising to deal with blogs and social networks, wrote Amanda Fung in the July 23 issue.

One key problem: the dearth of talent with five-to-10 years of experience. Don Middleberg, who now has a dozen staffers at Middleberg Communications, says its "tough" to find good people.

Well, Don, the reason it's "tough" is that most young PR pros today would rather work for exciting, new Net startups as in-house PR execs than work in large PR agency sweatshops, like Edelman and Burson-Marsteller.

Rudy & Obama Boys Battle on the Web

"Obama Girl" might beat "Giuliani Girl" in that funny YouTube video everybody is watching right now, but the real Rudy & Obama Boys are head -to- head on the K-Sync Web Noise Tracker this week.

Except for the Gilmore blip over the weekend, the Noise Tracker shows Rudy & Obama both garnering strong coverage on the Web. Yet, Hillary stills bests Obama among the Dems, a continuing trend over the past month.

Check it out at www.politics08.us. K-Sync Web Noise Tracker was developed by Septet Systems, a Bruni PR client and New York based Net outfit founded by Ben Epstein and Alexandre Brown.

Miro

Miro, formerly known as Democracy, relaunched this week and got rave reviews, including this one from Next 100, a prominent video topics blog:

"Miro is an open-source Internet TV application that combines a media player and library, content guide, video search engine, as well as podcast and BitTorrent clients. Developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro aims to make online video “as easy as watching TV”, while at the same time ensuring that the new medium remains accessible to everyone, through its support for open standards. Described by some as the “Firefox of media apps”, the resulting effort is a slick looking and easy-to-use application — not a mean feat when dealing in open-source methodology — that gives Apple’s iTunes (the default media player and video podcast client for many) a genuine run for its money."

Live on FOX TV - Max Haot - Mogulus CEO -Iphone interview

iPhone Launch TV

iPhone mania had its own live television station last Friday when Mogulus set up a live stream from its studio and the Apple downtown and midtown stores. Call it "disposable TV", live stations set up on the Web for covering major news events on the fly. Many reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week and others called me, grateful to see the action at the Apple stores without leaving their desks. Brett Larson, tech reporter for FoxTV5 in NYC, invited Mogulus founder Max Haot to talk about his iPhone experience this am on the FoxTV morning news show.