After I interviewed Mark Malkoff, I wanted to see if people knew who he was.

So I asked Malkoff to hold the camera, while I asked people walking by if they knew the guy who lived in Ikea for a week.

Here’s what happened:

Well, it might not look like New York is a friendly city after watching that video.

But it is! Trust me or just take Malkoff’s word for it.

He would know. He asked strangers to carry him on their backs to upend the stereotype of the unfriendly New Yorker.

Here are some of his video projects:

• Mark lives in Ikea
• Mark on AirTran
• Mark Malkoff Takes the Starbuck Challenge

Who is Mark Malkoff? is a post from: TechStartups.com

I think the New York Times article on “Attached to Technology and Paying a Price” is a bit overblown. Are we really that addicted to technology?

On average we consume 12 hours of media a day and we surf 40 websites daily.

I have to admit, when I got an iPhone I became more attached to technology — at times, I slept with it in my bed (and from what I hear is not all that uncommon).

The New York Times reports:

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

So fine, I did get side tracked yesterday while I was surfing the Internet and was late to a brunch. Maybe technology is so habitual that we are unaware of how much we depend on it. I must admit when I didn’t have a smart phone or Internet for 2 weeks, time went by more slowly and I read paperback books.

Now if you are wondering if you spend an unhealthy amount of time on the Internet, you might want to take a self assessment. No doubt, access to the Internet widens the range of temptations — so much so, scientists are finding that people who have a gambling problem also have a “problematic Internet” behavior.

Technology is a utility and we depend on it, so of course, it is changing our habits and our brains.

The NY Times also reports that experts think that this media overload makes us “impulsive, forgetful, and  even more narcissistic.” Oh, and I just thought that was just a part of living in New York.

Photo: rick /flickr

How gadgets are rewiring our brains and our behavior is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

As I said earlier, Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants people to move to New York to start their businesses. The NYC Entrepreneurial Fund will pump in $19 million into New York-based startups. The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The fund really is going to play a big role in encouraging information tech firms to move to our city,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We want people to get jobs. We aren’t trying to give handouts.”

Seed money is a start. Office culture matters too. New York also has incubation hubs that put these entrepreneurial minds together. There’s Dogpatch labs, which I went into a few months ago. The New York Times reports on another tech hub called Betaworks:

“Money is nice, but I actually needed expertise more than anything else,” [TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth] said. “Betaworks had a track record in this field back when no one had a track record in this field.”

Betaworks built Bit.ly and Chartbeat from scratch. TweetDeck and Bit.ly hit it big. But they are looking for entrepreneurs to help the hub grow with greater vision. Investors look to Betaworks to weed out the startups.

If you are in New York and are looking for ways to engage with the vibrant tech community, check out Mashable’s list of individuals and organizations who are attracting hundreds to thousands of people to their events.

Image: flickr/ Phillipp Klinger:.

New York wants startups: offers up money, hubs, and fun is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer –

Obama began Small Business Owners Week, asking Congress to create a small-business jobs package ASAP.

“Small business owners have been the hardest hit by this recession,” Obama added. “From the middle of 2007 through the end of 2008, small businesses lost 2.4 million jobs.” While it is not the government’s duty to create jobs, government must “knock down the barriers” preventing small business owners from getting loans or “investing in the future,” he said. [Politics Daily]

At TechCrunch Disrupt, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg encouraged people who want to start a startup to move to New York. ZDNet editor Andrew Nusca wrote about Bloomberg’s surprise visit, noting that:

[Bloomberg] announced a partnership with First Mark Capital — which had promised to co-invest up to $19 million in an NYC entrepreneurial fund founded a year ago — that expands that investment to $22 million. Finally, he announced that the fund made its first investment: $300,000 to mobile app provider My City Way for a New York-specific app.

New York is where dreams are made of certainly. However, other American cities are expected to become prime small business meccas too: Austin, Seattle, Washington D.C., Salt Lake City, Rochester, Des Moines, Burlington, West Hartford, and Topeka.

Image: flickr/ joiseyshowaa

Obama and Bloomberg encourage small business owners is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer –

The New York Times did a review of uCorder, a camcorder you can wear on your body. While the camera can record up to 72 hours of footage, the good quality video is off set with background noise and a distinctive hum. I take my iPhone everywhere and document everything. This seems like a gadget I’d love.

Sure, you can put the camcorder in your pocket (if you are a guy!). And it’s not so discreet that you can spy on people, but at least it offers a hands-free way of documenting your experiences.

Here’s a video review:

In a similar way, Microsoft’s Sensecam is also a camera that can document your life by taking 8 shots a minute. It dangles around your neck and can keep up to 30,000 images. The photos seen here are like a ghost walking through life, giving you an unfiltered view into another person’s world.

Researchers are testing the Sensecam out with patients with Alzheimer’s, hoping that the digital images will store and restore their long lost memories. The patient also carries around a digital recorder, so they can actively engage and remember what has happened to them.

Small video cameras let you document your life is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer –

Many of the entrepreneurs in New York have lived through the dot-com boom. But as of late, the tech scene has gotten a second life and the time is ripe for a new breed of Internet companies to thrive. The start-up energy sizzling on the streets of New York just got some love from the The New York Times.

Okay, it got a lot of love from The New York Times:

“After the crash, New York was a complete wasteland of dead funds and companies,” says Charlie O’Donnell, an entrepreneur in residence at First Round Capital, which hired him recently when it opened a new office in Manhattan.

Since then, “the community has gelled,” Mr. O’Donnell says. “We now we have a critical mass of support and financing.”

The main points of the NY Times story are:

• Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer started an investment firm with his father (co-founder of The Huffington Post). The father and son team will make 25 investments in start-ups.
• An earlier investor of Twitter, Facebook, and Google has invested 20 percent of his portfolio in New York City start-ups.
• NY has the right mix of entrepreneurs, investors, and developers.
• Silicon Valley. Boston. NY is third.
• Dogpatch Labs, a frat house for geeks, gives start-ups free rent. Home to 13 start-ups.
• VC Fred Wilson notes the shift from software business to Internet business.
• Co-founder of Hunch, Chris Dixon, also founded Founder Collective, a $40 million investment fund for start-ups.
• The New York Tech Meet-Up draws up to 700 people to its monthly meetings.
• North Brooklyn Breakfast Club hosts a brunch with A-list entrepreneurs

The “PayPal mafia” effect needs to happen in New York. The tipping point might be when a big tech company goes public, so employees can go off and start their own successful businesses. The Huffington Post comments:

The startup game is distinctly different from Wall Street, consulting, mainstream media and other professions that have long dominated New York’s economy. For those driven by money, it’s feast and famine, all or nothing. Folks who have grown up in the cushy get-along-with-everyone-and-get-good-performance-reviews-and-you’ll-slowly-get-rich world of consulting, law, and Wall Street aren’t well-prepared for the “I worked my ass off for 5 years and then lost everything” world of startups.

Feeling the startup jitters too? Well, why not try your luck in The Startup 2010 Competition.

Related Posts:

Venture Hacks play match maker for entrepreneurs and angles.

Small business owners react to The State of The Union address.

Creative people drawn to the Ace Hotel?

Start-up scene in NYC is hot! is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer –

The secret to success is to “play dirty.” And apparently, New Yorkers don’t know how to play rough enough.

Dan Porter reports in the Business Insider:

There are secrets out there. There are secrets about how to win at SEO. There are secrets about what hides in your analytics reports. There are secrets about what happens when someone looks for friends on your site by entering their address book. If I have to be more clear about that, well then you’ve proven my point. In the Bay Area, there are a wealth of folks who know these secrets. Folks who could take a health content site and have it suddenly appear on top in every search. Sites with millions of members that leave you scratching your head about why they joined.

None of this is wrong per se, nor in any blatant violation of common internet rules. But it’s that stuff in the trenches that those who know guard carefully and often are employed by those companies who we would never suspect employ them.

Silicon Valley folks aren’t sharing their tricks with the East coast people either. Porter says New Yorkers can wine and dine all we like, but warns that without the West Coast mentality, it will be hard for start-ups to gain global traction like Facebook.

Of course, playing dirty has its consequences — especially if every IM and email can later be used against you and later show up in an exclusive. Just ask Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, about that. Business Insider broke a story on Zuckerberg’s hacking tendencies in 2004 and the birth of the social networking website.

Zuckerberg’s IMs reveal his thought process before he created the multi-billion dollar empire:

Zuck: So you know how I’m making that dating site

Zuck: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing

Zuck: Because they’re probably going to be released around the same time

Zuck: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I’d have it done.

For the full scoop, read here.

Image: flickr/ Vasjen Katro

Facebook secrets revealed is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

Wahed Said wants to build a waste-to-fuel plant in New York. He is not alone. Said is a green entrepreneur, who is a managing partner for Native American Investors Group. His two partners are Native American.

“Our mission is to create economic development on tribal land. Our main focus is green energy,” says Said.

Ideally, he’d like to build a waste-to-energy plant on a reservation in New York. Said is focusing on Native American land because they “have an ability to work around state regulations.”

“We have a turn key operations. We have several types of technology, it doesn’t have to be plasma,” he says. “We want to take garbage and make energy.”

British Airways is developing a waste-to-fuel facility, to help power their planes by 2014.

And since 2003, Changing World Technologies in Carthage, Missouri has been able to turn anything into oil. Fed by the nearby ConAgra Foods Butterball Turkey facility, the plant is the first biorefinery that can take any type of waste — turkey, old tires, and mixed plastics — and turn it into high quality oil.

While the concept of turning waste into energy works on a fundamental level, even the company’s  most “mature” plant in Hamstead, New York is “struggling” after 5 years of full operation. But losing $5 million in the first quarter of 2008, doesn’t automatically mean it’s a bad thing for the startup.

Discover magazine reports:

But Changing World Technologies’ experience at Carthage—where the feedstock is tons of turkey parts from the nearby ConAgra Foods Butterball Turkey slaughterhouse—has yet to demonstrate the economics of biocrude. The company is in a “quiet period” as it prepares for a $100-million initial public offering and declined to respond to questions, but its detailed IPO prospectus tells the story. According to the filing, fuel output at Carthage is variable, sales are difficult, and costs are high.

But whatever you do, make sure you think about the name of your energy startup before you make the bad name mistake.

One man has waste-to-fuel dreams is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

The good news is that the “society” is more fair, according to the New York Times. You just need to be “smart and hardworking.”

As a journalist, this nugget stuck out. David Brook writes:

Journalism used to be the preserve of working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars. Now it is the preserve of cultured analysts who file stories and hit the water bottles. Is the media overall more reputable now than it was then?

Brooks points out a few reasons why things have changed. We reward people who have a lot of technical knowledge, even though they have no clue how to figure out the context of the situation. People don’t think long term, their business mind is on a short attention span, based on the stock prices or polls. And worse, it’s easier to out people now and damage their reputation immediately.

The times have certainly changed. We have no choice but to adapt to the open system we’ve created.

I’m looking forward to watching “How to Make It In America” on HBO. It’s about the hustle of the American dream. I’m living this right now, so I can relate!

The Hustle Of The American Dream is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

Over the last year, small coffee shops had slowly crept into New York. The timing couldn’t have been better. After all, the unemployeed, freelancers, and small business owners, need a comfy place to call their “office.”

The Ace Hotel serves the best coffee. I remember my first time experiencing Stumptown coffee well — the rich, chocolate taste. And now my coffee tastes have graduated from the likes of Starbucks and I’ve become a Stumptown snob. On a snowy day like today however, I will grab the closest cup of coffee.

New York Magazine did a lovely profile on Duane Sorenson, the founder of Stumptown. In it, you’ll learn the humble beginnings of coffee perfection in Oregon and why Sorenson moved his coffee tastes to New York.

New York Magazine reports:

Never mind Starbucks and its 264 franchises in New York; there’s Ninth Street Espresso, Grey Dog, City Girl, Irving Farm, Abraço, and so on. Roasters like Chicago’s Intelligentsia and Counter Culture from Durham, North Carolina, are a few years ahead of Stumptown in indoctrinating New Yorkers on the subtleties of bean varieties and breaking the psychological price barrier (a pound of beans from one of those roasteries can be as much as $27).

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How To Find A Good Cup of Coffee In New York! is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

I was at a party on Saturday night on a top floor apartment on Wall Street. There was no music, no dancing, but a lot of laughter. This was hardly the typical party, but was typical of our digital expectations.

About 10 of us sat around a couch and interacted with strangers until we hit “Next.” We were surfing Chatroulette.com, a website that takes you into the world of strangers (who are mostly at home in their bedroom). There are about 30,000 users playing the human shuffle right now.

I saw like 10 guys jacking off.  Hit “Next” please!

And worse, it made me feel old. Each “Next” took our party into the lives of teenagers, who were mostly drunk or high. We saw a guy point a gun to his head.

So-called normal interactions were hard to find, but they existed! There was a sweet couple, who wished they were in New York. And a high school boy (with frat potential) made us do the wave with him. He’ll be ready for college football games for sure! We bonded with people over being “normal” and gushed about the strange things we saw on Chatroulette.com.

My stomach hurt from laughing at humanity and I felt a bit guilty for doing so. However, I’m going to have nightmares from some of the f*cked up people on there. There is no filter! If the video website is going to turn into a profitable business, it will need to develop categories so people can search for like-minded individuals or at least give you the option to screen out things you don’t want to see.

The founder is a 17 year-old Russian who created the website for his friends because he enjoyed talking to them on Skype with a webcam and microphone. The New York Times reached out to Andrey Ternovskiy and posted his email response.

I do remember how addicting the AOL chat rooms were back in the day. And today, these brief Twitter-like interactions are all the buzz. In a similar way, the idea of Twitter was born out of AOL’s Instant Messenger status updates. So Chatroulettle.com is an AOL chat room with videos — a place where people can act raw because they know they will never see these strangers again. There are no consequences (yet) for acting inappropriately.

Before checking out the site for yourself, be prepared for permanent scarring. Or you could safely just watch the segment on Good Morning America to get an idea of what this video beast is.

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Will Chatroulette Be The Next Big Thing Since Twitter or AOL Chat? is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

I still haven’t bought a virtual good. In all honesty, I’d much rather spend my money on real stuff.

A virtual good is not real. It’s a non-physical object that you purchase in online communities. For instance, Facebook, Zynga’s FarmVille lets you build your own virtual farm. The more attentive you are, the better your farm will do. It’s an urban escape to rural life. And you can participate in it, digitally. Another pig purchase is a click away.

I’ve never played it. But there’s one friend on Facebook who must be addicted to FarmVille. The only thing I read on his Facebook wall are FarmVille updates. I think he needs an intervention!

“FARMVILLE ADDICT found some extra bags of fertilizer in their dairy farm in FarmVille!

FARMVILLE ADDICT is offering 5 extra bags of fertilizer to their friends who visit their farm!”

I recently talked to a friend in New York (who was born and raised in Kansas) about how silly the updates seemed. He thought it was interesting that all his New York friends were obsessed with feeding their chickens and worried about having enough fertilizer for their farm. He’s a little biased. After all, he fled the rural life for the concrete jungle.

Clearly, they are living out some fantasy of another lifestyle online and they become addicted to things they have control over. They are getting in touch with their agricultural side. And FarmVille must be fun to play or else it wouldn’t be attracting 72 million monthly users.

But it looks like we’ve only gotten a taste of social gaming in 2009. Experts think the exchange of virtual goods will hit main street this year. In 2010, U.S. virtual goods will ring in $1.6 billion, according to a report by Inside Virtual Goods. The big players are Zynga, Playdom, and Playfish.

Slide’s Max Levchin is focusing on selling virtual goods. Levchin anticipated the damage from the recession. In April 2008, he shifted away from advertising and went direct-to-consumers, by selling them virtual goods.

Are virtual goods going to replace the ad network? MediaPost reported companies like Godiva Chocolates and Gillette placed branded virtual goods into social networks. Branded virtual goods are much more engaging than a text advertisement.

In general, e-commerce is growing through the exchange of virtual goods. After Linden Lab’s Second Life bought two online markets Xstreet SL and OnRez last year, virtual goods have been a hot commodity.

The online world is vast and unknown. Go explore. I’m sticking to the free Internet for now.

Image: flickr / anshu si

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Focus on Virtual Goods Instead of Ads is a post from: TechStartups.com

Today begins a five day romp for social media types all over the world. Web types that either are or fancy themselves social media savvy and want to hear from successful practitioners and rub elbows with them at Tweet Ups are in San Francisco, New York, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo and Toronto.

So if you’re in these cities be prepared to end up on twitpic or Facebooked.These folks are going to be swept up in the fury that is five days of measuring skills, late nights drinking and shared insights with Flips and smartphones that won’t forget even the slightest of moments.

If you don’t hang in any of the social media circles this would be a great week for you to get out and see what the community has to offer you. It could be nothing or it could be that one insight that can help you in your business or personal life. You never know what these loose events can offer.

Social Media Week is styled after the Internet Week events where they are held in many venues around the respective cities with quite a bit of local public transport riding. Some of you might cab it up, but that is no way to get to know a city!

For a listing of events check out SocialMediaWeek.org and if you’re in NYC or the metro area these are the events on tap for you.

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Social Media Week Kicks Off (NYC Too!) #SMW is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

Is anyone going to the SOS networking event tonight? It’s at Connelly’s at 121 West 45th Street on the 3rd Floor.

The event starts at 6:30 pm and runs to 8:30 pm. I’ll get there around 7 or 7:30, so line up if you want to be interviewed!

I’m looking forward to hearing fresh ideas and learning about the struggles entrepreneurs go through in New York.

Lately, there’s been a lot of news about how innovation is great and how New York has a vibrant start-up scene. Democratic candidate for Congress, Reshma Saujani, wrote in The Huffington Post:

New York has always been a city of innovation – from the art, music, and culture inspired by our streets, to the incredible architecture of our skyline. Now is the time to regain our historic identity as an economy of innovation, by investing in the dreamers and doers of tomorrow.

“Start-Up America” needs to be our focus this year. We need to think long-term and if we do, these start-ups will create good jobs.

Are You Going To The Elevator Pitch Meeting Tonight? is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

Michael Karnjanaprakorn listed the major start-ups in New York. While he named nearly a hundred, but I listed 10 that stuck out at me.

1. Etsy

2. Hello Health

3. Meetup

4. SeamlessWeb

5. Livestream

6. Tumblr

7. Flavorpill

8. Urbandaddy

9. Foursquare

10. Pop!Tech

What are some companies that have been left off?

Image: flickr/ FromTheNorth

List of Start-Up Companies in NYC is a post from: TechStartups.com

Got a broken light on your street? There’s an app for it.

Enter Gov 2.0. You can snap a picture with your iPhone and send the picture with your GPS coordinates straight to City Hall.

Large cities like New York and San Francisco have been pouring data onto the web and sharing them with mobile developers. You, the taxpayer, can now use the web tools, mobile apps, and GPS systems to send your complaints to government.

CNN reports:

That may sound dull. But tech geeks transform banal local government spreadsheets about train schedules, complaint systems, potholes, street lamp repairs and city garbage into useful applications for mobile phones and the Web.

The aim is to let citizens report problems to their governments more easily and accurately; and to put public information, which otherwise may be buried in file cabinets and Excel files, at the fingertips of taxpayers.

Washington D.C. residents can use DC 311 to send in photos of graffiti and other city blemishes. Stumble Safely illuminates the safest streets that promise to take you from the bars to your bed. San Francisco uses tweets and SeeClickFix to address the needs of urban dwellers.

San Francisco has set up a clearinghouse of no-confidential data through DataSF.org. Making raw government data about seismic hazard zones and campaign financing easily accessible has attracted app developers. Washington puts its data on Data.gov and New York dumps some info on Data Mine. Also, the cities have put on contests to attract developers to the mounds of data they put online.

Besides helping citizens request quick fixes on potholes and graffiti around their home, the technology will change the way the residents interact with government. People have been wanting to get their hands on government information since the 1960s, but it required some good detective work. But this year, we have the technology to tap into the data in a meaningful way. However, it’s still too soon to tell if only the “good” information will make its way online. Only time will tell.

Image: flicker/ racoles

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High Tech Tools Provide Public Service for the Digital Age is a post from: TechStartups.com

Sort of like Back to the Future in the sense that these folks are working to build the next, next and next web connected devices and the event is in the past.. Anyway, like Doc, these mad scientists of the AR and Semantic disciplines got together to discuss there passions and find common ground.

They did find that common ground after some time, as I wrote last night. What I didn’t write about last night, partially because I had  the pleasure of posting from my phone, was about another required middle ground – commerce. Both of these technologies have made their greatest leaps in the labs of academics and their students, not in the business world.

For these technologies to find their way into the public consciousness in a meaningful way this merger is necessary. It is necessary not only for funding these endeavors but for continued growth and innovation on top of the core concepts that create the value to users.

This is usually the stage where the process devolves into a soap opera. It is similar to the current drama between journalists and bloggers. The stereotypes – one is trained in the art of story telling, fact checking and impartiality while the other trained in the art self-publishing, internet culture and telling it like it is. I won’t tell you which is which.

These technologies born of academic discourse, grant writing and undergrad sweat equity come to the marketplace they are often unpolished. Which gives the marketing and advertising people only a partial vision of what the technology can do. The academics, feeling that they have done everything right, because the technology works and solves a problem rebuff ideas of how to polish and package it.

This room was no different when marketers stood up and professed their passion for these technologies to the sounds of nerd snickers and snide whispers. That was until immediately following one of these marketing, advertising types pulled up an AR expert and asked them to demo a new project that had just come from the lab.

The video that came on screen was a demonstration of the everyday possibilities of AR to enhance the lives of the wired set – a fashion app. Yep, fashion. A simple everyday activity that some revel in and most of us just follow the trends. This application allows the user to be on camera, choose real clothes images and virtually try them on at scale. It might sound lame but it got the most attention for being practical.

Around the user on screen were buttons that could activate the program to switch clothing items, take a photo to save, buy the item, add a photo and link to social network and of course the old stand by of emailing it to yourself. This context being, of course, shopping – where the commerce meets the tech.

The product hasn’t been released yet but I can describe it simply as the perfect merger at the right time for AR and the public perception of its usefulness. Unlike other attempts to create interest in AR this one has a no-nonsense feel of a real tool. When it is publicly released we’ll do a full review.

My point isn’t to pick on either of these groups but to use them as examples of how leading edge technology products are created and the dissonance that exists during the process of bringing them to the public. It is a world where marketing and ad folks often get the media credit and the technologists get a byline. The gap between the two is closing as we become a more tech savvy culture, but there is still room for the drama. It’s up to us to recognize it and make sure we get back to the future.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Back to the Augmented Lounge is a post from: TechStartups.com

Can’t make it to SoHo anytime soon or in this lifetime? Then you should head over to StyleCaster to get a sense of what ambitious, smart fashion is walking the streets of NYC South of Houston. New York is teeming with this apparel and footwear clacking away to catch a cab.

StyleCaster is most definitely a Big Apple property, which is only to its benefit as they grow their site. The city is a fashion and media capital.

With the new boom of startup activity on the East Coast they find themselves in a great position to gain users, make partnerships (both tech savvy and with traditional media) and to be in the epicenter of the next fashion trends. Think what Portfolio.com used to be, but for fashion.

Fashion sites often suffer from a lack of depth, see content, or lack of tech to make them accessible. They often rely heavily on motion graphics in Flash and a business model based on revenue from affiliate sales. Not StyleCaster. They have mixed all the ingredients and a some other special sauce to create a complete user experience.

It would be hard to write this review if I didn’t break their site down from the beginning. StyleCaster is three distinct properties that have been plied together with one smaller cousin: Fashion Recommendations, Social Network, News/Blog and Shopping (the smaller cousin).

Fashion Recommendations

This is the core value proposition for StyleCaster. They deliver a tailored interface for weather and season with 360 degree model views.

Earlier this summer they took this concept and created an iPhone app that was just as robust as their site. The experience that they are able to deliver with their Daily Looks section should make retailers jealous. They have merged seamless cross-selling with the common sense that your friend might recommend and item to you.

Social Network

Everyone wants on this bandwagon for many reasons and the number one being to get funded. I’m not sure if this is what got StyleCaster $4 million but this is how it is done right, in case you were wondering.

They first look to a larger network, in this case Facebook, and integrate with their API through Connect. Second, they take this data and create an onsite profile each registrant. Third, and final in this process of hooking user into their community, they make it drop dead simple to engage with other users based on contributor types, cities, at random and a 15 minutes of fame section. A simple horizontal navigation that tracks users onsite fashionista moves.

News/Blog

Fashion Recommendations might be the awesome wow factor that you need to attract the fashion forward and a Social Network to get users connected and spending time on your site but the most impressive feature of this site isn’t really a feature. The Newsroom and Blog sections of StyleCaster are destinations for an insiders perspective on fashion. This is where the magic of this site is made.

This is content that matches the ambition and smarts of the fashion they follow . . . delivers and then some. My only gripe is that the IA and taxonomy is lacking lacking and it can be difficult to find much of the great content that is buried in the site.

StyleCaster’s headlines can be seen on other fashion/celeb sites around the net but smart money would probably say that there are more partnerships in the works to deliver full content. I’m not smart money, so I can’t say for sure.

Shopping

Well, what would a fashion site be without shopping? I called this the ‘one smaller cousin’  and I mean it. Simply put, the focus of this site is obviously to build a company and a brand based on high quality content, technology and a great user experience. It wasn’t built with shopping at its core. And that is awesome! There is a solid enough foundation in place that if StyleCaster went down this road they would find success but not as much as they will find by having all of other components in place.

I’ve gushed quite a bit here over what is just another startup. They are just another startup that needs to prove itself in the marketplace. I believe they will. And even if they don’t, this business, with any one of the three aforementioned sections would make any entrepreneur very happy with the traffic they could bring. Kudos to the team that are making this happen. They’re getting done the right way.

It wouldn’t be right to do a post about a fashion startup without some snark, now would it?

If you have ever wanted to release that inner hater, head to The Daily Looks section and spin them tall skinny models round and round until your petty little heart is content. Not that I did or would want to do this.

Tip if you do: Play house music to make it a party. Remember, you can’t do this in SoHo!

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

StyleCaster Is Your SoHo Connection is a post from: TechStartups.com