"Right now, the only way to get distribution for your application is to pay out the nose on an existing ad network, get “TechCrunched,” or to call in a favor at Apple (presuming you know someone there) and get featured on the iTunes homepage," wrote NY Tech Meetup's Nate Westheimer.

To combat this, Westheimer has launched a new project, Allify, in partnership with betaworks and Prehype, two digital studios that help incubate local startups.

Allify is essentially an advertising cartel in which members promote each other's products. Developers earn credits based on how many ads they show and can redeem those credits for ads featuring their product on the Allify network.

At first this seems a bit like the blind leading the blind, but if a few apps turn into home runs the network might start to attract enough members that it becomes a real promotional asset. Of course, showing these ads will cut into whatever small revenue stream developers might see, but most will probably appreciate the trade off in terms of exposure.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

One of the biggest crowd-pleasing moments came when DontEat.At's Max Stoller explained his app in under a minute: It blends Foursquare and New York City Health data to alert users when they check in to restaurants with a lot of health-code violations. He spent the rest of the demo talking about how he programmed the app for New York City BigApps.

Also well received were Proust, a question-based program that invites users to digitize family- and friend-related memorabilia, and Fancy Hands, the brainchild of former New York Times man Ted Roden, which aspires to provide personal-assistant services to subscribers.

The founders of TinyPass.com demonstrated a new easy-to-use micropayment system that would allow large-scale content producers like The Daily Beast and small-time bloggers to charge for premium content. They're not the only ones thinking about improving content payments; TheNextWeb today reports on the debut of Cleeng, a WordPress plugin that allows publishers to create premium sections of their websites.

Tax and accounting website Teaspiller seeks to help people find an accountant by culling user reviews, regulatory information and accountants' resumes. CEO Amit Vemuri made a crack about how people don't go to accountants for "breast exams" to illustrate the point that transactions with accountants can be carried out online.

CEO and founder Tereza Nemessanyi from Honestly Now introduced a website that would help users "make great personal decisions" by asking friends and qualified experts on the internet questions like "Should I wear this cardigan?" Other demos included an interactive gameshow from CollegeOnly's Josh Weinstein; Consmr, a Yelp for packaged goods; and Hyperpublic, a site that encourages users to engage with their local communities.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

"What I'd like to figure out is how we can create a much more sustainable and much more robust pipeline of developers into the NYC innovation community and I'd like to propose a lofty goal to inspire some solutions," O'Donnell wrote on his blog.

Investor Fred Wilson took up the charge next. "Charlie O'Donnell has put forth a challenge to bring 250 new software developers this year to NYC. I think that's a good start but I'd like to see a bolder number, like 1,000 a year, or even more," Wilson wrote yesterday.

Now Nate Westheimer, organizer of the New York Tech Meetup, is taking the idea to the next level.

A thousand non-technical New Yorkers should learn to code, he said.

"For as long as I've been involved in the NY tech industry we've made cries for more engineers to a) move here; or, b) abandon/avoid Wall Street so they can join our silly startups that are 'changing the world.' What if instead of calling on others to do things we just looked to ourselves? Aren't we the change we are waiting for?" he wrote yesterday.

Westheimer is in the perfect position to say this. Until very recently, he was a NoPE--"Non-cOding Product Executive." But two months ago, he decided to learn Ruby on Rails and spent a week at his desk in a mental "sweat lodge," doing nothing else.

Since then, he's built a voting app for the New York Tech Meetup and a meeting schedule called Ohours. He also posted a guide to learning code.

Westheimer already has 51 comments on his post, "Can 1000 of us learn to code?" so far, many of them NoPEs saying "I'm in."

Sounds like a New Year's resolution! Sanford Dickert created a page on nextNY.org where hacker hopefuls can publicly commit to learn a programming language.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

It's really not that surprising says director Nate Westheimer. "I think I got elected with like 400 votes." 

Candidate Noel "NoNeck" Hidalgo was the first to publicly raise the questions about the policy of giving each member just one vote, even though the race is for two seats.

"I find it disingenuous that we, candidates & community, are told one thing and then forced to deal with "on the fly" circumstances," he wrote to the NYTM listserve. "If our "16,000 strong" community has the ability to create multi-million dollar applications, surely we can find the community resource to architect a real democratic solution. I know we can do this, and I know we can do more."

Westheimer, for his part, said there was nothing "on the fly" about it. "There are many ways to hold an election. We choose this one." 

Tune back in here at 3 p.m. sharp for the election results. 

Last Chance To Meet The Candidates and Cast a Vote >>

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Beyond just selling out the Skirball Center every month, the organization is seeking official status as a non-profit and adopting a set of Governing Bylaws. 

As part of this maturation, NYTM is creating a 13 member board, with four of the seats to be filled by community-elected members. 

The candidates for the first two community seats will introduce themselves tonight and voting will take place online over the next three days. 

It's a strong field of contenders. "Once I saw the folks running I called Nate and told him I was dropping out," says SeatGeek's Ben Kessler. "There are people I would rather vote for than myself." 

Check out The Candidates! >>

He was at the Puck Building last night at the Internet Week Kick-Off party, sponsored by The Observer, the Webby Awards and YouTube and standing in front of a TV screen playing a Web video of J Geils Band's "Centerfold." Nearby venture capitalists and young entreprenuers in sports coats and were sipping wine and one guest was nearly passing out on the couch from a bit too much of it.

Perhaps New York's start-up scene has gone G-rated? "After Sept. 11, New York wasn't the same, and that's part of the reason why I left," Mr. Calacanis said. "When artists and creative people can't afford to live in Manhattan, the worse it got."

"Creative destruction is gonna be the greatest thing that can happen to Manhattan," Mr. Calacanis said.

Ah, and here comes the nostalgia:

"That's how it started back in the early 90s in Silicon Alley," Mr. Calacanis said, who now lives on the West Coast to run Mahalo.com. He noted that the Puck Building was near the heart of New York's original tech scene along Broadway. "It was a lot of out of work people who were working at magazines, advertising agencies and finance companies. When everybody got laid off, people started experimenting with CD-roms, and... then putting all of that on the Internet."

Mr. Calacanis said despite the real estate bubble, bottle service and VIP poseurs souring him to New York, he misses the city "terribly," he told the Observer. "Every week. I'm sure I'll come back. I like it more and more every time I come back."

And he sees potential in new startups, like Tumblr and Meetup. "They're making cool shit," he said and doing it for the love of the Internet, not the dot com dollars. "You have to get in the limelight based on what you do, how creative you are, and not how much money you make."

Two of New York's young star entreprenuers, AnyClip.com's Nate Westheimer and Drop.io's Sam Lessin stepped in to shake hands with Mr. Calacanis. He'll see Mr. Westheimer again tonight, when he hosts the New York Tech Meetup at FIT's Haft Auditorium. Mr. Calacanis is presenting a new version of Mahalo, his "human-powered search" engine. "The creativity here [in New York] is what made it great, the art is gonna come back," he said, before finding a quiet corner to Twitter on his laptop and duck out for some pork and corn at Cafe Habana.

All of the city’s young digerati will be Twittering about Internet Week New York starting Monday, June 1. Expect everyone from your regular Googlers and Facebookers to College Humor’s Jake & Amir, AOL’s newly minted executive Tim Armstrong, Barry Diller, Digg’s Kevin Rose and even Al Gore out on the town.

The “week” is packed with so many Web media panels, start-up contests and boozy mixers that organizers tacked on another day for the fest. It ends on June 8 with everyone shaking off their hangovers and trading their T-shirts for suits at the 13th Annual Webby Awards, hosted by SNL’s Seth Meyers and featuring honors for Jimmy Fallon, Trent Reznor and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the Internet!).

The Observer checked in with David-Michel Davies, who is chair of Internet Week and executive director of both the Webby Awards and the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (phew!), who said he expected “north of 15,000 attendees” total to the various events. Any company or group could host an event and slap the Internet Week label on it, so the schedule is pretty packed. We asked Mr. Davies to name a few of his favorites, and added in a few of our own, too, for your own guide to getting geeky at the fest.

Monday, June 1st

The Observer is partnering with YouTube and the Webby Awards for a Kick Off party. (Full disclosure: The Observer’s publisher Jared Kushner is on Internet Week’s board.) This cocktail party is by invitation only so expect the best and the brightest to be mingling at the Puck Building starting at 8 p.m.

Everyone else will navigate through the (now car-less!) Broadway in Times Square to attend Ignite NYC, one of the week’s most popular events that features several five-minute presentations of tech and geek culture. This year, Area/Code’s Kevin Slavin, Charitini.com’s Rachel Sklar, PR 2.0 guru Brian Solis, Girlwonder Molly Steenson and others are slated to present. Nick Bilton, lead researcher at The New York Times’ research and development lab, will be hosting the evening’s The Ignite Film Festival Competition as well. The party starts at 7 p.m. at New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street.

Tuesday, June 2nd

For breakfast, how about a discussion on the city’s digital business and how it can save the economy? Mr. Davies will host a panel, titled Start Me Up: Investing in the Digital Industry, featuring Steven Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online; Marc Cenedella, founder of TheLadders.com; Jalak K. Jobanputra, senior vice president of the NYC Investment Fund; and Rachel Lam, senior vice president and group managing director at Time Warner Investments, to talk about the possibilities, starting at 8 a.m. at the Time Warner Center Corporate Headquarters on 58th Street between 8th and 9th avenues.

Observer reporters will be at Start Me Up and the invite-only New York Women and New Media breakfast at Le Parker Meridien on West 56th Street, co-hosted by Blip.tv’s co-founder Dina Kaplan, Daily Candy’s chief operating officer Catherine Levene, Gilt Groupe’s chief executive Susan Lyne, Huffington Post chief executive Betsy Morgan, and Katherine Oliver, commissioner of the mayor’s office of film, theater, and broadcasting, this morning.

In the afternoon, stroll through the FIT Great Hall at 227 West 27th Street and see technologies built here in the city at New York Tech Meetup’s Demo Pit. They will be hosting the showcase from 3 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Afterward, you can head over to the FIT Haft Auditorium on 27th Street between 7th and 8th avenues for the official NYTM event. Head organizer (and newly dubbed vice president of product development for AnyClip) Nate Westheimer will emcee the evening, in which entrepreneurs will present their latest projects. The lineup so far features the new State Senate Web site, NYSenate.gov, Jason Calacanis presenting—for the first time—a new version of Mahalo.com, Aviary, Livestream / Procaster, UpNext, and MakerBot.

If that’s all geek to you, and you’re more into being a mini-Frank Bruni restaurant and business reviewer on Yelp, head over to their kick-off event for Yelp Passport to Chelsea, a week-long party with Chelsea’s local businesses wooing opinionated online reviewers with discounts to restaurants and local shops. At the kick-off, participants can pick up their passes and gift bags and get a tour of the Chelsea Art Museum, at 160 11th Avenue, where the event takes place starting at 7 p.m.

Wednesday, June 3rd

At 9:25 a.m., at the all-day Creativity and Technology (CaT) gathering at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, some of The New York Times’ brightest minds, including Mr. Bilton, along with the NYTimes.com’s senior software architect, Derek Gottfrid, will speak on “The New Old Media,” according to the schedule. Expect them to show off some of The Times’ latest online projects and experiments with monetization.

Silicon Alley Insider is hosting an all-day conference and start-up contest at Startup 2009, beginning at 8 a.m. at NYU’s Stern School Shimmel Hall, 40 West Fourth Street. Speakers include Facebook co-founder and Obama boy Chris Hughes; Mr. Calacanis; John Battelle, former chief executive of Industry Standard and founder of Federated Media; and AlleyCorp chief executive Kevin Ryan, among others.

Al Gore, College Humor’s Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld and MTV’s Tom Green will be speaking at the Digitas’ Digital Content NewFronts 2009 (kinda like a Web version of TV’s upfronts). Only folks with an invite will be allowed into Skylight Gallery, 275 Hudson Street, for the event, but you can watch via live webcast starting at 11:30 a.m.

Mashable founder Pete Cashmore will be speaking on Social Media Marketing at 92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street, along with Steve Rubel, senior vice president and director of insights for Edelman Digital, starting at 6 p.m.

Consider sneaking out early at 7 p.m. to head over to New Work City, 200 Varick Street in Suite 507B, for the Summer of Gov presentation, hosted by Matt Cooperrider and featuring the best local open government projects. Or, for a sillier affair, slip on your Sperry Top-Siders and try the College Humor and Guest of a Guest Yacht Rock party at the Hotel on Rivington Penthouse, 107 Rivington Street, starting at 8 p.m. We hope the DJ drops lots of Hall & Oates.

Thursday, June 4th

Barry Diller will be welcoming former Googler and current AOL executive Tim Armstrong and News Corp.’s new digital head Jon Miller at the Founders Club’s invitation-only party at a private rooftop garden overlooking Rockefeller Center.

Starting at 7 p.m., a bunch of geeky stuff will be happening at Webby Webster Hall, where there will be a live taping of Diggnation, hosted by Digg.com’s Kevin Rose and Alex Abrecht. If the Digg fanboys get overwhelming, head to Thrillist’s “The Internet Is Out of Control” party at 8 p.m. at M2, 530 West 28th Street. Gawker is hosting one of their signature boozy rooftop parties for the Interactive Advertising Bureau at their 210 Elizabeth Street headquarters at the same time.

Friday, June 5th

PSFK, a Web site for ideas and new trends, is hosting a Good Ideas in Collaboration Salon, in which entrepreneurs and creative professionals can mix and mingle. Speakers include Mike Brown Jr. of Virgin Group; Ben Lerer, founder of Thrillist; Sam Lessin, chief executive of drop.io; and Mr. Westheimer of AnyClip and NYTM. The salon starts at 3 p.m. at the Art Directors Club, 106 West 29th Street.

The evenings main shmoozing and boozing event will be the Webutante Ball, a “classy prom” hosted by Jessica Amason, lead blogger at Urlesque.com and columnist for TheFrisky.com, and Gawker’s cameraman Richard Blakeley. There’s an open bar with free vodka for an hour, starting at 6 p.m., and a Webutante King and Queen will be crowned ($20 on Rex Sorgatz?). You can vote here. Arrive in formal attire at the Empire Hotel, 44 West 63rd Street, 12th Floor, for the rooftop party by 6 p.m. From the invite: “Eat your heart out Chuck Bass: we may not have private planes, but we’ve got Twitter and we’ve got style.”

Sunday, June 7th

Time for Twiffleball! Angelwish and Social Media for Social Change (SM4SC) are co-hosting a Wiffleball tournament between eight teams. All proceeds will benefit Angelwish, which provides easy ways for people to grant wishes to millions of kids living with H.I.V./AIDS around the world. You’ll have to roll out of bed early to show up for the 9:30 a.m. start at Adolph Ochs Playground, 440 West 53rd Street.

Reward your Wiffling with a cocktail and meet Barely Political’s Obama Girl at M1-5, 52 Walker Street, for Next New Networks’ $99 Music Videos Season 1 Wrap party.  The show hooked up indie bands with video artists to create music videos shot in one day, with just $99. Party starts at 7 p.m.

Monday, June 8th

Tonight is, of course, the finale, The 13th Annual Webby Awards Gala, which will feature lots of nominees and honorees walking a red carpet at Cipriani Wall Street, 55 Wall Street, starting at 5:30 p.m. for cocktails before the big show, which begins at 7 p.m. Special guests will include honorees NIN’s Trent Reznor, Late Night’s Jimmy Fallon, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, comedy gals Lisa Kudrow and Sarah Silverman and Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane. Cheers, Webby Winners.

“Last week, I got dumped on the Lower East Side,” he told The Observer. Mr. Westheimer, the 26-year-old head organizer of the NY Tech Meetup, had just ended his term as an entrepreneur in residence at Rose Tech Ventures. He fiddled with his iPhone, and said he wanted to create a mobile application designed for wallowing—one that could queue up classic New York–based breakup scenes from movies like Annie Hall and Kramer vs. Kramer. “I was like, I really want to see all the scenes about heartbreak that happen on like the Lower East Side,” he said. “People do that all the time, right? They do see a sad movie when they’re sad. Movies are about life.”

Mr. Westheimer was explaining to The Observer why he had decided to return to the start-up game as vice president of product at AnyClip, an Israeli-based tech company that is planning to battle YouTube and other piracy sites in the free-media market by creating a competitive, legal database of movie clips for application developers. Only this one might cost ’em: AnyClip is hoping they can become a kind of iTunes for film scenes.

Of course, YouTube has some legal movie clips after signing contracts with various studios, who generate revenue through advertising. The more people who view the videos, the more cash the studios get. Hulu has the same approach. But Mr. Westheimer’s company has a different one, with both free and paid subscription options to get quality, developer-friendly content.

“You can’t build an application off of things on YouTube because there’s no standards. It’s Napster 2001—everything’s shit on there,” he said.

ANYCLIP WAS FOUNDED two and a half years ago by Erel Margalit and Illi Edry, two of the top venture capitalists and partners at Israel-based Jerusalem Venture Partners, and Mickey Schulhof, the former chief executive of Sony Corp., who resigned in 1995 and is currently chairman of New York–based investment firm GTI Group. Back then, the project was called MyHollywood; Mr. Margalit and Mr. Schulhof signed contract deals with Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. to build an instant messenger add-on called PopTok, which inserted legal snippets of quotable movies directly into chat windows. Instead of typing in a winking emoticon, users could submit a clip of Mike Myers as Austin Powers, slurring, “Do I make you horny, baby?”

Mr. Westheimer, along with the rest of the AnyClip team, plans to build a bigger database so developers will be able to create more cool applications, like his own hypothetical, location-based, breakup-movie-clip montage. Or Casting Couch, the Facebook application that AnyClip released last week. With Casting Couch, users can find a scene from a movie and label their friends as characters. Tag your geeky single buddy as Steve Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin on his first date or label your prudish friend as Molly Ringwald’s Claire in The Breakfast Club. 

And users sick of YouTube’s inconsistency and quality-of-content issues will be able to browse AnyClip’s high-quality movie scenes and post them on their blogs and Twitter feeds for free, without the risk of the video disappearing because of a take-down notice.

For example, Mr. Westheimer has never seen ’90s stoner classic Wayne’s World. “I know, right?” he said. “But when I do, I certainly plan on blogging about it or Twittering about it. And when I do, I want to be able to see how my view of it might be different now compared to other people when they first saw it.”

Mr. Westheimer said he plans on building a detailed metrics log that will track who uses the videos and on which platforms and in what context—so users can see how the clips are helping others explain their world. He explained: “How is this scene relevant in society? How are all these scenes relevant socially? How is the universe of movies affecting the world right now? How many people now reference Pirates of the Caribbean because of this Somali pirates situation? There’s something we can do here on the aggregate, showing how movies affect society and society affects movies.”

MR. WESTHEIMER SAID one of the reasons he joined AnyClip, despite having several offers from New York–based companies, was because of the challenge of monetizing media. Those moviemakers, from the big-time studios to the independent filmmakers, need to be compensated for making that “epic stuff,” he said. “I believe in the flattening of media,” he told The Observer. “I do not rejoice when a newspaper goes out of business but … I am an Internet person. At the same time, there needs to be a future, a revenue future, for people making cultural artifacts which make people’s lives better.”

Mr. Schulhof, the former Sony executive, told The Observer that, from the beginning, his company approached the studios from the front door instead of the back. In March, he hired Aaron Cohen, former chief executive of MenuPages and director of the independent-film-in-the-works about Jewish guys with his same name, to “restart” the company (there are three Aaron Cohens working at the company, by the way).

“I did not want to run a business that would be solely dependent on advertising for its revenue,” Mr. Cohen wrote in a post on his personal blog. “This ad-only business model did not excite me and, candidly, felt a bit soulless. At the same time, I needed to be close to the consumer. I love people and I love to design products/services or places that make them happy.”

So, merging his love of movies and the Internet, Mr. Cohen, 42, joined the company in late March as chief executive with plans to make every movie ever made available for legal use and to help studios create revenue in what he calls the YouTube-dominated “clip economy.”

“The challenge of the movie industry is that they get zero,” he told The Observer. “They have no control and they make no money. So what Nate and I are seeking to do, along with our other colleagues, is to build a service where application developers can take advantage of a gigantic, comprehensive database and build cool applications for it.”

“But the hassle of getting a legal, comprehensive, license-able clip database is essentially like putting people on the moon,” he admitted. “It’s really, really hard.”

Mr. Westheimer was wooed into the challenge during the last few months by Mr. Cohen over coffee at Roasting Plant on Greenwich Avenue or Comfort Diner on West 23rd Street.

“It’s going to be about convincing them about the future of the Web and what that means for them—it’s a different paradigm than they’ve been living in,” Mr. Westheimer said. “We have the consumer and we have to go back to Hollywood, we say, ‘Without them, we’re nothing, and you’re nothing, so this is why you sort of have to come along with us. Your content has to make sense for users.’ The hardest challenge is balancing those two things, having two customers and making both sides happy.”

But that will come with more contract deals, according to Mr. Cohen, who has been meeting with Hollywood executives and will be making frequent trips out to California to continue the conversations. Mr. Westheimer has been flying back and forth from Israel, preparing to restructure his team, and building an AnyClip location in New York, which currently has six staffers and sits between the Out magazine office and a movie production office. “It’s nice to be surrounded by creatives,” he said. He plans on hiring a slew of interns this summer to start picking out great scenes in movies and burning them into the AnyClip database.

“I love uncertainty and the seriousness of this,” Mr. Westheimer said, finishing up his granola at the Chelsea cafe. He has been on red-eye flights back and forth from Israel for the past month, but he bears a boyish grin when he talks about AnyClip. “The VC thing was fun and [I was] really, really appreciative of the opportunity, but, even David Rose [Rose Tech Ventures’ founder] said the first day he offered me my job, he said, ‘You’re not a VC, you’re a start-up guy,’ and it’s true. I’m so much happier now being in a start-up. I love not wanting to go home.”

greagan@observer.com

Mr. Westheimer (remember that now 26-year-old 'boy wonder'?), announced the event last night, during May 6th's NYTM at New World Stages on West 50th Street. The Meetup is a 9,500-member-strong, monthly meeting of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and miscellaneous geeks and costs $10-a-pop to see five or six companies present their latest projects.

Last night, five New York-based tech companies presented at the Meetup, including tools like Zemanta, which automatically looks for keywords as the writer is typing out an entry and suggests links within the text (to Wikipedia articles or YouTube videos) for context and also finds "blogger-friendly" photos—all in real time. ActionMethod, a kind of LinkedIn social network for creative designers, displayed their project organization tool, as did data collection application exZact Data Collection, a video storage and publishing platform SesameVault, and RmbrME, a mobile service site that debuted its new iPhone application, BeamME Pitch. Meetup's Scott Heiferman also spoke about his recent trip to Irag with a delegation of tech entreprenuers to the sold-out crowd.

Attendance has been so high during these recent meetings, according to Mr. Westheimer, that they could afford to pay for the showcase and make the "Demo Pit" for Internet Week free.

"There was no sort of like center where you could go see everything about every New York start-up," Mr. Westheimer explained to The Observer. Visitors will be able to stroll down the Great Hall and visit each tech project's table, where they can demonstrate their work on laptops.

So no big screens projecting the work, like in regular Meetups?

"No big screens," Mr. Westheimer said. "We're trying to make this free for everybody, and be more commmunity-oriented. Everyone's equal."

New York Tech Meetup is an official sponsor of Internet Week, which takes place from June 1 to June 8 and is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in cooperation with City of New York and the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting. This year, they are also partnering with Time Warner, Tumblr, Google, the New Museum, Columbia Business School and the Webby Awards for various events.

Mr. Westheimer said information would be available on the NYTM's official site to sign up this Thursday, May 6. Start-ups, companies and creatives working on a side project will submit them for consideration by category (mobile, nonprofit, etc.) and organizers will choose 10 companies from six categories so a diverse slew of New York tech is represented, according to Mr. Westheimer. He expects competition to be fierce, since hundreds of companies vie for a spot to present at the Meetup every month.

"It's all about people meeting you and seeing your cool stuff and stopping by and it not costing anything and showing off how frickin' cool New York tech is," he said.