AS THE TABLE TURNS. How hot is Turntable.fm? Not hot enough for Talib Kweli, reports a Betabeat tipster. More than 100 people showed up at the Turntable.fm party last night for the CMJ music festival, where the rapper was supposed to laptop-DJ along with Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai, Sterogum’s Amrit Singh and LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Wang.
Mr. Kweli was a no-show; Mr. Selvadurai was also nowhere to be seen. “Furthermore, no one at the event that I spoke to had ever heard of Turntable.fm or understood why they were just looking at five people playing songs from a laptop,” our tipster writes. “They were clearly expecting some Talib Kweli turntablism. To make matters worse, their showcase was in between an amazing turntablism set by AraabMuzik and an anticipated set by indie band The Dum Dum Girls, which left the turntable.fm as a head scratcher for people attending CMJ.”
Why would Mr. Kweli, who has shown TT love before, drop out of the mix?
7. Sick of Turntable hype.
6. Afraid of the gingers.
5. Intimidated by DJ Wooooooo.
4. Had some bad Chinese.
3. At Occupy Wall Street.
2. BlackBerry died, didn’t get the Google Calendar reminder, thought it was tomorrow.
AS THE SQUARE FOURS: Foursquare has fired its PR agency, Kaplow, ‘asploding a six-figure contract. We were on the receiving end of Kaplow’s efforts, which most recently included a foodie walking tour on which we expected to get free food but, like, it got rescheduled and then we couldn’t go. But they seemed fine! What was wrong? Could it be that foursquare just gets oodles of fucking publicity without having to lift a finger? Could that be it? They should pay Betabeat for all the PR we do! *Stupid foursquare.
PR PRANKS. “I’m going to make up a bunch of lies and tell a bunch of people and see who reports it without checking facts,” tweets Brandee Barker, former Facebook flack. Which would have been a great idea if she hadn’t twttred about it?
SMALL BRITCHES. Tumblr is scouting office space, and it’s not easy. The startup’s team is now more than 50 people squished into its Flatiron digs, and it just raised a monster round–time to get that baller office quick to fit in all the chic new Tumbsters! But finding the perfect, cutest, coolest, raddest office space in all the land is no small task. Betabeat got a tip that Tumblr made a play for 598 Broadway, the sunny Soho building that houses fellow New York rockstar startup ZocDoc, but things didn’t pan out. It’s possible, says our source, that Tumblr got nudged out by another local startup.
CUBES LOOSE ON CRAIGSLIST. Oh no, is Loosecubes going all Airbnb on us? We stumbled upon this listing for a sunny desk space, directing Craigslisters to a Loosecubes listing appended with the tagline, “Loosecubes is a community marketplace for great workspace.” Clever, or toeing the line of spammership?
*omg kidding
