If you’re traveling during the holidays, perhaps New York City is one of your destinations. Sporting some of the greatest holiday displays, the city is the premiere shopping mecca of the east coast.

Simply put, if you can’t get into the holiday spirit while in New York City, you’re a grinch.

Popular travel guide company Lonely Planet has decided to make its guide to NYC free for three days. Along with the free guide, Lonely Planet has released a list of “Dos and Don’ts” when visiting New York City during the holiday season.

The guide

Lonely Planet’s iOS app is brilliantly designed, which we have come to expect, since its books are among the most popular travel guides around. The app itself is free, but the company charges for guides in-app.

The NYC guide is usually $5.99, and is one of Lonely Planet’s most popular guides. You can grab it for free now until December 15th.

The guide itself is a pretty massive download coming in at 45mb, but is jam-packed with pictures, maps, and text for offline viewing. It even takes a minute or two to install, so you know that you’re going to be covered during your east coast visit. With over 1300 maps alone, this is an absolute complete guide to NYC.

Considering that at some point in your lifetime you might visit NYC, the free guide is well worth the download.

The tips

Robert Reid, Lonely Planet’s NYC Travel Editor, has put together some “Dos and Don’ts” for while you’re visiting his fair city. You can view all of them here, but I found this particular one to be helpful:

DO window-shop. Boutiques and department stores across the city dress up for the season.

DON’T stick with hipster downtown. Midtown simply does it better. Have a walk up Fifth Avenue from Rockefeller Center, to FAO, and detour to Madison to see the modern, funny antics of Barney’s on Madison Ave and 62nd St.

It’s true, all of the glorious shopping experiences happen in Midtown, and if you’ve never been to NYC before, this is an absolute must.

Happy Holidays, and be safe during your travels!

➤ Lonely Planet for iOS

We first met with Jason L. Baptiste and Andres Barreto, the founders of Onswipe on a snowy day in late January in New York City for an interview titled, Forget apps, Onswipe is the future of publishing. The two entrepreneurs were poised for the age of the tablet, both passionate writers who wanted to make their content look beautiful on the iPad. Armed with skills in coding and software development, and support from TechStars‘ mentors, Baptiste and Barreto, along with their third co-founder Mark Bao, have been tirelessly working to make the publishing experience more enjoyable for the reader from both the editorial experience and the advertising side. Today, Onswipe launches to the world.

“The tablet is the fastest growing piece of consumer electronics ever. In the future, everything will be touch. You already see little kids nowadays, confused as they touch their unresponsive television sets. Touch is going to be the entire web and Onswipe will be providing the premier monetization engine for it and its publishers. It will be the beauty of print with the scale and data of Google or DoubleClick… Yes, it’s an audacious goal. But we get a chance to change everything and rewrite all the rules. We want a completely different conversation. And we want people to do that with us. ”

-Jason L. Baptiste

To explain a complicated technical process as simply as possible, the Onswipe platform organizes a publisher’s content into a customizable, design conscious, mobile and tablet friendly format. In just under 3 minutes, Onswipe delivers an app-like experience within the web browser. Earlier this spring, Onswipe partnered with WordPress.com to power the tablet experience of over 18.5 million blogs via the service. And over the past few months, signups for the platform have been in the tens of thousands.

Onswipe works with publishers of any size, whether their audience consists of 100 people or 1 million and doesn’t charge for its platform but instead sees itself as a partner and monetizes by taking a small percentage of their advertising revenue. The revenue model is competitive with industry standards on other platforms, and is adjusted on a case by case basis, in particular with Onswipe’s Icon Partnership platform, which is for larger publishers that have their own ad sales teams. With Onswipe, the advertisers receive metrics and scale and publishers are monetizing web content at a much higher value than before. As the value of the CPM increases, Onswipe makes additional, incremental revenue.

“We don’t make money until you make money,” says Baptiste. But Onswipe has already made publishers a significant amount of money, according to the 25-year old CEO. Onswipe’s 8-10 launch partners include The Next Web, Gary Vaynerchuk, Hollywood.com, Stocktwits and Geek.com, as well as Icon partners Marie Claire, in an ad partnership with American Express and Slate, in an ad partnership with Sprint. Credit for the creative goes to Ogilvy and Mindshare for the two launch campaigns.

“We want to optimize Slate for every platform so our readers can consume Slate content wherever, however and whenever they want,” said John Alderman, General Manager of The Slate Group and Publisher of Slate. “We’re thrilled to be partnering with OnSwipe and Sprint on this latest incarnation of Slate that leverages HTML5 to bring an app-like experience to the iPad browser. “

Onswipe is the technology that joins publishers and advertisers together in the tablet web era. For the publishers who have resented the way technology has changed the industry in the past decade, Onswipe is helping them to maintain the beauty that advertising creatives deserve. Baptiste tells them that “apps are bullshit” and it’s all about making money off the tablet web. ”The banner ad is on life support, it just doesn’t work on the web or the tablet,” says Baptiste. Onswipe aims to deliver ads that people would want to rip out and put on the wall, to the tablet web.

OnSwipe believes its ad platform for tablets will trump both Apple’s iAd mobile advertising network and Google AdSense. “We’re creating something that the best creative agencies around the world can get excited about. No one ever remembers a Google ad. In fact, we dont think Google AdSense will work in the tablet world. But if you think of the past few decades of advertisements, you remember Got Milk, Just Do It, etc.,” says Baptiste. So far, the feedback from brands and agencies has been extremely positive.

“Think about those beautiful full page ads in magazines like GQ or Marie Claire. Let the art work and the photography speak for itself. We want to take your existing print creative, upload it and layer on slight modular activity such as geolocation so users have the ability to see stores nearby. We let you build something that is as beautiful as a print ad in the time it would take to set up a Google Ad words campaign,” says Baptiste.

Co-founder and CTO Mark Bao (the brilliant 19-year old entrepreneur whom they convinced to leave school), came aboard officially in June and has started working on “myOnswipe,” a feature that allows Instapaper-like offline reading, in the browser and in HTML5.  myOnswipe will allow readers to see what their friends are reading as well. So you’ll be able to take the subway in New York and continue reading an awesome TNW article on your iPad. It’s like having the Internet without any Internet as well.

Onswipe raised $5 million in a “Series Awesome” round led by Spark Capital, Lightbank, Yuri Milner, Lerer Ventures, SVAngel, Betaworks, Morado, Eniac and Thrive Capital, totaling $6 million in funding to date. Baptiste hopes to use the funding to scale his current team of 10 to 20-25 people in the next year, introducing a mix of engineering and business development positions.

But just a little bit of that funding money might go towards celebrating (deservedly!). This week, the Onswipe gentlemen will be renting out New York’s posh Soho House to celebrate the launch of their long-awaited, brilliantly easy tablet publishing platform. The event will bring together all the partners, advertisers and people who’ve been involved with Onswipe, featuring a 15-minute keynote talk by Jonathan Klein, the former president of CNN, who’s an advisor and close friend to Onswipe.

As one of Onswipe’s launch partners, be sure to check out how stunning our site looks on your iPad or iPhone this week. More announcements to come.

Today, at the 3rd annual 99% Conference in New York City, which sold out 5 months in advance, 380 advertising, design and related creative professionals and enthusiasts gathered for the first of 2 days of quality speakers and potential industry connections.

This year, The 99%, a part of the Behance Network, received the Webby award for best cultural blog. The ideas and trends site was named after the famous Thomas Edison quote: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” In somewhat of a paradigm, the conference’s first speaker, Simon Sinek was 99% inspiration, and 1% watery eyes.

Sinek, a Leadership Expert and Author of Start With Why, revealed a fresh way to look at fulfillment, communities and trust that seems as natural as sex itself, but is unfortunately ignored by most modern professionals, companies and particularly big brands.

He began by asking, “How can you help the human race and the human species progress?” At the end of the day the human is a social animal, dependent on trust. Trust comes from a sense of common values and beliefs. We seek commonality, which is why we love social networks; the immediate friendships on Facebook and the instantaneous connections on Twitter. It’s why when we’re riding the Paris Metro, and we hear an American accent, we say ‘Hello.’

If a country is a community with a common set of values and beliefs, a company should be the same thing because it is community that allows trust to emerge, says Sinek.

“When we trust, we’re more willing to experiment. We have the confidence that if we fail or trip over, that those who trust us will look after us. Our very survival depends on this. We’re not good at everything and we’re not good by ourselves… The goal is to amplify your strength and surround yourself with people who can do what you can’t do…”

-Simon Sinek

Every decision we make in our lives is a piece of communication. It’s our way of saying what we believe in. If you do what you say and what you believe, you will attract people who believe what you believe because, as human beings, we naturally surround ourselves with the people, products and brands that say something about who we are. So screw market research. Your customers don’t want to tell you how to act.

In the work place, how do human beings really reach fulfillment? “It’s all about helping inspire people to do the things that inspire them,” says Sinek. It’s the ‘spirit of generosity‘ that illuminates this idea. “If we’re willing to give to the person next to us, it’s amazing what they’ll be willing to give back to you,” he says.

Screw self-help. What about helping the person next to you? You can be happy because you did some great things at work, but do you know how you feel fulfilled at work? It’s when you do something for someone else. So why do 90% of people not feel fulfilled from their jobs? It’s because nobody helps anybody anymore, he says.

Generosity is doing something for someone else and expecting nothing in return, ever. Giving isn’t an equation. It’s designed to help you feel good. Sex feels good because it was designed to feel good so that we will continue to procreate. When we inspire those around us, it feels good because it’s supposed to feel good. That sense of fulfillment that we get was designed so that we’ll do it more. It’s how the human species progresses.

Today, brands are like homeless people. It’s all “me, me, me!” in an attempt to get something from someone. Brands are takers, not givers: We’re #1. We’re the best, the biggest, the most efficient. In an experiment to prove his point, Sinek asked a homeless person who makes an average of $20-$30 per day if he could just change her sign. In under two hours, she made $40 (so she decided to go home, er leave to go wherever). What did the sign say?

“If you only give once a month, please think of me next time.”

“Make the message about them, not about you. 100% of customers are people. 100% of clients are people. 100% of employees are people. I don’t care how good your design is, your marketing, etc. We are social animals…If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business,” said Simon Sinek, closing out his speech today to a room ready to do nearly anything for the person sitting next to them.

According to Business Insider, notable social media pundit and businessman, Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as “Gary V” will be joining Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily, hosting a weekly video show called “The Next Wave.”

“His quick wit and unique point of view make him a great fit, and we believe our subscribers will find his insights on the merging worlds of business, technology, and social media useful, as well as entertaining.” -Daily editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo

His show, “The Next Wave” will cover social media, namely Twitter, the importance of 1 on 1 communication and the merchant relationship with customers and those around you, which are topics of his previous books Crush It! and Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion and his latest book The Thank You Economy.

See our recent post on Gary V’s new outdoor ad campaign to promote his latest book.

10 years ago, if you wanted to plan a family vacation to the Caribbean, you likely had to go through a travel agent. Today, there are a slew of travel planning sites like Gogobot, TripAdvisor, Expedia, etc. that help you navigate to warmer waters.

Today the business of buying outdoor advertising space, a 6 billion dollar a year industry, is stuck in the 90s. To buy billboards, wallscapes, transit space or innovative street art campaigns requires lengthy excel spreadsheets, phone calls, and driving from site to site.

Adstruc, a 4-person startup based in New York City is changing the future of outdoor advertising space, by providing an online auction and listing-based marketplace for sellers and buyers. Founder and CEO John Laramie brought his team together last summer under the mentoring of David Cohen’s TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado, to build the entire system in just three months.

Last month, ADstruc released a campaign titled, “Billboards for Everyone.” Their first billboard, which depicts a play on the immigration policy and is aptly displayed in Arizona, was designed by Shepard Fairey’s creative agency Studio Number One. The campaign is supported by partnerships with BA Reps, Spread ArtCulture Magazine, and JWT New York. Each month, Adstruc puts out a creative brief to host a similar project in various states. For future campaigns they will work with popular street artists like Ron English and experiment with 3D digital outdoor campaigns.

“What’s fascinating about these projects is how full circle they are,” says Laramie, “The deal starts out online [on Adstruc], then they are produced in the real world, but end up gaining the most visibility back in the online space as they virally spread across blogs and websites.”

In September of last year, Adstruc closed a $1.1 million Series A investment led by DFJ Gotham, with participation from RRE, Founder Collective, Jeff Clavier, David Cohen, Kal Vepuri, David Tisch and Social Leverage. This gained them quite a bit of popularity in the New York area, catching the attention of notable businessman, Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as Gary V.

To promote Gary V’s latest book titled, The Thank You Economy, Adstruc partnered with Twilio to launch an innovative campaign on the streets of New York City featured on telephone kiosks throughout Manhattan from Titan Outdoor and a subway platform ad at 23rd Street and Park Avenue. The campaign engages consumers with a unique phone number on the advertisement that enables people to speak directly about the book with Gary V – all through Twilio, a web app that makes calling and receiving phone calls through the Internet easy. The campaign was created, produced, bought and installed without an advertising or media agency and cost less than $20,000 in total.

“It was a no brainer to work with Gary and Twilio,” says Laramie. “We thought about who Gary V is and that his new book is about 1 on 1 communication and the relationship with your customers and those poeple around you. We said, how can we have some sort of interaction other than QR codes or texting a number? There isn’t enough call to action and outdoor ads are flat. Integrating Twilio into the ads made sense.”

Earlier today, I tested it out and gave Gary V a call, and he answered! Since the ads went up last week, he’s received only 25 calls, answering all of them unless he’s on a plane or asleep. The first four people freaked out and hung up on him right away and many others asked him questions like “What’s the ROI of your mom? What’s the book about?”

“Dollar for dollar, I’ll have to look if the campaign was totally worth it but I wanted to do it because I think these guys are disrupting media. I’d never have been able to do this without them. I think being creative in outdoor advertising is a very big opportunity,” says Gary.

Adstruc gives buyers the ability to say, “OK, here’s who I want to target, the location, here’s my budget and let’s do this right away.” Adstruc gives buyers the ability to see a space and using photoshop like tools, play with their ad within that space. For sellers, Adstruc scrapes all of their available data on the spot and uploads it to the Internet so they have one place to manage it. On average, Adstruc saves buyers 2-3 weeks of time and 15%-25% off of costs depending on location and timing. For sellers, Adstruc helps sell otherwise remnant ad space.

A smartphone application is also in the works. Imagine being able to see a billboard, and submit a proposal right then and there? Why not? The future is here.

This week Flavorpill, a New York City born cultural media outlet, celebrates its 10th birthday by launching a revolutionary email newsletter, that “thinks.” The newsletter, in fact, learns and changes week to week based on your click throughs.

“As Flavorpill turns 10 years old, we’re evolving our offering to become smarter and more personalized. We’ve come a long way from our beginnings as a text-only email list in NYC, and we now publish content from editors in eight cities around the country and in London, as well as event listings entered by hundreds of the top venues in all our markets — feeding both our Flavorwire blog and our Flavorpill cultural guide. The new, personalized mailer now offers every one of our more than one million monthly readers a fully customized publication, and represents a significant step in Flavorpill’s evolution towards a dynamic, multi-channel arts and culture guide” — Mark Mangan, Flavorpill, Co -Founder

Each new newsletter is like a custom email for subscribers. Using technology developed by Sailthru, a startup powering email for the likes of the HuffPo and AOL, the new mailer not only lets users set their personalization preferences but also “gets smarter” the more it’s used, learning from users’ click through habits. In effect, future newsletters will become more personalized to users’ preferences.

“Flavorpill is reshaping the face of email. They are pushing their communication and our technology far beyond that of anything we’ve seen to date. They stand to revolutionize the ways brands and users communicate, creating a true one-to-one conversation.”– Neil Capel, Sailthru, CEO

The new Flavorpill mailer will feature two main editorial picks – one feature article and one event listing. It will also include multiple features and event picks recommended for every reader individually; the ability to update personal settings, including events from any of the Flavorpill cities, which includes NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas, London, with Dallas and Seattle coming soon; categories and subcategories of interest, and frequency down to the day. In short, the newsletter is a smarter, more personalized way to make sure you’re never bored again.

Check out our review of the Flavorpill iPhone app here.

First let me just say that no, robots will not replace journalists. Robots will likely only replace jobs with particularly low cognitive loads. So, maybe press release re-writing bloggers, but not thinking, analyzing, interviewing, friendly journalists.

In an on-going experiment called “My Boss is a Robot,” an alliance of journalists and computer scientists aim to combine the distributed human brainpower of Amazon’s small-task outsourcing engine, Mechanical Turk, with a robot boss pre-programmed to absorb a myriad of discrete human-accomplished tasks into something resembling the work of a single person. Niki Kittur, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction and freelance science and technology writers Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell are heading up the experiment.

We’ve seen automated “robotic journalism” before. The NYTimes uses the semantic web to automate wedding announcements. Business Week used software to replace sports journalists. Infonic’s Sentiment software analyzes thousands of news stories to determine how a particular company is faring. And TV journalism could be replaced by a prototype of software that uses voice-over narration of a rapid-fire series of pre-taped stories, vidclips and images to present television news.

The Mechanical Turk has even written a simple encyclopedia entry about New York City. Based on this success, the scientists behind My Boss is a Robot believe Turkers (as the distributed workers on Mechanical Turk are called) could transform a research paper into a 500 word piece of original science journalism.

Are we confident that our experiment will work? Absolutely not. In fact, we’d be surprised if it did. But we think it will be interesting to try. Equally importantly, we hope that chronicling our progress here will trigger debate about the future of journalism and of crowdsourcing. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our plans and, later, our progress.

Where does the robot boss come in to it? The crowdsourced workers will be coordinated by an algorithm. If the process works, we will hand the algorithm a research paper and, perhaps a couple of days later, it will spit out a polished news article.

The deeper question Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell hope to answer is whether or not the process of journalism or any other kind of knowledge-based work can be deconstructed and then restructured algorithmically.

If it works, the result will likely be something similar to AOL‘s Demand Media-style content generation efforts, also known as “The AOL Way.” But this “Bionic Journalism” will not be the future of media so long as human beings avoid falling into a meatspace existence and still enjoy reading thoughtful, creative and educated news stories on their iPads.

Non-mechanical fingers crossed.

Roomorama was launched by two avid travelers who wanted to inspire young urbanites to ditch the concrete and get out into the world to travel. Founders Jia En Teo and Federico Folcia are both travelers caught up with lifelong wanderlust. Roomorama is an online marketplace for short term rentals that vary from living room sofas to entire villas in the south of France. It’s best used if you’re looking for a room for a few days while traveling, or if you have a spare room and are looking for an easy way to earn easy cash. All payments are done securely through the website, so home owners don’t need to worry about following up on payments.

The site launched in January 2009 in New York City and expanded to all of the major U.S. cities throughout the year. From 2010 to 2011, they doubled their destinations, reaching into over 200 cities with over 60,000 members on the site.

To celebrate, Roomorama is offering 20% off booking fees for the month of January, but they will be extending this discount exclusively to The Next Web readers for the month of February- simply send an email to Perks@roomorama.com for discount code, subject line “BIG 200”. For those of you interested in SXSW, Roomorama is making a big push to host in Austin. They are running a special promotion to to encourage people to post their Austin properties and save. If you list your Austin property you get a $40 Roomorama credit. You may also want to start looking at properties in Amsterdam for our upcoming The Next Web conference!

Most recently, the company is expanding its Perks program, which the company feels sets them apart from AirBnB and other similar services. The Perks include eco-friendly laundry and dry cleaning services, Mint cars, daily Crunch Gym passes and in home wine tastings. “These are things we hope add enough value for people to book on our site,” says Jia. The Perks span across 180 cities. 10% of them serve all cities, and more than half serve every city in North America.

And Roomorama is extending a few perks to TNW readers for New York City’s upcoming Fashion Week. Fashion Week in New York City takes place on February 10th-17th. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, the 14th through the 16th, Roomorama is inviting 10 lucky readers backstage to hangout in their lounge. Expect WiFi, goodie bags, coffee, cocktails, small bites, yoga, make up touch ups and mini massages.

The idea is to give people a place to chill out in between the shows, “to feel at home within your lounge,” in a Roomorama property. To win all access passes, please become a The Next Web fan on Facebook, and either on the event page or in the comments below, tell us a personal traveling story in 140 characters or less. The best stories win.

To see more details, please click this link to visit our events page.

UrbanDaddy began as a free daily email devoted to bringing New Yorkers everything they need to know. They’ve since expanded to become one of NYC’s premiere cultural voices. “We’ve got some really cool, tech savvy things happening at UrbanDaddy right now,” says Lance Broumand, UrbanDaddy’s CEO. Their latest iPhone app uses GPS to let users find the perfect nearby spot to go for food, drink or a little late night debauchery. Members are offered a selection of exclusive hook-ups, offers and opportunities at new bars and restaurants in several cities including New York , Boston, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Chicago, Miami and Atlanta. Think of it as a digital concierge in your pocket.

“Staying on top of new technology makes sense for us since our readership is naturally tech-savvy. Our typical reader is in their late 20s or early 30s, someone who is an early adopter in a creative field with a disposable income to spend on rich, cultural activities,” explains Roman Garcia, UrbanDaddy’s Director of Emerging Media.

The series runs in Nolita’s Openhouse Gallery, the innovative creators of the indoor woodland, for several nights in January and features films like Dangerous Liaisons, Dazed and Confused, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Edward Scissorhands. The events are all open bar, include delicious fare and vary in price from $75-$125 per person.

Check out their iPhone app here and follow UrbanDaddy on Twitter here.

According to The Cutline, a Yahoo! news blog, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will join Rupert Murdoch on stage to unveil News Corp.’s much-anticipated iPad newspaper called “The Daily,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on Jan. 19th.

Murdoch is reportedly spending a total of $30 million on The Daily. While Murdoch has tried to keep the project quiet, I know a few reporters in New York City who’ve already begun work on The Daily, many of them poached from local media outlets like the NY Observer, The Daily Beast, Forbes, AOL, Politico and the New York Post and from far-flung zines like San Francisco’s Wired Magazine. In total, News Corp has already hired over 100 journalists including three managing editors: Mike Nizza, a veteran of The New York Times, AOL News and The Atlantic; Steve Alperin, a producer at ABC News, and Pete Picton, an online editor at UK Newspaper, The Sun. The company will be headquartered in the big apple with staffers in Los Angeles.

The Daily is expected to cost .99 per issue and will implement a new “push” subscription feature from iTunes that automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, with a new edition delivered to your iPad each morning.