Troubled Nokia is troubled.

The latest bad news for the Finnish phone maker is that it had to repay New York State $420,000 after breaking a deal to bring hundreds of jobs to Westchester.

Actually, Nokia did bring about 300 jobs to said county after it bought a former IBM building back in 2006, back when things were still going smoothly for the now beleaguered phone giant. The main issue is that it couldn’t keep the jobs there as they’ve left the area.

Nokia originally received a $700,000 “Jobs Now” grant, but the entire amount couldn’t be recouped because the company did technically create jobs for a while.

Worse is that Nokia spent $30 million on the renovation of the building, “stripping the structure down to the steel and rebuilding it as a modern glass-enclosed office building” according to Lohud.com.

The fancy building was vacated in March 2012.

While living in New York’s tech community this past year has been a wild ride, it’s been a ride alongside a welcoming, supportive and extraordinary group of people. We’ve seen pivots, partnerships, massive hiring, acquisitions and rapid rounds of funding. And we’ve seen more success than failures, which has inspired us to keep running.

We welcomed accelerators like the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator, TechStars and DreamIt Ventures, played with new incubation models like Gramercy Labs Collective and Prehype and raised over $100,000 for local hackers through a fashion-infused tech celebration called Raise Cache. These organizations helped bring together an extraordinary group of mentors within NYC, and established a sense of camaraderie and mentorship within the community. If the years prior we’re about gathering materials and putting the pieces together, 2011 was a year to see the New York tech industry all come together.

For an end of the year, dose of nostalgia, we caught up with 13 entrepreneurs, who all launched companies this year and asked them what their most exciting moment was in 2011.

E-Commerce

Goodsie

Given Goodsie‘s long path to launch, CEO Jonathan Marcus, who also founded the all-new Flavors.me, gets nostalgic thinking of how much the company achieved in 2011. For Marcus, Goodsie’s public launch in early May 2011 was the most exciting moment of the year. He started working on Goodsie in early 2009 and just days away from launching in late 2010, he made a very difficult decision to part ways with their technical team because of personal chemistry issues, and re-write the entire code base from scratch in a different programming language.

“A core group of the Flavors team spent the next 5 months moving heaven-and-earth to finally bring Goodsie to life. There were countless times where it seemed as though Goodsie would never launch,” says Marcus. “When we launched in May, a full two years after starting this journey, I was incredibly grateful and proud to have finally achieved and realized a vision that had become a multi-year labor of love.”

Today, Goodsie has 1,000 active, paying sellers, and is growing 20% month-over-month. Over the past 30 days, Goodsie’s top 50 retailers generated half a million dollars in sales. Just this week, Goodsie launched an integration with SoundCloud for sellers to import and sell SoundCloud audio. “Given our traction in music, we expect the SoundCloud integration to be very well received,” says Marcus.

Fab

After an initial pivot or two, Jason Goldberg, the CEO of Fab.com, may have had the best year ever. Since launching in June 2011, it’s on target to hit over $20 million in revenue by the end of the year. Earlier this month, Fab announced $40 million in Series B funding led by well-known investment firm Andreessen Horowitz.

“It has been a thrill to see the Fab concept come together, and frankly the movement behind it,” says Goldberg. ”In February we shut down our former business and we were just 2 guys with a dream. Today we’re 140 people worldwide, we’ve sold 700,000 products, and we’re making 1.5 million members smile each day by providing them with fun, witty and affordable daily design inspirations. It’s just been an incredibly rewarding, humbling ride. And, it’s just the start.”

Social and mobile innovations are breathing new life into the e-commerce industry, making it more about discovery than search. For example, the Fab Live Feed enables users to quickly discover what other people are buying, what’s popular and what’s being most discussed, all in real-time.

Chloe + Isabel

The direct sales industry is in need of a modern day makeover, and chloe + isabel is doing just that with fashion jewelry sales. The impressively backed startup is run by Chantel Waterbury, who spent 14 years in corporate merchandising working with brands like Cartier, Tiffany and Co., and Van Cleef and Arpels.

“Launching Chloe + Isabel was the defining moment of my year — and my life! It has truly been a labor of love,” says Waterbury. “In 2012, I think we will continue to see entrepreneurs look to disrupt high margin businesses. Chloe + Isabel — along with other startups like Warby Parker — has developed the ability to provide consumers with a higher quality product at a much lower price. I am also excited to see how technology continues to define and evolve the future of social selling.”

This fall, Chloe + Isabel raised $8.5 million in a Series A led by General Catalyst Partners. The company recently launched its Social Content Curator on the Merchandiser dashboard, a tool that lets merchandisers update personalized e-boutiques with their daily inspiration, news and jewelry, while engaging their social networks. In 2012, C+I will expand its engineering team to continue evolving.

Memberly

Subscription service startups were hot this year. There’s Birchbox for makeup, Lollihop for health food, Bluum for new moms, Guyhaus and Hoseanna for staples like hosiery and deodorant, BarkBox for dogs, Craft Coffee, Babbaco, Blissmobox, Put This On, Paleo Pax, Little Otsu… the list goes on. In July of this year, the folks at Disrupto, a trendy digital product agency in New York City, including co-founder Jack Cheng, launched Memberly, a platform that helps individuals and small businesses run their own subscription programs.

“Subscriptions really took off this year and it’s exciting to see,” says Cheng. “We used to have a relationship with the people we bought from–they were local storeowners, people you knew. But that loyalty all got lost when commerce moved to big retail chains. Everything was all made in one place and distributed by big companies. Now we’re starting to see a revival of consumers interacting with people they know, people that have an expertise. And that is really exciting. People are curating and selling products with their knowledge and expertise. It’s never been easier making a living doing what you love.”

To celebrate the holidays, Memberly launched a gifting feature, which hides the price and wraps the voucher in a friendly interface. There are currently 500 sellers on the wait list for Memberly; Cheng says they’ll be admitted in waves of 50 at a time, starting in 2012.

Media

Shelby.tv

At this spring’s TechStars’ Demo Day, Shelby.tv CEO Reece Pacheco took the stage to present his company to a room of 750 attendees including hundreds of investors, press and big names in the tech industry. Shelby is wicked awesome platform that helps you discover videos that your friends post on Twitter and Facebook.

“For 3 years, I was constantly panting and trying to catch up. Now, I’ve learned to go faster, while accomplishing a lot. It’s been insane,” says Pacheco. “But at the same time, I’ve learned to slow down and chill out a bit, and I think a lot of that has to do with running the NYC Marathon this year. You can’t just sprint 26 miles. You have to plan how you’re going to get through it. I’ve learned how to delegate more and execute faster. While I can still sprint, I’ve also slowed down my pace to appreciate the moments I have with my team. It’s a tough ride but it’s about striking a balance and learning to enjoy it.”

This year, Shelby released its first iPad and iPhone app, raised $1.5 million and grew from 2 to 9 employees. While Pacheco’s New Years’ Resolution is always to have better posture, he says Shelby will keep pushing the app onto new platforms and continue to release new features to help inspire people through video.

Percolate

Percolate is one of New York’s freshest, new media companies. The news curation startup works with individuals and brands by scraping your RSS and Twitter feeds based on who you follow and who you subscribe to. It then looks at the sites people are linking to and runs it through an algorithmic filter which applies 10 factors such as your personal preferences, how popular it is within your network, how old it is, and then a few ‘secret sauce’ algorithms. Co-founder James Gross tell us about his most exciting moment this year with his co-founder Noah Brier:

“We were passionate about bootstrapping the company for the entire year. I was most grateful and proud when I looked at the books in July and knew we could make payroll for the rest of the year and give our employees healthcare. Noah and I had a moment at that point when we realized we were building a real company. It felt good.”

“To be a great content creator, you have to be a great content consumer,” says Gross. “This year we saw brands struggling to create content even while they were building massive audiences on channels like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. We realized that brands struggle to create content because they don’t consume anything. As individuals, we are constantly consuming and therefore always have something to curate and Tumble, Tweet and Facebook share to our audiences.”

Brier and Gross (pictured right) built Percolate to help brands build an interest graph that would allow them to consume content they were interested and then have a more natural curation process. “It’s all about stock and flow,” says Gross. “Stock brings in audience, flow keeps them coming back.” All of Percolate’s 2011 clients renewed for 2012 and the company is looking to double its client base in Q1 of next year. This December, Percolate raised a $1.5 million seed round.

Onswipe

I first met with Jason L. Baptiste and Andres Barreto, the founders of Onswipe on a snowy day in late January 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. Besides their first TNW interview, Baptiste says their launch event on June 21st, 2011 was the most exciting moment of the year:

“Less than six months before launch, we were a little side project and here we stood with a talented team and product launching with a slew of great partners like Ziff Davis, New York Times, and Sprint. It is still the most exciting and proudest moment of my life.”

This year, Onswipe watched as publishers began to prefer HTML5 apps over native apps on the tablet. Companies like Onswipe, Pressly and individual publishers like the Financial Times have shown what is possible in this realm. “If the tablet is the TV of this generation, building for the touch web is the way to get a channel on it,” says Baptiste. Onswipe will be releasing a new product the first week of January, stay tuned.

Education

Skillshare

Skillshare is a community marketplace that enables users to learn anything from anyone, thereby democratizing learning. “I’m extremely proud of the team we’ve built at Skillshare,” says CEO Michael Karnjanaprakorn. “One of my goals was to build a company that would attract the most talented people across all industries to make our world a sustainably, better place. I believe that when you have the world’s most talented people working together to disrupt an industry – true innovation can happen. I hope that Skillshare inspires other entrepreneurs and startups to do the same.”

“This year, we saw the rise of collaborative consumption and the move from hyper-consumption to hyper-sharing. People are sharing (skills), swapping, bartering, and renting access to products as opposed to owning physical things. Companies like Kickstarter (unleashing creativity in the world), Airbnb (sharing space), and TaskRabbit (time) are paving the way for this new world,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “If you told me two years ago that I would be letting complete strangers into my home, I would have laughed. Or, if you told me I could learn something valuable from someone I pass on the street. But, what you see today is a unique trust between complete strangers that didn’t exist before. I think that’s the most exciting thing about collaborative consumption – believing that people are inherently good.”

This past year, Skillshare racked up 15,000 hours of teaching on its platform. Today, the number of students in the Skillshare community equals the size of New York University. In addition to some exciting announcements next year, Karnjanaprakorn will be speaking about Skillshare at TED 2012, something he’s been dreaming about since watching Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk , in which he encouraged everyone to start a learning revolution.

Codecademy

We first wrote about Codecademy in October, while in the midst of a fascinating wave of disruption in online education. The Y-Combinator bred, New York City based company teaches people to code through free interactive instruction online. Of the company’s August launch, co-founder Zachary Sims says, “Our launch was incredibly exhilarating and super exciting. I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who have been through our lessons and by the ability of the web to spread ideas and education.”

“I think education is finally having its moment,” continues Sims, “It’s been awesome to see other cool startups like Tutorspree launch, and nonprofits/institutions like MIT and Stanford trying their hand with online courses and certificate programs as well.”

In 2012, Sims plans to continue building his product, and his team. He’s released a few new features just before the holidays including Labs, a web-based code editor and will have new courses coming in 2012.

Also…

Fitocracy

We first wrote about Fitocracy in our recent report on The Future of Fitness, in which we interviewed founders Brian Wang and Richard Talens, who used to be “really out of shape, video game addicts”. Talens was “super fat” and Wang was “super skinny”. While in college, they realized they had to make a lifestyle change and thus became “addicted to fitness”. Inspired by their experience, the two built a platform that tracks workouts and turns personal fitness into a social game. Since then the company has moved west to take part in Dave McClure’s 500 Startups accelerator.

Wang says, “I’ll never forget the morning I woke up to find that XKCD drew a comic about us. Aside from the fact that we were being featured on a comic I’d been reading for a long time, my inbox was filled to the brim with new user notifications and would continue to get flooded throughout the week.”

This past year, Wang has noticed a lot of myth debunking and overturning of preconceived notions around fitness: “For the longest while, the industry has been plagued by misinformation and anecdotal nonsense, and while they continue to persist, I think people are starting to take a much more empirical, science-based approach to their health and fitness.” Fitocracy won’t release any new numbers but we know that even before the boys opened up in beta, they had close to 100,000 members. And this just in: Fitocracy has passed 1,000,000 logged workouts on its platform.

Nestio

No startup could be more essential to a city than Nestio is to New Yorkers as apartment hunting here is one of the most grueling life experiences. The three founders, CEO Caren Maio, CCO Matthew Raoul and CTO Michael O’Toole launched a social apartment hunting platform in April of this year to disrupt the online real estate industry.

“The moment we first came across people we didn’t know using our product was one of the most exciting of the year,” says Maio. “We were working on the beta version of the site and pushing updates quietly – just alerting our fellow TechStars companies and mentors to solicit feedback. All of a sudden, we started to see real renters on the site, using our service to help with their apartment hunt. Talking to our earliest users and receiving validation that we were on the right track and solving a pain point for people was beyond exciting.”

Maio says that the real estate industry as a whole is recognizing the increased importance of a strong mobile strategy. “The accuracy and timeliness of data has the potential to be exponentially improved and everyone is really excited about that – both real estate professionals and consumers,” she says. “Everyone’s testing the waters, and I think we’ll see the home hunting process come a long way, with more and more people embracing mobile.” [Check out Nestio's mobile app here.]

Nestio recently launched nationwide and is planning to unveil some significant developments in 2012 on both the mobile front as well as improvements around listing discovery. Stay tuned!

Now, once you’ve got your apartment sorted, where will you work?

Coworking Campuses

2011 was an exciting, if not exhausting year for the New York City startup scene with hundreds of companies launching out of coffee shops and studio apartments. And we can thank coworking spaces like WeWork Labs, General Assembly, Projective Space and Dogpatch, who sprung up to house them all.

Coworking spaces operate like startup campuses, providing eager minds with outlets and WiFi, as well as access to angel investors and VCs, serial entrepreneurs who act like mentors, and a fertile breeding ground for collaboration between entrepreneurs, designers and developers. Let’s take a look at two of the top coworking companies that launched this year.

General Assembly

General Assembly is New York City’s most impressive coworking space, located just around the corner from a number of notable investors at 902 Broadway in the Flatiron. The 20,000-sq ft campus, which opened in January 2011, was immediately booked to its 100-seat capacity. It now has 350 members, representing 100+ early-stage startups, selected through an application and interview process. ”There were so many exciting and inspiring moments this past year — too many to count,” says GA co-founder Matthew Brimer. “Though if I had to choose, it’s probably when we graduated the first class of students from our 10-week Front-End Web Development course. It was very inspiring to know that we helped empower a group of people with a new set of skills that they’ll be able to immediately put to use in their careers.”

“One of the biggest ideas I’ve seen in education this year is the increasing gap between where a collegiate liberal arts education leaves off and where the 21st century begins. Traditional academic institutions can provide a solid intellectual and social foundation, but typically don’t touch all the requisite skills to succeed in the new economy. I’ve encountered all sorts of amazing education startups tackling this issue in interesting ways, and it’s fascinating to watch entrepreneurship start to become a powerful force in a meaningful arena like education, an industry that hasn’t changed much in centuries yet is now increasingly in need of overhaul.”

-Matthew Brimer, Co-Founder of General Assembly

General Assembly now has 3,000 attendees each month for classes, events, and other programs and is producing 2-4 classes and workshops on technology, design, and entrepreneurship every day. GA has built 5 long-form courses, taught by top practitioners, offering robust skills in front-end web development, Ruby on Rails, user experience design, as well as business development and sales. In addition, GA launched its first two hybrid (online+offline) courses: “Forming Your Startup” and “Introduction to Web APIs” (with more on the way). And perhaps its biggest news of the year? General Assembly will cross the pond in 2012 to open up its first London campus.

WeWork Labs

WeWork Labs is a co-working hybrid founded in April 2011 by Adam Neumann (Egg-Baby), Jesse Middleton (Guy Haus), and Matt Shampine (Onepager), located in the heart of Soho at 154 Grand Street. Since April, 77 entrepreneurs that comprise over 40 companies have called or currently call WeWork Labs home, including startups such as Consmr, CityPockets, Fitocracy, Handshake and Turf. And WeWork Labs has 300 more entrepreneurs on the wait list.

“Teaching others was a big trend this year,” says Shampine. “We’ve hosted a number of Skillshare classes in WeWork Labs and quite a lot of my friends took the time to put together an agenda to teach a class. The trend isn’t just limited to Skillshare classes. I remember a recent town hall meeting at WeWork Labs where I loved seeing just how adamant the group was on setting up classes to teach each other.”

Since April, over $3 million dollars has been raised by WeWork Labs startups and with more to be announced in the near future. Startups in WeWork Labs have made their way to great accelerator programs such as AngelPad, 500 Startups, and TechStars. Just this month, the team announced the expansion of WeWork Labs, so in addition to its offices in Midtown, Soho and Meatpacking, WeWork will occupy 75,000 square feet, offering up 700 desks in Tribeca at 175 Varick Street starting in February 2012.

There were dozens of other companies that launched this year that we’d like to mention like SideTour, a peer-to-peer marketplace of marketable serendipity; Sonar, the hyperlocal, networking app of the year; Piictu, which bills its photo sharing app as a new kind of visual network; Coursekit, a social network for education; Quickish, Dan Shanoff’s sports site; Hatch, a new iOS app for making plans with friends; Uncram, a social media extension and content platform; TheHappyCloud, a cloud gaming startup; Dispatch, a service for cloud file sharing, movement, and management; social network Subjot, Everything Butt Art, a children’s iPad app; online education startupVeri; and Timehop, the ultimate daily email for life loggers.

Did we miss you? Let us know and we’ll be sure to keep up with you in 2012.

Technology, especially in New York, is more of a meta-industry and than it is an industry. Startups are building and leveraging technology to transform all manner of existing industries, from music to art to journalism to fashion to advertising to retail. There’s so much opportunity ahead — we should always strive to broaden our horizons and push ourselves as entrepreneurs to explore new frontiers.

-Matthew Brimer, Co-Founder of General Assembly

And what about companies that turned 1 year old in 2011? Check out: Lessons from 12 New York Entrepreneurs After a Year in the Biz.

Image: Songquan Deng via Shutterstock

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.

In its blog post Mike [raldi] writes that “There are only about 100 sites on the entire Internet that get a billion pageviews in a single month, and now reddit can put on its smoking jacket and join that exclusive club.” A club, mind you, that doesn’t include The New York Times, Expedia, Weather.com, about.com, or Fox News.

Reddit has grown tremendously this year, from 250 million page views in January 2010 to 829 million in December, and more than doubling its number of servers from 50 to 119 in the same timeframe.

In September 2010, reddit pageviews surpassed Digg’s, when Digg founder Kevin Rose revealed that his site only garnered 200 million page views in the month of July. Reddit claimed at the time that they were 40% bigger, traffic wise, than Digg. Then reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s adorable little alien, asked the press to “get with it,” and stop comparing reddit to Digg as a smaller community.

Mike [raldi] sends a big thank you to all of the reddit community:

This is an accomplishment that all redditors should take pride in, because people wouldn’t keep arriving in droves — and coming back — if not for the community that you’ve created here. To see how fast our little site’s been growing, contrast this post from July or this one from last month. Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the billionth pageview was this submission.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad last January, it kickstarted a year of rapid experimentation as news publishers hunted for ways to capitalize on tablet computing. The “iPad effect” was a tsunami through the publishing industry.

The two entrepreneurs, Baptiste, age 25 and Barreto, age 23, were poised for the age of the tablet. Both men are passionate writers who wanted to make their content look beautiful on the iPad. Armed with skills in coding and software development, Baptiste and Barreto are now entrenched in their efforts to make the publishing experience more enjoyable for the reader from both the editorial experience and the advertising side.

“We’re a media company with a heart and soul of awesome software and design,” says Baptiste.

The men arrived in New York City just two weeks ago for the inaugural NY TechStars class by way of Boston via Miami (Baptiste) and Miami via Argentina, Chile and Colombia (Barreto). Averaging about 5 Red Bulls a day (provided by the TechStars program), the two spoke very highly of their experience thus far under the wings of TechStars founder and director, David Cohen and David Tisch, respectively. Aside from a rough adjustment to NYC’s winter weather, they’re very excited to be in the city that never sleeps, and very stoked that there is a 24-hour Best Buy just steps from their office.

So what is OnSwipe? OnSwipe is a platform that makes it easy for any publisher from a blogger using Posterous to the New York Times to make their content and advertising an immersive, aesthetic experience on iPads via a Web browser. It runs off of WordPress for now but will work with Movable Type in the near future. Mind you, OnSwipe IS NOT AN APP. It delivers an app like experience on the web that looks beautiful on an iPad.

“Apps are bullshit for content,” says Baptiste who refers to native apps as “PDF readers” and equates them to a Ponzi scheme for publishers. “It’s all about delivering an app-like experience on the web. With OnSwipe, publishers can have their cake and eat it too.”

As an editor you don’t have to do very much work. Just turn the OnSwipe platform on and it organizes your content into a customizable, design conscious and iPad friendly format. Want to know more? Watch the gentlemen behind OnSwipe talk about their platform, the future of digital publishing and why the iPad is so important.

“The demo shown in this video is of PadPressed, the precursor to OnSwipe. Think of padpressed as the equivalent of our “university research project.” OnSwipe is a much larger evolution from that and encompasses much more,” explains Baptiste.

“This is our time to reinvent media. It’s not going to happen again for a very long time, so we might as well do it right and have fun with it,” Baptiste says with a wide smile.

Baptiste is currently writing a book on entrepreneurship under the Portfolio imprint of the Penguin group. Before founding OnSwipe, Baptiste worked on numerous start-ups including Cloudomatic, Genevine and Publictivity. Meanwhile, Barreto is also a serial entrepreneur. In addition to working on Cloudomatic, he founded two businesses in Latin America, PulsoSocial and Socialatom and later co-founded the exceedingly popular online music sharing community, Grooveshark. And he is just 23 years old, by the way.

While they haven’t officially launched yet, in just 30 days the boys raised a sweet 1 million in seed funding from Spark Capital, Betaworks and AdMob investor ENIAC Ventures. Angel investors included Hubspot CTO Dharmesh Shah, Jennifer Lum, Roy Rodenstein and Wayne Chang. While they’re looking to hire between 8-10 new employees, they’ve also convinced Threewords.me founder Mark Bao to work with them part-time.

For now you may click onto the next story, but just remember the future of media will be all about swiping.

Remember when Richard Branson cabbed around New York in a black pullover hoodie and placed USB dead drops and paper mache mannequins in various spots of the City? It was his way of saying, “I want you to be a part of Project! My new iPad magazine!”

That is why Sir Richard Branson is my favorite billionaire. In case you need further clarification, read the article I wrote about Project’s launch and call for talent here or watch the video below.

Today, Virgin announced the winner of this competition to design the front cover of their crowd-sourced issue planned for early next year – you can see the winning video here. TRON fans, look for the ‘error’ in the video.

The video was made using Photoshop and Motion, by a design psychology consultant and author known on YouTube as “The Motivated Life.”

Secondly, with the iPad set to be one of the top gifts this holiday season, some of Virgin’s key partners are sponsoring Project as a festive gift. Courtesy of Virgin America,, Virgin Blue and Virgin Mobile Canada, issue 1 will be free to all people downloading it between the 23rd and 29th of December. Download your free copy of Project here. Issue 2 will hit the app store on January 7th, 2010.

The New York Observer‘s Holiday Gift Guide 2010 is a “What To Get The Who’s Who of Manhattan,”  whether it be a “Player,” “Urban Adventurer,” “Bergdorf Blonde,” “Foodie,” “Yummy Mummy” or “Culture Snob.”

Gift guides are nothing new, but media outlets partnering with daily deals site is new and it’s a big deal. What makes companies like Groupon successful? Mainly two things- a large database of e-mail addresses and an active sales team. By combining forces, media outlets and daily deal sites have the potential to create a powerful deals business. What’s even more special about The New York Observer’s partnership with Scoop St. is their local focus on New York City. In fact, the New York Observer already has a daily e-mail list running of interesting things to do in New York City, focusing on a young and savvy demographic.

Over the past few months, the two have teamed up to offer co-branded “Scoops” aka special, targeted NYC-centric deals for Observer readers. For example, a bus trip to Woodbury Commons Mall, a big outlet mall outside of New York City was offered to New York Observer readers who fell into the “Bergdorf Blonde” category. Scoop St. deals on the New York Observer list this holiday season include spa specials, rock climbing classes, cup cakes and wine and sushi classes.

The New York Observer’s Holiday List also includes gift ideas from OpenSky, a New York City based start-up that offers people a new way to shop, buy, and sell products. OpenSky gives anyone with an audience — bloggers, editors or celebrities — find and sell their own products. Products range from cooking ware, jewelry, tech to fine art and prints.

While typically publishers have been using white label technology to push out their own deals, the New York Observer/Scoop St. partnership represents a trend of curated and more focused deals. Direct site operators like Scoop St. believe they have a leg up on the white label tech companies to provide a smarter sales force. This is the start of what I believe will be an explosive trend in 2011: the “curated” marriage of content and commerce.

TEDxBrooklyn, a satellite TED event with the same mission to share: “ideas worth spreading,” was an intellectual call to arms for local New Yorkers yesterday, who absorbed a several hours of diverse, divergent and inspiring 17-minute presentations under the theme “One Moves Many.”

Brooklyn’s name originated from the Dutch, “Breukelen,” meaning “broken land,” but today it is New York City’s most populous borough with approximately 2.5 million residents. It’s home to hundreds of artists, intellectuals, movers and shakers including author Paul Auster, director Mel Brooks and, of course, rapper Jay-Z.

The event was hosted by Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman and Chris Kazi Rolle, founder of the Hip Hop Project. Speakers included professors from the Pratt Institute, such as William Katavolos, and Dr. Haresh Lalviani, who dumbfounded the crowd with his presentation on “shaping genomic architecture,” a belief founded in the idea that architecture is converging with biology.

Lalviani stressed that nature’s design strategy is the common logic of how all things are built and the way to make seamless things. The 86-year-old professor was the oldest person in attendance at conference, as pointed out by the 75-year old TED conference founder Richard Saul Wurman, who had the crowd in hysterics with his blunt, wry humor throughout much of his interview with author Kurt Andersen.

Wurman, an entrepreneur of ideas, shared his current projects. “5X5X5″ is about creating a matrix of medical information in countries overseas; the “192021 Project,” is based on the fact that no two cities in the world graph their maps to the same scale or the same legends (and that 51% of the people on Earth now live in cities). The project captures 19 cities that will have more than 20 million people in the 21st century through a series of films, a documentary and a website to be displayed in 19 urban observatories. His next project, planned for August 2012, is WWW.WWW. He couldn’t share any details except that partners will include TED’s Chris Anderson, Jack Dangerman, co-founder of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) and Jay Walker of Priceline.

“Innovation is the opposite of expectation. Isn’t that fucking wonderful?” He shouted to the crowd after teaching us how primates open bananas (from the bottom, it’s easier and there are no strings!). (See this NYTimes article on his house in Newport, RI here.)

Barbara Bush, the president and co-founder of Global Health Corps nearly brought tears to my eyes (she’s a much better public speaker than her Dad) as she outlined her plan to improve global health. Bush, a self-described idealist, sees problem solving as one of the most relevant forms of design. Bush wasn’t the only famous last name on stage yesterday, as Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, outlined his fight to save the world’s oceans, where 95% of the Earth’s biodiversity lives. Cousteau called social media one of the most potentially powerful tools in our arsenal. “I love New York City,” he said, “Even more importantly, I love Brooklyn cause I live here. It’s one of those places that brings so much in art, culture and innovation and of course in environmental stewardship . So let’s protect this planet not for the protection of the planet itself but for our own future. “People protect what they love,” he said quoting his Grandfather.

“When people ask me what instrument I play, I say computer,” said Daniel Inglesia, who spoke about his work with PLOrk, Princeton’s “laptop orchestra.” Everyone plays a laptop and the instruments are created in software. Check them out here:

Brooklyn’s Samuel Cochran started a business from scratch based on values. Wanting to “deploy photovoltaics in an urban realm,” he launched Solar Ivy, customizable solar panels that can fit any building’s needs. The  ”Solar Ivy” can be customized by density, angle, orientation and color. They can even take the form of ads. Below is a photo of Solar Ivy on a brownstone in Brooklyn.

Ben Brofman, a musician and progressive thinker, presented another amazing eco-conscious invention: the Global Thermostat, which extracts carbon directly out of the atmosphere. “She’s clunky but she works,” Brofman says about the invention, which is able to pull 400 ppm of carbon out of the air at a time. Brofman hopes to redefine how everybody thinks about carbon. “It’s not a pollutant, it’s an ingredient. It’s not a carcinogen but a commodity,” he says.

My favorite speech of the day was by “genetic architect” Karl Chu, who asked “Why is there something rather than nothing? “What is architecture?” Architecture is the structure of possible worlds. It is a concept as small as bacteria and as large as dinosaurs, from the outside in or the inside out. Existential architecture holds the expectations of what architecture should be as implicated by our expectations. Chu vigorously spoke of the multiplicity of language and how architecture is an extension of humanity. Genetic architecture is ”man written large,” the construction of possible worlds and possible realities. “Being is the largest concept that encapsulates everything that exists,” he said, “up until now.” Now he explained, we have to treat our architecture like an artificial being. He finished his speech by redefining architecture as “The Global Brain.”

The day was tiring, but awe-inspiring. TEDx events are designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to replicate TED-like experiences at the local level. The event took place yesterday at Pratt Institute, a private university specializing in architecture, art and design.