LED Tower Light Show

Singer Alicia Keys flipped a switch at Clear Channel New York studios Monday, unveiling the Empire State Building’s new LED lighting system. Radio World reported that the LED tower light show show revealed a new, 16 million-color palette with “ripples, cross-fades, sparkles, chasers, sweeps, strobes and bursts.” The new system, developed by Philips Color Kinetics, has better light and vibrancy levels, superior to the previous floodlights. The light show was synchronized to Keys, songs, including Empire State of Mind.

Radio World

Gary Whitehill (Rocking Out) and Gillian Brett (Pulsus) network on the 60th Floor (credit: Lauren Keyson)

By Lauren Keyson

Gary Whitehill’s Rockin’ Out Series has found a new home on the 60^th floor of the Empire State Building because his rooftop apartment was getting too small for so many people; even so, Tuesday night’s event was still bursting with investors and 325 entrepreneurs from three different states.

“The companies tonight are consumer products, retail, event, digital media, investors and consultants all converging to rock out together for four hours over some good drinks, some fun stories, and figuring out how they can come together and connect and leverage opportunities,” he said.

The entrepreneurs had their 30 second pitches ready and hit the floor to network. “Nobody has an attention span, everyone wants the elevator pitch really quickly, value add, get done, meet more people. We’ve had many successes tonight,”  Whitehill added.

He said that one of these was SharkStores, a deal-a-day site that predates coupon-type purchasing and actually fulfills products to customers, was one of the night’s big hits. Co-founder Daniel Weinstock explained how his company works, “We do the lowest price anywhere on the internet for one day only,” he said. “If we’re not selling a product at the lowest price, then we just don’t sell it. We have about 250 thousand customers, doing over ten million in sales annually, but we haven’t been growing at such a high rate in the last few years. So we need to bump that up, and are looking for investment in our company.”

Another successful networker was Gillian Brett, founder of ThePulsus.com, which she calls emotional and mood intelligent. “It turns people places and things into color coded dots to see what’s vibing and where. So you’re a red yellow, I’m a blue-yellow and so on. We do this for the users first so that we can understand who you are and we do it for event, businesses and everything around you.” She launches her prototype today, October 20.

Graham Lawlor, founder of Ultra Light Startups, holds pitching events each month. The company that caught his eye at Rockin’ Out was My Stream. “I’m very excited about seeing the app. It allows you to stream music for any audio tracks off of your phone and have somebody else listen to it on their phone over wireless networking.” Richard Zelson, the founder of the mobile app described it slightly differently: “Share your music…not your headphones!”

Lawlor observed how these pitching events were starting to gain traction, “We’re getting a lot of applications these days – it used to be you could register and pitch at an event that was a week away. But now basically it’s a month or two away, so people are already registering now for December and January events.”

Image via Wikipedia

After the attacks of 9/11, the city’s major broadcast stations atop the north tower of the World Trade Center were destroyed, leading them to relocate to the Empire State Building, where a lot of their back-up facilities were used during the months that they were restoring their over the air service. Recently, the Durst Organization has been trying to attract broadcasters back to 1 World Trade center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower and currently being built.

According to TV NewsCheck, Durst is trying ease costs  by building a common infrastructure (like back-up generators) that all the stations could share. Fox is currently open to Durst’s pitch and could possibly have transmitters at both the Empire State building and 1 World Trade. After 9/11, the Metropolitan Television Alliance (MTVA) announced that the Empire State Building wouldn’t suffice in the long term, and searched for a new broadcast tower that could provide better market coverage. An agreement was reached with 1 World Trade in 2003, but back then it was expected that the tower would be completed by 2008, and the agreement was dissolved when the building was passed from Silverstein to the Port Authority.

Although there are a few holes in their coverage at Empire, broadcasters are doing relatively fine there and, generally speaking, have no compelling motive to move, says MTVA President Saul Shapiro.

TV NewsCheck

Image via Wikipedia

With ComicCon kicking off today in San Diego, NY fans who could not get to the conference might be interested in a new local tour from The Celebrity Planet Company. The company has created a walking tour of midtown Manhattan called the”Superhero Tour of New York” that takes guests to landmarks where events in comic book history took place.

The two-hour tour is typically hosted by Paul Lepelletier, a former comic cartoonist and now advertising art director. The tour begins right across the street from the Empire State Building at Jim Hanley’s Universe, a comic book store. The tour stops at many iconic locations in superhero history, including the former location of Marvel Comics, the home of the first actor to play Superman, and workplace of Batman’s creator.

For more information on the Superhero Tour of NY: http://www.thecelebrityplanet.com

The Washington Post

The new space will allow them to consolidate and expand.

The Real Deal

Originally, Apple like the location and leased adjacent 25 West 34th Street, providing the site of the possible Apple store with 75 feet of sidewalk frontage and pays $5,906,692 in rent annually according to the paper.  Now however, it has been leaked that Jobs disapproves of the site.

Silicon Alley Insider