July 6, 2007 — The Copacabana could be moving to Da Bronx.

The famed nightspot at 34th Street and Eleventh Avenue shut its doors last Saturday night, leaving the fate of the club, made famous by Barry Manilow’s popular song of the same name, up in the air.

“We’ve been actively showing him spaces in the Bronx and there is a good chance the Copa may be leaving the city,” said the club’s broker, Alex Picken of Picken Real Estate & Nightlife Brokerage.

The MTA late last year condemned the club, which was cater-cornered from the Javits Center, to make way for a new No. 7 line station. Since then, owner John Juliano has been actively seeking a new locale, but has been stymied by climbing rents and neighborhood resistance .

“No one wants a nightclub in their backyards,” he bemoaned. “The city that never sleeps wants to sleep.”

Juliano has acknowledged that he probably can’t replicate the 50,000 square feet that his 34th Street venue had, and said he would now be happy with 20,000 to 25,000 square feet. “Half would be fine,” Juliano said.

In the meantime, he’ll be running some events at his Columbus 72, a smaller club that holds 800 partygoers.

There is also the possibility of a bifurcation of operations, something that many office tenants are also now considering in the face of climbing rents. That would involve keeping a private catering operation in Manhattan and a public party club in an outer borough - possibly the Bronx.

June 8, 2007 — If there was any doubt that the motto for publicly traded cable companies is get big or get out, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons erased it with his comments yesterday.

Speaking at a Merrill Lynch conference in London, Parsons said that as consolidation in the cable industry continues he expects Time Warner’s stake in its cable unit to get smaller as its footprint gets bigger.

“Eventually, five years down the road, it’s conceivable to me that because of the way that business grows . . . there could come a point in time when there’s two separate stand-alone companies,” Parsons said of a potential split of Time Warner from its cable division.

Translation: Time Warner expects its ownership of the cable unit to get diluted more and more as the division uses its stock to buy additional systems until eventually it and Comcast are the only two cable companies left trading on the public markets.

Just a few years ago there were upwards of eight publicly traded cable companies, but competition from satellite and telephone companies has resulted in a wave of acquisitions or companies being taken private.

Time Warner and Comcast teamed up to buy Adelphia Communications out of bankruptcy, while Cox and Insight were taken private. And Cablevision’s founding Dolan family is currently trying to take that company private.

“Cable industry consolidation makes economic, financial, marketing and regulatory sense,” said The Carmel Group’s Jimmy Schaeffler.

Aside from Comcast and Time Warner Cable, only the much smaller Charter Communications and Mediacomm Communications remain on the public markets.

Industry observers expect those two companies to be acquired or taken private as competition intensifies.

Having only two publicly traded cable companies would bring the industry in line with its satellite and telephone competition.

Both those industries feature two dominant, publicly traded players - DirecTV and EchoStar in satellite television, and Verizon and AT&T in telecommunications.

Startup sweepstakes offers $50,000 prize

TechCrunch20, a two-day conference founded by Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, and Michael Arrington, the man behind the TechCrunch phenomenon, that will screen 20 aspiring startups, said Thursday that the startup sweepstakes winner will take home $50,000. The winner will be selected by an advisory panel stacked with industry experts including Marc Andreessen and Marissa Mayer.

Some 200 companies have submitted their applications to launch at the TechCrunch20 conference. Today is the deadline. The draw for entrepreneurs: They attend and present for free, getting potentially valuable air and face time with bloggers, venture capitalists and others. Most conferences require startups to pay steep fees to publicly display their wares.

Consolation prizes include $10,000 off legal fees associated with the first round of financing from Fenwick & West. TechCrunch20 will be held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in September.

In the meantime, Calacanis and Arrington seem to be making out well on the new venture. Corporate sponsors include AOL, Charles River Ventures and Sequoia Capital. And early bird audience tickets are going for $1,995 through July 15, $2,495 afterward.

TechCrunch20 has its own blog at techcrunch20.com/blog.

– Jessica Guynn
Facebook drawing far more faces

Traffic to Facebook, which opened to the public last fall, has jumped 89 percent since last year, comScore said Thursday.

Nearly 16 million people used the site in May, averaging 186 minutes.

Facebook initially limited its site to members with e-mail addresses from universities, high schools or businesses but started to allow anyone with an e-mail address to sign up in September.

Since then, Facebook has seen a 181 percent jump in users ages 25 to 34 and a 98 percent increase in members 35 and older. The number of users 12 to 17 grew 149 percent.

More recently, Facebook let loose widgets on its site, allowing people to add slide shows and other applications to their profile pages. Introduced at the end of May, it has already created a frenzy.

– Ellen Lee
Thomas takes over as Valleywag editor

There’s a new editor in town. Replacing Gawker mogul Nick Denton at Silicon Valley’s online tabloid chronicling the social goofs and gaffes of the geeky and (sometimes) powerful is Owen Thomas. Valleywag’s new editor hails most recently from Business 2.0 but started his career at Suck.com.

Denton, a British journalist who got his start at the venerable Financial Times, made a small fortune founding Gawker Media, a network of spicy and sardonic blogs. He soon became known as a prince of publicity: just as good at generating it as he is at manipulating it. During his tenure at Valleywag, he certainly stirred up Silicon Valley.

Matt Marshall of VentureBeat calls Valleywag “the ‘Daily Show’ of the tech blogosphere” featuring jokes, analysis and breaking news. Thomas, now Valleywag’s gossip in chief, has a prodigious online following in his own right. And he will surely benefit from talented typers Nick Douglas and Megan McCarthy.

Said Thomas in his first blog post: “There’s a new wag in town. And I’m feeling good. This sleepy little burg has a thousand secrets, and I can’t wait to start telling them.”

– Jessica Guynn
Babelgum offers high-quality video

There’s been a lot of buzz around Joost, the Internet television service created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa.

But it’s not the only one (or two or three or four) streaming high-picture-quality shows through the Web.

Babelgum was founded by Italy’s Silvio Scaglia, who also founded Fastweb and was the CEO of Omnitel, now Vodafone Italy.

Introduced this year, Babelgum is similar to Joost: You download a video player on your computer, which lets you browse several themed channels and pick and choose from about 600 hours of content.

You can also create a personal channel. Over time, it’s supposed to learn what sort of shows you might like, based on your ratings and what people like you have enjoyed.

Scaglia, who was in town a few weeks ago, said he doesn’t worry much about Joost just yet. He’s just trying to get people thinking about tuning into the Web for television (although he acknowledges that television is here to stay).

“We have to have the pie before worrying about how to slice it,” he said.

– Ellen Lee