An amazing week in nyc new media...

Wendnesday morning- Lauren Tooby from Media Bistro held a terrific breakfast of Internet Entrepreneurs from around the city. It was great to see Chris O'Brien from Motionbox, Robert Levitan from Pando, as well as Ester Dyson and Rob Tolmach of Change The Present. The breakfast was at Balthazar - a terrific place for dinner that seemed to find the concept of coffee a bit outside their area of expertise. That said, it was a great group - and very engaging.

Lauren did a great job as hostess, asking us all to share with the table some of our greatest challenges and successes. With a bit of a nudge, my table was off on a rather spirited discussion about the challenges of hiring in New York... which appears to be the single most over-arching challenge for New York Tech companies.

Then, next stop - a terrific briefing from the folks at Joost. Joost is one of those things that seems both theoretically impossible and at the same time... almost inevitable. Joost is peer to peer cable TV. Thinking back to Skype, the founders back then knew that folks were ready for a new paradigm in telecommunications. And, they knew that folks increasingly were paying for both an internet connection and a phone line. They put voice over IP, and Skype was a rocket. Is Joost the same thing? It may be. It's clear that if Joost can get content owners to provide them with access to libraries of content, the patents that built the Skype empire will do it again - this time to TV. Watching the demo, it's clear that they've built solid technology, and will certainly over time build interesting tools to create community on top of a video sharing platform. Who will Joost face of against? It's too early to say - and they need to solve the Net to the TV 'missing link' problem before they're really going to be in the living room. But there are a bunch of ways that will get solved, from TV manufacturers to Apple TV to the unknown boxes that are being built right now. I wouldn't bet against Joost. These guys are too smart, and to well funded... and too smart. Oh, that's right. I said that already.

And finally, last night Mary Meeker. DFJ Gotham hosted it's Entrepreneurs Dinner, and invited a gang of folks to listen to Meeker share her insights about the current state of the internet. Meeker has seen this whole space evolve, and she's amazingly rigorous about data. Here's a slice of her data:

Advertising — 8% of total US advertising online in 2006E growing to estimated 13%+ within 5 years - Google + Yahoo!

US Internet Advertising has mostly been driven by text. Rich media advertising has not grown at nearly the same rate. Morgan Stanley predicts that rich media will be the next avenue for US internet advertising spend growth.

Communities are exploding: Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, CyWorld are all exploding. Blogs continue to double every 7 months (now at about 57M blogs)

The big headline is that VIDEO is big, getting bigger, undermonetized, and likely to have its biggest impact in narrow sectors.

Of course, we love this :)