• by Kelly Samardak , January 23, 2009

OnMedia 100 Cocktail Reception, Grace Building, New York
January 24, 2009

I've never heard of OnMedia or AlwaysOn, so why was I at the OnMedia 100 party last night? Well, imagine you're the writer of a social diary and say, at the beginning of January you look at February and, aside from the glorious day of your birth, the month is empty. What do you do? You search the Internet, friends! And The Internet revealed to me a conference brought to you by AlwaysOn called "OnMedia NYC." They used last night, on the 46th floor of the Grace building, to get the winners of the OnMedia 100 to mingle it up and give the hairy eyeball to each other over the gorgonzola. Want to see what went "On"?

Thursdays are the worst days. I've hit my wall by that point due to late night event-going. I even managed to double down this week as well. With a huge smile I'd like to thank Yelp for contributing to my state of lethargy as I dragged myself off the subway at Times Square and begrudgingly shuffled my Conversed feet to 43rd and 6th. It's easy to derail me on Thursdays. Any little hiccup and I can easily wash my hands of the situation, head back home, and make sweet sweet love to a hamburger.

This hiccup almost came courtesy of, 1), I didn't realize that was the Grace building and I walked right by it, 2), the entrance I finally found was closed and I had to go past the angry political Jesus guys (who now have an amplifier) to get to the other entrance, and 3, well there is no 3. What kept me moving was the prospect of reuniting with the dashing Jeff Ragovin Vice President, Sales and Business Development for Buddy Media, who was attending with Buddy Media's CEO Mike Lazerow, and the percussive Joe Ciarallo, who not only operates as a Horn PR dude, but also wrangles PRNewser for mediabistro.

What's this OnMedia 100? It's a list of "100 private companies that have demonstrated excellence in five primary categories: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value creation, and media buzz." Errr, ok... I'm glad I went, though, because I got to hang with Jeremy Frank of Brightroll who I met AGES ago at the Brightroll (roll roll roll) garden party. Since his crew is mostly in San Fran, he's the NYC delegate to go to these things. "I'm usually the youngest in the room so people treat me like I don't have much to offer," Frank grinned through a crab cake.

In the middle of some lawyer jokes, a tray of steak chunks with gorgonzola cheese took the opportunity to disappear into my belly, while David Hirschman materialized as if from thin air (possibly a product of the NASA mysterious space-thumping phenomena that Jaime Alger, Account Exectutive at OwnerIQ and Aaron Holm, SVP of GlobalEdit freaked me out with). Hirschman writes for mediabistro and used to play the tuba. We shared band camp stories; I think with my trumpet and his tuba, we could be a nice brass media duo. One standout in the sea of minglers was the striped-velvet-jacket-and-red-shoe-sporting Shay David, PhD. Dr. David is co-founder and VP of business and community development for Kaltura, an OnMedia 100 honoree in the category of Technology Enablers. He was hard selling Ron Yekutiel, co founder and CEO of Kaltura - who appeared recently in an Esqire piece about "The Suit: Version 3.0".

Zephrin Lasker, CEO and Co-Founder of Pontiflex, wins for best name. He was sharing some space with Brock Pernise of The FOCI group. A little language arts for you: Foci is having multiple focus point with focus -- as opposed to having multiple focus points in a whackadoodle sea of blur. Share this newfound knowledge with a friend today.

By far my favorite conversation of the night was when Hirschman and I tag teamed Ari J. Greenberg, CEO of Baveo.com. From the name alone, which he got by using a random domain name generator; you can't discern that it's a baby blog community and not an ambient light TV. We tried to help him rename it. We came up with postfetus.com, exfetus.com (like, ex patriot - you're no longer "of the womb"), and somethingelseridiculous.com.

 As much as I dislike infants, I love this whole baby blog/toddler community situation out there. So much easier to share photos and post fetus milestones online when the village that raises the baby is now spanning the globe. And, you don't have to deal with annoying pop-ins to see/feel/hold/drop the wiggly worm. Back in the day he drove a huge pink.. escalade? promoting Victoria's Secret's Pink line. Not a bad gig.

Ciarallo, Hirschman, and I closed the party, which is either totally deplorable or just plain awesome. And now I'm more than ready to end my week. Tonight I hope to stuff my face with pickle pie at the National Pie Day event hosted by Huffington Post food writer Lisa Lacy. You heard right, pickle pie.

Invite kelly@mediapost.com to your networking mambo and we'll get together, yeah yeah yeah!

See who else was on last night!

If verizon wireless would fix my BlackBerry screen, I could have tweeted about last night in real time.