“When she wasn’t there it was an office,” Blank said. “But when she was there it was more like a home, which made it harder for us to have all-nighters.”

Startups often begin in a bedroom, basement or garage, but those lucky enough to expand often need office space to accommodate that growth. Fortunately for Blank and his co-founders, Pixable managed to secure a spot at NYU Poly Varick Street, a city-funded incubator for tech startups. Along with affordable rent, the Varick Street incubator gave Pixable a rich environment in which to develop ideas.

As New York City’s tech scene continues to blossom, a host of locations like Varick Street have sprung up to support fledgling companies. Typically these spaces are open to any entrepreneur willing to pay, but some are more selective.

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Led by CEO Darian Shirazi, 23, whose nascent career has already seen the launch of multiple startups and a stint at Facebook, Fwix signed a recent deal to provide aggregated local news for the New York Times Company (NYT). Fwix, founded in October 2008, sorts through about 200,000 pieces of news every day, analyzing and filtering stories from tens of thousands of local sources.

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The firm, founded by private-equity investor Alan Patricof in 2006 to invest in digital media startups, has raised a new $130.7 million fund following a $75 million fund in 2006. Rounding up the cash for the new fund wasn’t an easy process, however.

Ian Sigalow, a partner at Greycroft, says the firm started raising money more than a year ago in March 2009. In total, the firm had 160 first meetings with potential investors and dealt with many months where no investors committed, he says. “The first quarter of 2009 was miserable,” Mr. Sigalow says, recalling the deep-freeze that followed the stock market meltdown in late 2008. “It was cold. (Some investors) were saying why would we invest in a new fund?”

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The companies, ranging from music discovery software to mobile virtual worlds, have all received a small amount of funding from Facebook’s fbFund, a $10 million seed fund that Facebook and two of its backers–Accel Partners and Founders Fund–dole out annually. As finalists in the annual program, the startups have spent the past 12 weeks camped out in an old Facebook building in downtown Palo Alto, building their products, scribbling ideas on whiteboards and refining their pitches. Facebook fbFund program manager Cat Lee says that the fbFund, which is funded by Accel and Founders, invested more than $800,000 in the latest group.

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Many of the moves have been triggered by Facebook Inc., which this week paid current and former employees who participated in a program that let them sell a portion of their shares in the privately held social-networking site. Current workers were allowed to sell up to $1 million worth of Facebook stock or 25 percent of their vested shares, whichever was greater, according to people familiar with the terms.

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Now some venture-capital firms are trying to tamp down the anxiety levels over taking a company public.

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Next week, another of these companies, SharesPost, plans to announce their new service, say people briefed on the matter. The Los Angeles-area based company, headed by CEO Greg Brogger, will unveil an online platform where people can list their private company shares for sale and get bids for the stock.

SharesPost is positioned as a kind of Craigslist for private company stock, connecting sellers and buyers in an online classified ads-like model, say people briefed on the matter.

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As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”

None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

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Yesterday, I moderated a panel at AlwaysOn’s Venture Summit East in Boston, called “Is There Still Upside in the Internet?”

Short answer: Always and forever, as long as there are venture capitalists with bags of other people’s money and enough rat holes to shove the cash down!

In all seriousness, it was a great discussion, centering on the lack of exit for start-ups via IPO, the slowing down of the M&A scene and a need to build businesses that have strong revenue outlooks.

As to hype? Social networking, of course! And underhyped? Mobile.

The panelists included: David Kidder, CEO, Clickable; Waikit Lau, Co-Founder, ScanScout; Bob Davis, General Partner, Highland Capital Partners; David Beisel, VP, Venrock; and, one of my personal favorite VCs and charmingest Yahoo (YHOO) board member, Eric Hippeau, Managing Director, Softbank Capital.

I gave Hippeau a teeny hard time about the MicroHoo situation (essentially, WTF!!?). He deftly ignored me and made the most salient point of the panel about the continuing transformative power of the Web.

(Thus, shaming me for my tiny-minded, here-and-now focus! Well, I was only ashamed just for a second, but it was a really long second!)

Here’s the video with interviews with Hippeau and others, including conference organizer Tony Perkins:

Was it just me or did you also get a bit of déjà vu upon reading a story today by the New York Times’s Laura M. Holson about yet another mash-up of a Hollywood talent agencies with Silicon Valley VCs.

That’s apparently what is happening with a new investment venture that includes the William Morris Agency, Accel Partners, Venrock and–filling out the unlikely foursome–AT&T (T), as a limited partner.

The focus of the investment fund will be to hand out cash–and, presumably, expertise–to digital media start-ups in Southern California.

While the Times drilled in on the presence of a big cellphone carrier–just the kind of company that my partner Walt Mossberg has dubbed one of the “Soviet ministries” for stifling innovation with overly controlling behavior in the mobile space–I am more focused on the rocky road of many such deals that have been struck in the past.

Now, I think all the players involved are very smart, including Accel’s Jim Breyer, Venrock’s David Siminoff and also William Morris CEO Jim Wiatt (as well as Morris’s Paul Bricault).

That said, a lot of sharpies have gotten sucked up in the past into the this-has-to-be-a-marriage-made-in-heaven dreams of the perfect Hollywood-Silicon Valley pairing.

Today, there are a number of interesting efforts, such as Comedy Central’s deal with the creators of “South Park” to create a joint-venture digital studio, as well as the better-known pairing of Sequoia Capital with the Will Ferrell-led Funny or Die comedy site (see my video interview with Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme about the site below).

And, of course, although nothing was actually settled, the recently ended writers’ strike was all about content revenues that might–or, perhaps more accurately, might not–be coming from digital sources in the future.

But if the past is prologue, this new group of investors might have to learn to be a bit patient.

Breyer acknowledges as much in the Times’s article. “There is always a fear, I know, that the bubble is about to burst when a parade of actors and actresses comes through my door,” he said, before noting, “this time the discussions are much more rational.”

I guess that is why the funding is in the tens of millions of dollars, the article noted, rather than the larger sums that have been spent in previous attempts to forge these kind of tech and entertainment alliances.

In fact, Holson herself penned a very good piece in 2002 about the failure of one much-touted experiment in such an integration–LivePlanet–between celebs Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Redpoint Ventures.

That company was supposed to be a multimedia wunderkind, straddling the tech and media worlds with all sorts of gizmo-content wonders. One of its debut press releases in 2000 was, in fact, titled: “LivePlanet Unveils Integrated Media Concept–Entertainment Experiences that Span Traditional Media, New Media and the Physical World.”

Now, it is a shadow of that. According to a January article in Variety about the shuttering of its film unit, “LivePlanet evolved into a satellite company that [partner Sean] Bailey, Affleck and Damon would return to when not engaged in their own projects.”

In the 2002 piece, after a series of problems, including the bust of the dot-com bubble, Affleck himself got it dead right.

”If we stick around long enough and convince people we can do these things, we will matter in the new economy. I’d like to slip to the last page to see how it ends. But who knows.”

And, even six years later, who knows?

Here is the Kvamme video, in which he discusses Funny or Die:

The group, which includes former Silicon Valley player Danny Rimer, whom I interviewed in this post yesterday, threw a schmoozy gathering for its tech partners and some of the start-ups it is investing in and the press at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto.

Thus, I decided to play make-an-elevator-pitch with some of the entrepreneurs of the start-ups there, seen in this video. I also talked to Danny Rimer’s two older brothers, also at Index, and included in the video my chat with Neil Rimer, who talked about the difference between doing tech in Europe and in Silicon Valley.

“Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks,” he writes in earnest about how all that was once beautiful and pure about the Web 2.0 culture has become a wee bit tawdry. Money quote:

I wasn’t writing a blog in the first bubble so I can’t compare now to then. But entrepreneurs are no longer talking to us just to get our opinion and hope for a blog post and a little discussion. These guys need press to stand out from the scores of start-ups just like them. Saying no to them isn’t really an option. They show up at our front door with a bottle of wine or flowers. They instruct their PR firms to do anything necessary to get a story. More than once I’ve had a CEO break down and cry on the phone when we said we weren’t covering them. And more than once, I folded and wrote about them after those conversations.”

Having actually been around in the first bubble, covering the sector for The Wall Street Journal as its Internet beat reporter, I can empathize with the relentless pitching and aggressive self-aggrandizing that start-ups and their minions engaged in (although no bawling CEOs ever called me!).

Back then, they wanted the press (and, presumably, the stamp of approval from The Journal on that passport to Richville) to either get funding from venture capitalists or to IPO their typically half-baked company, much to the detriment of the investing public.

Here’s my simple cure for the seemingly beleaguered blogger (who has, in fact, made his name writing about this new crop of wannabes, some of whom are worthy and some of whom are not): Flowers and wine and comely PR come-ons are pretty easy to resist, and saying no is actually an option.

Let’s practice: No. Nope. Sorry. Uh-uh. Zip. Zero. Nada. I’m sorry, what’s UGC? Wait, I have a call on the other line.

All kidding aside, having just gotten back into covering the sector, I find the landscape quantum levels higher than the mostly ridiculous roundelays of world-shaking claims by subpar start-ups that took place in the last bubble.

At that time, I recall one start-up exec tell me with a straight face that his company was “pre-revenue,” while another toddler entrepreneur bragged that he was considering making a run at The Wall Street Journal and that he might keep me on. Most of those kinds of fools and braggarts were flushed right out of the system, the result of speculation and excess that only unlimited funding and a lack of business plan can create.

Aside from financial ruin, the biggest damage these companies did was in obscuring the fact that the Web was still a profoundly transformative medium and that the true disruption was to come not via Wall Street machinations, but from rapidly shifting how information and content were created (and by whom) and distributed (and by whom).

Today, the new companies, for the most part, are actually useful and much more disciplined and with much less lofty goals. While most are built to flip, they offer features that improve the experience on the Web for consumers and businesses and are filling in areas that need improvement. In fact, while there are some mildly laughable ideas, it is hard to find any on the level of the party that was 1999.

How I long for a Boo.com, Webvan.com or Kozmo.com to mock, but those gems are exceedingly rare in the new environment. And there simply is no Pets.com to kick around anymore.

It’s enough to make a reporter–oops, newbie blogger–weep.