I have not had TV in my apartment for almost five years! That is to say, I have a flat screen, Apple iTV, Bose 5:1 Lifestyle channel system and a Netflix account, but I have not had any kind of cable or TV connection for almost five years.   Ok, I have a Slingbox hooked up at my In-laws, who have 500 channels, but I’ve only watched it a total of 10 times in a year, three of which was to show my friends and family how cool it is.  I know, lame! But remember that we started Trulia a little over four years ago and I had my first kid 14 month ago, and so I haven’t done much outside work and sleep (a little) for at least that long.  I also travel extensively for work and pleasure, so I need my media to be portable!

So when I read all the news about New York based and funded Boxee last week it seemed cool, but I wasn’t sure it was really relevant to me. Also, I honestly couldn’t figure out how it was different from what I already had when I first read about it.  Well, I had a few extra minutes to check it out the other night.  Three hours and a few House episodes later I was totally hooked!

Here are the top 5 things I love about Boxee and what makes it the perfect all-in-one entertainment platform for busy people like me:

1. The Netflix streaming service only works with Windows and I use a Mac to play my media on my TV.  Given Netflix is well over a $1B company, this has puzzled and frustrated me for the last year. But it doesn’t matter anymore, as I can access my Netflix account from Boxee and Boxee works with Mac!

2. Boxee plays media from my Apple iTV! Need I say more?

3. I can login to Pandora, access my channels and create more on my TV using Boxee!

4. The Boxee Bookmarklet lets me add videos from anywhere on the web to my Boxee Queue so I can watch them in bulk when I have some “free time” instead of stopping what I am doing to watch videos as I come across them. More Scobleizer for me!

5. I can watch anything, anywhere from my laptop or TV. Boxee is basically a media vertical search engine that enables you to pull media from anywhere and play it in one slick, and easy-to-use platform. If you are time starved like me, you need everything packaged as simple as possible if it has any hope of seeing the light of day more than once!

If I wanted, or could fit, another electronic device in my apartment, I would have easily added the Boxee Box and Boxee Box Remote to my list, as both look incredible cool!

My top wish list items for Boxee are:

1.  Let me access my Slingbox! Then Boxee will truly be a all-in-one for me!

2. Give me a Boxee iPhone app that will truly enable me to access all my media, including my Slingbox (who’s app cost $30 BTW) anywhere, anytime!

Thank you Boxee! You just put entertainment back into my busy, transient life!

Startup SeatGeek, who’s site forecasts event tickets prices to help you know exactly when and where to buy,  raised between $500k and $1M in a Series A financing according to TechCrunch.

Made in NYC, SeatGeek’s offices are located in the heart of Silicon Alley at 447 Broadway and the round was lead by four NYC angel investors: Sunil Hirani (founder of Creditex, an online derivatives market that was acquired for $625M in 2008), Mark Wachen (founder of Optimost, an enterprise multivariate testing app acquired for $52M three years ago), Arie Abecassis (former President of MindFire) and Allen Levinson (former MD of Moody’s KMV).  SeatGeek was previously incubated in and received a seed round of $20k from Philly based DreamIt Ventures.

SeatGeek is basically a vertical search engine that searches hundreds of secondary market websites every day to aggregate all the information relevant to event ticket pricing, including ticket list prices, days of week and even the weather.  It crunches that info into predictive pricing intelligence and layers that on top of listings and interactive seating charts to give you a comprehensive listing service that is also smart enough to tell when and where to buy to get the best deal. If you are too lazy or busy to keep checking back on the site, SeatGeek will send you alerts when tickets hit what their systems deems the lowest price.

So how does SeatGeek make money? Buyers can use the service for free and tickets brokers and other sellers get a premium (aka paid) service. SeatGeek also gets 7 to 10% of ticket sales where it has affiliate relationships with ticket brokers. They’re also preparing the roll-out of a ‘ticket insurance’ product, where users get compensated if SeatGeek doesn’t provide accurate forecasts.

SeatGeek has forecasts for about 5,000 events and claims a 82% forecast accuracy rate for all new events, which uses a database of historical ticket prices that has grown to over 11 million sales in the past few months.

SeatGeek was founded by Josh Groetzinger and Russ D’Souza, who also co-founded Scribnia and Evolving Vox together.  Assuming they didn’t raise any additional funding between the round from DreamIt and this A round, Josh and Russ have accomplished quite a bit with very little. It will be interesting to see how far they get with this next traunch of funding, most of which they plan to use for hiring. Not surprisingly, it looks like most of the hiring will be focused on hiring engineers from the New York tech community by the looks of the open positions posted on their jobs page!

Our prediction for SeatGeek? Chances are it gets scoped up by one of the leading online ticket sites like TicketMaster or StubHub within a year or two. Only time will tell how accurate our predictions are!

First Round Capital is planning to open a New York Office after making over a dozen investments in NYC based startups and hiring a local Entrepreneur-in Residence in Charilie O’Donnell.

First Round was founded in my hometown of Philadelphia by Josh Kopleman.  In a city known mostly for cheese steaks, cream cheese and soft pretzels, Josh is an anomaly in that he founded not one but two successful internet companies in Philadelphia: Infonautics Corporation, which went public on the NASDAQ in 1996 and Half.com, which was bought by eBay for $350M in 2000.

To kick off their increased focus on New York this year, First Round is doing a startup roadshow the first week of January dubbed “New York City Startup Trek 2010″ to meet with as many entrepreneurs as possible. Below is the email we received yesterday from our shared-office landlord TechSpace, one of the stops on the tour:

“Are you one of the thousands of innovative startup and tech folks working at Sunshine Suites, Techspace, the NYU/Poly Incubator, New Work City, or the Incubator at RoseTech?  On January 5th, First Round Capital is making a trip around the city and we want to meet you on our “New York City Startup Trek 2010″.  (#frctreknyc)

Five investment professionals from First Round Capital, a seed stage venture capital firm opening up a new office in NYC after making over a dozen investments here, will be visiting 8 incubator/temp office space locations throughout the city.  (And yes, we’ll be huffing it on foot!)  We’ll do a walkthrough, shake some hands, say hi (please say hi back!), and then set up shop for an hour for a very informal meet and greet.  We’ll be happy to answer any questions about technology, seed investing, our interest in the NYC tech community, etc.  This doesn’t have to be a pitch session, but we to hear about your companies and find out if we can help.

In attendance from First Round:

Josh Kopelman, Partner
Chris Fralic, Partner
Howard Morgan, Partner
Phin Barnes, Principal
Charlie O’Donnell, Entrepreneur-in-Residence

- We’ll also have a interested members of the media who will join us and who want to write about the New York startup community and where the startups are working.

- We’ll be coming with bags of Perky Jerky, which is, I kid you not, caffeinated beef jerky.  The founder is a friend of our firm and he thought it was the perfect entrepreneur pick me up.  I think its pretty fun leave behind.

Schedule of TechSpace visits for Tuesday, January 5th:

WEST VILLAGE: 12:30PM-1:30:PM (95 Morton Street)
UNION SQUARE: 3:15PM-4:15PM (41 East 11th Street)
CHELSEA: 5:00PM-6:00PM (44 West 28th Street)

Then join us at the NY Tech Meetup at 7PM at FIT’s Haft Auditorium on 27th St btwn 7th and 8th Avenue.

If you would like your startup company to be highlighted by a reporter coming along with us, please contact charlie@firstround.com and we’ll see how many features we can get out of each location.  Please include info on the founders, company stage, and a brief description.

We hope to have more coverage the week of the tour, so check back here then.