Next week we will move to a new office in NYC (57W 16th St. 3rd floor). The previous tenant was Bonobos (we’re trying to get a few of those pants as part of the deal..).

It is a new neighborhood for us and we’re looking forward to becoming “locals” in a variety of new places.

When it comes to coffee we will adopt Cafe Grumpy as our coffee shop (4 blocks + 1.5 avenues = 7min, which is totally worth it for a good cup of coffee).

I will have to abandon my campaign to become the mayor of Stumptown on Foursquare, but I am looking forward to running for the mayorship of Grumpy. The incumbent mayor is spending a lot of time in the gym, so I hope my unhealthy lifestyle will be an advantage in this case, and that while he is working on his cardiovascular fitness i’ll be sipping an espresso and taking over as mayor.

Any recommendations for nearby places will be welcomed. Willing to walk 10min for a good coffee/pizza/burger/indian/sushi/tapas.

View Boxee NYC Office in a larger map

It’s 8 days until the beginning of events at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Do you know where your Boxee experience will be?

On the show floor(South Hall #36232) – We’ll have a great demo of the Beta & the Boxee Box at the D-Link booth.

In a Suite (@ the Wynn) – If you’d like to set up a private meeting with Boxee please send an email to bizdev@boxee.tv

At Planet Hollywood with Next New Networks (9-12pm, Jan 6th, @ Planet Hollywood) – Enjoy a few drinks, party with Obama Girl, and see the Boxee Box in action. RSVP to rsvpvegas@nextnewnetworks.com.

Press Events – In an effort to really get our money’s worth out of our press guy (me), we’ll be attending every major press event at CES this year.  Whether it’s CES Unveiled (Jan 5th), The Digital Experience with Pepcom (Jan 6th), Lunch at Piero’s 1 (7th), Showstoppers (7th), or Lunch at Piero’s 2 (8th) I will be there with my requisite 13 items of flare and a Boxee Box.  Come by and I’ll tell you all about what we’re releasing at the show and our plans for the future.  Massages and stiff drinks are welcome.

If you’ve never been to CES before, our friend Jeremy Toeman does a good wrap-up of how to prep for the show for booth staff, but it also works for attendees.

Awards

Now that we have a gadget with Boxee on it we’re elegible for even more awards this year.  Some are editor’s choices like the CNet Best in Show and G4′s Best of the Best while others require audience participation like Last Gadget Standing (LGS).  Last year LGS organizer Robin Raskin shot down my application for Boxee because “we weren’t a gadget.”  Pshaw! “We’ll be back next year,” I told her.

Well Robin, it’s 2010 and we’re ready. The Boxee Box has already advanced to the final round and we need your help ensuring its triumph. 
Check out the competitors and send your votes Boxee’s way!

If you can’t make it out to CES, don’t worry, we’ll be sharing all the latest and greatest right here on the blog so stay tuned!

– Andrew

While Monday’s Boxee Beta Unveiling has many excited about the upcoming Boxee Box (it’s quickly becoming gdgt’s most wanted media streamer), we know there are still many hoping to get Boxee to their TV for the holidays, and don’t mind using a mini-PC to do so. With nettops and netbooks on sale for the season we wanted to give you a few low cost computers that will run the Boxee Beta well.

We’ve mentioned the major improvements to the Boxee Beta’s back-end to help Windows machines with a dedicated graphics processing unit (GPU) run better looking video with less effort (thanks to the Direct X Video Acceleration & Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 support we’re developing).  We’ve done a lot of work with  NVIDIA to optimize Boxee for their ION platform which has a dedicated graphics chip to turn up the visuals on compact, low-power PCs with performance up to 10X faster than similar systems.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Acer Revo	HP Mini 311	Zotac ION

Keep in mind we’re talking about improvements in the Beta so the software won’t be available publicly until the beginning of next year (although you can sign up for the Beta Pre-Release list here), but if you’re taking advantage of holiday deals we want to ensure you’re picking up something that will benefit from the work we’ve done.  While we’re talking gifts, here are a few others we like…

Give Netflix

If that special someone already has Boxee, you might think about expanding what they can watch by giving them a gift subscription to Netflix for access to thousands of Movies and TV Shows they can play straight from Boxee.

Give Anime from Crunchyroll

If there is an Anime / Asian entertainment fan on your gift list, save the money you were going to spend on that ultimate anime DVD package and instead get them an account at Crunchyroll.com – the largest source of Asian entertainment in the U.S. They’re running a promo now – pay with PayPal and get $20 back, which means a 3 month subscription actually earns you a nickel(ends today so hurry!).

**Update – Crunchyroll promotion extended through Monday.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Boxee!

–Andrew

We are very excited to unveil the Boxee Beta. It is a big step in the evolution of Boxee, but rather than bore you with sentimental prose about how the path we took to get here, I wanted to dive right into what’s new with the Beta release.

Home Screen:

We’ve completely re-designed the home screen to make it easier to navigate to your favorite content. We’ve pulled the menu out from the side and put it front and center. Below is your hub for recommendations and content; See recommendations from friends on boxee, Facebook or Twitter (Feed), recommendations from Boxee’s staff and partners (Featured) and the latest episodes from your favorite shows or things you’ve saved for later (Queue).

Global Menu:

This is one of our favorite additions to the Beta – the global menu. This menu makes it easy to access helpful resources (TOP – Logout, Settings, Queue, Feed, History), the main menu (MIDDLE – Photos, Music, Movies, Home, TV Shows, Apps, Files) and shortcuts (BOTTOM) to your favorite Apps, TV Shows, Movies, or folders.

TV Shows & Movies:

We overhauled Movies and TV shows to include both Internet and local content; If you know what it is you want to watch, we’ll show you where you can find it and start playing it immediately – no need to go through an App. Not sure what you’re in the mood for, we’ve made it easy to browse a ton of popular movies from the Internet by selecting the Movie library.

We’ve put a special focus on TV Shows to better organize what you can watch. Boxee now organizes TV shows by season and episode, and let’s you filter by whether freely available or not, so once you’ve seen all the free episodes you can decide if that DVD is worth it.

Queue:

The Boxee Queue is a list that you control and manage. You can put almost anything into your Queue, a movie, a TV show episode, an Internet stream, a local file. In addition, if you added your favorite TV shows into My Shows then new episodes will automatically be added to your Queue. Unwatched items will appear in bold, white font.

Applications:

We have made it easy for you to find and test new apps. You can sort by popularity or browse the newest additions to the Boxee App Library. Clicking on App will let you choose whether you’d like to run it, add it to My Apps (the list of your favorite apps) or add it as a Shortcut. We also made it easier to add and browse 3rd party App repositories.

Sharing:

We have made it easier to share what you are watching and also let you put your own custom message, which will be sent to your Boxee, Twitter and Facebook followers.

Getting the best out of your Windows machine:

As part of the Beta we also changed the underlying graphic library on Windows from OpenGL to DirectX, and we’re now taking advantage of DXVA, which means Boxee for Windows just got faster and can play 1080p without your CPU breaking a sweat. There is now a long list of affordable Windows-based devices that can turn into a kick-ass media center (e.g. Acer Revo, Dell Zino, HP Mini)

Tonight at 7pm ET we will unveil the Boxee Beta in Brooklyn. The event has sold out, but you can still get your name on the waiting list (we have asked people who RSVPd , but can’t make it to let us know, so we can release the tickets to people on the waiting list).

If you are coming to the event, but not a local, check out the Boxee’s Handy Guide to Williamsburg. We recommend arriving early and grabbing something to eat on the way. The line will be long, but we’ll try to make it move quickly.

If you can’t make it in person then you’ll be able to watch a live broadcast here on the blog (in the player above), or on Boxee by installing the Boxee Beta Unveiling App, powered by Livestream and Cliqset. If you install the app you’ll see that you can chat in real-time with other viewers on Boxee.

We’re going to be using Hot Potato (http://hotpotato.com) during the unveiling tonight. You can join in whether you’re attending, watching on Boxee or Livestream, or just following along. Use Hot Potato for sharing the experience live via photos and commentary in real time around our event  from the web (http://htp.to/5chJRD ) or your iPhone (http://bit.ly/hotpotatoapp).

The event will be R rated for strong language and sexual content, viewer discretion is advised

Planning to attend the Boxee event, but new to Williamsburg? No worries. Zach Klein put together a quick guide to give you some great options for food and drinks not far from the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Getting there

Take the L train from Union Square to Bedford Avenue (3 stops, 7 minutes). From the station, walk west 3 blocks to North 6th and Wythe Avenue. Music Hall of Williamsburg is located just west of Wythe, look for the marquee with our name on it.

Getting back

Of course, take the L in reverse or call Northside Car Service at 718-387-2222. A car to the East Village costs $12.

Good Places to Eat

Egg
135 North 5th Street
(718) 302-5151

El Amacen
557 Driggs Avenue
(718) 218-7284

Marlow & Sons (a little far, but worth the walk)
81 Broadway
(718) 384-1441‎

Radegast Hall and Beer Garden
113 North 3rd Street
(718) 963-3973

Sweetwater Tavern
105 North 6th Street
(718) 963-0608

Good Places to Drink

Blackbird Parlour
197 Bedford Avenue
(718) 599-2707‎

Brooklyn Bowl
61 Wythe Avenue
(718) 963-3369

Hotel Delmano
82 Berry Street
(718) 387-1945

Hugs (skeeball!)
108 North 6th Street
(718) 599-5959

The Levee
212 Berry Street
(718) 218-8787‎

As our Beta simmers over an open flame in Tel Aviv, getting ready for it’s debut next Monday in Brooklyn (we’re sold out!), we’re giving you another reason to get excited.

The Escapist.

The home of Zero Punctuation, Unskippable, Rebecca Mayes Muse, Apocalypse Lane, Doomsday Arcade and more is coming to Boxee.

If you’re not familiar with The Escapist, let me break it down for you.  If you like video games and you like funny, then Escapist is for you.  It has hilarious video game reviews from Zero Punctuation (think a British version of the micro-machines guy with a chip on his shoulder and a sharp wit) along with movie reviews that educate you, make you laugh, and make you realize you probably want Movie Bob on your pub trivia team.  There’s a video game twist on MST3K in Unskippable, video game ballads in Rebecca Mayes Muses that left me wanting to download the music, and Apocalypse Lane, a cartoon highlighting the warped characters left behind after WWIII.

If you’re a gamer, the Escapist is your artist colony – a place where people put all their creative talents together to explore and expand the games we play (anyone else addicted to COD:MW2?) with entertainment. Honored with both a Webby Award and People’s Voice Award in 2008, The Escapist is responsible for the web’s most viewed video game review series, Zero Punctuation, in addition to introducing the first-of-its-kind Internet Film Festival for Gamers and the March Mayhem game developer competition.

We’re excited to have The Escapist’s co-founder Tom Kurz on hand at the Boxee Beta Unveiling to show off their brand new Boxee app. Here’s a sample of what you can look forward to.

For those who have never heard of Clicker.com, get ready to say to yourself, “I thought of that”… Well you might have thought it, but Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone and a team of 50 spent a year to actually make it happen; they built a new type of guide for The Web that lets you search any show, any movie, any keyword, any category. Basically, it’s a hot steamy batch of awesome for entertainment lovers.

Clicker is one part directory, one part search engine, one part wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR. At the heart of it all is a massive database that looks like this:
450,000 episodes,
from over 7,000 shows,
from over 1,200 networks,
tens of thousands of movies,
and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.

Oh, and one killer Boxee App!

As of today, Clicker is available on Boxee from the App Box, and we’re so excited about the app, we’ve invited CEO Jim Lanzone to do a full demo for us at the Boxee Beta event.