For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

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Drippy Manhattan evenings aren’t usually a draw for an outdoor cocktail party but the FoundersClub NYC Internet Week soiree had something that overcomes a little rain: power. Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC (NSDQ: IACI), was hosting two of the hottest not-so-new guys in town—AOL’s Tim Armstrong and News Corp.‘s Jon Miller—in the Rooftop Garden at Rockefeller Center and the draw was irresistible for Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendy, Jeff Zucker, Sir Martin Sorrell and more from media, advertising and tech.

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And the award for the Most Bitterly Ironic Media Award goes to…the Fred Dressler Lifetime Achievement Award, to be bestowed upon Arianna Huffington by Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at the upcoming Mirror Awards luncheon in Manhattan.

Congratulations, Arianna!

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Artist Jorge Colombo may have drawn the dreamy, nocturnal cityscape of Manhattan on the June 1 cover, using his iPhone, but a software engineer named Steve Sprang built Brushes, the iPhone application that transformed Mr. Columbo’s swipes into digital strokes.

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Goat cheese is the new black. Introducing goat cheese cheesecake, asserted the Twitter account for a Manhattan food outlet called the Dessert Truck one morning in April, a few hours before it opened up shop at its semi-regular haunt on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Third Avenue.

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Boxee, a free software package that pulls together multiple sources of Internet video in an easy-to-use interface, has quietly been building an army of ardent fans.

But what is it about Boxee that is driving the technorati wild?

Turns out, more than a handful of the 600 or so people who filed into Webster Hall in downtown Manhattan on Tuesday evening for a free Boxee-focused event couldn’t quite put their finger on it either.

In fact, a number of them weren’t exactly sure what Boxee was.

Aarin Clemons, who won a Mac mini computer by performing a beatboxed song incorporating Boxee’s name during a talent show portion of the evening, confessed he’d never used the service. “My friends brought me here,” he said.

Vincent Polidoro, a 25-year-old filmmaker in New York who persuaded Mr. Clemons to attend the gathering, said he had recently joined the ranks of those who adore the service, which many people use to pipe video from a computer to a TV screen.

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A few hours before the global launch of Nokia’s (NOK) latest high-end phone, the company gave a sneak peek at the gadget to a dozen bloggers and journalists gathered at its swank Midtown Manhattan concept store. With an elegant touchscreen that slid open to reveal a full keyboard, the device evoked lust in even the iPhone disciples present. So when can we get it in the U.S.? The company’s answer: “Globally, sometime in the first half of 2009.” The U.S. launch will come after that. No carrier has been announced. In other words, just about never.

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The debut today of the Research In Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry Storm, the company’s first touchscreen phone, has drawn long lines at some Verizon Wireless stores, according to Reuters and other news reports. At some stores, people lined up by the “hundreds.”

Reuters notes that more than 200 people had waited at a Verizon store in midtown Manhattan early Friday, but that many were turned away after it ran out of phones less than an hour after it opened at 9 a.m.; according the report, “angry customers caused a ruckus and police came to restore order.”

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