In our No Nametags interview series, Geekosystem chats with the creators, operators, and visionaries in today’s tech scene.

Last week, we spoke with Rick Webb, co-founder and COO of The Barbarian Group, a digital marketing firm and creative agency with a personality, as immediately displayed upon visiting their website: “Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, art direction, design, technology, content creation, strategy, gaming, viral marketing, an almost radical devotion to Internet culture and nice red Swedish Fish™.”

Speaking with Webb at Tom & Jerry’s, a bar in NoHo that happened to be displaying an art installation during the time of our chat, we discussed the differences between running a tech-related firm in Boston and New York, his angel investing ventures, his music label, The Archenemy Record Company, known for geek rockers Freezepop, his views on the tech and advertising bubble and on advertising in today’s world of modern technology.

In our No Nametags interview series, Geekosystem chats with the creators, operators, and visionaries in today’s tech scene.

This past week, we spoke with Lauren Leto, the creator and cofounder of Texts from Last Night and the CEO of Bnter (pronounced “banter”), a social site and app that allows users to share conversations either publicly or privately and create small, intimate networks of friends. Last week, Bnter hit two new milestones in its development, following up on its iPhone app with an app for Android and also releasing a bookmarklet that allows users to easily import conversations from Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, GroupMe, Foursquare, and Campfire.

Speaking with Leto at a Williamsburg restaurant a few blocks from the Makery, the co-working space where Leto, her CTO, and Bnter’s recently hired engineer have set up shop, we discussed the future of Bnter, the New York tech scene, and why social networks where everyone has to have hundreds of friends are totally overrated:

In our No Nametags interview series, Geekosystem chats with the creators, operators, and visionaries in today’s tech scene.

This week, we stopped by TechStars‘ Union Square office and chatted with David Tisch, who serves as the startup accelerator’s Managing Director in New York City. TechStars invests a small amount of money into a select set of tech startups — $6,000 to $18,000 — in exchange for a 6% equity stake in the respective companies. The real draw of the program, though, is the network of mentors that the program hooks the companies up with: Each startup gets the individual attention of several experienced members of the local tech scene, who advise them on business, product development, and the process of growing a company.

TechStars has programs in Boulder, Colorado, where the program originated, as well as Boston, Seattle, and New York City. This year’s class of startups is the NYC program’s first. At this Thursday’s Demo Day event, they will show off what they’ve been working on for the past three months to a crowd of 750 people, including a number of potential investors.

In our No Nametags interview series, Geekosystem chats with the creators, operators, and visionaries in today’s tech scene. This week, we grabbed a beer with Hugh Dornbush, the founder of OMGICU, a free iPhone app which describes itself as “just like Wikipedia, only with celebrity sightings.” The app grabs user-generated photos of celebrities from Twitter and Facebook and puts them into a slick interface, and encourages users to share their celeb spottings.

Previously, a prototype of the app existed as an SMS-based service under the same name, but despite gaining some traction — it scored a publicity coup when Dornbush launched a successful campaign under the OMGICU banner to convince Tracy Morgan to join Twitter — the service was ultimately shuttered when Dornbush decided that a full-fledged smartphone app would better be able to accomplish what he had in mind. The OMGICU app is expected to launch in April or May of this year.