Dany Levy

Dany Levy sits in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at Beverly and Robertson clutching her New York Times as a badge of identity. She flashes her newsprint accessory and telegraphs her East Coast otherness to a sea of airheaded Angelenos blissfully gulping down their nonfat, decaf iced-blendeds. "This is the first time I've read the paper since I've been out here," she confesses. Green-eyed, ambitious, fast-talking and refreshingly high-strung, Levy, 29, is the founder of www.dailycandy.

For trend addicts, DailyCandy.com is the hard stuff. A fashion/lifestyle content site based on the notion that no 24-hour period should pass without a bulletin on the hottest new restaurant or hippest new shoe, DailyCandy was launched by former print journalist Dany Levy in 2000. Since then, she has e-mailed a tsunami of daily tips to a growing subscriber base, with separate editions for Los Angeles, New York and Chicago and a San Francisco edition due for launch after Labor Day.

For trend addicts, DailyCandy.com is the hard stuff. A fashion/lifestyle content site based on the notion that no 24-hour period should pass without a bulletin on the hottest new restaurant or hippest new shoe, DailyCandy was launched by former print journalist Dany Levy in 2000. Since then, she has e-mailed a tsunami of daily tips to a growing subscriber base, with separate editions for Los Angeles, New York and Chicago and a San Francisco edition due for launch after Labor Day.

Dany Levy sits in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at Beverly and Robertson clutching her New York Times as a badge of identity. She flashes her newsprint accessory and telegraphs her East Coast otherness to a sea of airheaded Angelenos blissfully gulping down their nonfat, decaf iced-blendeds. "This is the first time I've read the paper since I've been out here," she confesses. Green-eyed, ambitious, fast-talking and refreshingly high-strung, Levy, 29, is the founder of www.dailycandy.

There was a time, way back in the late 1990s, when coolhunting was still cool, when nearly every Madison Avenue ad agency wanted a resident hipster to interpret the spending habits of those inscrutable Gen-Xers. Then the Internet exploded, connecting everyone to everything in an instant, and suddenly, the art of predicting the next big trend got way more complicated.

Sitting around a long dinner table at Octavio Becerra's Palate Food + Wine are 24 impeccably coiffed young guests. Among them are "Mad Men" actor Miles Fisher, designer Tiffany Saidnia, Eater L.A. editor Kat Odell, a Prada runway model, an entertainment attorney and several musicians. Crystal Meers, Los Angeles editor of Daily Candy, chats with William Kopelman, an art consultant who tells of his newest project -- negotiating the potential sale of a bronze cannon from the HMS Victory, a British battleship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1744 -- to a very important and wealthy "man of the sea."

IF YOU'RE one of DailyCandy's 2.5 million subscribers, you already know the online newsletter with its sly signature illustrations and chirpy, conspiratorial tone. Each piece reads like a whisper in the ear from a giddy chum who's always in the know -- the girl who told you where to score a one-of-a-kind feather headband and dragged you to an after-hours vegan cafe before the food fundamentalists flooded in. Even better, this gal pal never stands you up for a new beau or a better plan.