Startup singlet?

Do We Really Need More Blogs? For the last three years, Quora has been the site for headsdown homebodies to ask their fellow coding brethren about what it's like to go outside. But the company has recently announced two new developments that show a shift of attention to writers. The question site now has plans to include blogs. Quora has also announced the release of a rich text editor for their mobile app which should help Quora users ask bolded crazy questions while they're on the go.

Haute Hack Fashion and tech don't usually speak the same language, which is why all eyes are on Conde Nast's Decoded Hackathon this weekend. Designers and developers will be heads down at the Alley NYC in Midtown February 2-3 to create an app that lines up with the Council of Fashion Designers of America's mission to grow the fashion industry. The prizes are pretty sweet. The winning teams get $10,000 in API and product prizes and the chance to get their app launched by the CFDA. The top three finalists will get an introduction on stage at the NY Tech Meetup and a chance to present on the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week after a keynote Dennis Crowley. Maybe the Fuelband will make its first runway appearance?

The New Flash Mob Proposals This is the first job offer we've heard of delivered via GitHub pull request, but we suspect it won't be the last. After honing his coding chops at the Flatiron School, Adam Jonas created a fan site for Carrot Creative, a Dumbo marketing agency, to show off his skills with Facebook open graph. Carrot responded by forking his project and turning it into an offer site, complete with an embarrassing photo of Mr. Jonas in a singlet. That's so Startup!™

Give Us More Specials Please Foursquare just released a companion app to its ever-changing mobile app for business owners. The company explained in a blog post that with the app's capabilities, "managers can create a Foursquare update and easily cross-post it to Facebook and Twitter at the same time. They can also use the app to see recent check-ins, turn specials on and off, and look at business data." Seems like a really good timesaver for a small group of people. Servicey!

Get Free Tickets Now FinTech Hackathon will be hosting its first hackathon aimed at the global community. The focus of the competition will be financial technology. It's going to be held in New York on the weekend of April 6th. 10gen, Betterment, Bloomberg, Caplin, Dwolla, are all among the list of sponsors. The first 20 developers to sign up at www.fintechhack.com will receive free tickets to the event.

Brooklyn Girls Dreams GOOD Ada Ng, a Brooklyn resident, is one of three finalists in GOOD's quest to add a member to their tech team through a contest called "Coding For Good." Her project was a hack of the Google Maps API and the Instagram API to create an interface where the user's travel time counts down to reveal an Instragram photo from the destination. All of Brooklyn is rooting for you Ms. Ng!

Always Be Closing (on Mobile) Online design shop Fab just released a new mobile app.  Not that they need the help, the company says 30 percent of sales already come from its iPhone, iPad and Android apps, compared to 10 percent for most ecommerce companies. Fab’s mobile customers also purchase 20 percent more items per order than its web customers and have a higher lifetime value. "It is not an understatement to say that Fab is a breakout mobile retailer," founder and CEO Jason Goldberg enthuses. Stop it, you're making Zuck jealous.

Primetime Ponies Back in November we introduced you to your new addiction: Derby Jackpot. The site, which lets you bet real money on live horse races, was like a fever dream Mark Pincus once had about updating off-track-betting for the casual gaming set, except it was launched by three brothers working out of General Assembly. Today the site is open to the public and includes enhanced chat features and a Facebook connection. Along with the grand opening, Derby Jackpot is also now accepting all major credit cards, but you'll still have to provide the cigarette smoke and pitchers of beer yourself.

Mr. Vinh. (Photo: Tumblr.com)

Shopping Site Goes Shopping Back in 2011, Khoi Vinh, the former design director for The New York Times’s website, attempted to launch an iPad collage maker called Mixel that even Taylor Swift would love. The interface was kind of clunky, and the company soon pivoted to a smoother iPhone product, which became fairly successful. And now Mixel has been acquired by the custom product giant Etsy.

No, you won't be creating any collages of your twee collectables any time soon. According to AllThingsD, The Mixel team is being acquired for its stellar mobile talents. Mr. Vinh and his cofounder Scott Ostler, along with employees Akiva Leffert and Roy Stanfield, will all make the move to Etsy's Brooklyn offices. Mixel will be shutting down the social side of its app, but will leave up its collage-making tool. In an email to Betabeat, Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea explains, “We expect our mobile traffic to surpass desktop traffic by the end of 2014." 

Not Even Punking You Kanye West's favorite Pinterest-like site, The Fancy, just expanded its subscription box service, originally a monthly plan that gives you $60 of curated goods for $30. Now everyone, not just the minds at Fancy, can choose a bunch of items to send out to their adoring fans. Fancy gets to split the profits with you, of course. The first partner is Ashton Kutcher with his A+ Box, which includes brain-shaped ice cubes and mustache-shaped Band-Aids.

Iowa Now Trendiest State Dwolla, the fast-growing money transfer app, reached a pretty big milestone this week. The company announced its partnership with the Iowa state government to help modernize the state's tax system. Starting soon, businesses will be able to use Dwolla to pay the cigarette stamp tax, which accounts for about $100 million of Iowa's revenue each year. In a blog post, the company seems to be looking to the future already: "And while you may not be able to pay your taxes using Dwolla today, you are going to start seeing our logo pop up here and there as the state looks to modernize the payment experiences and do better business for the 21st century taxpayer and economy (e.g. mobile payments, low-cost transfers, and real-time notifications, etc.)."

Norman Mailer Badge Foursquare recently partnered up with Voice Media Group, the company that was spun off from Village Voice Media, now without the icky Backpage.com. The Voice's Places event data will now be syndicated on Foursquare and the company's highly popular "Best Of" will be integrated into the service as well.

Let's All Go to the Lobby: Dogfish Accelerator, the first accelerator program for film producers, launched this week. Started by a former TechStars associate, James Belfer, the accelerator puts film teams in a three-month intensive training and networking program and gives them $18,000 in seed funding, along with free office space. But why wouldn't you just try a Kickstarter and go to Sundance?

Award Tour See.Me, the social network for artists, is currently running a bunch of contests for its 600,000 users. There's $125,000 in grants and awards up for grabs. The site has just announced that founding Tribe Called Quest member Q-Tip is going to serve as a judge for its music competition. In a press release sent to Betabeat, William Etundi, founder and CEO of See.Me, said, "Our simple goal is support creative people with recognition, shows and grants and we are super excited to bring Q-Tip into that process.”

Fund My Relationship Coming Soon If you've ever wanted your neighbors to pick your next significant other, then you should try ChainDate. The site is billing itself as the world's first site that uses crowdsourcing to find you a match. Every user gets "Wingpeople," users who like the same type of person that you do. The site matches you up with people that these similar-minded users thought were cute too. Sounds a bit competitive.

Nothing Really Matters The mobile analytics firm Adeven claims that over 435,000 new apps will be added to the iOS app store in 2013. That's too many apps to fit on your tiny phone, but don't worry, you won't even notice most of them. The firm also reports that 60 perecent of apps are "zombie apps," or apps that go completely undiscovered by iPhone users. A Zombie App Survival Guide is surely forthcoming.

Stuff Michelle Obama Likes  Whole Kids Foundation, PACT and Indiegogo are teaming up to help build urban sustainable gardens across the country. Leaders raise $2,500 on Indiegogo pages and Whole Kids Foundation will provide additional help like gardening materials. Crowdfunding kind of saves the day again.

Help Out, Y'all LuckyAnt, the crowfunding platform for small businesses, is hosting a very large crowdfunding campaign for 9 South Street Seaport businesses to help them out in the enduring disaster of hurricane Sandy. There's 19 days left in the project to rebuild historic Front Street and over $10,000 has already been raised.

Wake Up, Loser If waking up to the blaring sound of beeping or shocking radio static isn't for you, then you should download Mood O'Clock. It's the first emotional alarm app for Android, which lets you choose what kind of mood you want to wake up to. Depending on what you choose, the app will play you a corresponding morning soundtrack. We need a setting to help us wake up feeling like a brogrammer for those special Saturdays.

Katie Couric in Warby Parker. (Photo: Facebook.com)

Rose-Colored Glasses Warby Parker just released its annual report for 2012, and it's a pretty fun slideshow to click through. The glasses empire now has 113 full-time employes and 42 part-time employees. Of those bespectacled folks, 108 have company-sponsored gym memberships. In other Warby Parker health news, 2,507 pounds of salad were eaten in the office this year. Although there are not too many exact sales figures in the package (besides the fact that 296 monocles were sold this year) a diagram on the last page shows that sales from the first quarter of the year to the last one have nearly tripled. Warby Parker says it gave out 250,000 pairs of glasses this year, some of which went to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

G Train Still Lost Forever If you take the Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 trains, you already know what time your train is coming based on the large signs that tell you. In December, the MTA released an iOS app to tell you the subway times. But now the MTA is providing a web app, as well as a native iPhone app, so that you can know what time your train is coming before you get to the station. The web app is located at onthego.mta.info and has real-time updating data for all of your arrival times. Most importantly, the MTA has decided to release the data behind the app to developers. Let's hope someone whips up something cooler than this thing.

Fund This Office Kickstarter will soon be moving to into its new Greenpoint offices in the former home of the Eberhard Faber Pencil Co. Renovations to the space began in the summer, and renderings of the new office were released yesterday and then swiftly taken down. The gorgeous plans show that the former factory will contain a lot of rooms, including a theater, an art gallery, a lounge, a library, a green roof and a cafeteria. Oh yeah, and offices too--have to do work at some point.

Thinkers Posthumously Fill in the Rap Deets Rap Genius is speeding right along on its quest to become the Talmud of the Internet. John Wesley, back from the grave, now has an account to comment on the teachings of the bible. And none other than Samuel Johnson is reading between the lines on some of Shakespeare's juiciest bits. Now if we could only get Heidegger to fill us in on some 2 Chainz lyrics, we'd be all set.

Whistle While You Cowork An article published yesterday on FastCompany has some interesting stats on coworking. The piece says that "50% of all coworkers access their work space around the clock" and that "71% report a boost in creativity since joining a coworking space." Secret Clubhouse, the coworking space originally established by The Barbarian Group cofounder Rick Webb, gets highlighted in the article as well. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the space served as a functional workplace for employees from all over the city.

LinkedIn for the Klout Enthusiast A new jobs site launched today that takes your personal connections into account when matching you up with jobs. CareerSonar is a site that matches the employment history of your friends with every job available online and shows you which jobs you could be connected to. In the "it's who you know" world, this might make the most sense for looking for a job online.

Girl Put Your Records On(line) Accessing your medical records online is an impossibility right now, but the NYC-based New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and Health 2.0 are trying to fix that. Yesterday, the two organizations launched the Patient Portal for New Yorkers Design Challenge. They are looking for designers and developers to create a prototype for a website for patients to access their medical records online. This seems like something important!

Jerseylicious Accelerator Wants You TechLaunch, New Jersey’s premier Technology Accelerator, is now accepting applications for its 2013 class. The program is slated to begin in May and will culminate in mid-September with a Demo Day at Montclair State University. The teams that make it past the selection process will join the class and will each receive up to $25,000 of seed capital.

Be an Average Boyfriend The Netflix for fancy flowers, H.Bloom, has recently announced the launch of a special Valentine's Day service its calling "H.Bloom Hero." It allows men to become "heroes" by scheduling flowers to be delivered to their loved ones on Valentine's Day. Not sure if that makes a guy a hero or just a subpar boyfriend, but we're all just taking what we can get at this point, right?

Better Gets Better Betterment, the personal investing startup that helps users manage stocks-and-bonds portfolios from an online dashboard, hit a milestone last week, topping $100 million in assets under management. That was cause to celebrate and also for a minor redesign. "We have a dashboard screen on the wall that shows our assets under management and how they grow each day,” said CEO Jon Stein in an email. “We've finally had to adjust the font because the number wouldn't fit anymore."

Hipster Becomes the Man AOL is switching things up a bit and poaching one of its mobile employees for its venture fun. Doug Ludlow, the former CEO of the AOL-acquired photosharing startup Hipster, is leaving AOL's mobile side to become the first innovation partner at AOL Ventures. The title is extremely unclear, but it's understood that Ludlow will be spending a bit more time back in New York and getting out of AOL Ventures' Palo Alto headquarters.

Because Tweetdeck Popups Suck Rapportive, the add-on that replaces Gmail's ads with information about your contacts, has just launched an early version of Twitter integration to its service. The update lets you follow, reply and retweet your contacts from within Gmail.  You can request early access to the feature here.

Congress Fail Whale (Photo: blogspot.com)

API Rate Limit Exceeded Back in April of 2010, the Library of Congress promised to add every tweet up to that date to its famous archives. But like anyone following too many people at once, it's just caused one big mess. The library now has an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets totaling to a compressed 133.2 terabytes. Now the librarians of Congress are planning to work with Gnip, the company currently organizing all of the data, to develop a plan for archiving all of the tweets.

Apparently there have already been more than 400 access requests to the Twitter archives from researches doing work on citizen journalism and political communications. Someone needs to teach the librarians how to make lists as soon as humanly possible.

Schools Get Cash The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has just pumped a bunch of cash into New York's tech universities. It has awarded a total of $15 million to Columbia University, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and High Tech Rochester to create three Proof-of-Concept Centers dedicated to helping inventors and scientists turn their high-tech, clean-energy ideas into successful businesses. Columbia will form a new accelerator, several upstate schools will work together on a new development center, and NYU-Poly will work with CUNY to create PowerBridge, an applied science research institute that focuses on challenges specific to an urban environment.

Drop The Ball, Up The Traffic The customized mobile site publisher Onswipe had lots of reasons to pop champagne on New Year's Eve. The company says that it has reached 44 million unique visitors in total for 2012 and now is reaching more than 10 million monthly active uniques on iOS devices. The publisher also saw a huge bump in traffic after people opened their gifts on Christmas morning. Most notably, in the two days after the holiday, total unique visits on its sites jumped 22 percent and Kindle Fire unique visitors increased 75 percent.

Get Glasses, Give Glasses Diane von Furstenberg is teaming up with the insurance company VSP Vision Care to run a contest on Pinterest to help benefit the NYC Mission Society. Every time an image gets repinned from the VSP Pinterest Board, a gift certificate for an eye exam and glasses will be donated to the New York City Mission Society. These repinners are in luck too--when a user repins that image, they are automatically qualified to win a pair of DVF sunglasses and a $500 DVF.com gift certificate.

Move, Drop, Shake Unpakt, the site that lets you compare movers, continued its “Innovators on the Move” series. It features tech entrepreneurs reflecting on recent moves in their lives. This week's video features VHX founders Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson talking about the move to its first offices in Brooklyn.

Innovators on the Move: Casey & Jamie from Unpakt on Vimeo.

Baby You're A Firework (Filter) The favorite photo sharing app of the Williams sisters, Mobli, just celebrated 2013 in the best way they know how--by adding two new filters to its app. Both of them are New Year's Eve themed. One has a fireworks overlay, while the other has "2013" glittering in gold. Siiiick.

Live Like 'Countdown' Just last month, Gojee was the site to go to for recipes based on what's in your pantry. But it's recently launched a slew of fashion verticals which include landing pages for lingerie, heels, dresses, jewelry and handbags. The recipe sites are still up, so there's no need to panic about your dinner just yet. This makes living your best Beyonce life ("All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time") all that much more possible.

More Style Buying Speaking of buying clothes based off the pretty images you find on Tumblr and Pinterest, there's now StyleSays -- a new fashion image sharing community that connects users’ favorite style images to purchasable content. It tags pictures of pretty outfits with links to purchasable items. Some might be the exact product and it could give you an affordable alternative.

AT&T Sucks If one of your New Year's resolutions is to ditch your phone provider once and for all, consider making a switch to T-Mobile. The company is now touting the results of its $4 billion commitment to improving service and says its reception in New York is better than ever. Neville Ray, the CTO for T-Mobile, said in a blog post that NYC customers "can also bring their unlocked AT&T smartphones to T-Mobile and experience a significant speed boost on our network with most devices, while also saving up to $50/month compared to AT&T."

Old dog learning new tricks, etc. Bluefin Labs, the social TV analytics company for advertisers, just added an important employee to its team. Scott Grunther, a former Nielsen executive, is joining the Bluefin team in 2013 as a senior vice president. He will also be the general manager of media products out of the company’s New York office. He's been in the industry for 20 years.

The Pope (Image: Twitter.com)

The Catholic Church has had a pretty rough couple of years in terms of popularity. So the clergy must have been thrilled when the pope announced his arrival to Twitter earlier this month.

On December 12th, he tweeted his first message to the world, which sounds like an excerpt from a wily Aunt's last chain email, "Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart."

The Vatican is now bragging about the success of the first heavenly tweet and comparing il papa to Canada's own Holy Father, Justin Bieber.

The Vatican newspaper wrote in Thursday's paper that the pope's first tweet set a "percentage record for re-tweeting." Never heard of that record before, but let's just go with it. Congrats!

Reuters reported that  The Vatican newspaper said that, as of yesterday afternoon, the pope had 2.1 million followers. In actuality, his English speaking account only has 1.2 million and his Spanish speaking account is still hovering around 500,000. The others just don't add up to that reported number.

The Vatican also announced this week that the pope will add Latin and Chinese language accounts to the list of his Twitter personas. A Latin Twitter account? Because nothing says web 2.0 like tweeting exclusively in a dead language.

Can someone put Gary Vaynerchuk on a plane to Vatican City already?

Ms. Cyrus (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

Miley Cyrus had a brush with social advocacy last year when she recorded Occupy Wall Street's unofficial theme song, "Liberty Walk."  But since then, she's remained pretty quiet on any issues of equality. In 2012, she's cut her hair several times, most notably when she got rid of her bun, which put popular fan account @Mileys_Bun in an awkward position.

But now Ms. Cyrus is back to the fight with a new issue. Yes, Ms. Cyrus has something that all Americans can get behind -- Emoji equality.

For the uninformed, Emojis are the cute little image characters that iPhone users use like secret code or special embellishes to text messages. And on Tuesday afternoon, the beauty chain Sephora asked its Twitter followers to retweet their message if they wanted more colors for the nail painting Emoji. For the record, there is currently only a pink nail polishing Emoji.

Ms. Cyrus quickly responded with Emoji concerns of her very own:

This woman is right! There is injustice in the Emoji world right now.

This might just be Ms. Cyrus atoning for her past racially insensitive sins, but we're rooting for her cause. After all, it's kind of annoying to have to represent your female Indian friend with some dude rocking a turban.

Mr. Ohanian (Photo: Twitter)

r/findmeaparkingspace ParkWhiz, the Chicago company that enables users to find and reserve guaranteed parking spaces before reaching their destination, today announced that it has closed a $2 million Series A round of funding led by Hyde Park Venture Partners. Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian also took place in the round along with Hyde Park Angels, Amicus Capital, and others. In a press release sent to Betabeat, the company said that since its launch in 2006, it has driven $10 million in parking revenue to parking operators and provided access to 3 million parking spaces nationwide.

Fab Goes To India Jason Goldberg, the founder and CEO of Fab, took to his personal blog yesterday to announce that his company had acquired new funding. Times Internet, the digital arm of The Times of India Group, India’s largest media company, has chosen to invest in the company. Mr. Goldberg notes in the post, "As part of this investment Fab will be working with Times Internet to explore and execute on our India market strategy in the coming years." Since launching in June 2011, Fab has raised over $150 million from investors.

Tumblr For Your Tablet Tumblr just updated its Android app to support use on tablets that run on Android. So if you've taken some cool black and white pictures of ladders next to lakes, you can now upload them straight to your Tumblr with ease. Thank the artsy lord.

Disruption Gets You On The Nice List Harold DeLucia, a 27-year-old New York City public school teacher from Astoria, Queens, and Josh Lanzera, 29, a construction foreman from the upper West Side, are the founders of NYC Trees Direct, an online Christmas tree ordering service. The two New Yorkers saw a open market and went for it, investing $6,000 of their own money into the seasonal business.

Go Back To School NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in Downtown Brooklyn announced this week that the New York State Education Department has approved its curriculum. Now that New York believes it's a real school, the University is now accepting applications for the fall semester of 2013. CUSP's website has the application up now. Please post videos of yourselves opening your acceptance letters to YouTube.

The September App Bloglovin', the blog reader for fashion and lifestyle blogs, just launched its first iOS app. The company says that it has 1.8 million members as of this December. The company raised $1 million back in July in seed round funding from investors such as Betaworks, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Bruce Jaffe, Hank Vigil, Fritz Lanman and others. In a press release sent to Betabeat, Bloglovin' cofounder and CEO Mattias Swenson said, "Our goal with our seed-round was to build an fantastic app that would bring people an optimized and highly visual reading experience. So it’s great to finally see it in the app store!”

Bosses Are Really Happy Charley Polachi, a partner from Polachi Access Executive Search recently polled tech CEOs and found out that they all think the futures is extremely bright. 85 percent of respondents had a neutral or positive outlook for hiring in 2013, 79 percent said they had a neutral or positive outlook for hiring from 2013-2017, 84 percent had a neutral or positive outlook for expansion in 2013, and 81 percent had a neutral or positive outlook for expansion from 2013-2017.

Learn About Your New Hood Spun is a news discovery app that shows you stories based on your location. It was recently launched by the same team that made Broadcastr and Electric Literature. It could definitely be useful to fresh New York transplants. AOL gave the new version of the app a nice tour and it looks pretty cool.

School Mascot Is The Rose H. Bloom, a subscription based flower delivery service, is expanding its efforts to educate its employees. Right now they have the SEED (Startup Education and Entrepreneurial Development) Program, that shows current employees to make a big local impact. But starting this week, the company is using a new program called H.Bloom University, a six-month program that educates current employees in leadership and business.

The Customer Is Always Right Gripevine, a site where you can complain about customer service and review companies, just launched an updated version of their site. It now includes ratings and reviews. The same team also launched Resolution 1, a tool for businesses that lets them manage feedback from multiple sources at once.

Ms. Houston (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

And I Will Always Google You Google just released its year-end zeitgeist list and Whitney Houston was named the most searched person and term of the year. Gangnam Style clocked in as the second most searched thing of the year and the now-pregnant duchess Kate Middleton was the second most searched person in 2012. In terms of New York's search history, Hurricane Sandy took the number one slot and was followed by "MTA" and then "NY Knicks" (The new Brooklyn Nets didn't manage to crack the top 10). In terms of restaurants, Nobu was the most searched place to eat in New York, but Daniel and Chef's Table didn't fall too far behind.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Tumblr Tumblr is instructing its users to tag their favorite posts "#TumblrGiftGuide." The Tumblr team then will troll through the entries and reblog the best entries onto the official Holiday Gift Guide Tumblr. A look on the site shows a knit skull and a case for an iPad with cute typewriters all over it. No GIFs are currently on the site or for sale anywhere in the world.

Just Disrupt It Nike has announced a partnership with TechStars Oregon's branch to create an accelerator called the Nike+ Accelerator. The company plans to host ten companies for a three-month mentor-driven accelerator experience in Portland. The companies have to make products that integrate with Nike’s fitness-tracking Nike+ technology. But how will they get to test any of the equipment if they're coding all day long?

Cooler To Look At Than Macy's Christmas Windows NYU's winter ITP show takes place this weekend. Projects made by students in the two-year graduate program will be on display. Some of this year's entries include an app that lets you find hungry friends to eat with and a site that lets you capture a friend's reaction to a YouTube video. Cue up all of those videos where something jumps out and scares you.

Zuck Saves The Children Citizen Schools, a NYC nonprofit, has partnered with low-performing middle schools and volunteers from companies like Google and Facebook, to organize an after school program that encourages kids to learn more than just what goes on in the classroom. This Friday at Bronx Writing Academy, a middle school, the students will show off projects that include solar-powered cars and video games they programmed themselves. Software engineers, designers, and programmers from Facebook who’ve been teaching all semester will be there to watch their proud pupils.

And It's Just Like Honey We could all use a couple discounts this holiday season, so thank God for Honey, a Chrome extension that automatically scans the web for discount codes and then instantly deducts money from your total bill at checkout. It works with a ton of websites including Amazon, Nike, and Sephora. After a big boost from Reddit, the extension has been downloaded about 60,000 times. Honey said in a press release sent to Betabeat that "at just 7,000+ installs, Honey had saved consumers $30,000." That's a lot of extra gifts that you can buy for your mom.

I'm Feeling Very Lucky The search technology startup Q-Sensei Corp just announced the end of a Series A-2 funding round led by Verizon Ventures. $1.175M was raised which raises the total of its seed and Series A funding to over $5 million. Richard N. Nottenburg, the former CEO of Sonus Networks and graduate of NYU Poly, also now joins Q-Sensei's board.

Be My Benefactor Recent college graduates who want to achieve their dreams while still battling their impossible mountains of debt now have a new solution. Pave, a company that matches up the young and hopeless with backers who want to help the youth achieve their dreams through mentoring and/or cash sponsorship. In turn, when prospects turn a profit, they reward their backers with a percentage of earnings. It's like turning your poor post-grad life into a Kickstarter project.

(Photo: Instagram)

David Mas, a graphic designer based in Crevillente, Spain, was just looking for a creative way to stand out in his crowded field. So he turned to the land of sepia filters and brunch photos for help, natch.

Mr. Mas created an Instagram account, @esto_es_un_curriculum, to showcase his skills and past projects. Uninterestingly enough, no borders or filters have been applied to any of the 38 uploads, but none of them have been tagged with #nofilter. It's a total rookie move.

Cool for this guy, but please this cannot become a thing. Make your resume’s short and tight. No attachments either. What is this, amateur hour?

If you're interested in creating your own resume, Mr. Mas has created a tutorial video that has left us scratching our heads:

Mi Instagram Vitae from David Mas on Vimeo.

Why not just make another Instagram account to explain how you made the first one?

Rejects (Photo: Tumblr.com)

Half of the fun that comes along with having a Facebook account is dealing with the seething rage inspired by watching someone’s status become more popular than yours. Well if that whole thing isn't really your cup of tea, then the Facebook Demetricator is for you.

The browser extension lets you look at Facebook without the number of likes and comments hitting you in the face. It’s the perfect solution for the Klout-less among us whose statuses are left naked and bare, just hanging there, probably not even showing up in your newfeed because Zuck's magic algorithim knows that no user could possibly ever admire them.

The extension was created by Ben Grosser, a Champaign, Illinois, based new media artist. Mr. Grosser told the L.A. Times that it took four months to build and that his goal was to "to eradicate all the quantifying numbers on the site." It's available for free on his website.

We guess Mr. Grosser's project falls in the "art that makes you think" box. After all, what’s the point of having a baby if you can’t know how many of your friends like that you have it?