Picadilly CIrcus, London, (Source: Paul Atherton via Wikipedia)

LAWGIC. Today 2tor is partnering with Washington University to put their Master of Laws degree online. 2tor's previous partnerships with USC, UNC and Georgetown have put high-end higher education online with programs in social work, business and nursing. The Washington University partnership is specifically aimed at removing a hurdle for international students who want to study U.S. law. Now they can do it from abroad but still have access to the faculty they would be working with if they were physically in St. Lous.

BE MOBILE. Last week New York City based bMobilized locked down $1.5 million in series A funding from European VC firms Alliance Venture and Investinor. The mobile technology company uses cloud technology to convert websites from one of seven languages to HTML5 for a better mobile browsing experience.

RABBIT EARS. Yesterday NimbleTV named Lou Borrelli as their CMO. Mr. Borrelli joined the cloud-based television subscription service last year as an advisor and investor. His resume includes senior positions at NEP Broadcasting and AOL.

WORKSITE. Yesterday, Scrollkit, the intuitive site building platform, unrolled two big new features. Now users can draw on their websites and buy a domain that automatically propagates. Build entire websites at the speed of Twitter.

COMMUNITY. New Work City just revamped their community membership policy. Now, for $30 a month, members receive one free day pass, discounts on other days and events and access to happy hours, a startup support group, meetups and show and tells.

URBAN EXPLORATION. NYC BigApps winner MyCityWay has gone transatlantic. The urban concierge app is in London just ahead of the Olympics with all the features New Yorkers already enjoy. Need to find Tea? Crumpets? Petrol? They've got you covered.

PUNCH THE CLOCK. Hourly, a matching service for workers and employers looking for flexible work, just relaunched with a slew of new features including enhanced search, a premium membership offering and civic and trade group associations.

DIY. In response to customer feedback, Vook, the e-book creation, publishing and distribution platform, is making their product financially feasible for small players. The new Vook Starter Account is available for $9.99 a month and includes 100 MBs of storage and all the other features that make Vook so attractive, including automatic distribution to the Amazon and Barnes & Noble and royalty collection. Another victory for independent and individual publishers!

INTERNET INVASION. In celebration of Internet Week, WalkaboutNYC is pulling back the covers on New York tech. For the third year, everybody is invited to check out the offices of big names like 10gen, Behance, Art.sy, Codecademy, Gilt Groupe, Jetsetter, eBay, Knewton, Lot18, Spotify, Tumblr—there's a lot, okay? The citywide event is completely free thanks to time tracking company Harvest, and participants can tailor their experience with tours, founder talks and of course, demos.

NERD PROM. The 2012 Webutante Ball is a week from tomorrow where founders, investors and other big names in tech get together to drink dance and crown the king and queen of the Internet. "Series B" tickets are still available for $60 but if you wait for those to sell out the "IPO" ticket round bumps the cost up to $70. All this is happening on May 16 at Marquee, 289 10th Ave.

Stacy London of What Not to Wear has a new startup called Style For Hire. (Source: Phil Plait via Wikipedia)

SHUTTER. Luminance is not your average photography conference. Instead of focusing on the latest gear, this two-day program will bring together experts at the forefront of the technology we use to create, manipulate and share our images. Among the speakers are Behance founder Scott Belsky, Hipstamatic cofounder Lucas Allen Buick, Google's Chris Chabot, Pulitzer prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson, Tumblr CEO president John Maloney, Facebook Photos engineer Srinivas Narayanan and the School of Visual Art's David Ross. All speakers will present a 20-minute TED-style lecture.

TOE, HEEL, TOE, HEEL. What Not to Wear's Stacy London is the cofounder of a just-launched site that aims to connect personal stylists with the stylistically clueless. Style For Hire stylists will perform a "closet audit," provide personal shopping services or create new outfits out of clothes a customer already has—that's called closet shopping. Now women who aren't lucky enough to be on the show can still have their closets—and lack of fashion sense—torn apart, but without the benefit of a judgmental, national audience.

FREE LUNCH. Rickshaw Dumplings, Mexicue and Wafels & Dinges are giving away food tomorrow to all Fondu users. Download the the micro-reviewing platform for restaurants, create an account and head to West 4th and Greene Street from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to get your grub on. Sorry to all you Android or yet-to-adopt-a-smartphone users out there—Fondu is only available on iOS.

INCUBATE. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a program that provides startup with access to seed capital, mentors and coworking space, is taking applications until April 29th. Brooklyn Beta's summer camp for designer-developer teams is also taking applications through May 31. The 12-week program fosters connections between talented  people, invests $25,000 in participating companies and has advisors from top companies like Kickstarter, Airbnb, Union Square Ventures, Etsy and many others.

HACK 'ROUND THE CLOCK. ZocDoc HQ  will be the launching point for April 24th's 10gen 24-hour hackathon. The event, which begins at 568 Broadway at 6 p.m., will focus on working with MongoDB. Hack away until breakfast the next day at 9 a.m. and then hack your way to the post-awards afterparty at Von Bar.

DEVBOOTCAMP. DevBootcamp is a 10-week program that brings non-programmers up to basic programming level via an intensive curriculum. It's in San Francisco, but the organizers invite national and international students to apply. Participants include an aerospace engineer, a kid "straight out of highschool," a math teacher and finance grads, making for a veritable DevBreakfastClub. "The spring cohort finished two weeks ago, 7 out of the 16 looking for jobs have so far had job offers," DevBootcamp's Lachy Groom wrote in an email. "Almost everyone has had an exceptional amount of interviews (I think the average might be 8 each). We're expecting a very high job rate within the next few weeks."

NETWORK. Entrepreneur Week, an event that brings established entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors together to foster opportunities and relationships, began on Monday and will continue through tomorrow. Tickets are still available for some of the week-ending talks and events. Check 'em out here.

BLOG WAVE. Tidal, a company that provides tools to bloggers and publishers to help them share and be shared on similar blogs, just announced its 250,000 post milestone and three new partnerships. Tidal is loading up the Sony Music Popmarket Backstage site with reviews, photos, users and content creators eager to promote and share. Neighborhoodies, a T-shirt and hoodie company, is moving from textiles to terabytes as Tidal breathes life into their site with style posts, restaurant write ups and travel tips all focused on NYC. Finally, Seatgeek, a third party tickets site, is getting the Tidal treatment as well, as members talk about tour dates and their favorite and most anticipated shows.

NET-WORKS. Things just got a little bit faster on Staten Island. AT&T recently announced the expansion of their 4G LTE network which means mobile internet could be up to 10 times faster on those devices.

LUNCH MONEY. Education startup 2tor has obtained a $10 million line of credit from Comerica Bank.

COLLIDE. Kaleidoscope, a new way to shop for street fashion by browsing a mix of submitted and professional photos, is now on iOS.

MOMMA. Shapeways, a platform for creating and sharing 3D designs, is holding a Mother's Day make-a-thon. Participants can turn any flat two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional plastic or metal work of art. For Mother's Day, it certainly beats a stale store-bought card. Order by April 22 for metal and April 29 for plastic to get those gifts in time for dia de los madres.

JOBS. Bitly needs a new sales research associate. Acclivity is looking for a UI/UX designer and Python back end developer. Send a snazzy email. What's Watched has an opening for a sales director with three years of experience. Email Burr. News.me would like new senior iOS  and Python engineers. Torsh needs a technical cofounder and chief architect to develop web and mobile apps.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg with Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley. The mayor declared April 16 NYC's official 4sqDay. (Ben Weitzenkorn)

2x2^2. April 16 is officially 4sqDay in New York and over a dozen other cities around the country. The fan-created social media holiday's official celebration will begin at 7 p.m. at The Caulfield. Check out the community blog and RSVP here.

CAPITAL IDEA. General Assembly is bringing back “Assembled Capital,” an all day event dedicated to getting startups funded. The $200 (plus a $4.97 fee) to get in is a bit steep, but breakfast, lunch and booze are totally included! The event will include talks, panels and plenty of elbow-rubbing time with the like of Squarespace's Anthony Casalena, TechStars NYC's David Tisch, Charlie O'Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Shane Snow of Contently and many others.

AIRbnFREE. Airbnb is teaming up with Thrillist and sponsoring Tour de Thrillist, a bicoastal race to discover all that LA, Vegas, Austin, Philly and of course NYC have to offer. Up for grabs is a five-destination trip and free Airbnb accommodations. Cross your fingers and enter the sweepstakes here.

SELL, SELL, SELL. New York-based Goodsie, a platform that allows anyone to setup their own store and sell pretty much anything, just announced the rollout of a host of new features to help merchants make smart business decisions including an integrated email marketing system, sales analytics and mobile optimization.

FIT FIGHT. Fitocracy, the fitness game that uses points and milestones to keep us motivated and moving, is now available on iOS. Users can see what their friends are up to and add and log new exercises right from the palm of their hand. To accompany the mobile app launch, Fitocracy has revamped their website, making it easier to see friends' updates, browse achievements, check scores and see how many points away from the next milestone they are. Slimkicker, a similar app, also made its iOS debut on the same day.

THERE'S ANOTHER MAPP FOR THAT. This week, MyCityWay, a mobile app that combines reference app information with city data, won the “Best Travel App” award at this year's Appy Awards. The app can be used for anything from job searches to driving direction to ordering Chinese food.

DEEP IMPACT. The next installment of the NYU Series on Impact Investing will be on April 9 at Vanderbilt Hall in Room 210 at 6:30 p.m. on the NYU campus.  The panel discussion will focus on legal and policy issues and how they impact investments.  This and future installments will focus on "issues related to the measuring of impact, the key regulatory questions raised by impact investing, and the role that development finance institutions play in impact investing." More information is available here.

STARTUPS 101. Last night, LEAN301 - Advanced Startup Metrics for Founders, the advanced version of the most popular class on Skillshare, held its first class. The class is taught by Lean Startup Machine founder Trevor Owens. Classes are limited to 12 students and future dates can be found here.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. Quotiply, a business app that connects companies and helps them collect, rate and assess offers from providers, just came out of beta last month. The app has profile, messaging and address book features built in and will even make suggestions to help members find good business partners. Quotiply is currently based out of Paris but CEO Paul Dupuy is currently in NYC with the team until the end of April. The company plans to move to NYC as soon as possible.

VIEWTUBE. Some pretty noticeable people including Hank and John Green, and Michael Aranda are using VYou, a video blogging platform, to answer questions and communicate with their fans. Annie Barrett of Entertainment Weekly uses the platform to do show reviews. Daily Candy has a channel where editors answer questions from the audience.

TECH SIDEKICK. Code for America needs a “Gotham Brigade Captain,” whose job will basically be to help bridge the gap between tech and government.  The job will involve high-visibility and a firm grasp of the complex relationship between government, the law and technology. It sounds like a tough job but we really need someone to do it.

WHISTLE... Shapeways is looking for a community manager with at least four years of experience to synthesize and advocate for user needs as well as a software engineer proficient with PHP, Apache, MySQL, HTML and Java. Beyond NYC, Shapeways is hiring all over the world. Lifebooker needs a lead software engineer and architect with at least five years under their belt, excellent OO skills and proficiency in at least one programing language. Submit your application here. Conductor, Inc. has put out a call for an entry-level QA engineer with a bachelor's degree and sharp analytical and communication skills. Development operations engineers are needed at 2tor to manage and monitor their hosted server infrastructure. QA internship opportunities are open at Aviary and BetterCloud, 2tor is looking for PR, tech and development interns, Foursquare needs a community intern and ZocDoc has internship openings in design, marketing and IT.

(Jamie Grill via Getty Images)

Online learning platform 2tor today announced the close of a $26 million Series D funding round led by an affiliate of the Hillman Company. This brings the Chelsea Piers-based company's total venture funding to $96 million. All previous investors—Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Novak Biddle Venture Partners and City Light Capital—who helped 2tor raise $32.5 million just over a year ago decided to come back. Joining them were new investors SVB Capital and WestRiver Capital.

"The next steps—plural—are really to continue building out our existing programs and to launch new programs that are of the exact same caliber and quality of our existing ones,” Jeremy Johnson, cofounder and CMO of 2tor said. “We believe the world is moving more and more online and we believe that these programs are head and shoulders above anything else out there."

Roughly 1,000 students have already graduated, and masters candidates are perusing degrees on 2tor through big-deal schools like USC's Rossier School of Education and School of Social Work, Georgetown's School of Nursing and Health Studies and UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School and School of Government. Mr. Johnson said 2tor is largely responsible for the Rossier School's ability to expand its student base from 75 to 1,500 online students in just two years. The program also jumped from 38th to 15th in education school rankings, he said.

What separates 2tor from its competitors is its social component. "We focused on building a robust social network so it feels much more like Facebook than BlackBoard and we focused on live streaming video so most of the classes on the platform are done in a live environment where you see the professor," Mr. Johnson said. "You can raise your hand. You interact with them in the way that you would interact in a small group session in a class so it feels very different than all those other platforms because you're really replicating the campus experience. You actually are showing up at a certain time and engaging with other students in the way that you would in a classroom—you just don't have to be in South Central Los Angeles or Georgetown.”

2tor plans to announce a sixth university partnership this spring. The company is hiring for more than a dozen positions and an army of interns.

Quincy cofounders Christina Wallace and Alex Nelson via Quincy

WAITING ROOM. ZocDoc just became active in Austin, the company's 16th market. Available to over one-third of the U.S. population, ZocDoc is continuing its mission to make scheduling doctor's appointments really fucking easy with well over one million unique visitors each month.

DINERO. Integrate, a New York-based company that helps businesses "plan, execute, track, analyze and optimize their multi-channel marketing strategy" just raised $11 million in Series B funding. Comcast Ventures and Liberty Global joined Foundry Group, a repeat investor.

VERTICAL BUZZ. Last week BuzzFeed launched two new verticals—Sports with Jack Moore and Kevin Lincoln and Shift, aimed at female readers, with Amy Odell of New York Magazine.

MEASURE UP. Harvard Business School bffs Christina Wallace and Alex Nelson are tall girls who were looking for tall girl pants. Enter their new fashion startup, Quincy, which rethinks women's apparel sizing by assigning sizes based on bust and height. The site launched yesterday with a collection of five blazers, and will roll out more highly-tailored items over the coming months.

FLEXIBLE. The new DUMBO Startup Lab at 68 Jay St. is giving membership to those who qualify. Members can choose to  lay down a "stationary" workspace starting at $400 per month. "Portable" work space is $200 per month and everyone has 24-hour access to conference space, mentorship and advice from DUMBO Startup Lab pros.

SHOPTIME STORIES. In January, we told you about an as-yet-unnamed store in Chelsea that was selling online goods from startups like Birchbox, Artspace and Quirky offline for limited time. Well, founder and merchandising whiz Rachel Shechtman who likes to call her company, "a retail space that has the point of view of a magazine, changes like a gallery and sells things like a store," has given her shop a name, Story. Starting yesterday, Story opened its doors for its second "issue," and startups are once again on display. This time the theme revolves around color with items from BaubleBar, CHROMATICgallerie, StyleMint (the Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen brand), and more and will be open daily until Tuesday, May 22nd.

DJ DROID. Last week Songza, the company behind the mobile app that helps users find and make playlists based on mood, time of day and other variables, released an iOS app update, adding to their new Music Concierge feature. The update is designed to help users find the tunes they're in the mood for easily and faster. With no fees, limits or commercials, it looks like healthy competition for Pandora and Spotify.

BREAKAWAY. Startup Hockey is tonight at 95 5th Ave. on the fifth floor. Leave your skates at home though, all you need is your thumbs. The organizers also made "a half-hearted promise to schedule these further in advance."

HACKING? Hacker office hours are tomorrow night at 6 p.m. Go to 71 Pineapple Street in Brooklyn for all your programming questions.

GET TOGETHER. The inaugural NY Tech Day is on April 19th. Free registration is now open but hurry up because nothing's infinite, right?

ONLINE DATING—IN REAL LIFE. Uncubed, formerly the Silicon Alley Talent Fair, is now open for registration. If you're looking for a job, go here. Hiring companies, register here and use code "EB11" to get  15 percent off. You'll be among 80+ NYC companies and 500+ people hungry to work. Drinks, music and ping-pong will round out the event on April 26th.

CANDLE WIX. Wix is a site building tool "for the code inept." Earlier this week, Wix unveiled its HTML5 product, adding new functionality to the formerly flash-only platform. In addition to their web products, the Israel-based company also has the Wix Lounge in Union Square, a workspace for creatives. There's one in San Francisco, too.

WHISTLE WHILE YOU... Lot18 has openings for an account management intern, acquisition manager, marketing coordinator, user experience designer, director of engineering, front end developer and softwae engineer. Check out job descriptions here. 2tor is looking for a staff accountant with more than two years of experience and a strong basis in MS Office. They also need a tech intern and have many other NYC based jobs on their website. ChallengePost needs a UX/product lead who will say "I don't know" before giving a bullshit answer. Don't lie here.

Mr. Liu

Yesterday Knewton, the Union Square-based online education startup, announced a $33 million Series D round led by Founder's Fund, the VC firm co-founded by Peter Thiel. That might explain why Betabeat heard Mr. Thiel's fellow co-founders Ken Howery and Luke Nosek were throwing a pre-game party Friday night in New York.

Existing investors Accel, Bessemer and FirstMark also participated in the round, along with Pearson, an education publisher, putting Knewton's valuation higher than $150 million, according to TechCrunch. Another New York City-based education startup, 2Tor (get it??), raised $32.5 million earlier this year. But what sets Knewton apart is the adaptive learning algorithm the company developed, which figures out student's weakness and can be applied to any type of curriculum.

Indeed, after trying its platform out in test prep, Knewton is now being used by all 10,000 incoming freshman at Arizona State for an online math readiness course.

Betabeat talked to COO David Liu about why Knewton isn't making teachers obsolete, how its adaptive learning algorithm works, why Mr. Thiel would invest in an education startup and why Mr. Liu thinks Knewton is, basically, going to take over the world of personalized education.

It seems like there's a lot of buzz around online education startups recently. There's 2Tor, Veri, Code Academy, and General Assembly may even get into the game.

We definitely see ourselves in the center of it. We have this huge industry now transforming to digital and it's not enough. E-books are not going to disrupt an industry. But it is a very fundamental step that needs to happen for the traditional materials industry—getting it online is a huge step. Once you do that, Knewton becomes incredibly viable for a lot of these content providers because what we do is we take content and tag it and break it down to a very fundamental level.

That's where adaptive learning comes in?

To give you an example, we take, let’s say a text book in geometry, and we break that down. If we know you’re weak in a concept, we’ll look within geometry. We’ll find maybe you have issues with triangles. But maybe it’s not just triangles, it’s right triangles. Then we’ll go all the way down to the Pythagorean Theorem. We will know because the content is tagged at such an elemental level that we can reformulate that content back to you based upon what you do on our system. One half of it is breaking the content down to that level, no one else is doing that.

How do you tag a text book down to that level?

We have a template. We used to do it manually, but certainly auto-tagging is something that’s being done today. Even the largest publishers in the world are beginning to automate a lot of that work. Just doing that is the first step. Then you have to put it into a hierarchy, you have to put it into what we call a "knowledge graph," which kind of formulates what concepts goes before another, what comes after. So that’s a little bite of our proprietary stuff.

How do you know where a student's weakness is?

What we also do on the front end of that is we’re measuring and we’re processing thousands of data points an hour on every student on the system. They are answering questions, and what we call assessments on questions. Or how much time they’re spending on a piece of video content. Or how much time it takes for them to read through content. Whether they’re moving faster in the morning or in the afternoon or in the evening. Imagine what a user does on Facebook or Netflix, we’re doing the same thing in terms of measuring what data they’re producing on the system when they’re on a digital course that we’re powering.

This is where the algorithm comes in?

We’re taking all that information, we put it into our algorithm. Then based upon where you are in the course or where you’re supposed to be--or based on your individual ability as a unique student--we then produce that next bite-sized piece of content that you need to master. What we’re finding is that a lot of people in the industry are beginning to throw around the term "adaptive learning," but we’re really one of the few companies that actually does adaptive learning this way. Most companies when they talk about adaptive learning, they’re talking about adaptive testing, that’s been around for years. If you get a question wrong, it gives you an easier question.

Well, you mentioned Netflix, which has faced a lot of pushback from the old guard. Are you going to make teachers obsolete?

We’re absolutely not making teachers obsolete, we’re taking all the dirty work out of teaching so that professors can spend a lot more time teaching instead of trying to pour inefficiently through data—or even not even having access to data about individuals in their class. We’re so incredibly precise and surgical about understanding how individual students are progressing, so we can highlight those individual problems so quickly so professors can come in and do with the class what they do best and that’s instruct and teach.

That's how they're using Knewton at Arizona State?

That's what Arizona State saw first with our college readiness course and now we’re powering a blended learning first year math course across the campus. What they found was that the data was just as valuable as the technology. We’re able to now create a user profile of each student, confidential to the professor, obviously, and they’re now able to make sure during a semester that students can progress as quickly as they need to. Of course the learning outcome is what we’re all interested in. We want to make sure that the kids are learning and that they’re learning in the most efficient and effective way. When they jump into another course, after they take another one of our courses, you don’t have a cold start. So when the student comes in that professor already knows their strengths and weaknesses.

Is Knewton going to focus on the college market from now on?

We started out by proving the efficacy of the technology in test prep and we sold those courses ourselves and now we’re in higher ed, licensing the technology to universities and building some of these courses for universities so they can see the power of platform and the technology. The next step is to continue to broaden this out so that we can now power any content provider’s content and education so that we’ll be powering the materials part of the industry.

Why focus on materials?

That does a couple of things. One, you don’t have to change what people are doing today because text books still drive a ton of syllabuses in any course of study. It’s the big flow of how education content is being distributed, but now electronically and through the cloud. The second thing this does is drive big adoption of the platform much faster. So while we can still and will go school to school, the materials space, the materials industry, big publishers and all the rest hit millions of students all at once at different schools all around the world. That’s where I think the potential of this becomes very powerful because we can revolutionize that industry very very quickly.

That's where the API comes in?

We’re on our way in the next year or so to opening up our platform where any company or individual will be able to come in and begin to build just unbelievable courses using our technology. So we’ll have a toolkit just like any another API provider and you’ll be able to build a business or build a textbook, if you will, with the world’s best content in it, including publishers, nontraditional publishers, and even open education resource content from an MIT or Code Academy, we want to power all that.

What are Knewton's revenue streams?

Well we’re still working on all this stuff, so our business model overall is to license our technology. We’re a tech platform and we license that technology. When we open up our platform it’ll be a freemium model platform, so that if you’re a non-profit and you don’t charge for content, we’re not gonna charge you access to our APIs, but if you are a business then we’ll charge you some variable rate to have our technology.

If your platform is offering content, wouldn't materials companies like Pearson want a cut?

For a publisher, I suppose that we would license it to the publisher and then share in the revenue. I mean they’re interested in making their content and their course solutions much more effective, so you know ultimately hopefully it will change the economics of their business as well.

Peter Thiel has been very local about his lack of faith in the power of a formal college education. Why go with Founder's Fund?

We’re incredibly thrilled. Founder's, outside of Peter Thiel’s comments about education, I'm just commenting on Founder's on a higher level, they believe in investing in companies that can change the world in their respective industries. Look at Tesla, look at Palantir, look at SpaceX. So we’re incredibly thrilled to be working for them because they believe we’re that type of company for education.  Ultimately we want to be able to provide personalized learning and better outcomes for every person on the planet. It’s a big, big meaty kind of vision and we’re gonna build many paths to that goal.

Do you find it surprising that Founder's would be looking an education startup at all?

With respect to Peter Thiel’s comments, again I’m not gonna comment on his earlier comments. I think what they’re interested in as a firm is to really fundamentally improve, big big markets that have been under-performing. I think that’s really all he wants to do. So I think it’s a great statement about us that they found something that they believe can actually make that change.