Photo: Fast Company

HopStop, Now With Complaints On Monday, transit app HopStop released its new social app HopStop Live!, which lets users update each other in real time on transit issues and changes. (Because the only thing more fun than dealing with transit issues is hearing other people complain about transit issues.) The app is also designed to create communities around specific subway and bus lines, which could help cities identify which lines need improvements or additions. Although this is great for HopStop users, we still prefer the simplistic istheltrainfucked.com.

The MTA Wants Next Generation Apps And in other transit news, the MTA is partnering with AT&T  for a hackathon and AppQuest challenge with NYU Poly and Challenge Post in order to develop the next-generation of public transportation apps. Some of the goals of the challenge include developing tech solutions to navigating time tables and alerts, helping travelers navigate inside stations, integrating with other apps, and developing user generated data. The hackathon will take place May 4 and 5 at NYU Poly in Downtown Brooklyn, with winners sharing $10,000 in prize money. They'll also be automatically entered in the AppQuest challenge, which is scheduled to conclude in early September. Hopefully the developers of istheltrainfucked will enter with an expanded site, "isthemtafucked.com."

Foursquare Version 6.0 Makes Stalking Your Friends Even Easier Today saw the release of Foursquare's newest update, version 6.0, which streamlines the geolocation service to more easily access the app’s core features. Now when you open Foursquare, the search function is at the top, while a map with your friends' most recent locations and personalized recommendations (based on a newly developed search algorithm) displays along with the signature check-in button at the bottom.

Jason Rapp Joins Science Inc. Digital business developer and technology studio (and owner of the most unoriginal company name ever) Science Inc. announced Monday the hiring of Jason Rapp as the company's Managing Director. Mr. Rapp previous experience includes time as president and member of the board of directors at educational app and video compnay Mahalo.com, senior executive in Barry Diller’s IAC corporation, where he served as CEO of Gifts.com, and as an executive at The New York Times Company. The Santa Monica-based company has more than 13 investments with companies such as DollarShaveClub, DogVacay, Ellie, Uncovet and others. Maybe the first thing Mr. Rapp should do at Science Inc. is work on a new company name.

People Like Reading Tech on Their Tech Mobile publishing developer OnSwipe released their most recent user data, and it looks like people can't get enough of reading about their technology. With 16 million unique iOS users per month, technology was the most popular topic on the OnSwipe platform both in terms of page views and average time spent on its apps. Other popular topics included men’s and women’s fashion and general news and politics. My, OnSwipe's users are a versatile bunch.

Barkbox, The Birchbox For Dogs (Really?) You know the monthly delivery craze is reaching its zenith when Barkbox, a Birchbox-style doggy treat and toy delivery service, not only has 35,000 subscribers, but just received $5 million in investments from venture firm RRE Ventures. The new funding is on top of the $1.7 million the startup recieved last year from a similar group of investors.Barkbox plans to expand its efforts after rebranding the company to Bark & Co., with BarkPost, a website which CEO Matt Meeker describes as “a dog-specific version of BuzzFeed’s 'animals' site,” according to allthingsd.com, and BarkCare, a $200 annual vet consultation service that  gives dog owners 24/7 access to vets by phone. Pet startups: the new tech bubble!

AppNexus Is All-In Today the adtech platform AppNexus announced an "all-in" commitment to mobile advertising by extending its technology to mobile platforms. “We built the technology foundation that unlocked unprecedented innovation and spend in display. Now we’re taking the same approach to mobile, allowing our customers to do business ‘full spectrum’ seamlessly across display and mobile,” said CEO Brian O' Kelly. The announcement comes after AppNexus raised $75 million in January in Series D round investments, led by Technology Crossover Ventures.

Mr. O'Kelley.

For a city that has wears its ambition to become a technology hub on its sleeve, New York lacks those coveted billion dollar exits that lend credibility to the ecosystem and help buttress the ever-multiplying ranks of startups.

Sure, consumer-facing companies like Gilt Groupe, Foursquare and Tumblr have sucked up attention, not to mention venture funding in recent years, but none of those companies appears to be close to the type of major exit or sustained profitability it takes to be king of New York.

But maybe it's not going to be a consumer-facing company that rules the Silicon Alley roost: Maybe what the ecosystem needs is thriving pure play technology firm to serve as New York's totem. At least, that's what AppNexus CEO Brian O'Kelley told Betabeat over the telephone yesterday, fresh off his companies announcement that it had closed a $75 million Series D round.

"New York needs a real technology firm to be the heart of the community," Mr. O'Kelley said. "We want to be that, we want people to point to us and say, 'You can build an innovative tech firm in New York.'"

Of course, New York has long been an ad tech kind of town. Mr. O'Kelley himself helped pioneer the ad exchange as the CTO of Right Media, which sold to Yahoo for $870 million in 2007. Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of ad tech firm DoubleClick that same year remains the exit to beat for Silicon Alley firms—and in turn spawned a series of successful New York companies, including Kevin Ryan's Gilt-10gen-Business Insider empire.

But Mr. O'Kelley said that his company's role in the ecosystem wasn't tied to its particular corner of the industry.

"It's not because we’re an ad business, it's because we’re a real business," he told us. "Our revenue model is proven and understood."

To that end, he said the company was serving 13 billion ads a day, and managed more than $700 million of ad spending last year, with 40 percent of the business coming from abroad.

"Marketing money is really at the core of the Internet," Mr. O'Kelley said. "Is it crazy to say that New York is going to be the hub of the financial ecosystem for the Internet? No, New York is already the hub for the global financial system."

If the company is going to wear that mantle, AppNexus's Series D, which boosted the company's total raise to $140.5 million, won't hurt. Lead by Technology Crossover Ventures, a firm noted its experience helping Facebook, Groupon and Netflix go public, and may put the company on the path to an eventual IPO.

In the meantime, Mr. O'Kelley said he wants to be increasingly active in the tech community, building on past activities like the company's sponsorship of Girls Who Code, or a fireside chat with Fab CEO Jason Goldberg that Mr. O'Kelley hosted this week at company headquarters.

As for the Series D, Mr. O'Kelley said the funds will help AppNexus scale its operations, and hinted at a big announcement this spring, as the company works on what it has called the third generation ad network.

When Betabeat checked in on AppNexus last April, the company had just opened offices in London and Paris, and boasted a staff of 230 employees.

Nine months later, the company had more than 400 employees and says it's serving 16 billion ads a day. The next year could see the company double its head count again, a hiring spree that Mr. O'Kelley said would bring fresh waves of engineering talent to New York.

Some have speculated that a $75 million raise prices AppNexus out of reach potential acquirers. “You’re never too expensive for someone to acquire,” Mr. O’Kelley retorted. However, company’s mission is to “change the advertising world,” he added, and no amount of money would divert him from that path.

As far as an eventual exit goes, Mr. O'Kelley didn't scorn the idea of going public.

"It's just another financing round," Mr. O'Kelley said of the prospect. "We're not going to have pressing need for quite some time. But there's something very special about being public. The idea of being at the center of the ecosystem, and that New York could use a real solid innovative tech company that’s public. We'd love to be that company at the right time."

The morning after the first snow. (Photo: Flickr/tomasfano)

The CEO's of AppNexus and LocalResponse we're always besties. [PandoDaily]

Alexia Tsotsis breaks down what exactly rubs Valley-ites so wrong about Start-Ups: Silicon Valley: "We’re so snobby we’re above snobbery." [TechCrunch]

Who convinced President Obama to convene with the forever alones on Reddit? His crack team of data crunchers, of course. [Time]

Even a superstorm can't break the internet. [AllThingsD]

We didn't see the Fail Whale once during election night, even as tweets poured by. Twitter VP of infrastructure ops Mazen Rawashdeh credits the company's stellar performance with its backend overhaul from Ruby to Java. [Twitter Blog]

Ms. He's sign

On a mild, sun-dappled Sunday, Betabeat applied our sunscreen and ventured to the Long Meadow in Prospect Park for an event aptly named "The Internet Picnic." A few weeks ago, a friend of ours named Nicole He had won the Listserve lottery and was tasked with sending an email out to 20,000 random Internet strangers. Ms. He works in community at the crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter. "What should I write??" she frantically gChatted us, before eventually deciding to invite all 21,288 subscribers to a picnic yesterday in Brooklyn.

"I have a mole under my eye and I'll be wearing red," she wrote, and then posted the same invitation to her Tumblr, where it received almost 300 notes.

Back in April, Betabeat introduced you to The Listserve, a project out of NYU ITP that allows a different user each day to send an email to a list full of subscribers. The idea is to give one randomly chosen person daily the opportunity to expound upon whatever's important to them to a platform of over 20,000 apt listeners. "This project makes every-day people think — and talk — about the internet," one of the Listserve's cofounders, Alvin Chang, told us at the time. "It makes people aware of the medium.”

Though Mr. Chang now lives in Boston and couldn't attend the event, his comment turned out to be especially prescient. When we arrived, Ms. He had positioned a hand-painted sign that read "#internetpicnic" (hashtag included) to rest upon a memorial rock. About 50-75 people (we're terrible at estimates) were spread out on blankets across a hill at the end of the meadow, eating fruit salad and drinking beer and laughing.

Just in case you weren't entirely sure that the people at the picnic were "from the Internet," a tan and white corgi named Tartine pranced about, provoking awws as she tried to nab some of the picnic food. (For the unaware, corgis are arguably the favorite mascot of certain corners of the Internet.) We wondered how many BuzzFeed posts Tartine might inspire.

All of the attendees at the picnic appeared to be under 35 and most of them worked on the Internet for a living. Many lived in New York, but a fair amount came down to the city just for the event. A couple of Yale computer science students who had traveled from New Haven took up residence on the extra space we had on our blanket. A guy throwing a frisbee around said he had come from Maryland. The youngest attendee was a 15-year-old boy, sporting the accessory so common among teens that age: a full set of braces. He was visiting from San Diego, and had heard about The Listserve through Twitter.

Tartine the corgi

But the majority of attendees worked in tech in New York: we spotted employees from Kickstarter (including cofounder Yancey Strickler), Foursquare, Etsy, Tumblr, Timehop, AppNexus and ScrollKit. It was basically a New York Tech Meetup, but with more pie.

John Skylar, a scientist with an organization called Better Worlds, introduced himself to us. Mr. Skylar also moonlights as a sci fi writer and asked that we use his pen name. We asked him why he decided to spend his Sunday afternoon fraternizing with Internet strangers. "Besides a general spirit of adventure, I run a lot of events geared towards getting people to talk to each other, and I was like, 'Hey, I could have discourse in real life!'" he said.

Next to us, we heard a snippet of conversation: "Troll has such a dirty connotation." Another person behind us was saying, "I blocked Henry Blodget on Twitter." The sun grazed the trees and began to spoil the fruit that was splayed out on blankets that had been abandoned for a group game of Cards Against Humanity, which--yes--was a successfully funded Kickstarter project. We also detected a hint of weed in the air, but it could've been coming from the cricket players across the lawn.

The Listserve's creators, minus Mr. Chang, also made an appearance. "It's pretty phenomenal," Zena Koo told Betabeat. "I wasn't sure how many people would come, but it's nice to see how many people actually showed up. I think The Listserve attracts a lot of people yearning to have conversations online, so this is the perfect evolution of all that coming together full circle."

"This whole thing keeps surprising me every day," added Greg Dorsainville, another Listserve cofounder.

A couple hours into the festivities.

Mr. Dorsainville and his fourth cofounder, Josh Begley, told us that they've never had to censor an email, except for a spammy one that broke the terms of service. Though, many Listserve emails do have a similar theme: "Everyone turns into Deepak Chopra," quipped Mr. Begley.

Behind him, someone started playing "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid on an acoustic guitar. A startup cofounder with a Dali mustache joined our circle and asked us what low-cost superpower we would have, if we could choose. We picked the power to have the subway arrive at the exact moment we hit the platform, every single day. A guy from AppNexus said he wanted the ability to never burn his food.

The acoustic guitar wasn't the only instrument to make an appearance. Ms. He had brought her ukulele, but demurred when we asked her to serenade us. As a girl began to play Gotye on an accordion, and people began to fold up their blankets, we decided it might be time to take our leave. We hugged Ms. He goodbye.

"See you on gChat!" she called, as we headed back, sun-tired and socially drained, towards the F train. A long night of socializing--on the Internet, naturally--lay ahead of us.

The 20 Girls Who Code participants working out of AppNexus's Flatiron office (Photo: girlswhocode.tumblr.com)

“Maliyah, step away from the mouse!” called Ashley Gavin, a software engineer at the MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and instructor at the Girls Who Code summer program. Maliyah Greene, the recipient of Ms. Gavin's reprimand, reluctantly tore herself away from Photoshop to come and talk to Betabeat. We were sitting in AppNexus’s Flatiron office, watching her fellow Girls Who Code students work on virtually tagging brick walls with their names. “It’s not as hard as I thought it would be,” Ms. Greene smiled.

She is one of 20 high school girls who gave up summer vacation to learn about app development, robotics, web design and other topics at Girls Who Code, a summer computer-engineering program for girls.

Though this is its first summer in existence, Girls Who Code already boasts executives from Gilt Groupe, Twitter and General Electric on its board and has been working with AppNexus and other New York startups throughout the summer.

Girls Who Code isn't the only high-profile effort to make coding more female-friendly. Other programs have also received financial backing from fellow startups. Earlier this year, New York City-based Hacker School, a freeform three-month coding workshop for adults, announced a partnership with Etsy, Yammer and 37Signals that would provide 18 grants to women who wanted to attend the program. Girl Develop It, a group that arranges coding workshops for women around the country, has also hosted meet-ups at the offices of Etsy, Twitter and Google. With few women pursuing programming careers, this move is an act of survival for many companies, who hope to increase the size of the talent pool--and maybe even grow revenue by leveraging an XX-perspective on innovation.

Indeed, labor conditions have made tech executives, in a word, desperate. As the Girls Who Code website points out, projections suggest that by 2018, there will only be enough computer science graduates in the U.S. to fill 29 percent of related job openings. Vaughan Smith, Facebook’s director of corporate development, told The New York Times that each engineer was worth $500,000 up to $1 million. And in an industry where the majority of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Etsy users are women, a female programmer could help companies to develop features that better fit that demographic's needs.

One of Hacker School’s backers, 37Signals, does not currently have any female programmers on staff. Hardly uncommon in the business world, where only 18 of the Fortune 500 companies are run by women. As we've noted, the gender gap among the top venture capital firms is even more abysmal.

“It’s self-serving in that sense: showing women that they can be successful ... means that we’re going to have many, many more really qualified engineers down the road,” said AppNexus co-founder and CEO Brian O’Kelley, adding that some female workers in the office were even inspired by the Girls Who Code students to learn more about computer programming. “It’s really just shown our employees, if a bunch of young women can learn to code, you can too. It’s really empowering.”

Of course, this all hinges on whether the students and women who enroll in these programs will choose to pursue a career in computer-related fields. While Ms. Greene is only a sophomore in high school, she said would like to look into studying graphic design in the future, and another student, Diana Navarro, said she is considering majoring in computer science. However, other Girls Who Code members are not so sure.

“I don’t know. I’m not very good at it currently,” said Lucie Pierre-Louis, a rising junior. Maria Gonzalez, a rising senior looking to go to University of Chicago, said she really wants to study business but might consider a minor in computer science.

“It seems like the number of the girls have family pressures not to remain in engineering and sciences,” said Alexis Maybank, the founder and CSO of Gilt Groupe and a board member of Girls Who Code. When they visited the Gilt offices, many of the Girls Who Code students asked Gilt Groupe's female engineering interns: “What do your parents think about it?”

Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of the programming language PHP who now works at Etsy, visiting Hacker School (Photo: twitter.com)

If Hacker School's previous co-ed classes are any indication, the program could directly benefit Silicon Alley's startups. Five out of the six original Hacker School students later found a job in programming, and other graduates work at companies such as OkCupid, Betaworks and Tumblr. Startups including Bit.ly, Quora and Pinterest also pay Hacker School to recruit talent to their business.

“I just hope that by helping we can increase the possibility that there will be some great female programmers out there who we might be happy to consider for jobs if they were to apply,” said 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried.

Other companies are motivated to fund these type of programs as a way to balance the scales.

“I think Etsy genuinely supports the cause of what we're doing in terms of a new type of programming education and one that's much more inclusive of women. They were very clear that they would be happy and see this as a success even if they didn't hire any graduates,” said Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, a Hacker School cofounder.

Despite the increased support from the tech community, Sara Chipps, the co-founder of Girl Develop It, noted that this new breed of non-profit female-oriented educational programs sometimes has a more difficult time getting funded than their less gender-specific counterparts. She declined to comment on whether this was the case with Girl Develop It, but she did say similar initiatives have gotten stuck in the funding phase.

Ms. Chipps said she thinks this problem arises because “organizations that usually donate to nonprofits really don't have an understanding of what we're doing because it really hasn't been done before.”

She pointed to the difficulty Black Girls Code, a program that aims to educate female minority students in programming, faced when trying to raise $18,500 through IndieGoGo. While more than 400 individuals contributed to the campaign, the program only received about five donations over $150. Within 33 hours of closing, the campaign had only raised $12,477. The project eventually raised more than $21,000, but only after two local companies--RailsBridge and Blazing Cloud--agreed to match up to $2,000 of donations.

Black Girls Code had a harder time raising than similar IndieGoGo campaigns run by more general developer education programs. Another, non-gender-specific coding program, CodeNow, also launched a campaign this summer to raise $15,000 for their summer coding program. Unlike Black Girls Code, nearly 20 people contributed more than $150 to the campaign, including multiple $1,000 donations. CampInteractive, a technology education program for underprivileged youth, was able to meet their $20,000 through a lucrative partnership with Nokia, who matched $10,000 in donated funds.

Kimberly Bryant, the founder of Black Girls Code, said she initiated the IndieGoGo campaign because her program wasn't raising sufficient funding through traditional methods, pointing to an "issue of cluster."

"Corporations are saying that they want to increase the diversity across the technology and STEM fields, but kind of only focusing on a couple of organizations to funnel their dollars to," she told Betabeat.

However, Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code who has close ties to the tech industry, said she did not have difficulty raising adequate funding for the program. Similarly, Hacker School was able to raise more grant money for women than expected. After admitting 23 women into the program, three more than initially planned, Hacker School realized more participants were requesting grants than the 10 they initially bargained for. Thus Etsy reached out to 37Signals and Yammer to provide funding for eight additional grants, bringing the total to 18. (Five women attended without scholarship money.)

Etsy has also allowed Hacker School to operate out of its Brooklyn office, a situation that Mr. Bergson-Shilcock said has proven very beneficial for the program’s participants. Working in Etsy’s office has provided “a lot of cross-pollination and mingling,” he said, noting that Etsy employees and Hacker School students have had a lot of time to interact during the twice-weekly companywide lunch called Eatsy.

Ms. Saujani said their partnership with tech companies has helped her students get a better, less stereotypical vision of what it is like to work in the tech industry. After touring Google’s plush New York office (which includes a tricked-out bistro, rooftop garden and gaming room), “One of the girls said, 'If this is work, I'm going to work everyday,’” Ms. Saujani recalled. The girls have also worked with a series of speakers and will eventually choose one of these speakers as their mentor.

“There's really this community of people that are coming around these girls and lifting them up and helping them,” Ms. Saujani said. “We're already changing the cultural stereotypes of what a computer scientist looks like or feels like or sounds like. And it's powerful.”

Full-time entrepreneur, part-time factchecker.

In in its Sunday issue, the New York Post put its own spin on data showing that New York City's tech start-ups racked up $1.7 billion in funding this past year. Using numbers from CB Insights, the paper identified nine "NYC tech giants" based on the amount of funding those start-ups had accrued. But at least one tech scene native was restless over the way the results were reported.

On her Tumblr, MessageParty co-founder Amanda Peyton, who works out of the Makery's co-working space in Williamsburg, pointed out some of the "half-truths or straight-up errors" in the piece. Her issue wasn't the numbers, but rather the way the paper described what the companies do. After acknowledging that the tech reporting isn't exactly in the Post's wheelhouse, Ms. Peyton added, "But surely someone there should know that Foursquare isn’t an e-commerce company."

Here are some of the points of contention Ms. Peyton circled in red:

“FourSquare Location E-Com” — Foursquare is misspelled and is not an e-commerce company. They have little revenue except for maybe the fact that they sell Foursquare shirts on their website, though that’s hardly a defining characteristic of the company.

“AppNexus Web Services” — web services?  What does this even mean?  That they do shit on the internets?  Yes, I suppose that’s fitting, but if you need to summarize the company in three words maybe “advertising” somewhere in there would help. “Real-time ad platform” is clearly too advanced.

”Squarespace Web Developement”  -- Web development implies a dev shop — a group of people who make website for other people.  Squarespace is not this.  Squarespace makes *software* that helps individuals make websites on their own. Big difference - one is scalable, the other is not.

“Adkeeper Web Ad Development”  Adkeeper does not make ads. “Ad Development” implies that they are somehow involved in the process of making advertisements for the web, which they in no way are.  They make software that allows consumers to save advertisements, which is tangentially related to “Ad Development," kinda.

If Ms. Peyton ever gets bored with building her own company, we bet old media's fact-checking departments will gladly snatch such an eye for detail.