Another precautionary measure: Seven months after raising $6.5 million in a funding round led by Union Square Ventures, Behance has been acquired by Adobe Systems. Behance said that it would remain in New York in a blog post discussing the deal. [Behance]

Zynga confirmed that it's shutting down its Japanese operation at the end of next month. If we get there. [TechCrunch]

Three Google executives were cleared by an Italian appeals court, which reversed a lower court's findings that the execs violated a child's privacy by failing to remove a bullying video. [Reuters]

NASA is going to keep blogging that the world isn't really ending until the sidewalk opens up and swallows its communication team whole. [NASA]

Noah, David and Adam Belanich of Joyride host a coffee tasting at the New York-based technology and design company Barrel. (Photo: joyridecoffeedistributors.com)

It was a chilly February morning when a young man with shaggy blonde hair sauntered into BuzzFeed’s new Flatiron office, quaint brown bags with small colored labels tucked under his arm. The zombiefied techies, engrossed in determining “The 25 Faces Fans Make Right Before Being Hit With a Foul Ball” initially took little notice of the visitor, but soon the whispers began. “Wasn’t that boy here last month?” “Is that…the coffee guy?!” Whispers gave way to a standing ovation as the surprised coffee delivery boy, otherwise known as Noah Belanich from Joyride Coffee, slowly made his way to the break room, Stumptown blends in hand.

Joyride first rolled down New York’s streets in 2010, the brainchild of brothers Adam and David Belanich and their friend Lev Brie. Since its founding, Joyride has started delivering Stumptown, Blue Bottle and Dallis Brothers blends to more than 70 caffeine-starved offices around the city, around 70 percent of which are in the tech or computer industries. These caffeine-crazed techies, who include the employees at Twitter, Tumblr and Gilt, will pay anywhere from $12.75 to over $25 a pound (with no delivery fee for orders over $50) for Joyride’s services. “The tech industry really loves coffee,” as Adam put it. “They get in a little bit later than other businesses, but you get emails from them at like two in the morning.” Between the bizarre hours and mid-afternoon meetings, the industry has become “fundamentally linked to coffee,” he said.

A customer-submitted photo of Joyride's pour over coffee. (Photo: Facebook)

Tech’s affair with coffee can be as romantic as Jack and Rose, but at times as volatile as Sid and Nancy. Many techies meet with investors or colleagues at coffee shops, convenient for a mid-day pick-me-up over which to close a friendly deal. At the same time, the coffee shop meeting has become a tired trope. Naval Ravikant, cofounder of AngelList, bought idontdocoffee.com because he was so tired of coffee shop meetings, he told the New York Times. (He redirected the domain to a Quora thread on manners and etiquette: “How do you politely turn down someone who wants to ‘grab coffee sometime’?”)

But coffee shop fatigue doesn’t mean techies are tired of coffee—far from it. Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and K-Cups have fallen out of favor. In fact, techies’ palates are more refined than ever. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what drives the tech industry into the arms of designer coffee blenders, aside from the national trend toward the artisanal and slow-brewed. But BuzzFeed has “an unusual number of coffee snobs,” admitted Scott Lamb, BuzzFeed’s managing editor. Boxee co-founder Idan Cohen didn’t hesitate before rattling off two local cafes his employees prefer: Cafe Grumpy and Ports Coffee. Nina Paige, the officer manager at Behance, imported her coffee sensibilities from her hometown of Seattle and converted the rest of the staff.

But how to grab a brew without running into your least favorite investor or, worse, a chatty wantrepreneur? Enter Joyride.

At Gilt’s offices, a couple of engineers dissatisfied with the “overall coffee culture” hired Joyride, said Gregory Mazurek, a front-end engineer for Gilt Groupe who roasts coffee in his apartment and penned a scathing rant against poorly-made iced coffee for Gilt Taste’s website. “It began to essentially raise the bar for coffee, and it was a bar that could not be reversed,” he said.

Mr. Brie on a Joyride delivery. (Photo: Facebook)

Their techie clients may be particular about their morning coffee, but the Belanich brothers have an equally sophisticated taste for the gourmet. Adam’s love of city street food even tops his addiction to NPR and skiing. Noah, who joined the company in 2011 around the same time as Mr. Brie left, cultivated strong taste buds when backpacking through Thailand. While attending school in Los Angeles, he would drive an hour to eat authentic pad thai at Krua Thai in West Hollywood. He can also name his favorite soup-dumpling and Szechuan restaurants off the top of his head. David, a former political philosophy major, prefers thinking about politics with a single-malt scotch.

The boys understand the difficult lives of overworked tech nerds. Adam is a former “Special Instructor” at Dartmouth College, and David was pursuing a Ph.D. at Yale before dropping out to run the business. “Nobody’s really doing it the way we are,” Adam said. “They’re roasters who happen to deliver their coffees. We’re more focused on doing coffee distribution. It requires a certain level of understanding of how things actually work in an office setting.”

Mom was also fairly good-natured about the whole quit-school-to-sell-coffee-out-of-a-rainbow-truck affair. “My mother is kind of confused as to why I’m not a lawyer and David isn’t a professor, but she is pretty supportive, all things considered,” Adam said.

In 2010, Joyride’s founders, leaving behind cushy futures in law and academia, packed their caffeine-infused fro-yo and trendy, hipster brown lunch bag-esque coffee bags into a rainbow FedEx truck, tweeting their location to loyal followers. However, realizing that the real opportunity lay in deliveries, the brothers sold their truck in 2011 to become to go-to coffee distributor for startup offices that value their perks.

The brothers deliver bags of whole beans to offices with their own espresso or grinding machines, or deliver bags of ground coffee beans to offices where employees then make the coffee themselves. Joyride stops short of providing clients with a bow-tied barista, but the company leases Fetco or Bunn brewers to around two-thirds of its clients. The brothers also host coffee tastings (Stumptown’s Hair Bender has proven to be the favorite) and the occasional milk frothing class. In a recent job listing, Joyride client Birchbox made sure to note “great coffee” as a reason to work there.

Prior to Joyride’s applauded appearance in BuzzFeed’s offices, the trend-setting startup underwent a “brief nightmare period,” Mr. Lamb said. Employees were forced to drink coffee from “robots,” straining the sanity of many workers and encouraging others to leave passive-aggressive notes for whoever dared to drink the last cup of pre-ground coffee delivered fresh from Staples.com. “Those were very dark days for us,” he said.

Gavon Laessig, an avid coffee drinker and BuzzFeed's News Editor, takes his first sip in the morning. (Courtesy: Ashley McCollum)

The Belanich brothers reached out to BuzzFeed, offering to do a taste test at the office. Not long after the employees first tried Joyride’s Stumptown and Blue Bottle blends, the three brothers started delivering to their office regularly. “It is a joy because every morning we come in and there are these two huge canisters filled with really delicious coffee,” Mr. Lamb said.

Occasionally, Adam said, he will walk into an office and glimpse a few techies standing around the coffee maker “literally watching it brew.”

After winning the loyalty of New York’s finest tech nerds, Joyride catered F.ounders, a lively event that brings together the brains behind New York tech startups. “That was insane,” Adam said, noting that the roughly 225 people in attendance drank over 1,300 cups of coffee. That is “maybe four or five times as much coffee as you would expect a normal person of that size to drink,” he said.

Notwithstanding the techies’ occasionally overzealous love for coffee, Adam said he really enjoys working with these companies.

“It’s very invigorating – to be around these people who are doing what they think is really cool,” he said. He even stays up-to-date on his clients’ latest funding rounds. Joyride recently posted an article supporting its client Boxee in its battle with the FCC, calling it a “real life David and Goliath story.”

The love is mutual. “In some ways, we both support each other, because they’re excited about what we’re doing, and we’re excited about what they’re doing,” Boxee cofounder Idan Cohen said.

A few of the featured apps.

There's clearly quite a lot of creative talent being devoted to the creation of iOS apps. Even hipsters are flocking to the craft. But does something like Path really rise to the level of art? Yesterday, Betabeat ventured downtown to the Internet Week-pegged gallery opening for “The Art of Apps,” to hear the argument out.

By the time Betabeat arrived at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art (the name stencilled sternly in white against a revolutionary red background), the party was winding down. We stepped inside to find a dimly lit gallery studded with high-definition flat-screen televisions, each offering up some element of iOS user design, attempting to recontextualize it as art, not just app.

The first screen offered a note from gadget blogger and host Peter Rojas, which explained a bit about the curatorial philosophy at work: 

Great apps often feel complete and polished in a way that websites often don't, sometime which obscures the process of experimentation, iteration, and (sometimes) failure that goes into making them. Creating an amazing user experience for an app--one where the device itself almost melts away--requires a thoughtfulness and cleverness that can be hard to find.

It concluded by laying out the exhibition's mission: "We wanted to showcase examples of some of the smartest, best-designed apps we could find, as well as give a peek into how they get created in the first place."

Some apps benefitted more from this treatment than others.

Up close and magnified to the size of a dorm-room poster, Path looks lovely. You can see the subtle textures of its red welcome screen; the moon-filled sleep screen looks gorgeous rather than oversharey. Meanwhile, Tweetbot’s interface serves basically the same function--serving up the content created by moment-to-moment status updates. But place them side-by-side, and it’s like comparing Anthropologie and Old Navy. Whatever the latter’s virtues, the aesthetics are underwhelming.

Further back were the creativity-facilitating apps. You know, the ones that are almost painfully calibrated to the Platonic ideal of the Apple user: Young, hip, design-savvy. Here the presentation was scattershot. Some displays, like social collage social collage iPad app Mixel, privileged art produced on their platform. Social video-making app Cameo (currently in beta, as per its website) injected a little whimsy, explaining the process with arrows stuck to the wall space between its two allotted screens, labeled "this" and "make." Repping for creativity suite Paper was a borderline motion-sickness-inducing POV video of the app in use.

After browsing the screens, struggling with whether to view what we were seeing as artwork or giant advertisement, we decided to investigate a sign pointing downstairs, which promised a Mixel. Given the app's display had some of the most eye-catching images upstairs, we bit. The display that greeted visitors at the foot of the stairs definitely landed on the commercial end of the spectrum: A table on which sat a great big washtub full of the hangover cure Berocca. Beyond that was the bar, stocked by a sponsor pushing a fluorescently lit liquor. (It looked like the type of thing that would require a hangover cure.)

In between was an enormous floor-to-ceiling screen, clearly connected to the demonstration. We finally found it nestled under the stairs, in prime opposite-the-bar real estate, we found the Mixel demonstration. A rep was explaining the concept to the lone holdout, demonstrating on an iPad connected to the aforementioned enormous screen. When the fleet of bartenders began breaking down the room, we felt it best to take our leave.

Upon arriving home, this reporter explained the concept of Internet Week using the event as an example to her boyfriend, who responded: “Oh, so it’s like Fashion Week, but for the Internet?” Pretty much.

Behance CEO Scott Belsky (scottbelsky.com)

After years of bootstrapping, online portfolio platform Behance is taking on outside funding to the tune of $6.5 million, TechCrunch says. Union Square Ventures led the round, and the list of additional investors is something of a who's who. Says a note on the company's blog: 

We’re also thrilled to have a few other people we admire help fund Behance, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (via Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment fund), as well as Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure (via 500Startups), Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp. These thinkers and investors have a history of changing industries. It’s a dream team for us.

Why now, when Behance has been around since 2006, subsisting on everything but other people's money? In the past, the site has "sold Action Pads, books, job postings, conference tickets, and even banner ads (horror!)" to fund the enterprise. The announcement explained that their recent growth means "it’s time for Behance to scale." The cash means more resources to devote to their "exciting product pipeline," and the post concludes with a reminder that yes, Behance is hiring.

So presumably at least some of that money will go to a "sick developer perks" fund.

The NYC Startup Job Fair was packed with tons of New York City tech companies and startups on the hunt for that oh-so-hard-to-find tech talent, specifically engineers and developers. Hopeful applicants, some fresh-faced, some not so much, squeezed past each other picking up job descriptions and dropping off resumes and business cards.

All photos by Ben Weitzenkorn.

(getuncubed.com)

If you're not into poaching, perhaps this event might interest you: several of New York's most prominent startups are banding together to host a tech talent fair in the hopes of recruiting fresh-faced new devs. And in order to do so, they want to ply you with liquor and music (those clever rascals).

NYC Uncubed is an initiative that seeks to buck traditional recruitment tactics in favor of innovative new ways for startups to recruit talent. The tech talent fair is one of these projects, and NYC Uncubed has enlisted some of the biggest names in the Alley to attend: Tumblr, Spotify and StackOverflow will be hosting, with speakers from Etsy and Behance, and recruiters from 80 New York startups.

According to a press release, "Uncubed’s disruptive partners bring more to the table than merely their names. The impressive roster of interactive sponsors includes Tumblr (providing an open bar poured into "tumbler" glasses), Spotify (bringing us live music), StackOverflow (building out a registration area complete with vinyl cut outs) and Shutterstock (manning an interactive photo booth.)" How... literal.

The event has been rebranded from last year's iteration, the Silicon Alley Talent Fair, though this year the fair will again offer ping-pong, as well as foosball, sponsored by Divide by Enterproid (phew!).

Considering there are four positions for every programmer, we can see why a tech talent fair would be necessary. Just make sure you don't take too much advantage of the open bar, unless that sort of thing helps stoke your ability to dream up great startup ideas.

The NYC Uncubed tech talent fair is on Tuesday April 26 from 1pm-7pm at the Altman Building. You can register here.

The new Behance

HOP SCOTCH. New York City based Next Jump, a company that strives to better match consumers with businesses, has raised over $500,000 to bring technology into more than 750 classrooms. The campaign, which started late last year, funds projects submitted through DonorsChoose by shoppers on OO.com, Next Jump's discounts and deals website. The initiative has already impacted the lives of 85,000 NYC students, most of them in needy public schools.

TARGET MARKET. PeerIndex, the social influence marketing platform, has raised nearly $3 million in Series A funding led by Antrak Capital. NYC resident and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer also invested in the round. PeerIndex, whose CTO is New York tech evangelist Sanford Dickert,  seeks to identify "influential individuals" on social media and "facilitates sampling interactions between brands and these influencers." Sounds effective—but kind of creepy.

TECHATHON. "April's" New York Tech Meetup is on March 27 at NYU's Skirball Auditorium with News.me, The Birdy, SpotlessCity and HotM-FakeGirlfriend.co confirmed to demo. The event will once again be streamed to New Work City and General Assemb.ly. Get your tickets here.

REHANCE. Behance relaunched yesterday and, boy does it look good. Now users will be greeted with a new landing page and an "explore" tab that allows users to filter their search based on medium, equipment used, creative field and location. Of course, they've also added a Facebookesque "activity feed" where other people in the Behance network can share and curate other work they like. With the goal of removing obstacles between artists and projects, the Behance platform aims to make showcasing and promoting creative work easier and more efficient. It allows for syndication and integration into ProSite, a Behance owned custom portfolio building platform.

SELL, SELL, SELL. Fab really doesn't need any more publicity—the company announced their three million member milestone at the London Web Summit—but we thought we should at least point this out: in under nine months, Fab has sold a million items. That breaks down to 2.6 sales a minute.

START 'ER UP. Business Insider's Startup 2012 Competition is coming up on May 3. Ten lucky startups will present to a VC panel for a chance to win $25,000 in cash and $50,000 in services. Applications close March 30.

CRAIN BRAIN. Do you know of a business that's over three years old with less than $100 million in the bank? If so, it's eligible for Crain's New York Business Top Entrepreneurs competition. The winner will appear in a May issue of Crain's. Enter your favorite (or your own) startup here by March 23.

DATA RESTRAINT. As a part of its Data Transparency Week, the Wall Street Journal is inviting developers to a code-a-thon to create "web tools that promote data transparency and control." Entry is free and $500 travel stipends are available, but the event is "open only to qualified participants," so if you don't know your   from your href just stay home. The event is April 13-15. For more information and to apply, click here.

TURN YOUR HEAD AND CASH. Startup accelerator Blueprint Health wants to help entrepreneurs improve the wellness industry with a three-month long startup bootcamp program and $20,000 of seed capital. Qualifying startups will have access to a shared work space, mentorship and angel and VC investors. Apply by June 8 here.

PUTTING UP WALLS. Banters, the platform devoted to saving life's quotable moments, just rolled out the site's newest feature: walls. Just like Facebook, Banters walls allow anyone to contribute but privacy controls give the user the option to approve quotes before they're made public.

ADAPTING. Mike Finnegan is the new VP of client services at social media ad company Adaptly, which handles social media for PepsiCo and News Corp. among others.

SAGE WORKS YOU. Sageworks is currently hiring for a number of positions including senior software engineer and, media relations associate, junior software developer and network engineer. Check out all the available jobs here.