We'll use this as an artist's rendering. (Photo: flickr.com/lac-bac)

Silicon Alley Smackdown One of the many tech events on rain delay because of Hurricane Sandy was the Big Apple Smackdown ping pong tournament, whose guest list included an impressive number of familiar names from the New York tech scene. (Betabeat is one of the media sponsors, so we may be a little biased.) Among the techno-athletes scheduled to play was Gilt Groupe CEO--and soon-to-be Gilt Groupe chairman--Kevin Ryan. Apparently, we missed quite a show.

The tournament was scheduled for Sunday, "and I played on Friday and on Sunday just to get ready for it!" Mr. Ryan told Betabeat. Really? "Oh yeah, because I won a tournament about a month ago." That was an invitation-only affair for ping pong ringers at the Hamptons manse of ABC Carpet & Home's Ken Pilot. "You had to put $100 into the pot and the winner got two-thirds of the pot, so I was pretty excited about that," Mr. Ryan enthused.

Mad that Sandy ruined your chance to see him action? You can drown your sorrows at Appular's F#@K SANDY event this coming Thursday and throw one back for a good cause.

Make It or Break It Start-Ups: Silicon Valley glamazon Kim Taylor finally has a name for her soon-to-launch startup, and being the gymnast that she is, she's named it after a move from Yelena Shushunova’s floor routine. The former NBA dancer will launch Shonova this winter, targeting the "millennial luxury fashion market," because you can never have too many websites dedicated to selling expensive clothes to young professional women.

LOLfamous Speaking of Bravo, it appears that I Can Has Cheezburger founder Ben Huh is starstruck by himself. Following the premiere of his new Bravo show, LOLwork, Mr. Huh tweeted a link to his freshly-minted IMDB profile with the caption "So...this happened." Don't let the fame get to your head!

And the techno's so loud USV ringleader and hometown hero Fred Wilson is wheels up and L.A.-bound today. However, his wife--Gotham Gal and investor-in-her-own-right Joanne Wilson--booked the tickets, and so he's not flying his preferred airline. Instead, he's flying Virgin, which is not his preferred airline and for a very specific reason: "I find flying on Virgin like going to a nightclub because of the lighting and I avoid it as a result." We always suspected Mr. Wilson was more of an indie music club kinda guy, and this cinches it.

"Executive scent" It seems that, after several years of "sifting through the crap," Team Thrillist has finally found the platonic ideal of brochandising. Behold:

Via Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer's Instagram.

So saucy Betabeat hates to clutch her collective pearls, but my goodness! Who knew the crowd at AllThingsD were quite so naughty? (Okay, we had an inkling.) Earlier this week, ATD doyenne Kara Swisher tweeted out the link to a colleague's story, which had the headline, "Meet the Man Behind Those Hot Pink Mustache Rides." Catalyst Group CEO Nick Gould immediately gave that the side-eye, noting that he "Can't help wondering if @lizgannes is aware of the off-color meaning of the term "mustache ride." Ms. Swisher didn't miss a beat: "i mean I ASSUME she is. I am." Duly noted.

Digging up history The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View, California, is kind of like mecca for tech geeks. Contained within its hallowed walls are artifacts that tell the history of computers and videogames. Among those artifacts, apparently, is a copy of Windows 1.0, originally owned by Digg founder Kevin Rose. "My copy of Windows 1.0 on display!" Mr. Rose wrote in a caption for the below photo. A nerd's dream come true.

(Photo: Instagram)

(Photo: Circa blog)

In recent months, LOLcat emperor and  Bravo TV star Ben Huh has systematically leaked handfuls of details about his news startup, Circa, to the press. Back in April, Circa raised $750,000 from a slew of investors (many of whom were named David). In May, Nieman Lab caught up with Mr. Huh at ROFLCON, where he provided buzzword-laden answers and metaphors involving newspapers and teenagers to their questions about the startup. But today, Mr. Huh's efforts have finally solidified into a cohesive company: Circa is an iPhone app that wants to change the way readers consume news.

Circa isn't just a news aggregator. It employs teams of editors who curate and synthesize news stories into digestible bites, optimized for reading on mobile devices. The point is to write stories that are designed exclusively for mobile, instead of repackaging stories released on other platforms and trying to fit them into a mobile setting.

According to the Circa blog:

Instead of articles, Circa presents news as a collection of details about a story: the facts, stats, quotes, pictures, maps, and more. These are the full stories, not summaries; summaries tend to compress stories and therefore lose details. Instead, each story on Circa has the same details you’d find in traditional articles, but broken down into individual chunks of information that are much easier to consume. It’s the facts, without the fluff.

The details, or points, are presented in an interface that works a little like the flash cards like we used in school to learn and retain new information. Flash cards improve  comprehension, retention, as well as speed of learning. Each point within a Circa story is presented on its own “card,” so it’s easy to swipe through and read a whole story in less than a minute.

Unlike a leisurely tablet reading experience where beautifully templated longform stories are embraced and pored over, reading on a mobile device is all about the quick and dirty. Circa aims to provide those digestible factoids for users to quickly absorb on-the-go. (It kind of reminds us of The Skimm, but not in a newsletter format.) Users can also follow stories and topics, and the Circa app will alert them when there are any updates.

“Once you start to think of news as happening in these ‘atomic units,’ rather than as things that need to be wrapped up and shipped in an article, you can start to do different and unique things such as let people 'follow' a story, provide different context based on what a reader has consumed before, bridge from one point to a story that provides background, and so on," Circa's editor in chief, David Cohn, told GigaOm.

Because the team of journalists tasked with writing the content for Circa is basically synthesizing other publications' reporting into a simple news for dummies flashcard, there's bound to be some grumbling about sourcing. Circa argues that proper sourcing is close to its heart, however. "We know that truth and trust are paramount in news, and that’s why we work hard to provide the source to every single point that we write within a story," reads the blog post.

No word yet on how adorable cat pictures will factor into the Circa newsgathering process.

Everyone's new favorite medium was used to save the Olympics, as well as reinvigorate the presidential election and now it's going to save TV too! CBS just bought the rights to a show based on the reaction GIF blog and What Should We Call Me clone site, Hollywood Assistants. The GIF has finally arrived.

Hollywood Assistants doesn't really seem as popular as most of its contemporaries. A lot of the site's recent posts have under 10 notes. Compare that to another reaction GIF Tumblr like How Do I Put This Gently, where all of the posts have hundreds upon hundreds of notes.

According to Deadline Hollywood, the blog's creator, Lauren Bachelis, started the site while she was working as an assistant at CAA. She then became an assistant to New Girl creator and executive producer Liz Meriweather, where she continued to post reaction GIFs from TV shows and movies to the moderately popular blog.

Ms. Bachelis took her GIF inspiration and wrote the show which is titled 20-Nothings. It's about five 20-something friends living in Los Angeles trying to make it in Hollywood. Sounds watchable enough, especially because it's going to be directed and executive produced by Wonder Years hero, Fred Savage.

We hope Ms. Bachelis is judicious about posting GIFs of her GIF show on her GIF blog. Wouldn't want anyone to get GIF'cepted.

Mr. Huh (flickr.com/yodelanecdotal)

Ben Huh, the CEO of Seattle-based Cheezburger Network, stood in the lobby of the Le Parker Meridien hotel on W. 56th St. peering into his phone as he uploaded a photo of a soggy Central Park snapped from the view outside the elevator. "All my friends have switched to Path," he told Betabeat, pulling to refresh. "Twitter just has too much noise."

Mr. Huh was in New York for a charity gala and a few business meetings on his way to the third bi-annual ROFLCon. ROFLCon is a Boston conference for "people at the center of memes and people who make their living from Internet culture, and people who are just fans," as Mr. Huh described it. The conference consists of two days of talks and panels about subjects like GIFs, webcomics, supercuts and "lulz."

"It's actually really academic," he said. "It's incredibly high-brow and incredibly low-brow at the same time." Attendees may show up in say, a Pedobear costume, but the "the panels tend to be rather academic. We talk about really serious topics."

He expects the biggest topic of discussion at ROFLCon this year will be the now-dead Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have posed a significant threat to meme-friendly sites like Reddit, Tumblr and BuzzFeed. The collaborative "remixing" that creates memes often starts from an image or video that may have be copyrighted.

He likened copyright protection to tariffs on free trade. "Copyright is protectionism for content," he said.

All this will only become more relevant for society at large, he said. ROFLCon is the "leading edge of this cultural change because of the Internet," he said. "It's the future of entertainment, the future of culture and how we communicate."

LOLcats are probably the most mainstream meme, he said, but "new memes will crop up that speak to larger audiences" as the percentage of the population that grew up with the Internet increases. "Nothing we do seems to be really accepted by the mainstream yet," he said. "It's more like, 'oh these weird freaks on the Internet.'"

For his part, Mr. Huh is working on the beta sites.cheezburger.com, a basic website builder where anyone can make a simple showcase for the things that make them LOL. One could, say, arrange a spread of ten photos or curate a collection of favorite memes. Cheezburger is now hosting about 25,000 such sites, he said. "As LinkedIn is to resumes, we want Cheezburger to be for people's sense of humor," he said.

Betabeat attempted to steer the conversation toward Circa, the freshly-funded news consumption startup of which Mr. Huh is a cofounder, but no dice. "Matt, my CEO, told me not to talk about that," he said.

Mr. Huh (flickr.com/yodelanecdotal)

Ben Huh, the genius behind Icanhascheezburger who has delivered cute and crazy cat pictures to the masses for years, is working on a new startup called Circa that wants to "reimagine the way you consume news." Today, TechCrunch reports that Circa has raised $750,000 from a slew of A-list investors, including a few notable New York techies.

According to Techcrunch:

Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors like former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, has just raised 750K in seed funding from eonCapital, Quotidian Ventures, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, Tumblr’s David Karp, Eric Norlin, Manesh Arora, Pedro Torres-Picon, Rick Webb, Scott Belsky and Soraya Darabi.

Mr. Huh has mostly remained mum on the details of what Circa actually is. The company's about page is sparse and generalized: "Our vision is to create the best possible news experience by optimizing for truths, encouraging diversity, and empowering readers." Okay...sounds good?

Hey, Mr. Huh: we can haz more info about Circa, plz?

@aplusk just tweeted out: "I am moving my domains off of @Godaddy due to their support for #SOPA. Paul Graham is also doing the right thing (cc @paulg)"

We all know what a tweet from Ashton can do to promote a brand, but can an Ashton sanction pull it under?

Mr. Huh is a news junkie frustrated with the way news is presented on the web and repetitive, irrelevant information--but he wants to reform something specific: breaking news. "If you’ve ever been a journalist, you know the exact feeling of a big news hunt. This is the Moby Dick of news, the big game that turns you into Ahab," he writes.

He's recruiting "great minds and passionate people" to tackle the problem with him and has published some wireframes of what news presentation should look like. The product might turn out to be a publishing platform like Wordpress, he told ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick.