Betabeat: Bringing you the finest in tech and startup news from these fine machines since before we were born. (BuzzFeed)

BLAST FROM THE PAST. Now, thanks to BuzzFeed, you can show all your friends how vintage chic your technology was—before it was cool. Prompted by the fairly recent Facebook timeline, BuzzFeed has introduced a Facebook app that lets users retroactively post images to their timeline. Checkout the "What Was Your First Computer?" question and reminisce about the nineteen eighties like it's the 2020's. The launch of this new app is probably just the beginning of a trend we'll see as Facebook prepares to unveil its new timeline backdating ability.

CLICK CLICK FLASH. Pixable, the photo sharing complement for social networks is rolling out a couple big features. First, is a hashtag feature that allows users to tag their photos or their friends’ photos for an easier experience when recalling and organizing snapshots. #drunkenregrets?

At the same time Pixable is being integrated into the Facebook timeline technology. Users will be able to share their photo viewing and tagging activity in the Facebook ticker just like when listening to tunes on Spotify.

HERE'S THE MAIL, IT NEVER FAILS... MailChimp, the easy-to-create email newsletter service has just acquired TinyLetter, another easy to use newsletter creation engine. Today, TinyLetter 2 is launching with cool features that allow you to see who has read your newsletter, who's sharing it and how many shares it has. PR's unanswered questions, answered.

WHAT'S ON... THE INTERNET? Onswipe just introduced cool new technology that will let tablet computer owners seamlessly browse and view related reading material from various publications just like changing channels on a TV.

ANGELIC. Check out Angel Guru, the new resource that "seeks to help new and emerging angel investors" from the always-ambitious Oren Bennett.

GET AROUND. If you just got a smart phone or don't already have a transit app for some other reason, Roadify is here for you. The newly updated app won the NYC BigApps contest last year and allows users to access official transit schedules, delay and service notifications, maps and anything else a savvy traveler's heart desires from one screen.

HEALTHY STARTUPS. AT&T is "providing scholarships to StartUp Health Academy for promising mHealth startups who are interested in leveraging the new AT&T Developer Center." Apply here.

EDUCATION. General Assembly is offering course deals on startup management lead by Justin Kan of Justin.tv and intellectual property from Bill Reinisch of Paladin Capital . Sexy stuff. Use promo code "_INSIDER_" to get 10 percent off and don't forget to check out the other GA course offerings.

TRABAJANDO. Bitly is now hiring for an application engineer, front-end developer, sales rep. and systems administrator.

Acclivity NYC needs a Cocoa UI developer, Python back-end developer and UI/UX designer. Polish up that CV and send it here.

Internet data company What's Watched needs a sales director. If this job is in your future, email Burr.

Inside Startups is searching for a web developer intern for a top secret project. Send your edited, spell-checked, grammatically correct cover letter to Ali.

The Banters team from left to right: Lauren Leto, Becky Carella, Matt Goggin, Patrick Moberg and Grant Custer.

Lauren Leto and Patrick Moberg thought they'd be using the name "Bnter" for oh, maybe six months at most before they could secure the dot-com with the proper spelling from a tight-fisted IBM (why?). But unable to secure the domain, the team and their three employees decided it was time for more vowels. Bnter, the conversation tracker, is now Banters, which happens to be hip U.K. slang. "I think 'Banters' is cool," Ms. Leto told Betabeat, noting in an email that "it's easier to remember and spell, and people will know how to pronounce it."

The site has a new look in addition to the new name. The interface is cleaner, the iPhone app works with Siri so you can repeat a conversation aloud in order to log it, and there are a few new features, including "likes," the ability to make posts private and freedom from the original three-bubble conversation limit and an "explore" tab to find funny Banters, of which there are about 50,000 on the site. The team has also started seeding the site with quotes and famous conversations from the likes of Mark Twain in party, the bookish Ms. Leto said, to populate the neglected "literature" tab.

The end vision is to make Banters a standalone social network, like an Instagram, but for quotes, Ms. Leto said. "We want to make quoting someone as easy as snapping a photo with someone," she said. "I think that our 'explore' tab is a big step toward making Banters the internet k-hole of quotes... I do think that sharing conversations is the next wave of friends."

Banters raised some money over the summer after a falling out with Spark Capital.

The Bnter team.

From Bnter Banter, the company's Tumblr, comes a start-up job ad with unusual humility and the added benefit of brevity in contrast to the overwrought manifestos and "rockstar/ninja" motifs that have become so common on job boards:

Bnter is searching for PHP developers. They should have knowledge of MVC framework. Bnter is also looking for iOS developers. Both positions can be contracted or full-time.

We’re a startup with three employees and more than 50k users. We love people who are self-motivated and independent. By this we mean: you’re passionate about the project and think outside the box. You would be working with us in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

See how the team interacts here: http://bnter.com/bnter. When we’re not joking with each other, we like to listen to stand up comedy CDs.

Email jobs@bnter.com to apply.

Mr. Haber.

DAVID HABER JOINS SPARK CAPITAL. "David has a interesting background, which included graduating from Harvard with a BioChem degree. Not a typical degree for a VC firm but we appreciated a different perspective and background than others at Spark," the firm says on its blog. Mr. Haber previously was a founding associate at Locus Analytics, which he started before he graduated. His new title is VC n00b.

IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE WE HAD A HACKATHON! Er, not really. But Game Hack Day is this weekend at General Assembly, sponsored by NYhacker, the "hacker union." "We've got a bunch of Arduinos, AR Drone-copters, great API demos (including open source game frameworks) and more," says co-organizer John Britton. It's expected to be as big as Music Hack Day, which produced no fewer than 72 demos.

Related, General Assembly co-founder and serious strategy gamer Brad Hargreaves is hosting a class Thursday on The Business of Gaming--check it out before you hack and you could have a start-up. Or, you can skip the entrepreneurship and get a job at OMGPOP, currently hiring for a game designer with "mad vision." Okay!

WHUFFIE HIRING; POSITION NOT COMPENSATED IN WHUFFIE. "In the novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [by Cory Doctorow], usual economic incentives have disappeared: Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things." The non-profit start-up is based in Argentina and London, but apparently advertising a position in New York. "We are a team of 5 really talented folks (3 full-time and 2 contract), in the middle of Alpha, barreling towards Beta--and we need to build the team fast. Angel-backed." Interesante! Wonder if investor and Whuffie fan Vamsi Sistla is the angel? (Oops, that was rumor-y. We'll save it.)

IDEELI launched a travel vertical; WANDERFLY launched "a new business platform for our company through branded pages of curated content, called Wanderlists... [to] become the first travel website to offer curated suggestions from top lifestyle brands," and MEEBLEMAIL launched stationary for email, with a "library of stylish and unique email stationery designs."

BNTER retools design; profile pages "now highlight who you're closest to by graphing whom you're attributed with the most on Bnter." FITOCRACY adds Twitter and Facebook integration. NORTH BROOKLYN BREAKFAST CLUB on Friday, NYC STARTUP AND DIM SUM ENTHUSIASTS MEETUP Saturday.

Totally not sour grapes. Members of the DUMBO Tech Breakfast Meetup think Facebook is dead. Okay!

Geek sweat. It's the first warm day in recent memory, and we hear General Assembly is a sweat lodge--but they had the fans on! Wonder what it'll be like in the summer?!

Blind item! Which New York start-up was so desperate to hire a hacker who presented at the HackNY marathon that they offered to double the offer he had received from a major (LIKE REALLY MAJOR!) media production company? Not sure, but we're thinking he said no. :( He had declined to work on the New York start-up's A.P.I. because the service was "too slow." Ouch!

That's... hot? Did hipster writer Bret Easton Ellis really once offer to publish Ronen Verbit's novel in exchange for sex? "FUN FACT," Mr. Verbit claims on Bnter. "During an interview. Which was being recorded." So, was that disillusioning, or like, perfect?

Overcrowding. Applications for TechCrunch Disrupt were sent in last week, and the hackathon is looking at having to host 500+ hackers. More challenging than the venue: Judge attention spans. Investors and other judges aren't going to want to sit through three hours of demos, the organizers fear, and some sort of run-off may be necessary.

Giggle city. The dead horse-beating Winklevi don't know which one is older! That and more fun facts in 10 Things the Media Either Gets Wrong or Doesn’t Know About the Winklevoss Twins, by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, here on Betabeat. They're also going to continue beating that horse with a Petition for Rehearing. Go for it!

Pretty apps make waves. Homegrown playlist-maker 8tracks posted a pitch to AngelList recently and now one of the co-founders is out on the West Coast, being all tight-lipped about why. The start-up continues to kill it, as the iPhone app was featured today by TechCrunch's number one Apple sycophant and proprietor of the Paris Lemon expressway to pageviews, M.G. Siegler.

Source: http://bnter.com

Lauren Leto is co-founder of Texts from Last Night and Bnter.

Q: What are the best and worst things about New York’s tech scene?

Best: I run into fellow entrepreneurs all over the city! Worst: I run into fellow entrepreneurs all over the city!

Q: What’s the next tech revolution that’s coming?

A: The current trends online have me thinking it'll probably be cats made of bacon.

However, it's the movement away from Facebook which interests me. I think the days of filling in the blank on social profiles are long gone. People are building their identities through more personal platforms. Facebook is too stagnant to convey anyone's personality and as users start to realize how much richer their network is through sites which focus on genuine representation, they'll drift away. The only reason I still have a Facebook profile is to update the fan pages for TFLN and Bnter.

Q: What's the biggest challenge facing Bnter right now? What can you isolate that will make or break you?

We have to make uploading a conversation as easy as snapping a picture. We believe Bnter is most analogous to a photo application, except the memories are textual instead of visual. We're utilizing every piece of technology possible to make the capturing of moments seamless and we're trying to develop it as fast as possible. We just added a bookmarklet, under http://bnter.com/tools, which can pull from GChat, Facebook chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe's web interface and Campfire chats. We're working on Twitter and Formspring import. We're also developing an Android application which can easily publish chosen texts by pulling them into the app. Soon, we will even be able to turn screenshots of your texts into Bnter posts.

Q: When does a company stop being a start-up?

A: When they have an equal number of women on the staff - heyyyyo.

As they start to hire more non-technical people, because engineers seem to be mostly male and they don't really hire non-tech people until they're growing.

Q: What is the best idea you’ve had that would never get funded?

A: I thought we were in a tech bubble. I thought even an iPhone app which made barking sounds that somewhat sound like random Midwestern cities could get beaucoup bucks (mobile!) (geo-location!). However, I still haven't been able to get angels in on a zipcar for puppies idea.

Q: Free form! Fill in the blank: Viral is...

Viral is unpredictable. I've made sites which I thought instantly they'd take off and they bombed. I've made sites which I thought were nothing and they exploded. Jonah Peretti gave a great talk at ROFLCon last year where he compared the chances of "going viral" to the chances of starting a forest fire by dropping one lit match. The conditions have to be just right and you can't control any of it.

Exactly a year ago, Ms. Leto did the same at the book party for her first startup, Texts from Last Night, where she knew only seven people. But this time the guest list included friends from New York's top startups, best newspapers, and David of PitchforkReviewsReviews, who DJ'ed; as well as Twitter's Jack Dorsey, newly-arrived from San Francisco and allegedly still on West coast time.

To answer the question "What is Binter?" posed by one freelance writer on his bewildered way in, it's pronounced "banter" (IBM owns the full domain), and it's a social site where people post the Sorkin-esque conversations they have with friends in real life. Which is why The Observer was expecting attendees to be at their wittiest, and felt not a little pressure to be the same.

In fact, the banter stayed at the party, with a few exceptions—maybe because guests were entertained enough to overpower the urge to micro-document. Unfortunately the Guest of a Guest photographer had arrived and left too punctually, and failed to capture both understated New York Times reporter Nick Bilton and the boisterous Rex Sorgatz; she also got no footage of the dance party reliably initiated by Mediaite's Rachel Sklar or the two times GroupMe developer Pat Nakajima planted an enthused kiss on the mouth of Foursquare engineer Anoop Ranganath.

The event officially ended at midnight when drinks ceased to be free, but guests pushed into the hotel bar, agreeing generally that New York startups—and company—know how to party. They continued until 4 a.m., even though Bnter's more reserved cofounder Patrick Moberg slipped away early and Ms. Leto excused herself around 12:30 a.m., blaming a pair of shiny black heels.

Mr. Dorsey was comfortably stationed at the bar's far corner, where guests came to talk to him. He toldThe Observer that startup festivities are unfortunately lacking in San Francisco, a reason he enjoys New York. "Like, maybe one day a week we'll go out to a bar," he said, and conceded the venue was usually 21st Amendment, the brewery across the street from Twitter's office. One well-dressed entrepreneur was similarly approving. "I was at a Cipriani party at Citadel, and bankers are fucking boring," he said, and ordered another whiskey.

Disclosure.

The actor had 6,192,355 followers and was on 63,499 lists at the time of this post. Because of his colossal Twitter following and his interest in the startup space, Kutcher has become a PR target for young startups.

Two New York startups, thefancy and BNTER, have both scored the tastemaker as a registered user. (UPDATE: New York startups GroupMe and Foursquare are on Kutcher's homescreen!)

But a tweet from Kutcher could really drive traffic—especially a glowing tweet like the one that garnered one small startup's demo video more than 23,000 views.

Kutcher tweeted about the demo video for PadMapper, an app that mashes up apartment listings with Google Maps and allows users to search and filter by certain criteria. Kutcher wrote: "this might be my favorite instructional video ever..." and included a link to the video.

Kutcher's tweet sent about 13,000 people to the video on YouTube within five hours, according to a blog post by Grumo Media, which produced the video:

Think about this, Ashton spent about 5 seconds writing the PadMapper tweet and that effortless act sent 13,000 people to go watch a 1:41 min video.

This means that my video was watched for a total of 365 hours. In other words, with 5 seconds of effort Ashton was able to consume 365 hours of his followers time.

Now, that is leverage. To be exact that is about 1 to 250,000 leverage!

 

Kutcher's fans are also total sweethearts, judging by the comments on YouTube. "Ashton's right! Great vid! LOVED your company's tag line :-)" and "Nice.. Ashton Kutcher sent me.. This is revolutionary!"

The video is cute, but it's a pretty standard startup reel: voiceover, cartoons and whimsical music, explaining how PadMapper makes it easier to find apartments. It's possible Kutcher has some financial interest in the app, since he's been pimping it for months; he crashed the site's servers with a tweet in August.

[via TheNextWeb]

Disclosure.