QLabs (Photo: Foursquare)

Good news, Silicon Alley denizens. After much demand from fellow gossip-mongers, Betabeat has decided to resurrect your favorite recurring Friday feature. Welcome back to Rumor Roundup! Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com

THE SUN SOMETIMES SETS ON THE AOL EMPIRE Multiple sources have told Betabeat that AOL Ventures plans on shutting down QLabs--the press-shy experimental think tank in Soho located at 670 Broadway. "The time frame must be darn near immediate," one source told Betabeat, alluding to some urgency around winding down existing projects. "It's dead," said a source with indirect knowledge of the decision. "Their funding ran out," the second source added, speculating that the initiative had a set funding size, but "nothing yielded."

During a rare visit to QLabs in May, Betabeat discovered that the 4th floor space functioned as sort of the yin to AOL Ventures' investment yang--with both organizations trying to keep their corporate parent nimble.

QLabs hired a number of hackers who collectively decided on ideas to pursue. After some market research, the team, which operates non-hierarchically, churns out a prototype in six to eight weeks. If the minimum viable product fails to take off, it gets scrapped. The unspoken expectation, QLabs director Chris Danzig told Betabeat in May, was that it would produce a hit within two years, or roughly five months from now. “It’s very possible it could be a successful business with a few tweaks,” Mr. Danzig said back then. “But I’d much rather throw away something that has potential than burn away time on something that’s not working.”

In an email, Mr. Danzig said, "As a general policy we don't discuss the lab with the press (only the lab products)."

QLabs managed to get traction on at least two products, the incubator told us in May: Framey, which lets users post video comments on websites, and Brom.ly, an events recommendation service that pivoted into an events recommendation tool for the Huffington Post.

The recently launched HuffPost Labs, which operates like a startup for online news experiments within the Huffington Post, also works out of QLabs.  (Codecademy and Turntable.fm were working out of the spacious environs this spring.) But HuffPost Labs director Connor White Sullivan told us that the two incubator-like organizations are distinct. "We get our budget from HuffPost," he said of his budding four-person team. "All I can tell you is they're excellent engineers that built good products."

"As we refine our strategy, we have become more focused on our innovation agenda," an AOL spokesperson told Betabeat. "This was one component of a broader portfolio in AOL Ventures.”

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS A cadre of Silicon Alley citizens–including Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste and CNET columnist Ben Parr–headed to Vegas two weeks ago for some end-of-summer partying and ended up having a meet cute with Ron Jeremy. Turns out that the notorious porn star likes hanging with the tech set. He showed up to the same mid-day party Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Parr were attending. "Ron Jeremy just came to our private party," one source told Betabeat. "He told us about his rap song with Lil' Wayne who the Hipset guys are close with.” Oh Mr. Carter, say it ain't so?

WWJD? Apparently some trolls have signed Instapaper founder and bombastic blogger Marco Arment up for an email newsletter he certainly didn't authorize. "Thanks to whichever of the trolls signed me up for all of these Jesus email newsletters yesterday," Mr. Arment tweeted. "Not a good week for liking other people." Following a very public spat, perhaps it was someone at The Verge?

SECRETS OF THE SOUL Whoever said ladyblogs are just for ladies clearly hasn't met NYU journalism professor Clay Shirky. Professor Shirky copped to enjoying advice columns on the women-focused site The Hairpin at a reading at HousingWorks Books. “My favorite bit of anonymity on the web is this thing that Edith Zimmerman runs on the Hairpin, called 'Imperfect Advice from Strangers,'" he said. "Which is the best name for an advice column, ever.”

AOL hopes to plant seeds with hip companies coming out of QLabs and AOL Ventures.

On Wednesday afternoon, Betabeat arrived at the arty brick headquarters where AOL's startup alter egos, QLabs and AOL Ventures, take up an entire floor at Broadway and Great Jones in Soho. We were greeted by QLabs founder and hacker Chris Danzig, QLabs hacker Eric Skiff, and hacker-biz developer Michael E. Gruen. Everyone's title is "hacker," we were told. "We're extremely flat," Mr. Danzig said.

The hackers were having trouble controlling the temperature on what was a very humid day. The QLabs space is like the underbelly of the Titanic, with myriad chambers divided by arches and doors. "We have the AC, the heat on, and the windows open," Mr. Danzig apologized, as we settled into a small conference room around a table made of reclaimed wood.

QLabs is an experimental think tank for the rapid prototyping of ideas on the web, one or more of which will hopefully become the next big AOL property. There are only seven hackers on the QLabs team, with about three more in support staff—but the corporation rented the entire floor with the foresight that it may one day be filled with thriving companies spun out of QLabs projects.

The office is so sprawling that QLabs invited local companies—Turntable.fm and Codecademy are two current residents—to use the space for free.

It's a page from The Innovator's Dilemma: AOL, once a disruptive force on the Internet, is in grave danger of being supplanted by younger, lither companies. In order to remain relevant, the giant dialup-content-media conglomerate has hired a group of technohipsters and given them free rein to make whatever they want. (The other arm of this effort, AOL Ventures, scouts for and invests in innovative companies outside AOL's doors.) The QLabs hackers report quarterly back to the mothership, Mr. Danzig said, but even though QLabs has yet to produce a hit, it's had 14 months without executive interference.

The unofficial expectation is that QLabs will come out with a hit within two years, he said. (Unspoken: Yikes. Ten months to go.) QLabs has built seven products and already scrapped three. The effort is part incubator, part agency, and part startup. First, the team collectively decides on an idea—"kind of by Socratic method"—based on whether the hackers think it will hit, how long it will take to build, and whether there is a chance for monetization down the road. They do some market research, then slam on a prototype for six to eight weeks. When they have a minimum viable product, they set it live and cross their fingers. If the product fails to take off, QLabs shuts it down. By then, the hackers have already moved on.

QLabs.

The three month mark comes from an informal survey of companies that Mr. Danzig and AOL Ventures's Mike Brown had worked with, as well as public data about recent startups. They found that if users aren't reacting in three months, the idea is probably a bust. "It's very possible it could be a successful business with a few tweaks," Mr. Danzig said. "But I'd much rather throw away something that has potential than burn away time on something that's not working."

If a project were to take off, QLabs would spin it out into an independent startup, hire employees, and get funding, which might be as simple as a dedicated budget from AOL, which owns everything QLabs builds.

The Lab has had some traction on various projects. Brom.ly, an events recommendation service that wasn't very popular with consumers but turned out to be a useful data service, now powering event recommendations for the Huffington Post (see that synergy?). Framey, a tool that lets readers or users leave a video comment from a website, was used for public awareness campaigns by the Sierra Club and Housing Works. For better or worse, the Huffington Post is also interested in its potential to enable readers to leave video comments.

Slain projects include NumSay, a system that lets people leave anonymous comments or reviews for a person, a la Rate My Ex, or business, a la Yelp. The reviews are anonymous and tied to the subject's phone number, so you can type in the digits you just got at the bar and find out if that beautiful stranger is a secret sociopath. NumWay was put in cold storage because it was too evil, the hackers said. "The anonymous side of it is just too dangerous," Mr. Skiff said. The team has also produced Bread Alert, an email that recommends what to eat for lunch; Mixnomer, a site that helps come up with startup names; and BLEEOO.com, Mr. Skiff's one-off side project that lets users upload videos of themselves imitating the sound of a dial-up modem via Framey. "Oh, I haven't seen the cat one. Do you guys mind if we take a little detour?" Mr. Danzig asked, interrupting the demo for a video of a guy holding his cat up to the camera while making vigorous bleeping noises.

Okay, that's adorable, we said. But how is AOL letting you guys get away with making memes? "I think we'll see more significant traction in the next few cycles," Mr. Danzig said. QLabs is getting better at the speed startup game, he said. For one thing, they've decided to spend more resources promoting each project, instead of putting things out into the wild and hoping they get noticed.

QLabs has high hopes for two projects right now: Huntsy, an organizational tool for job seekers, and When, a social network for families that launches next week. "I'd put our product team against any product team in New York," Mr. Danzig said. "We can build things very well and we can build things very fast."

As for the lab's notorious press-shyness to date, Mr. Danzig said he just didn't want to promote QLabs until it had something to show. "I didn't want to pull a Color and go screaming from the mountaintops," he said, referring to the overhyped Sequoia Capital investment that raised $40 million before flopping its way into irrelevance.

For Chad Gallagher, New York nightlife was an embarrassment of riches. "A lot of the time I was kind of paralyzed by all my choices for what to do on a Friday night, so I would just end up doing whatever my friends had chosen," he told Betabeat.

One of Mr. Gallagher's friends was a frequent business traveler who complained about spending 24 hours in a city, taking meetings during the day and not knowing what to do with his evenings. So Mr. Gallagher founded Brom.ly, a search engine that collects data from sources like Meetup, Eventbrite and partners like Thrillist, then uses social data from Facebook to recommend events to users.

The company collects a small commission when the users it sends to paid events convert to customers, similar to the way SeatGeek collects a small fee for sending qualified leads. "It's nice to have a revenue stream from the get-go!" he said. So far it's kept its user base small and tried to avoid press, while raising a little south of $1 million from AOL Ventures. "We're trying to be the opposite of Color," he said.

The Brom.ly iPhone app launched this morning and the company has paired up with the largest theater agency in NYC to give away free tickets for the opening night of Traces at the Union Square Theater to the first 50 users who share an event from Bromly out to Facebook or Twitter.

Last but not least Mr. Gallagher, who believes checking in will be mainstream by this time next year, says Foursquare integration is on the way, allowing people to track what events recommended by Brom.ly are trending.