Now selling for $10 on Foap.com.

Secondhand News The online consignment shop Refashioner.com went live this week. Billed as a “curated, online eco-mmunity” for buying, selling and trading vintage clothing, users can apply to create a “closet” and upload pictures of used clothing to sell—which must be approved by the “ReFashion police.” For more info, we direct you to the site’s 10-point sustainable fashion manifesto.

Pricey pics Short on cash? Now you can sell your iPhone photos for $10 a pop. Simply download Foap’s free app, upload photos from your iPhone albums and send them to Foap’s “experts” for approval.  The only catch: Foap pockets 50 percent of your profit on each image, and users are warned that images with heavy filters from Instagram and the like won’t be approved. But still!

Communal connectivity Open Garden, a free app for Android, Mac and PC that enables one gadget to share bandwidth connectivity with nearby devices, announced a new Wi-Fi Direct feature for Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” at Google I/O last week.

TV on the internet BuddyTV announced an update to their iOS app, which is now integrated with Facebook Open Graph--enabling users to share your ratings, favorite TV shows and movies and other app activities with Facebook friends.

Check-in Foursquare just launched their “Connected Apps” platform, which enables developers to build apps directly connected to Foursquare. Partners include The Weather Channel—now you can get the weather forecast with your first check-in to a new city—and Eat This, Not That, which tells you what dishes to order and avoid once you check-in to a particular restaurant.

Green apps Check out the winning apps from the city’s first sustainability hackathon, Reinvent Green. Try them out and vote for your favorite before July 15.

More data Chartbeat Publishing, a data analytics service for editors and publishers, just launched its Heads Up Display. Designed to give content producers immediate information on the health and user activity of their sites, the new display provides vitals to help editors understand which articles are driving site traffic, how quickly a particular story is accelerating or decelerating, and how far down on the page viewers are reading.

Now hiring We’ve heard that Bitly is looking for a Sales Research Associate, Acclivity NYC needs a UI/UX Designer and a Python Back-end Developer and News.me wants a Senior iOS Engineer.

Walt Mossberg with Steve Jobs in 2007. (Source: Wikipedia)

DIA DE TECNOLOGIA. New York Tech Day was full of NYC based startups—from the established to the unfunded—all stages in the NYC tech lifestyle were represented. The companies that follow really stuck out to NY Tech Day Judges. Best use of Location - BiteHunter, Best Design - Chartbeat, Best Educational Startups - Three Ring, Best Social Startup - GiftSimple, Best Booth Design - Cannonball, NY Tech Day Staff Choice - Snakblox, Best use of Data - Hoppit, Best Mobile App - Uber, Best Business Model - Temboo, Best Enterprise Startup - SendGrid, Best Unfunded Startup - Unroll.me.

KICK BUTT. Everything Butt Art, the adorable drawing app for iPad, just launched a Kickstarter campaign. As of this writing, the founders have raised just over $1,000 and still have a ways to go towards that $20,000 goal.

SMELLS LIKE... "Inside the Internet Garage," a new series from NYU Steinhardt with thoughts on early Internet history from technology's leaders will kick off  tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. at NYU's Courant Institute. AllThingsD cofounders Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg will be interviewed by professor Aaron Cohen for the series' first event. More information and registration is available here.

IN THE APP STORE. MyCityWay, an app that users can personalize to get the information they need, is now available on iOS. From theatre tickets to fuel, users can find deals on the things that matter to them with real time updates.

JOB HUNT. The Daily Muse, a website devoted to women and their careers, has been featuring cool employers with job openings on its company board. Busy bees seeking a new hive can search by company type, size and location among the likes of StumbleUpon, Airbnb, Giorgio Armani, Tumblr and Mashable, to name a few.

HELLOOO, NURSE. Thanks to ZocDoc, Detroit residents no longer have to pull out hair or fight dangerously high blood-pressure when scheduling doctor's visits. The Motor City is the startup's 17th market.

FUNDS. AdSafe Media just locked down $10 million in funding from Pelion Venture Partners, Atlas Venture and Coriolis Ventures. AdSafe helps protect brand identity by determining, at the page level, whether or not the content is appropriate for that particular ad.

PARTY. Another entrant to the party planning space, imbookin.com seeks to make throwing a party at one of New York City's main attractions easily and of course, below full price. Partners with over $1,000 New York venues, imbookin.com allows users to customize all the details online. Open bar? Check. Light appetizers? Check to that one too. Eventup, another party planning and event booking site, also popped up recently in New York.

JOBS FOUND. Work Market is looking for a community manager with "STRONG ENTREPRENEURIAL desires" to work on email marketing campaigns and viral marketing initiatives. Apply here. DerbyJackpot needs a lead Rails developer slash chief gambling officer for the first gambling game to be launched on Facebook (coming in June). If you have Rails, CoffeeScript, Redis and Jasmine chops, email Tom. Vimeo is looking for backend, PHP application, cloud system, Java data, junior video encoding and entry-level web application engineers. Apply here.

The new Chartbeat, with analytics from someecards.com.

Chartbeat just announced a hefty new round of funding led by Josh Stein, managing director at Draper Fisher Jurveston, and Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures, for $9.5 million in all. Some of the funding has already been put to use, as Chartbeat is rolling out a "complete new look," CEO Tony Haile told Betabeat, with a new dashboard, two major new features, and a mobile app. 

"Thanks Saul, thanks Josh, we’re going to make you proud," Mr. Haile wrote in a blog post this morning.

The new feature is "peer stats," which show how the site is performing compared to other averaged data from other sites using Chartbeat. "We're thinking about not just your site, but your site in the context of the wider web," Mr. Haile told Betabeat.

Peer stats will show how a site compares to others of its type. "We anonymize and aggregate all the data, and then we slice it down to sites like yours so it would be like, tech blogs who have between a certain number of concurrents... and usually peak at 2 p.m. in the afternoon," he said.

The new dashboard will also feature an emphasis on how much time people are spending "being engaged" on the site with a feature called "Engaged Time." That means people who have your site open in a forgotten tab no longer count for much.  Chartbeat will also now feature what's happening with your content outside your site more prominently, Mr. Haile said."We're making social a much bigger part of Chartbeat," Mr. Haile said.

Chartbeat's "engaged time" view.

Also, Chartbeat announced a beta for its iPhone app (which may be a curse for already Chartbeat-obsessed editors). The mobile version reinforces Chartbeat's mission: real-time data. "If something happens... you'll be able to see it immediately and adapt," Mr. Haile said. "It's the same real time goodness." Chartbeat updates about every three seconds, he said.

"Obviously we're hugely excited about the round," Mr. Haile said said. "We are hiring like crazy. Back end, front end, designers, people on sales and marketing... we've been a bit resource-constrained." Chartbeat is also looking for a new office, he said, in the same rough area on the west side below 14th St.

Chartbeat spent more than a year looking for the right investors, he said, and settled on Mr. Stein because of his expertise. The three-year-old company has raised a total of $12.5 million. Its last round was in August 2010, and it raised the first $1 million of this Series B from existing investors in December.

The company, which charges between $9.95 to $149.95 per month depending on the size of the site, has been making millions of dollars in revenue for some time. Revenues have grown 3.5 times over in the last year, Chartbeat said.

Mr. Borthwick. (betaworks.com)

Our apologies to evangelists of gamification and QR codes, but 2012 is all about data—at least according to New York startup non-incubator Betaworks. “We know the importance of understanding big data,” Betaworks CEO John Borthwick wrote in a confidential letter leaked to PandoDaily on Saturday. “Data is the new plastic. The network is both the frame and the metaphor we are building towards and on. This network-centric model is core to betaworks, and a key competitive advantage.”

Three of Betaworks’ most successful companies—Bitly, Chartbeat and SocialFlow—capitalize on the ever-elusive ROI of social media, attempting to quantify the impact of the “social web” in which they believe so mightily.

Data does seem to be a rapidly developing theme in 2012, as Betabeat deftly pointed out in our 2012 Tech Predictions piece. Numberfire, a data science app for fantasy sports, raised $650k in seed funding earlier this month, while Visual Revenue scored $1.7M for technology that doesn’t just report web traffic data, but predicts it.

Mr. Borthwick’s letter also outlines four key learnings from 2011 that will motivate which ideas and companies betaworks decides to groom in 2012. Aspiring NYC tech entrepreneurs—this one’s for you:

- Proliferation of devices that are connected to networks is accelerating the rate of innovation: Companies focusing on the networks created by people on mobile devices will take center stage in 2012, as mobile adoption continues its rise.
- Connected devices are enabling real-time services and real-time networks: As mobile usage rates increase, methods of real-time group interaction become progressively important and valuable.
- Networks of people, participation and ideas matter more than networks of devices: The Social Graph takes precedence over the actual network infrastructure of the Internet.
- Great design has become increasingly vital as computing gets less expensive: The cheaper hardware construction becomes, the more time and resources you have to focus on the minutia of design.

Apparently trend prediction is Betaworks’ forte, as its focus on data and the real-time social web led the company to a slew of successful exits in 2011, yielding full investor returns while “still retaining capital on the balance sheet.” This is good news for New York startups looking for a place to help scale their ideas, and for the Silicon Alley scene in general, which apparently needs to prove to Valley-ites that “New York is really a tech ecosystem that is here to stay.”

Exactly how central big data will become to 2012 companies remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: the New York tech scene continues to blossom. “New York as a technology hub has taken on a life of its own,” wrote Mr. Borthwick. “It is no coincidence that [Betaworks] is based in one of the most vibrant and creative cities in the world.”

Betaworks Shareholder Letter

"It's go big or go home time. We didn't want to slow down, but we also didn't want to take money from the wrong people. So we got an inside note to keep things pumping while we go out and find backers for a much bigger round later this year," Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile told Betabeat. 

Chartbeat's current investors, who backed a $3 million seed round in Septemeber of 2010, include Index Ventures, O'Reilly AlphTech Ventures, SV Angel, Lowercase Capital, Founder Collective and Lerer Ventures.

The company is currently hiring for:

• Interaction and UI Designer
• Frontend Engineer
• Backend Engineer
• Community Evangelist

It has expanded to its own floor above betaworks main office in Chelsea and recently began highlighting some of the fun projects it team experiments on during their 20% time on a site called Chartbeat Labs.

(Illustration: Oliver Munday)

You can feel the love in Silicon Alley. The city’s tech scene is a brotherhood of mutual admiration and support. “Proudly Made in NYC” proclaims Meetup's website; “Hatched in NYC” notes Aviary’s. Founders wear each other’s company T-shirts and tweet each others’ releases. They made “We Are NY Tech” buttons for South by Southwest and wore them proudly. Once in Austin, Betabeat asked the Bay Area superangel Dave McClure about the city’s tech prospects. “New York needs to stop smelling its own farts,” he said.

Yes, on the record.

Still, it turns out there is a limit to camaraderie. When it comes to hiring, especially in a competitive market, the shivs start flashing. Of the 184 startups that have “Made in NYC” emblazoned on their websites, no fewer than 130 are staffing up. That means if you want to build a startup, you’re going to have to poach some devs.

Slideshow: New York's 20 Most Poachable Techies >>

Engineers don’t hop around in New York as much as they do in Silicon Valley, where noncompete contracts are unenforceable, but the city’s congenial entrepreneurs are raiding one another’s employees with increasing frequency. Before GroupMe was acquired by Skype for about $80 million, the well-endowed group-texting startup plucked developers from Gilt Groupe, Pivotal Labs and College Humor. The CTO of the fast-growing Betaworks startup Chartbeat, Kushal Dave, jumped to Foursquare in July 2010; the Union Square Ventures-funded Shapeways snagged Signpost’s former tech director a few months ago.

But startups don’t just compete over technical talent, which is in famously short supply. Thrillist nabbed Gawker’s Richard Blakeley to manage content strategy in March, and Crowdtap snatched marketing whiz kid Ben Kessler from SeatGeek in September. “We’ve hired about 500 people in the last 12 months,” said Kevin Ryan, the founder and CEO of Gilt Groupe, who still personally interviews every candidate. “They all have to come from somewhere.”

And while some take the Machiavellian view—“Is there any etiquette to that? I thought all’s fair in love and war,” said Lean Startup Machine founder Trevor Owens—most startups do observe certain gentlemanly guidelines. The unspoken rules of poaching are fairly clear cut. Don’t poach from early-stage companies you share an investor with. Get your investors involved if there is a possibility of taboo intraportfolio hiring. And by all means, keep your friends out of it whenever possible if you ever want to show your face at Tom & Jerry’s. “Never poach from close friends or people you know pretty well,”  said Jason Baptiste, the swaggering, crew-cut-sporting CEO of OnSwipe. “That’s a cardinal sin.”

He would know. Last spring, Mr. Baptiste stood up in front of his classmates in the TechStars accelerator and triumphantly announced that his company had raised $1 million in the first week of the program. “Hide your developers, hide your designers, because we’re hiring everybody,” he said, referencing the catchy “Bed Intruder” remix that made its way around YouTube last year. The joke got a laugh, but no matter: Bloomberg Television, in the middle of taping a TechStars reality show, juxtaposed the scene with soundbites from local founders Vin Vacanti and Dennis Crowley talking about the delicacy of poaching at a time when talent is scarce. “Let me give you some advice: I wouldn’t tell the other companies you’re trying to hire their people,” TechStars director David Tisch said on the show. After receiving a stern dressing-down behind closed doors, Mr. Baptiste promised, “Everybody here is safe.”

“Randomly spliced stuff,” Mr. Baptiste said of the episode. “No one thought we were going after any of the other TechStars companies. We weren’t and never would. Seriously.”

Check out our rundown of New York's most poachable tech talent >>

The politics of poaching can be even more delicate for hot companies like Foursquare, considered one of the most attractive startup employers in the city by developers and nontechnical job-seekers alike. Foursquare is one of the most active evangelizers for New York tech; founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai appear everywhere from conference keynotes to Gap ads. The resumes of Foursquare’s 70-some employees are dotted with New York startups, including the now-defunct Hot Potato and the still-existing Thing Labs. But even though hiring the best people possible is the company’s top priority right now, Foursquare says it does not poach. “We know that all it takes is stealing one engineer from a startup to make the entire community feel like Foursquare is going after their best people,” said Susan Loh, the company’s head of recruiting, who was hired away from Yelp. “Many of us have friends at these companies, so we want to make sure that if we do end up hiring someone from another startup that it’s not going to disrupt our relationship with these startups at all.”

(Although if anyone should be afraid, it’s Google. Foursquare boasts a fierce legion of Xooglers, including Ms Loh, Mr. Crowley, head of product Alex Rainert, platform evangelist Ashkay Patil, lead engineer Harry Heymann, public relations manager Erin Gleason and many others.)

To avoid any strife in New York startup land, Ms. Loh regularly updates the management team on whom she’s talking to from other startups. If Foursquare did covet an employee of another startup, she said, Mr. Crowley would talk to the employer directly and make nice.“In general, I think the New York tech scene really knows how to play well with each other,” she said. “I don’t see a lot of the aggressive poaching you see in Silicon Valley.” (Foursquare recently started recruiting for its new office in San Francisco.) Still, even Foursquare has to play defense. “One day I had a huge package show up at the office with letters written to every one of our engineers,” Ms. Loh recalled. “Hand-written letters, but it was the same letter written 12 times.”

Mass love notes, courting over LinkedIn and other ham-handed recruitment efforts usually come from nontech industries or third-party tech recruiters, some of whom are notorious for targeting those who seem happily employed. “We close the unrecruitable candidates,” boasts Daversa Partners, whose clients have included Gilt Groupe, SecondMarket and Twitter. It’s these recruiters that make the city-wide talent search, which otherwise would be merely tense, into a paranoid frenzy.

Mr. Ryan sees “zillions” of attempted poachings at Gilt, although the vast majority are unsuccessful, he said. “I’m not sure that poaching is any different from hiring,” he said. “I’m not sure where one draws the line.”

Which is not to say he’s willing to be raided himself. When the CEO of a much smaller New York startup asked Mr. Ryan for hiring advice, he told her the key was to have a dedicated recruiter on staff. Four weeks later, the CEO made a very attractive offer to Gilt’s internal recruiter. “She was desperate,” Mr. Ryan said. “I don’t think it was a good move for the long term. That will irreparably hurt our relationship.” To make things worse, the recruiter declined to leave.

Check out our rundown of New York's most poachable tech talent >>

When it comes to poaching, Mr. Ryan operates by a simple maxim: don’t try to nab anyone who had been introduced by a boss or a common investor. If a candidate is discovered in the course of a recruiting search, however, he or she is fair game.

The case could be made that the various tacit no-poaching agreements that keep things relatively congenial at New York’s many techie social events is exerting a negative pressure on salaries, keeping pay rates artificially low.

Mr. Ryan didn’t think that was a danger. “There are literally hundreds of companies here,” he said in an email. “Most companies have a few companies that are on a no-hire list (we generally have six to seven) for legal or relationship reasons. [But] this is out of 1,000 companies, so no big deal.”

Besides, as competition for talent continues to heat up, the gentlemen’s agreement seems to be eroding. “Recruit away our team. I dare you. Heck, I encourage you” was the title of a recent blog post in which Jason Goldberg, CEO of Fab.com, a daily-deal site focused on design, dared poachers to just try sweet talking his staffers into jumping ship. He even offered to hand over their phone numbers. Later, as if to underline the point, he boasted to Betabeat, “Guess what? I’m going to call those companies and try and recruit their people.”

When news came out recently of one high-profile New York startup’s demise, another startup founder admitted he’d been secretly courting one of its top engineers. “This is going to make life a little more challenging for me,” he told us. “A lot of people will start hitting on him. But that’s fine. Competition is a good thing.” Dave Carvajal, a tech recruiter, noted that the longstanding rule that one shouldn’t recruit from other companies within the same investment firm is increasingly broken. “What’s happening is it doesn’t even matter anymore,” he said, noting that clients simply say, “‘Get me anyone from any good company.’ No holds barred.”

One New York founder told us in a casual conversation that his rules were hard and fast: no going out and poaching from fellow startups, but if an application comes in, tough luck.

Not that he was willing to say so on the record. “Don’t really want to be quoted for poaching in case we actually end up poaching someone in the future,” he said in an email, punctuating with a smiley face, of course.

Slideshow: New York's 20 Most Poachable Techies >>

(http://saulhansell.blogspot.com/)

Betaworks just got an entrepreneur-in-residence with some old and new media cred: Saul Hansell, former Timesman and the founding editor of the Grey Lady's Bits blog just announced he's coming aboard. Mr. Hansell headed up AOL's freelance network, Seed.com (now "in the process of reformatting" and not giving out any new assignments, hm) before AOL bought the Huffington Post. "Seed is in fact thriving and will continue stronger than ever as part of AOL’s Advertising.com group, which is devoted to providing the best tools to online publishers and marketers," Mr. Hansell wrote at the time. 

He continued:

I am very proud of what we achieved at Seed over the last year. And I’m just as proud of what we didn’t do. Despite our reputation as “hellish scheme” dedicated to “slapdash, disposable content churned out en masse,” we didn’t pollute the Web with millions of articles that would be embarrassing even in a high school newspaper.  Rather, we worked on ways to respect our creators and our audience by creating formats that delivered lively, useful and reliable information that writers can produce efficiently. You can see the results in articles like these: What Is Christine O'Donnell's Religion?, Giardia in Dogs: What You Need to Know as a Dog Owner, and Jack Daniel's Drinks: 4 Drink Ideas From a Bartender.

Right! So: Seed was a big flop seems to be what he's saying there, no? Either way, Mr. Hansell became Big News editor for HuffPo in May. That lasted a little under six months. Now, Mr. Hansell joins his old buddy John Borthwick at what is obviously a better job, EIR at Betaworks, a company that is not crushing the creative spirits of its employees.

But wait! It's not that, Mr. Hansell insists: "I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s many assets to achieve that vision."

Indeed. HuffPo, while ruthless and depraved, has given AOL a breath of new life—Arianna Huffington's newsroom is fast-paced, agile, inventive and we're told, has been given a lot of control over its better halves in the rest of the AOL empire.

At any rate, with Mr. Hansell's wide range of experience going from NYT to AOL, he should fit right in at the incubator/innovation lab that has produced publisher tools such as Chartbeat and SocialFlow as well as consumption tools such as Findings and News.me.

[via AllThingsD]

A universe of users

For Chartbeat addicts like us, the introduction of the new Labs page is a real problem. There is now a smorgasbord of tantalizing visuals to watch, from maps to solar systems, that represent the incoming traffic to Betabeat.

Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile says Labs is a place to highlight the work his team does during their "free" time. Like Google, Mr. Haile insists that his shop spend one out of every seven weeks working on their own side projects. "The only rule is they can't work on stuff in the development queue."

The idea is to unleash a whole range of creativity that the team would otherwise miss. "It shows me where I am missing things and what opportunities we might explore in the future," said Mr. Haile.

For a company focused around providing an analytic service, it's also a reminder that product is at the core of what Chartbeat does. "It's all about inspiring the team and helping to refresh their innovation," he said.

Tony Haile - Internet Explorer - outside betaworks

When a huge surge of traffic suddenly starts washing over a website, publishers have to act fast to capture the most value from these visitors. Yesterday, for example, Betabeat popped our cherry on a pickup by John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog, which turned on a fire hose of new readers who had never previously been to our site.

I knew there was a high percentage of first time visitors because I was using Newsbeat, a more powerful version of the real time analytic engine Chartbeat, which breaks down the percentage of new versus returning visitors. I was able to throw some additional links into the story taking these reader back to some of our best coverage on the mobile space.

As the story spread around the web, Newsbeat also gave me a look at the volume of tweets surrounding the story and let me find some of the influencers who propagated the piece across different networks. It captured a lot of info that my Tweetdeck @ mentions column missed, allowing me to reach out to those users and give a follow up link or a thanks.

With Newsbeat I can also get a sense of a stories momentum. For the first time it doesn't just show me how many people are currently reading an article, but which direction a story is trending in term of new eyeballs. This means I can focus on a story when its on the way up, but stop wasting time trying to tend to it after it has peaked. Or, viewed another way, I can know when the momentum is shifting, and change the placement or promotion of a story to get it traffic building again.

"We are predicting the path of every story and showing you how much you should be getting from direct traffic, inbound links and social media," says Chartbeat general manager and betaworks chief troublemaker Tony Haile, running a hand through his lush, golden locks. "Now we can show you where a story is headed, a measure of momentum, not mass."

One big change in Newsbeat is the way it measures direct traffic versus social. "Direct has been this bullshit black hole. People may type in betabeat.com, but no one is typing in betabeat.com/article/news-breaking/2011-5-13. A lot of what we used to record as direct traffic is actually coming from email, IM and apps, especially Twitter client, so now we break that out into its own section."

Newsbeat is the first specialized extension of Chartbeat, but Haile says versions for e-tailers and gaming companies are both in the works. "We don't want to build a better Omniture, we want to stay very real time. Hopefully we can work closely with a lot of these publisher to help build the newsroom of the future."

Now it appears that there was not just a temporary outage, but that some customer data was permanently lost, meaning another headache for local entrepreneurs to explain to their users.

Chartbeat, for example, sent an email out to its customers explaining that 11 hours of data, which measure real time traffic and engagement on those sites, had been lost and would appear as gaps in their timeline.

Several start-ups Betabeat chatted with last week said they were considering a switch to Amazon's biggest competitor, Rackspace, as well as looking into a refund based on the downtime. No word yet on whether this new revelation has pushed any entrepreneurs to the breaking point.