(Photo: Flickr)

If there was one salient lesson gleaned from the two-hour, day-glo sex romp that was Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, it was this: just pretend that life's a video game. As it turns out, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley maintains the same mantra. At the Twofixsix conference in Brooklyn, presented by gaming magazine Kill Screen, Mr. Crowley told the crowd that his success in tech largely hinges on his love of video games.

"The Zelda games were a big influence on how I saw the city,” Mr. Crowley said, according to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, they made him wonder, "Can you apply that magical experience you have in those games and bring them out into the real world?"

Instead of a magical experience, though, Mr. Crowley came up with Foursquare, an app for bragging to people about the time you went above 14th Street.

You too could be successful in tech, if only you can pretend life is a video game with no financial or emotional consequences. Just think of a down round like losing and having to start from the beginning of the level!

The happy couple. (Photo: Instagram/aubrey)

Leaning Out of Tumblr Jessica Bennett, the Tumblr employee who was laid off with the shuttering of Storyboard, announced today on Twitter that she's taken a job with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. "Turns out being fired ain't that bad," she tweeted, along with a link to a Facebook post by Ms. Sandberg herself announcing Ms. Bennett's hiring:

"So excited to welcome Jessica Bennett to the Lean In team! Jessica is joining us to run Editorial - helping us connect women all over the world with their passion for leaning in! Special thanks to Nell Scovell and Rachel Sklar for introducing us to Jessica!"

How much leaning in was required to land that job?

Must Square TV You may not have realized it, but the most recent episode of Parks and Recreation was actually one big native ad for Square. An excited @Jack Dorsey retweeted a fan noticing that the mobile payment dongle was being used at the digitally attuned boutique owned by Tom Haverford. If Rent-A-Swag is the first Pawnee outpost to employ Square, what will be the second? We’re guessing Paunch Burger.

https://twitter.com/ShawnMarieH/status/330153591467802626

Sunglasses at Night Since an appeals court judge blocked the TLC’s ehail pilot program again, the city’s would-be disruptors have kept quiet (for now). Now, they’re not totally hunkered down: Last night, Ed Casabian, Uber New York’s senior community manager, made the brief stroll from the company’s Long Island City HQ to demo their black car app at the Queens Tech Meetup. But mum was the word about yellow cabs. He prefaced the Q&A: “I can’t say anything about taxis.”

But he didn’t turn up wholly empty-handed. He brought a discount for new users, and, for loyal customers, Mr. Casabian pulled a pair of white faux-Wayfarers out of his back pocket and said he could offer “a shiny new pair of Uber shades.”

“Come see me, I have a big box over there.”

Disrupt This Monday brought the yearly entrepreneurial orgy that is TechCrunch Disrupt New York. Tech stars like Dennis Crowley, John Borthwick and the bros of Rap Genius all took their turn onstage, leading the tech blog to triumphantly announce in a post, “New York City Turns Out For The First Day Of Disrupt NY 2013.” Well, Meetup founder Scott Heiferman has his doubts about that. He retorted on Twitter, “actually vast majority of ny tech is busy making internet.” Pardon the cliched expression, but ZING!

Dinner Club Oh, so this is what FOMO really feels like. Four Silicon Valley power players had dinner the other night and you weren’t invited. In attendance were the CEOs from Twitter, Pinterest, Square and something called Box. Scarfing down a roast chicken at Zuni Cafe in, where else, San Francisco, they probably talked about Amanda Bynes' breakdown or something equally important.

Checking Into Married Life Foursquare VP of Engineering Harry Heymann tied the knot with social software researcher Alice Marwick at Bayard's Private Dining Hall in the Financial District on Saturday. Former Tumblr employee Rick Webb officiated the ceremony, which hosted attendees like Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and his fiancee Chelsa Skees, Sailthru VP of marketing and gal-about-town Aubrey Sabala, Vizsla founder Alex Rainert, Business Insider executive editor Joe Weisenthal, Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea and Fashism founder Brooke Moreland.

Here's a Vine of the duo having their first dance (to Goldfrapp!), posted with the official hashtag #hplusa. Mazel, you two!

https://twitter.com/fimoculous/status/328578677480771584

Mr. Crowley (screencap)

This week is the New York edition of TechCrunch Disrupt, which means it's time for the annual friendly grilling of Silicon Alley personalities. Taking his turn in the hot seat this morning: Fuelband-brandishing Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley.

This year's conference takes place in the least startup-y of neighborhoods: right next door to Penn Station, in the Hammerstein Ballroom. It's covered in faux rococo detailing, and the carpet has seen better days, possibly during the Ford administration, and don't even try sitting down on the stairs to make a phone call because you will be bounced.

So it was in incongruous surroundings that @dens tackled a no-fun question: Where did all the adulation go? 

"We're not the shiny new thing any more," Mr. Crowley admitted with a shrug. "We're in that interesting hazing period for companies, where people are still skeptical of whether this company is going to be able to pull it off or not."

"It's not terribly daunting," he added, all but literally brushing his shoulder off. "It's fine if people are skeptical of what we're doing--let's just put our heads down and focus on the work we're doing."

That doesn't mean he could resist a couple of digs at "the haters," the metaphorical pebble in Mr. Crowley's cross-trainers. He suggested that, "there's a lot of people who still think of us as 2009 Foursquare," adding that, "the biggest haters and critics haven't opened the app for six months." Makes you wonder about those monthly active user numbers.

He also responded to former Square Keith Rabois, who recently criticized Foursquare on Twitter. "I don't think he's looking at the same data we're looking at," Mr. Crowley said. Diplomatic! He went on to point out that Mr. Rabois is on the board of Yelp and suggested that he probably ought to be worried. "We don't pay attention to people that are misinformed."

Do startup execs take lessons in shade from the contestants of Rupaul's Drag Race?

He also called the perception that Foursquare isn't growing false, saying the metrics they track regularly (like active users and signups) are all growing 10 to 30 percent month over month. On the merchant side, a million businesses have claimed their listing on Foursquare, making it easier to sell them on promos. Mr. Crowley said revenue growth is steady and the company is "routinely signing six-figure deals" with national merchants.

Not that he'd cough up much in the way of hard numbers, though: "We're a private company, so we don't have to disclose our master plan for you," he pointedly replied to one of interviewer Colleen Taylor's more probing questions.

Also, Mr. Crowley described himself as an Uber "super user." So there's that.

(Photo: Dan Lampariello, via Twitter)

Earlier this afternoon, two huge explosions ripped through downtown Boston near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, injuring spectators and athletes alike. It's still very unclear what's going on, but there's a familiar face reporting in from the scene. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley was running the marathon today--you might have seen his automatic check-ins from every milepost, interspersed with the occasional mid-stride misspelled tweet.

But the auto-updates suddenly stopped. After reassuring everyone he was fine, Mr. Crowley began tweeting dispatches from the middle of the race:

I'm ok.about 20k of us in corral just before mi 26. marker. @chelsa ok too

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) April 15, 2013

FYI no one at mi 26 has any idea what's happening. — Dennis Crowley (@dens) April 15, 2013

rumor has it rest of race is canceled. but no cell service so lots if rumors / can't get texts thu so can't plan family rendezvous — Dennis Crowley (@dens) April 15, 2013

god bless you mophie battery park. every runner is almost dead battery. people see me texting and queuing to use my phone

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) April 15, 2013

scene at mile 26 - mass ave @ comm ave twitter.com/dens/status/32…

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) April 15, 2013

btw it juuusssst hit me how lots of walking on mi 24 may have saved me a bit. pretty shaken up.

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) April 15, 2013

Reports suggest that cell service in the area is overwhelmed, so don't panic if you can't reach someone and texting is likely better than calling.

Someone has already posted a Vine of the explosion itself, grabbed from news coverage, and it's frankly horrifying. @Dens and everyone else in Boston--stay safe.

(Photo: Sound Ctrl)

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Foursquare, the New York-based check-in and recommendations app that was the breakout darling of SXSW 2009.

Former Square COO Keith Rabois recently engaged in a very public dustup with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley on Twitter, tweeting that only a "Hail Mary Bebo-style acquisition will bail you out." In January, data and research company PrivCo predicted that the startup will fail by the end of the year, eventually surrendering to an acquisition price of no more than $50 million (though the analysis didn't account for mobile traffic). In November of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that investors were "cooling" on Foursquare. "The company claims more than 25 million registered users, but only about 8 million of them use the app at least once a month," it wrote.

Now, Businessweek reports that Foursquare has raised $41 million in loans and convertible debt from Silver Lake Partners, a private equity fund, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and others. The influx of capital, Businessweek notes, will allow Foursquare time to grow as it tussles with low revenue (a source tells BW that the company only made $2 million last year) and works to launch a new ad program that will allow all of its merchants to serve mobile ads.

Foursquare's latest update to its iOS app brought search and recommendations to the forefront; sources also told Betabeat that the company has toyed with the idea of a recommendations app not equipped with check-ins, which speaks volumes about where the value of the app lies. A new mobile ad strategy, which would most likely serve ads to users based on their location, could help to greatly increase revenue at the company.

Taking on debt instead of raising a new round also helps Foursquare avoid a dreaded down round and what would undoubtedly be a fierce public debate about its valuation. The Series C in 2011 brought the company's total capital to $71 million at a valuation of $600 million, but the novelty of a check-in app seems to have worn off since then, and that coupled with thin yearly revenues could lead to a lower valuation.

One source told Betabeat that the company is “frustrated with lack of hype/momentum/growth," and that company culture has transitioned from “uplifting” to “oh shit."

Investors in this debt round are patient, allowing Mr. Crowley the time he needs to expand the business. But others, like Greylock's John Lilly, declined to participate--according to BW, he simply thinks Foursquare's $600 million valuation is too high.

Mr. Crowley, who ducked out to run a half-marathon.

Do high-powered tech types have any idea of the right way to spend a weekend? Apparently not: When VC and former Square COO Keith Rabois made a critical, slightly snide remark about how Foursquare is faring, he ignited a two-day-long tussle over when it's okay to criticize a founder.

I swear, sometimes you'd think we were covering the goings-on among seventh-grade cliques.

It all started when newly minted VC Hunter Walk tweeted, "Wow, who knew 40,000 developers use the @foursquare API..." Pretty innocuous! But it seems Mr. Rabois couldn't contain a smart remark, and so began the sequel to his Twitter brawl with @dens from back in November:

We assume it's the months of rumors about a possible down round that has Mr. Crowley so sensitive.

Buddy Media founder Michael Lazerow chimed in (on his LinkedIn blog), tut-tutting Mr. Rabois for daring to shit-talk a founder. Mr. Lazerow complained that "founder-on-founder verbal violence seems to be at an all-time high" and then proceeded to take a swipe at Mr. Rabois, pointing out that as helpful as he is, well, he's never started a company, which apparently makes him a second-class citizen in the Valley:

Keith was the Art Garfunkel to the Paul Simon of each of his companies. The Barney Fife to each of his Sheriff Taylors. Change Entourage to Entrepreneurage and Keith is Turtle to the Vincent that is Jack Dorsey.

Art Garfunkel? Way harsh, Tai.

Business Insider added some real value with a recap that confused Square and Foursquare, as well as mixing up Mr. Walk and the Observer's own Hunter Walker. Whoopsie daisy!

@Dens ducked out to run a half-marathon, as one does, but that doesn't mean Foursquare's honor was simply there for the besmirching. Anil Dash strapped on his suit of shining armor and pointed out that Mr. Rabois is on the board of Yelp and maybe he ought to bring that little tidbit up when he criticizes Fourquare:

Whatever your thoughts on the future of Foursquare, surely we can all rally around of keeping hashtags like #hatersclub out of our tech talk?

(Photo: Amazon)

Front Page Printed Pages of the Internet Just before taking stage at SXSW to talk his crowdfunded Internet 2012 tour, Alexis Ohanian emailed out a link to his new book, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed.

Since you asked, Mr. Ohanian, we dig the cover, but "without their permission," sounds a little iffy in the context of Reddit's Creepshot scandal, no?

Last week, we wondered when Mr. Ohanian was running for office already. “Alas no,” he emailed back. “I'm not going to rule anything out but right now I'm having too much fun (and impact) from my place in the private sector.” However, as the Young Entrepreneur Council founder Scott Gerber pointed out, Mr. Ohanian does happen to own the domain name ohanian2013.com.

Just checking in 525,600 minutes. How do you measure a year in the life of a (defoundered) man? Earlier this week, on the anniversary of his abrupt departure from Foursquare, cofounder Naveen Selvadurai posted a recap of the last 12 months. Don't expect to learn much about what he's been working on, though. Think more in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights and cups of coffee.

Mr. Selvadurai lost the founder 15; he traveled; he saw his family and friends; he traveled some more; he read books; he went to Disney and rode Space Mountain many times; he learned to drive stick; he went to the Olympics. "I always kept saying 'year 30' wouldn’t be such a big deal and that it’s just like any other. it turned out to be so much more and i’m grateful for that," he reflected.

Oh, but he might have picked up a bit of a gloomy streak, too:

this is how the war will start - "ohio man charged with shooting robot" singularityhub.com/2013/03/04/ohi…

— naveen (@naveen) March 6, 2013

(Photo: Instagram/Dens)

So (proto)typical Google Glasses are now just popping up everywhere, it seems. The latest sighting comes via Digg community manager Veronica De Souza: "SPOTTED: A skater bro wearing google glass in bedstuy. Who are you?" she tweeted. Betebeat welcomes any intel as to the identity of this mystery man, so we can pester him until he lets us try his specs on.

Maybe Dennis Crowley knows the guy. The Foursquare cofounder recently, "lost my Google Glass virginity."

(Photo: Instagram/Fred Benenson)

Spotted! Our friends at Quora--the erudite agoraphobe’s answer to Yahoo! Answers--never got the memo that print was dead. Thus earlier this year, the site opted to publish a 441-page hardcover book called “The Best of Quora,” featuring 131 primers. Forbes called it a “fascinating, enchanting, exasperating book,” and wondered if the inquiring minds of Quora were “too clever” for their own good.

Author Clive Thompson and Kickstarter’s Fred Benenson got to thumb through the pages and see for themselves when they spotted a copy “in the wild” at Lil Frankie’s Pizza in the East Village. Mr. Thompson said on Instagram that he received an advanced copy this week. As Bill Couch, a front-end product engineer at Twitter explained in the comments, “[Quora] issued them as gifts to the authors of those answers at the end of last year, then provided it as a PDF online.”

Guess the question about Betabeat didn’t make the cut.

:( Guys, we think Tumblr really hurt Shelby.tv cofounder Reece Pacheco feelings. He recently published a long, sad blog post announcing, "Tumblr I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down." Nothing says heartache like LCD Soundsystem! So what set Mr. Pacheco off? He logged into Tumblr the other day, as he does regularly, and found himself subjected to a laborious, drawn-out attempt to get him to follow more blogs. Then, he was given a few hovering tool tips--on a service he's been using for years.

He did not like this!

Thing is, I wouldn’t be so frustrated with you, Tumblr, if I didn’t love the platform so much. If you were just some other social network, I’d say “Do whatever you want. I don’t care. Your only value is your scale.”

But that’s not you, so don’t treat me like some number. You know I’m active. You know I’m a creator more than a reblogger. Treat me that way and show me some added benefit, rather than just trying to get more mindless engagement out of me.

Sorry, Reece--those revenue targets aren't gonna hit themselves.

Mmm, cake Happy birthday to GroupMe cofounder Steve Martocci, who got quite the gift in celebration. There's a Vine of the festivities, but here's a teaser:

Looks like a party, alright!

High fashion Huffpo cofounder Kenny Lerer is well known around Silicon Alley as an investor. But did anyone know he is, as his son Ben Lerer put it on Twitter, "fcking fashionable"? Mr. Lerer the Elder recently appeared in a New York Times profile of Laurent DeLouya, "the amiable proprietor of a hair salon that over 50 years has amassed a following that is kind of a cultural Core Club." Papa Lerer told the Times he'd "walk over hot coals for Laurent,” and apparently Mr. DeLouya performed baby Ben's first haircut at age 3.

We yearn to someday achieve that kind of rapport with a stylist.

User #279 Your user number can be a figure of pride among the tech set. If it's low enough it signals that you're an early adopter, and makes you feel cool, which is kinda sad if you think about it cuz like, look at your life.

"I'm User No. 279," humblebragged New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton in a recent Twitter back and forth. "I got @dens drunk and [sic] Nick Denton's house and made him give me a beta account."

Whatever works.

Into all that drama jumped Decoded Fashion with an exceedingly practical idea: a fashion hackathon where industry insiders tell techies what's actually lacking in the market. In other words, rather than the umpteenth street style photo-sharing apps, how about the next Fashion GPS, a digital tracker for samples and look books used by designers like Lanvin, Dior and many, many more.

The hackathon, which took place at AlleyNYC in Midtown last weekend--Betabeat was one of the judges--began with a panel of designers like Rachel Roy and Uri Minkoff, founder and CEO of Rebecca Minkoff, who stressed the need for innovation in areas like managing manufacturers, analytics tools around a product's success rate, and getting the right items in front of the right customer when they're ready to buy.

Decoded Fashion, which was founded in 2011 by Liz Bacelar, acts as a liaison--introducing startups and emerging technology to leaders in fashion and retail through events and discussions. Stephanie Winston Wolfkoff, the ringmaster of Fashion Week, is Decoded Fashion's co-executive producer. The organization is supported by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the hackathon winners were chosen based on a number of factors, including how well the hacks would further the mission of the CFDA. (Top prize: $10,000 and CFDA will build your app.)

There's been some grumbling about corporate hackathons of late--and the "fine line between engaging and exploiting." But in a Series A crunch, Decoded's set up seemed like a call for rationality, at least to us. There were also plenty of familiar Silicon Alley faces by way of tech bona fides. Mentors included Startup Bus conductor Mike Caprio, Andy Hagerman from The Design Gym, and Status Chart founder Chris Kennedy, whom we named one of the most poachable players in tech in last Spring.

In addition to getting the right balance of fashion vs. tech and startup folks vs. industry big wigs, the crowd of about 300 was also markedly diverse.

"I’ve been to many hackathons before. I’ve never seen a fashion hackathon with that much diversity of thought--this diversity of race, with this diversity of gender," a 7-months pregnant Ms. Bacelar told the crowd. "We’re 40 percent female here today and I’m so so proud. We didn’t recruit for that, it just happened. It shows how technology is changing and I’m so proud of it so thank you."

And, seriously, you've never seen such a well-dressed bunch of bleery-eyed coders. We spotted knee-high shearling boots, two shimmering gold numbers (one worn by Tumblr fashion evangelist Valentine Uhovski--a fellow judge) and plenty of leathah.

Unlike your traditional hackathon, the five finalists chosen had from Sunday until the grand finale, which will happen on the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week with a keynote from Zach Posen and Dennis Crowley. Yes, like QR codes, apps are about to make their big tent debut.

So despite concerns about vaporware, judges were looking for ideas that would present well in a couple weeks--with advice from mentors like Kevin Ryan along the way. (Notable considering some of the chosen few sounded like future Gilt Groupe acquisitions.)

The finalists included Coveted, a universal checkout platform for brands on Tumblr. That one is already in operation, as one of the hackers demonstrated by buying a $250 pair of sunglasses live during the demo. Fashion Dashboard, which analyzes how consumers are interacting with your brand, was another winner for displaying how Prada store windows are popular on Instagram and Foursquare check-ins on H&M. 42 was chosen for its attempt to measure and personalize in-store experiences, as opposed to offline ones. Then there was Avant-Garde, which wants to help with excess inventory by looking at the social media activity of customers on your mailing list. Lastly, SwatchIt is an app designed to help with inefficiencies of sourcing material from, say, rural parts of India so that designers can send questions and get a yes or no response to a database of artisans.

You can check out more information about the projects via Hacker League.

The five finalists will be whittled down to three before the 14th. Now we just have to figure out if there's anything in our closet that won't get us kicked out of the tents.

(Screencap from Bloomberg TV)

There's rarely been a shortage of speculation on the future of Foursquare, the New York startup everyone loves and nobody knows how to monetize. Just last month, a story in The Wall Street Journal and had us wondering whether Apple might kick the tires on Dennis Crowley's company as a way to buttress its iOS Maps.

Now from the World Economic Forum in Davos comes reason to wonder whether another Silicon Valley giant might have its eye on the Silicon Alley starlet.

In an interview with Bloomberg Television's Erik Schatzker, Yahoo CEO Mariss Mayer said that location-based services are among the most exciting in the technology industry:

"I think there are amazing things you get to see all the time. All kinds of amazing technologies on mobile. When you think about what it means to be location sensitive…Some of these are very basic in terms of things like being able to check in, so there's Foursquare, but if you actually know where people are and where they check in, there are all sorts of sophisticated and interesting thing you can go on to do. So I think there are amazing technologies like that."

Might a New York City shopping trip be in the works?

BuzzFeed also Instagrammed a photo of Mr. Peretti donning said shirt and drinking what appears to be a beer. YOLO, we suppose.

(Photo: Instagram)

New Year, New Guilt On January 2, even as many attempted to turn over various new leaves for 2013, Anil Dash had to go and remind us all that despite our best Code Academy-inspired intentions, barely anyone actually learned to code last year. He tweeted, "So did anybody learn how to program after signing up for New Year's resolution lessons last year?" Judging by the @replies, there are quite a few people no closer to Javascript mastery than they were 12 months ago.

If you're looking for some other promises to break this year, Get Instinct and Greatist will want to teach you how to be healthier and play guitar.

Jammin' The improvisational warhorses of Phish played several shows at Madison Square Garden this week, including New Year's Eve--and it seems several local techies turned out. Among the attendees: Aviary cofounder Michael Galpert, IA Ventures' Ben Siscovick, and GroupMe cofounder Steve Martocci, who found this appropriately psychedelic photo on his camera the next day:

Trippy!

Missing in action was CrowdTap marketing director Ben Kessler, who took to Twitter to lament his absence: "Wish I caught Phish this run but I’m sooo tired. Maybe we’ll get some Hampton shows?" Nothing like being sunburnt and baked.

International Relations When last we checked in with Art.sy, a high-brow Pandora for fine art, the well-capitalized startup was hosting a beachside barbecue at Art Basel attended by Lenny Kravitz and a rompered, dancing Demi Moore. Things took a much darker tone today, however, when the company announced that it had permanently moved its URL from art.sy to artsy.net to avoid potential outages related to the civil war in Syria.

In a press release, Art.sy said, "The move comes following an outage with our art.sy domain, which was down for a period of 36 hours this week due to an issue with DNS servers in Syria." As has been widely reported, the authoritarian Syrian government is behind recurring Internet blackouts in an attempt to suppress activists.

In response to questions from Betabeat, a representative said all of Art.sy's servers were in the U.S., but added, “We also did not want a domain that could be construed in any way as supporting the Syrian government.” Why not the more logical Artsy.com? The site “was not available,” said the company spokesperson. Whoever is sitting on the domain must be asking a pretty penny, if  investment* from the likes of Wendi Deng, Eric Schmidt, and Jack Dorsey wasn’t enough to tempt them.

Art.sy also announced that it was "simplifying" its name to Artsy. Perhaps startup names with a dot.suffix are going the way of CamelCase as well?

Chapel Check-In It’s not just your high school friends updating their Facebook statuses to “Engaged" lately. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley proposed on a dark stretch of beach to his longtime girlfriend Chelsa Skees this week. “She said yes!” he tweeted. And check out that rock:

(Photo: Business Insider)

*Disclosure