Have we got the phone number for you, Mr. Woods! (Photo: Wikimedia)

Here’s A Tip. Are you travelling outside the U.S. soon? Are you afraid of getting publicly humiliated by an Austrian waiter because you rounded his tip up to the nearest 5 percent, not 10? Well How Much Should I Fucking Tip has a goddam solution! Just type the country or city of your choice into the search bar and get the proper percent to tip at restaurants, at hotels, and in taxis. There are also convenient notes on countries with sneaky service charges, or specific parking rules. But don’t exit your browser until you’ve typed in “North Korea.”

Bye-bye Burner Phone. A CallingVault number is the phone equivalent of your exclusive-to-Craigslist-Casual-Encounters email address. The virtual phone line provides you with a second phone number  to send/receive texts and calls from your cell without revealing your personal one. The website swears to vault-like protection of your most important conversations. Tiger Woods, we’re talking to you.

Movies, Yeah! Exclusive actor and director interviews, little known facts, and interactive quizzes are making regular movie watching seem just plain vanilla. For $4.99 per 48-hour film rental, you can get meta with your favorite flicks instead. YEAHTV.com streams curated movie content around “iconic” movies like Scream and Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2. “Two months of in-depth research goes into every film curation,” so fans like us could learn about Lawrence Teirney’s on-set diva outbursts and discover firsthand if Robert Pattinson sparkles in the sunlight.

IHeartTraffic. Now you can take a break between bass drops on your personalized EDM station to listen for tidbits about Mayor Bloomberg or for more information about how it’s already raining. IHeartRadio is expanding its radio access to things of importance. Listeners can now request geo-targeted local news, traffic, and weather updates via the “Add-Ins” feature.

Helping Journalists Help Themselves. Visual Revenue has been acquired by Outbrain in an endeavor to help editors optimize their online content sharing. Outbrain aggregates data to increase site traffic, while Visual Revenue uses analytics to advise media companies on strategies that send viewers to flocking to their websites. Now blogs know where to send their thank you cards.

Poached! Jennifer Barrett is leaving the women and teens digital network at Hearst to become vice president of editorial and product for DailyWorth. Is this a new venture to combine fashion and tech? Betabeat has been looking for the ideal shade of lipstick to compliment their cellphone…

Welcome to our Brunch Party. What do techies talk about at the brunch table? Themselves mostly--and innovation. Elepath's Jake Lodwick, Beth Comstock of GE, Bre Pettis of Makerbot, and robot designer Carla Diana get together at SXSW to interview each other.

So much for Facebook's anticipated external ad network, at least for now. The social media giant is halting testing on a program that would use social data to place ads on third-party sites. [AllThingsD]

The New York Stock Exchange touted its role in the startup community, noting that 52 percent of 2012's tech IPOs listed on the Big Board, and and even showing enough tact to refrain from mentioning that Facebook's high-profile IPO debacle wasn't one of them. [NYSE]

Elepath is set to launch Moonbase, a plug and play service that lets users create web animations—without learning how to code. [The Verge]

Alas, the terrible things that didn't happen to Flavorpill digital media developer James Reston as he skated his longboard to work. [The Onion]

Here's wishing you an ff-ing happy holidays. [David Teten/ff Venture Capital]

Map-maker, Map-maker, Build Me a Map! If Tim Cook's mea culpa wasn't enough to demonstrate how hard Apple is scrambling to fix its iOS 6 mapocalypse, then how about its last ditch recruiting techniques to find Ruby developers? Mojo Talantikite, a cluster engineer at Engine Yard in New York City, said he (and a number of his technically talented friends) have been hit up by Apple recruiters recently.

The recruiter's LinkedIn inquiry mentions "Maps" specifically:

"We are looking for a passionate Ruby coder to have a HUGE impact our Maps, Flyover, Geo and Siri teams in iOS. I've read about your work on Heroku's infrastructure. Is it a good time for you to chat?"

My, What Colorful Balls You Have Startup perks tend to veer toward the infantile. Between the snacks, slides, and nap pods, managers might as well try to wipe your nose when you sneeze. But newly-married Elepath founder Jakob Lodwick actually committed, procuring the ball pool of your childhood dreams for Elepath's San Francisco "studio." At least that's what we thought based on his recent Instagram offering. However, on closer inspection, an antimated gif from Elepath's blog reveals the ball pool is less Chuck E. Cheese and more kiddie pool. Things on the Internet, it seems, may be smaller than they appear.

Cussing For a Cause Last week Tech4Obama hosted an evening in New York with serial entrepreneur and current CTO for Obama for America Harper Reed. Next to the guest list--heavily studded with Silicon Alley stalwarts like Soraya Darabi, Rachel Sklar, and Betaworks' Andrew McLaughlin and investor Pedro Torres Picon--the invitation loudly warned "THIS EVENT IS CLOSED TO PRESS." Now we know why. Apparently the bearded Mr. Reed has quite the mouth on him. But doesn't he know reporters love that shit?

Colorblind We're still not really sure what Color was launched to do, but it got $40 million in funding to do it. The app subsequently became the archetypal overfunded startup representing tech's hype bubble (even inspiring a fake pitch deck!). Color treaded in the wave pool for a bit before pivoting to a new idea altogether.

Now, TechCrunch reports that Color may be experiencing an executive level shakeup, with sources saying CEO Bill Nguyen will be taking a step back from from day-to-day operations at the flailing company. In his stead, an "executive committee" has been assembled to take over his responsibilities.

Mr. Nguyen apparently hasn't shown up to the office in two months, leading sources to conjecture that he's "probably either in Tahoe or Hawaii.” (Ugh.) An ominous Quora post from January of this year wondered why Color had shuttered its Palo Alto office, but CNET journalist Casey Newton responded that the company said they'd "hung some paper up to cover its windows while they do some work inside." Hmm, engineers do have some weird working habits.

Of course, a question about why Mr. Nguyen left Color immediately cropped up on Quora and was quickly answered with a cringe-worthy response. "After the disastrous pivot from the initial (fairly brilliant, but poorly implemented) photo sharing concept, it was really only a matter of 'Nguyen, not if'."

Sigh.

Digging K-Pop Looks like Digg cofounder Kevin Rose is officially a fan of the "Gangnam Style" hype. Mr. Rose posted a photo on his Instagram of a little bobble head Psy doing the infamous horse dance, sharing a photo of his Psy laptop decal shortly after. Try to ignore the awkward comment about "open condom style," below.

(Photo: Instagram)

Business Tattler Henry Blodget proudly outed Verge's editor-in-chief today, tweeting, "Josh Topolsky reads Business Insider!" But the real question is: does he hate read it?

As always: 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

Mr. Lodwick, Mr. Watts, and Ms. Cantrell (Photo: Instagram/Mike Bodge)

Love must be in the sticky, humid, sweltering air this season. After three Facebook mafia nuptials in a succession, New York techies are taking their turn at the altar.

The New York Times covered Rachel Sterne's East Hamptons wedding to LiveStream founder and CEO Maxime Haot twice in the past two months, once in a trend story about live-streaming your special day. (Yes, they live-streamed it. No, you couldn't watch without a password.)

However, Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick, perhaps burned by the public's response to previous displays of affection, avoided the paper of record's carefully combed-over Wedding section.

(Photo: Facebook)

Besides, isn't that what Instagram is for?

Earlier this week, Mr. Lodwick used the app to document the wedding ring tattoo he got at Three Kings in Greenpoint, noting that "It felt like they were sawing my finger off with a steak knife." On Saturday, guests tweeted photos of Mr. Lodwick's wedding to dancer and choreographer Robin Cantrell, director of the Indelible Dance Company. Mr. Lodwick directed a number of videos of comedian Reggie Watts, who officiated the ceremony by asking the bride, "Do you promise to accept his eccentricities and reject his bullshit?"

Last December, we broke the news that Mr. Lodwick had raised around $1.5 million from prominent New York investors like Chris Dixon, Lerer Ventures, David Karp, Bre Pettis and David Tisch without an idea for a product. Earlier this month, Mr. Lodwick offered some details about the company's two projects: Debris, which he describes as an IRC with images, and Elevision, a platform that lets users discover and watch films and boasts a rather stunning logo.

Skeptics of Mr. Lodwick's funding-before-idea concept take note. Elepath has already used its "Darwinian framework" model to axe development on an iPhone app called Cult that was supposed to help users make social plans. "It sort of worked, but while we were building it, we saw 30 other apps come out that did the same thing, and not get much traction. And even though Cult was different, it wasn’t different enough to stand out (or even to make US happy)." AMEN.

Ms. Sterne's ceremony concluded with fireworks on the water. Mr. Lodwick offered guests a parting gift of Mast Brothers chocolates wrapped in what appears to be an illustration of the couple naked. Artisanal Brooklyn's version of a tiger-monkey photo booth?

Who dreams of electric sheep

Vimeo co-founder and internet eccentric Jake Lodwick has just raised around $1.5 million from a gaggle of big name New York tech types including Chris Dixon, Lerer Ventures, David Karp, Bre Pettis and David Tisch. The interesting part is, he doesn't have an idea for a product, at least not yet.

"I just don't think it makes sense to have a product idea, THEN raise money, THEN build a team," Mr. Lodwick told Betabeat over Gchat last night. "People need to trust each other and build up momentum as a team and once we have that, we can drop everything and focus on a great product idea."

The pitch to investors was about Mr. Lodwick's theory of the most fertile ground for big inspiration. "Most great tech companies have a ripe team before they do something great. HP, Apple, Yahoo, Google, there's always a story about a great team or duo that was working well together and stumbled on their product."

We asked if this would be something like betaworks, or perhaps what Kevin Rose is doing with his mobile lab, Milk. "People have asked me if it's an incubator or a 'labs', and I don't really know what to say. I don't know exactly what those words mean, I'm just going to improvise."

As to what kind of product ideas he wanted to play with, Mr. Lodwick was coy. "It's called mydunks.it. It's better than NBA jam. It's a universal 'like' button for the web, but instead of 'likes' it's 'dunks.'"

We were suspicious. "Actually we're working with some of the best cartoon-realistic animators on the web. It's one part foursquare and four parts onesquare," Mr. Lodwick said.

So basically, there was no idea yet, just the focus on the perfect team? "It was fun raising money with no cofounders or product ideas," Mr Lodwick concluded. "Entrepreneurs always get distracted by fundraising, so I just did that part first."