Mr. Karp (via livestream.com)

Marco's confident Tumblr made the right call: "This is clearly what David believes is best for his product. On such big decisions, he hasn’t been wrong yet. This time, though, I don’t have any doubts." [Marco.org]

Dave Winer, on the other hand: "When you sell your company, no matter what promises were made, you sold it. It's theirs now. They will do what they want to with it. Promises don't matter." [Scripting News]

Sounds like former Tumblr president John Maloney is just irked he's being left out of the story. [Twitter]

Fab is reportedly raising a round somewhere in the ballpark of $250 million to $300 million, pushing the company's valuation north of a billion dollars. [Wall Street Journal]

The Senate, meanwhile, says Apple dodged, oh, about $44 billion in taxes. [Politico]

Pre-announcement jitters.

Fab famously got traction once the cofounders pivoted from gay Yelp to design-focused flash-sales site. But now that flash sales are no longer the darling of the tech industry, Fab is moving on. Hence the company's announcement at its kindergarten-like West Village HQ last night: "We're going to do a little pivot again," CEO Jason Goldberg announced.

"We're redesigning Fab as the world's number-one design store," he said. "We're going from flash sales to design store, and we're going there in a really big way."

That means a revamped website, products sold exclusively on Fab, brick-and-mortar stores, and the acquisition of a German company offering customizable furniture. 

"The vision that we had back in early 2011 was, we said we can be the global brand synonymous with design for years and years to come," Mr. Goldberg explained. "We said right then and there we want to build something really massive."

"We said we can create the Ikea/Amazon of design," he added. Don't be shy, fellas.

To that end, Mr. Goldberg had several announcements:

First off, the company has wholly redesigned its website and mobile apps. Search is better, and thanks to the addition of departments and other ways to sort products, it's now much easier to go looking for a particular item. (No more paging through the entire furniture category on a fruitless quest for a green rug.) They've added designer pages (opening up the possibility of marketplace-style selling) and an outlet, as well.

Not that this is an entirely new development. Two thirds of the company's daily revenue already comes from search and browsing.

Second: The launch of "Exclusively Fab," a line of products unique to the site. That might be products designed in-house, capsule collections from particular designers or lines of products where Fab has taken on the upfront costs of manufacturing.

Third: Fab has purchased the German company MassivKonzept, which makes customizable furniture. Fab will be launching the offering in the U.S. as Designed By You. So if you've got a weird corner in your house that needs an odd length of table, hold tight.

Fourth: Fab is opening actual brick-and-mortar stores, starting by converting a MassivKonzept showroom in Hamburg. (So Monocle!) "We're going to test a number of different physical retail environments," Mr. Goldberg said.

"There will be more than one Fab store this year, and there will be multiple formats," he said. "We're going to learn how to do this by trying it a number of different ways."

Also, Fab is launching in France.

What Mr. Goldberg didn't announce was a new round of funding. All he'd offer is a tease: "When the time does come for us to raise money--and we will raise money in the next few months, to build out our global footprint--we'll be looking for investors to help us take Fab and spread this brand everywhere we want to take it."

We assume that means: Get ready to write a really, really big check if you want in.

Let's hope this means more wacky pet products.

Fab is reportedly raising over $100 million, at a $1 billion valuation. That's a jump from the $600 valuation the last time the company raised. [TechCrunch]

Netflix now has (just barely) more American subscribers than HBO. [Variety]

"Apple Inc. is facing an identity crisis on Wall Street." Sounds dramatic. [Wall Street Journal]

Matthew Keys, who was indicted in March for allegedly conspiring with Anonymous to hack the L.A. Times website, has been fired from his job at Reuters. Apparently they didn't like a parody Twitter account he created, or his tweets about the hunt for the marathon bombers. [Atlantic Wire]

There's a startup that wants to disrupt raising your hand in class, FYI. [GigaOm]

Yep. (Photo: Fab.com)

Fab.com has made more costume changes than a drag queen. Launched in 2011 as a social network for gay men (name: Fabulis), the company then transformed itself into a flash-sale site selling arty farty tchotchkes. Now, Business Insider suggests, Fab might be gearing up to design its own products.  According to a blog post written by Fab cofounder Jason Goldberg, details of the pivot have not yet been publicly released but it will be "gradual."

According to Business Insider:

"It will be 100% towards delivering the best customer experience in the world for discovering everyday design. We’ll offer even more unique products supported by an even better experience," wrote Mr. Golberg in December.

Business Insider speculates that it's moving toward an in-house model of designing, making and selling its own products. Bradford Sellhammer, the company's other cofounder, told Fast Company that it wants to become "the world's alternative to Amazon and Walmart."

"The only way to compete in the world of Amazon is to sell things that Amazon doesn’t sell,” Shellhammer said. “We’re building a brand, and part of that is bringing the brand to our own line of products.”

Fab said all will be revealed at a press event on April 29, but signs of its gradual change are seeping out. but signs of its gradual change are seeping out as the company held a design competition earlier this month. The company held a design competition earlier this month, and contestants--who consisted of designers and students--were asked to create product ideas for immediate judging. Winners will have their concepts sold on Fab.

Maybe one concept can be designing a sustainable business model.

If there were a word cloud for recent ecommerce reports, it would be shaped like a mushroom cloud with "over-hyped" "implosion," "froth," "down rounds," and "suck it, America, Europe does it better," all in extra large font.

So we weren't expecting to hear that JackThreads, the men's ecommerce site acquired by Thrillist in 2010, had its best revenue month ever in February, even bigger than typically high-selling holiday months. Growth in new members was up 366 percent year-over-year and double the growth in number of new users joining in November and December of 2012.

The company also boasted the highest number of app downloads in February. Mobile revenues were triple from November, with sales from the app counting for 40 percent of JackThreads February revenue. But the most important metric--as that imaginary word cloud can attest--was the fact that JackThreads did it while maintaining its highest gross margin month ever as well.

"I can feel the heat," heat-seeking CEO Ben Lerer told us by phone, "Frankly, for a company that's seven years old, it's a little unexpected." Mr. Lerer raised a $13 million Series A last year (after growing Thrillist to 150 people on just $1.7 million). He attributed the surprising success to a number of little tweaks and improvements, rather than one magic bullet.

"You figure out make a bet and you win one, you lose one. But they all harmonically came together," he said, adding, "I don’t know if that’s English." Improvements were made on the website (adding a search function and boosting speed) as well as in mobile development, SEO, speed of order fulfillment, greeting customers the right merchandise when they arrive on the site, better photography, and buying deeper into certain categories.

One popular item seen around the upwardly mobile men of Soho? A seasonally appropriate "ninja hoodie." Rebrand it as a snuggie for your neck and Betabeat might consider throwing down for a few.

Of course, if there's any niche that's getting beat up worse than ecommerce, it's digital media, i.e. the Thrillist side of Mr. Lerer's business. But he brushed off concerns that Jackthreads gains means that he'll eventually be running an ecommerce company, rather than a "media group."

"The lifetime value of a user," he said, "is monetized through both media and ecommerce. Ultimately, it's going to mean a larger audience for our advertisers to reach as well, but that doesn’t work in real time." They're sure trying. Register for JackThreads and you'll get a pop-up noting the city you're in and wondering if you'd like to sign up for relevant recommendations from Thrillist.

We asked the ever-amiable Mr. Lerer why he thought there was so much skepticism about ecommerce recently. "There has been a tendency online for ecommerce companies to buy revenue," he replied. Companies like Gilt Groupe and Fab.com, he said, have spent a lot on marketing. The idea is, "I can make no money on my users, but they can buy a whole lot of stuff from me," he said, noting, "You don’t raise $150 million to put it in the bank. You raise it to spend it." Only after they scale does the focus turn to making money. "Gilt is an example of that. I think Gilt will pull it off, but not without some pain to get there. And Fab is on a similar trajectory."

Mr. Lerer opted against that route. "Maybe we were wusses," to try growing a more comfortable clip rather than aim to be an industry leader, he said, but, "our margins feel a lot more like businesses that are private label than companies that are also selling large quanitifes of third party goods." Despite unintentional misses, like early foibles running a shipping promotion without understanding how it might impact margin, "We don’t give the store away."

JackThreads has evolved over the years from its target 18-to-24-year-old demo, he said, and been able to sell at a higher price point, incorporating more athletic brands and tailored items. "Our users are a little bit less price sensitive and a lot more focused on curation and brand discovery," he said. "If you’re gonna be known for being super cheap, you better stay super cheap." You can find Self-Edge denim on JackThreads, but at the same time, they're not selling $250 pairs of jeans.

Mr. Lerer said JackThreads recently did a sale on vintage Patagonia items and is incorporating more home goods. "But without the Gilt approach of: JackThreads Home! JackThreads Taste!"

Mr. Ohanian (Photo: Twitter)

r/findmeaparkingspace ParkWhiz, the Chicago company that enables users to find and reserve guaranteed parking spaces before reaching their destination, today announced that it has closed a $2 million Series A round of funding led by Hyde Park Venture Partners. Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian also took place in the round along with Hyde Park Angels, Amicus Capital, and others. In a press release sent to Betabeat, the company said that since its launch in 2006, it has driven $10 million in parking revenue to parking operators and provided access to 3 million parking spaces nationwide.

Fab Goes To India Jason Goldberg, the founder and CEO of Fab, took to his personal blog yesterday to announce that his company had acquired new funding. Times Internet, the digital arm of The Times of India Group, India’s largest media company, has chosen to invest in the company. Mr. Goldberg notes in the post, "As part of this investment Fab will be working with Times Internet to explore and execute on our India market strategy in the coming years." Since launching in June 2011, Fab has raised over $150 million from investors.

Tumblr For Your Tablet Tumblr just updated its Android app to support use on tablets that run on Android. So if you've taken some cool black and white pictures of ladders next to lakes, you can now upload them straight to your Tumblr with ease. Thank the artsy lord.

Disruption Gets You On The Nice List Harold DeLucia, a 27-year-old New York City public school teacher from Astoria, Queens, and Josh Lanzera, 29, a construction foreman from the upper West Side, are the founders of NYC Trees Direct, an online Christmas tree ordering service. The two New Yorkers saw a open market and went for it, investing $6,000 of their own money into the seasonal business.

Go Back To School NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in Downtown Brooklyn announced this week that the New York State Education Department has approved its curriculum. Now that New York believes it's a real school, the University is now accepting applications for the fall semester of 2013. CUSP's website has the application up now. Please post videos of yourselves opening your acceptance letters to YouTube.

The September App Bloglovin', the blog reader for fashion and lifestyle blogs, just launched its first iOS app. The company says that it has 1.8 million members as of this December. The company raised $1 million back in July in seed round funding from investors such as Betaworks, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Bruce Jaffe, Hank Vigil, Fritz Lanman and others. In a press release sent to Betabeat, Bloglovin' cofounder and CEO Mattias Swenson said, "Our goal with our seed-round was to build an fantastic app that would bring people an optimized and highly visual reading experience. So it’s great to finally see it in the app store!”

Bosses Are Really Happy Charley Polachi, a partner from Polachi Access Executive Search recently polled tech CEOs and found out that they all think the futures is extremely bright. 85 percent of respondents had a neutral or positive outlook for hiring in 2013, 79 percent said they had a neutral or positive outlook for hiring from 2013-2017, 84 percent had a neutral or positive outlook for expansion in 2013, and 81 percent had a neutral or positive outlook for expansion from 2013-2017.

Learn About Your New Hood Spun is a news discovery app that shows you stories based on your location. It was recently launched by the same team that made Broadcastr and Electric Literature. It could definitely be useful to fresh New York transplants. AOL gave the new version of the app a nice tour and it looks pretty cool.

School Mascot Is The Rose H. Bloom, a subscription based flower delivery service, is expanding its efforts to educate its employees. Right now they have the SEED (Startup Education and Entrepreneurial Development) Program, that shows current employees to make a big local impact. But starting this week, the company is using a new program called H.Bloom University, a six-month program that educates current employees in leadership and business.

The Customer Is Always Right Gripevine, a site where you can complain about customer service and review companies, just launched an updated version of their site. It now includes ratings and reviews. The same team also launched Resolution 1, a tool for businesses that lets them manage feedback from multiple sources at once.

Here's a novel idea for flexing your consumerist impulses on Cyber Monday: organize your shopping by a company's cap table. For Cyber Monday, First Round Capital, which specializes in ecommerce, has set a site that shows off exclusive deals from portfolio companies like Birchbox, Chloe & Isabel, Refinery 29, Hotel Tonight, UrbanSitter, TaskRabbit, DogVacay, One Kings Lane, and more.

Honestly, we're surprised New York techies haven't already set up a buy local site that encourages only shopping at startups for Christmas.

"The real power of [the site]," First Round partner Phineas Barnes told Betabeat, "Is the ability to reach out to the tech community for people who care about the First Round brand." Many of Birchbox's subscribers "are probably not in the tech community, but plenty of people in the tech community would enjoy Birchbox or giving it as a gift," he added by phone during a car trip back into the city.

In a blog post introducing the holiday site, First Round managing director Josh Kopelman noted portfolio companies' experimentation with the ecommerce business model like subscription (Birchbox), curation (Fab), and vertical integration (Warby Parker). "These companies," he wrote, "have now go on to to raise over $350,000,000 in follow-on capital and will be shipping hundreds of thousands of products this holiday season to customers all over the world."

Mr. Kopelman was also careful to note the gifting site "isn't meant to replace our annual holiday video." Considering First Round went the Rebecca Black route last year, does that mean we can expect a "Gangnam Style" parody for 2012? "Maaaaaybe," said Mr. Barnes.

(Photo: flickr.com/classicchanelhandbags)

Healthy Hills? Everyday Health, the SoHo-based and more successful version of WebMd, has acquired EQAL, the creators of Lonelygirl15 and the owners of LaurenConrad.com. Everyday Health's ad revenue grew 40 percent in the first quarter, compared to WebMD’s decline of 20 percent. This coincides with Everyday Health's announcement that they're moving beyond YouTube and launching a version of it's web show "Recipe Rehab" for ABC stations around the country.

Diller Brings Back Dog Ben Silverman's multimedia entertainment studio Electus, part of Barry Diller's IAC, just sold ten episodes of a new show starring Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife Beth to CMT. "Dog and Beth are not only great television characters," said Electus CEO Chris Grant, "They are the best bounty hunters in the world, and this show is a natural evolution of their life story.”

Exit This Way Indeed, which describes itself as "the #1 job search engine worldwide," has been acquired (for a rumored $750 million to $1 billion price tag) by Recruit Co. Ltd, a large-scale Japanese HR company with over $10 billion in revenue. Rony Kahan, co-founder of Indeed, says that half of the site's traffic comes from outside the U.S and that they see this buyout to further that.

Thrillist on the LES Jackthreads, owned by Thrillist, just launched Goodale's Fall 2012 collection. Swedish singer/songwriter Sebastian Mikael modeled the clothes at the Lower East Side's Hotel Chantelle. There are a few days left of the heavily discounted sale. What, no Asher Roth seasonal playlist to shop by this time?

Shop Local Smallknot, the site that lets backers help small businesses get off the ground in exchange for rewards, had a pretty busy couple of weeks. They launched their first three Los Angeles businesses this week. The company partnered with Accion USA, a microlending company, to help fully fund A7, a Brooklyn-based shop that makes handcrafted leather camera straps. The team at Smallknot is also hard at work at a new product that will help small business owners get the word out about their products.

But It's So Dead At Night The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) launched a competition called “Take the H.E.L.M.: Hire + Expand in Lower Manhattan." The contest invites all companies that plan to either open or expand office space in Lower Manhattan in the next 12 months to apply for the opportunity to win a grand prize of $250,000. Twenty finalists will also will also receive $20,000 each. David Tisch and former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt will join Reddit's Alexis Ohanian as judges to pick the winner.

Will Hack For Food NYU's Courant Institute will be holding a hackathon this weekend with over 300 hackers already planning to attend. It starts this Saturday at 2 p.m. and goes until Sunday at 2 p.m. Appetude will be providing free food at the event for sleep-starved participants.

Mongo Matriculation 10gen announced today that it will offer free online training courses for its parent company's key product, MongoDB. The courses are open for registration now--there's one for developers and one for administrators. Lead MongoDB developer Dwight Merriman will teach the first class that starts in early October. Learning MongoDB is apparently the second most wanted skill companies are looking for right now.

Très Fab Custom design shop, Fab, just expanded the site's European version, which already has 2 million members. These updates essentially make the site just as fully functional as the U.S. version. There are already 200 million Fab employees overseas. The company says that Fab Europe is on pace to represent about 30 percent of the company's 2012 sales.

Changing That Ratio Women 2.0, a media company that offers resources for aspiring women in tech, just announced its partnership with Google. Their first effort together will be pumping up Women 2.0's signature event, Founder Friday, a monthly networking meetup. Detroit and Mexico City will host the event on November 16th, followed by Sao Paulo, New Orleans, and Moscow later on. Mary Grove, head of entrepreneurship outreach at Google, said, "We're looking forward to hosting these important gatherings in Google offices around the world and working together to help female entrepreneurs turn their ideas into innovative, sustainable businesses." No word yet on whether the gift bag includes What Would Marissa Mayer Do? bracelets.

In the throes of creation. (Photo: Courtesy of Quirky)

Late Friday afternoon, the Chelsea offices of Quirky--past the High Line and across from the Porsche dealership--looked like they'd been abandoned in a hurry.

The front desk: unmanned. Tables in the spacious central meeting area: covered in papers but utterly empty. In search of our assigned guide, Betabeat wandered inside the startup, which marries the wisdom of the crowd with the technical expertise of a team of in-house engineers to create products sold in stores like Bed Bath and Beyond and Lowe's. We made our way past a glass-enclosed workshop and conference rooms with brick artfully exposed, before finally stumbling upon signs of exhausted life among the open floor plan of the back office.

This wasn't mere Friday flakiness. Most of Quirky's 70-plus employees had been up all night, hacking away on an insane attempt to develop a line of accessories for the new iPhone 5 in the course of just 24 hours. Typically, would-be inventors must pay a small fee to have their ideas evaluated by Quirky's community of creative and experts. However, as a special event to get the new vertical off the ground, submissions were temporarily free of charge and thrown into a special high-speed development process.

Community members submitted 1700 ideas all told, and the Quirky team had narrowed them down to just 15 ideas for development. Everything had to be done by Friday night, when CEO Ben Kaufman was scheduled to fly the prototypes to their manufacturers, so that the final products could go up for sale on Fab.com by Wednesday morning.

The number of visible coffee cups suggested it had been a long night.

Typically, Quirky releases two new products per week. Until very recently, those could've been almost anything from shower caddies to spatulas. But the rush to develop new iPhone accessories is part of Quirky's new mission: to launch a series of new verticals on the site and for the company's product line, starting with Apple accessories.

Ultimately, Quirky will roll out a new product each week in each of its new verticals, as well as the two "general" releases. The company just raised a $68 million Series C to help them along.

The aftermath.

The entire office wraps around one glass-enclosed workshop composed of two connected spaces. The dirty room contains the power tools, and is typically covered in sawdust. Goggles and WPA posters urging workplace safety hung side by side on the way. Then, down a pair of stairs, is the clean room, which holds the 3D printers, sewing machines, and the like. As we descended, PR honcho Jaime Yandolino paused and, surveying the paper-littered tables, admitted, "The view from here just shows the aftermath."

The larger of Quirky's 3D printers--nicknamed "Bertha"--was originally installed when the company was based on Bleecker and Broadway. She got her name because she didn't fit up the stairs, requiring Quirky to close down Broadway and "haul this big girl up the side of the building," said Ms. Yandolino, like a piano in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The night before, there'd been 200 people bustling about the office, for a special edition of Quirky's standard Thursday night evaluation meetings. "Invention ambassador" Andrew Erlick--who, prior to Quirky, developed and sold a device for laser light shows to haunted houses--explained that each of the chosen ideas for Apple accessories had progressed through its own development process. Features and characteristics were hashed out. Then, once refined, concepts were handed over to a designer to execute.

Quirky's standard development process is a little less hell-for-leather. Normally the rate of submissions is more like 1,500 per week. The most promising are upvoted and evaluated by members of the Quirky online community, then evaluated by the company's in-house experts.

Mr. Erlick walked Betabeat through a massive wall of products, separated out by their various stages of development, from exploration (the very earliest stages of tire-kicking) to pricing (where the product is fleshed out and its marketability is evaluated) to production (where Quirky starts really investing resources). The production phase is when engineers “come together and start talking about what we could do with them, to the minute details, every little inch,” he explained. From those discussion, the team at Quirky builds a prototype  in-house, which might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Once the prototype gets the sign off, it's onto one of Quirky's manufacturing partners and, ultimately, onto store shelves.

The bottleneck, it looked like, lay in the pricing section. "As we grow bigger and bigger and we sign on more retailers, those products will hopefully find a home," Mr. Erlick noted.

Quirky is hoping that its new verticals-based approach will be a better way to connect experts with producs they actually give a crap about. "We'll have professionals that have worked in that field before, you know--if you have a person who's working in kitchen products, engineering and designing, you want that person to give their opinion and surface his best ideas."

And, of course, the contest leaves Quirky with quite a backlog of invention ideas to feed the beast that is that new line of Apple accessories--especially considering that charger connector is now completely different, rendering many older items so much garbage. "All of those ideas and every idea that ever gets submitted to Quirky, we have in our 'vault,' our archive," explained Mr. Erlick. "If a retailer comes to us and says, 'Hey I really want this,' we could look at our archive and see what's out there."

United at last. (Photo: Quirky Blog)

Quirky isn't resting on the laurels of that recently announced $68 million series C. Apparently hellbent on setting a new land-speed record for collaborative product development, the company is partnering with Fab.com to bring a brand-new line of Apple accessories to market by roughly the time the latest devices ship later this month.

Hold on to your hats and synchronize your watches, tinkerers, because it's going to be a crazy 48 hours.

Anyone interested in participating has until tomorrow afternoon to submit ideas (for free) to a new Apple Accessories section of Quirky's site. Submissions will be evaluated at 7p.m. EST to determine which inventors proceed to the next stage, a design workshop with "Quirky designers and members collaborating round-the-clock to design and refine each invention pick into a final Quirky product."

So a hackathon, basically.

On Saturday, CEO (and onetime Apple accessories entrepreneur) Ben Kaufman will take whatever's developed to Quirky's factories, which'll churn out a final product for sale on Fab.

We assume that, on Sunday, Quirky's community of creators will rest.