(Photo: Zazzle)

"What's a joke about Hoboken?" we mused aloud upon sitting down to write this post. "What isn't a joke about Hoboken?" shot back our news editor, without missing a beat.

"Fast Company thinks Hoboken has its own tech scene on its hands," we responded.

"When have they ever had anything on their hands?" retorted The Observer's real estate reporter.

"If I write this I'll never be able to go to Hoboken," we considered.

"As if you'd want to," spat the same reporter.

We weren't just soliciting jokes about Hoboken for the fun of it. In fact, we were doing so for a very important reason--namely, a Fast Company piece published recently that rallies around Hoboken as a burgeoning "hip and young and hungry" tech beacon.

As evidence of the Garden State's growing startup presence, the author offers up the popularity of the New Jersey Tech Meetup, which has swelled to almost 2,000 members, as well as the recent successes of New Jersey startups like Audible and Diapers.com.

Hoboken is just a 15 minute train ride into the city, which means residents can have easy access to Manhattan's amenities while enjoying roomier apartments and the myriad comforts of the suburbs (Chili's!).

But not everyone was thrilled with Fast Company's quick and dirty write up of the New Jersey Tech Meetup event. "You seem to have missed the 'heart' of this meetup. Innovation!" wrote a commenter named Susan Newman. "From the mingling, to start-ups to guest speakers, what we are all learning is what each other is doing in New Jersey and what the coolest new ideas are out there being developed."

New Yorkers have a tendency to look down their noses at Hoboken, which has probably been described somewhere at some point as Manhattan's red-headed stepchild. But--due to their proximity to industries like, according to Fast Company, "pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and manufacturing"--the New Jersey Tech Meetup offers a different breed of entrepreneur, one that those used to attending the massive New York Tech Meetups might find refreshing. Betabeat even attended a New Jersey Tech Meetup in Hoboken a few months ago, and found it quite delightful.

"What's another joke about Hoboken?" we asked the thinning newsroom.

"I don't know, my friends from high school live there," replied one Betabeat reporter.

Hoboken: The Kind of Place Your High School Friends Live™

While reading the piece, we found we were at a loss for words. Several frenzied Skype messages were exchanged, each more convoluted than the last. It was best, we finally decided, to communicate in our native language in order to truly do this piece justice: it was best to communicate via GIFs.

Upon seeing the photo, in which Jesse Draper is wearing only one shoe, one Draper son has his collar dramatically popped and Papa Bill looks like a salt-haired version of David Caruso:

"If you're connected to the Draper family, you simply must attend the Valley Girl holiday party, a bat mitzvah-type blowout at Atherton's posh country club, the Menlo Circus Club."

"That's the thing about growing up in Silicon Valley. No one's famous and no one's rich . . . because everyone's famous and everyone's rich," says Anderson. "So no one realizes, Oh, not everyone celebrates ski week?"

"My brother got bored in the middle of an interview with Eric Schmidt and put the camera down on the ground," Jesse says of the show's early days.

His next venture: trying to turn Silicon Valley into its own state. "I've already written up a constitution," he says.

Mr. Dannen (airbnb.com)

If you're looking to make some extra cash, Airbnb can be an easy alternative to finding another weird Craigslist roommate or moonlighting as a rich dude's arm candy. But if you're going to go the room rental route, you probably want to make sure that doing so doesn't violate your lease--or else you might just find yourself kicked to the curb (or at least served with a restraining order).

Consider the case of Chris Dannen, a Brooklyn resident who claims to have made upwards of $20,000 in nine months from renting out his two spare bedrooms on Airbnb. According to a missive he penned for Fast Company:

On Monday, June 4, about 10 days before my cofounders and I planned to push our first product into the iTunes App Store, a stranger in a blue blazer served me with a restraining order filed by my landlord.... Attached to the order was a complete printout of my Airbnb listing and all my reviews, included as evidence I had violated clauses in my lease. (Some leases, I have since learned, have evolved specific language prohibiting tenants from listing their pads on vacation-rental sites such as Airbnb.)

We feel badly for Mr. Dannen, but we can't help but wonder how this came as a shock to him. Aren't lease clauses always the catch with Airbnb, and why you should only use it if you own a place, or if your listing is suuuuper stealth?

Let this be a warning to all of you cash-strapped, enterprising Brooklynites with space to spare: read your lease before signing up for Airbnb.

Mr. Mankins (Google+)

Crounty, a new venture from Fast Company CTO Matt Mankins that takes its name from a portmanteau of "Crowd" and "Bounty," launched on Wednesday for one simple reason: Sometimes you need help from the crowd to locate talented programmers or trusted subletters, and sometimes the things you need help with are so important that you're willing to pay a bounty for them. Crounty is a platform that lets you do just that.

Mr. Mankins told Betabeat that the idea for Crounty was inspired by a project out of DARPA called the Red Balloon Challenge, where DARPA offered $50,000 to the team that could locate five red balloons randomly placed throughout the United States. The winning team, based out of MIT, used the power of social networks (and cash bounties) to find all of the red balloons.

"They agreed to split the $10,000 [per balloon] so that the person who finds the balloon gets $5,000, the person who referred them would get $2,500, the person that referred them would get $1,250 and so on. By using that strategy they were able to find and locate the balloons the fastest," Mr. Mankins told Betabeat by phone. "Crounty applies that principle and gives users that incentive to perpetuate a message closer to where they think someone can fulfill it. So in the case of looking for a job, I know someone who is a Drupal developer or programmer, so I’m more likely to send a message to them because they might actually know someone who could do a job. Crounty is a mechanism for doing that."

In his role as CTO at Fast Company, Mr. Mankins found it incredibly difficult to hire programmers, so he and his team hacked Crounty together in about 24 hours. Crounty is not officially affiliated with Fast Company, but Mr. Mankins is employing the tool to help hire new personnel at the magazine.

What's impressive is that this project, which initially came together over one weekend, already has a functioning business model. According to the site, "Once you confirm that the bounty has successfully been claimed, Crounty divides your $100 bounty up as follows: $50 goes to the person that gave you what you were looking for, $25 went to the person that referred them, $12.50 went to the person that referred them, and so on, with the remainder going to the Crounty.com service."

Crounty has only been around for two days, but Mr. Mankins said people have already signed up to utilize the crowd to rent out a Boston condo and find a set of very specific lawn chairs, among other things.