Ms. Baggio (twitter.com)

We first noticed The Roger Magazine when The Huffington Post included it as a source in a roundup of interesting startup office spaces. We were confused about why we'd never heard of it-- the online magazine, distributed via Issuu, is gorgeous and professional looking, even on our cracked, dirty Macbook screen.

Turns out we'd never heard of it because it's actually a small side project from four New York City women, all of whom have full time jobs, and who work on the magazine in their free time. You'd never know that just by looking at it, though--the whole thing looks so damn professional.

The Roger hinges on a simple mission: we spend the majority of our days at work, so why do we shy away from developing a communal identity, one that is defined by where we work and who we work with? "Everybody works," reads the mag's mission statement. "Our mission is to transform the way you think about it. At The Roger, we believe that what you do is as important as the poise and style with which you do it."

The magazine focuses on the interior design of interesting office spaces in New York, and their first two issues have prominently featured many startup office spaces, including Yelp, Betaworks, Refinery29 and Etsy.

"I'm an investment banker, I work at Tumblr--those are communal identities," Ms. Baggio told Betabeat via phone. "So the intention was never really to be focused so much on startups--it just so happens that those types of companies are the ones taking the overall paradigm shift in the workplace much more seriously by putting a lot of resources into it to showcase who you are, how to make employees happy."

The magazine is definitely bootstrapped--there are only four people on staff, two of whom write all of the articles. Ms. Baggio works full-time at First Round-funded startup Axial Market, a marketplace for privately held companies. She produces The Roger in her spare time along with friends Alexis Romanoff, Sam Deitch and Joanna Curran. The team of four women fund it entirely themselves and work out of the Nola Picture offices, a commercial production company in the Flatiron. "They're wonderfully generous to us and we’re grateful for it," said Ms. Baggio.

Of course, we couldn't let Ms. Baggio off the phone without asking her to divulge some of her favorite New York startup spaces.

"Obviously a space like Horizon Media is just incredible," she said. "I think their space is just breathtaking from a design standpoint. Big Fuel has a great space because you can’t really come in and claim a space. Most offices are still reserving some personal space, be it a walless cube or a desk, but Big Fuel is the first one that we encountered where you literally walk in every day and it’s up to you to pick a spot."

As for office design tips, Ms. Baggio says that the open and collaborative layout is very much "in" right now, but it's important to have alternatives to that environment so that employees can feel like they're part of a team, but also have privacy. In open layouts, it's important to have quiet spaces where employees who can't work with a lot of noise can escape to, as well as designated rooms where employees can make private phone calls, she said.

"The devil is in the details," said Ms. Baggio. "I think some of the cooler spaces take the time to put in their own little sense of character. Things like having blue jelly beans because everything in the office is blue--tiny, quirky things that really make a difference and feel like you’re in a space that belongs to you and your team. It sort of draws everybody in together and makes the space more than just the workspace and really a place for a team."

Hey Observer overlords, think we could get some jellybeans up in here?

Chad Miller, actor, writer, Rabbit

At midnight on Tuesday, TaskRabbit, the real time peer-to-peer marketplace that lets you outsource your dirty work to nearby "Rabbits," announced that it raised a eye-popping $17.8 million series B round led by LightSpeed Ventures, the Sand Hill Road firm that also backed DoubleClick.

How thoughtful of TaskRabbit! Now Zaarly doesn't have to be the only player in the do-it-for-me market with funding in the tens of millions. (In October, Zaarly announced a $14 million round led by Kleiner Perkins.) Betabeat recently profiled both firms in a feature about the rise of the convenience economy.

TaskRabbit's existing investors like Collaborative Fund and First Round Capital, also participated in the round, along with one very notable newcomer: investment bank Allen & Co., the same firm Zynga used to help underwrite its public offering. Cue the TaskRabbit IPO speculation in 3, 2, 1 . . .

The company, which launched in 2008 but didn't close its series A round (for $5 million) until this May is certainly growing quickly. Last month, founder Leah Busque told Betabeat that the site was getting $4 million in requested activity a month, adding, "All our key metrics have tripled since the first quarter of this year so we’ve got a ton of momentum right now and we’ll continue to be aggressive about rolling out to new markets."

As Betabeat noted in the feature, TaskRabbit's head start in the market, and its emphasis on services over goods, has helped the startup establish a culty, feel-good culture, in the same vein as other Collaborative Fund companies like SkillShare and KickStarter. Although it remains to be seen whether TaskRabbit and Zaarly are a viable alternative to pervasive underemployment, both companies tout that in their pitch.

In a company blog post, Ms. Busque and her CEO Eric Grosse discussed how they plan to spend that $17.8 million:

Our new investment will help us respond to this overwhelming demand and allow us to bring the service to those who have been clamoring for it as a solution to their employment and economic situation and their hectic, crazy lives. So, where are we headed? Seattle, Portland, Austin, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, DC, Denver, Philly (just to name a few)… get ready for some easy living!

To ensure the most positive user experience in all our markets, we will also be focusing on making our product and marketplace even more incredible that it is today – that includes adding some cool new features and capabilities. For example, we will adding features that allow our users to more effectively manage their lives through a seamless Task posting process. We will also be building and enriching features that support the mobile experience across multiple platforms. And, as always, we will continue to refine our best-in-class safety features to ensure our community’s security.

To support our aggressive roll-out and growing community, we will be accelerating our recruitment and hiring. Yeah, that’s right! All you engineers and designers out there, we are looking at you! If you’re looking to work on a product that is revolutionizing the way people collaborate with others in their community, reach out to us.  As we’ve said before, we are bringing the neighborhood back. Now, we want to bring more talented folks on board to help us realize this vision. If you are interested, please send your resume to careers@taskrabbit.com.

We've reached out to Ms. Busqe to see what these developments mean for TaskRabbit's New York City outpost, and we'll update you as soon as we hear back.

Funding makes Mr. Welde happy.

Smartling CEO Jack Welde just closed a $10 million Series B round from existing investors (U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and First Round Capital) as well as a new face: IDG Ventures.Venrock's David Pakman is already on the company's board, now joined by Steve Krausz from USVP. Clients like Foursquare, IMVU, Scribd, and SurveyMonkey use Smartling's cloud-based platform to create and maintain multilingual versions of their websites and mobile apps. The platform allows for combing different translation methods such as crowdsourced, professional, or machine learning.

“The Web is, by definition, worldwide, so every site and app should be multilingual. With this funding, we’ll continue to optimize our elegant, easy-to-use solution for this historically complex and costly technology process," Mr. Welde said in a press release. But there's a more practical, monetizable motivation than just democratizing the web for the good of the global internet. According to the release:

"Every online business, regardless of size, wants to increase its “Y” variables over time: web traffic, users, donors, sales, profit. With more than 70 percent of Internet users – or 1.4 billion people – claiming a language other than English as their preferred and primary language, there is a massive opportunity to increase “Y” with these new audiences."

Or as Smartling's website says: "Translate your website. Double your market." Now, to a more pressing translation issue: Who can help us translate this article from The Marker from Hebrew to English? Based on the photos of tall buildings and Michael Bloomberg, we think it's about the New York's tech scene. But we can't say for sure.