This is what comes up when you Google image search "Butt-shaped cloud." (Photo: Drawception.com)

All innovationed-out following too many humblebraggy tweets about the tacos at SXSW? Feel like you might puke the next time you hear the word "panel?" This might've been the year of the hardware startup, but we're sure there were scores of bright-smiling marketing people in matching startup t-shirts preaching the gospel of the cloud.

Luckily, some hardworking developer named "panicsteve" has posted a delightful Chrome extension on GitHub that will forever rid you of the evilness of "the cloud." The "cloud-to-butt" extension does exactly what you think it does: every time the phrase "the cloud" appears in your browser, the extension automatically replaces it with the phrase "my butt." Genius?

Fellow engineers have already jumped into the fray with similarly amusing pull requests. One user suggests that every time "cloud storage" appears it's automatically replaced with "butt storage." Another wants to change "/.aaS/" to Ass, naturally.

Innovation, indeed.

Startup singlet?

Do We Really Need More Blogs? For the last three years, Quora has been the site for headsdown homebodies to ask their fellow coding brethren about what it's like to go outside. But the company has recently announced two new developments that show a shift of attention to writers. The question site now has plans to include blogs. Quora has also announced the release of a rich text editor for their mobile app which should help Quora users ask bolded crazy questions while they're on the go.

Haute Hack Fashion and tech don't usually speak the same language, which is why all eyes are on Conde Nast's Decoded Hackathon this weekend. Designers and developers will be heads down at the Alley NYC in Midtown February 2-3 to create an app that lines up with the Council of Fashion Designers of America's mission to grow the fashion industry. The prizes are pretty sweet. The winning teams get $10,000 in API and product prizes and the chance to get their app launched by the CFDA. The top three finalists will get an introduction on stage at the NY Tech Meetup and a chance to present on the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week after a keynote Dennis Crowley. Maybe the Fuelband will make its first runway appearance?

The New Flash Mob Proposals This is the first job offer we've heard of delivered via GitHub pull request, but we suspect it won't be the last. After honing his coding chops at the Flatiron School, Adam Jonas created a fan site for Carrot Creative, a Dumbo marketing agency, to show off his skills with Facebook open graph. Carrot responded by forking his project and turning it into an offer site, complete with an embarrassing photo of Mr. Jonas in a singlet. That's so Startup!™

Give Us More Specials Please Foursquare just released a companion app to its ever-changing mobile app for business owners. The company explained in a blog post that with the app's capabilities, "managers can create a Foursquare update and easily cross-post it to Facebook and Twitter at the same time. They can also use the app to see recent check-ins, turn specials on and off, and look at business data." Seems like a really good timesaver for a small group of people. Servicey!

Get Free Tickets Now FinTech Hackathon will be hosting its first hackathon aimed at the global community. The focus of the competition will be financial technology. It's going to be held in New York on the weekend of April 6th. 10gen, Betterment, Bloomberg, Caplin, Dwolla, are all among the list of sponsors. The first 20 developers to sign up at www.fintechhack.com will receive free tickets to the event.

Brooklyn Girls Dreams GOOD Ada Ng, a Brooklyn resident, is one of three finalists in GOOD's quest to add a member to their tech team through a contest called "Coding For Good." Her project was a hack of the Google Maps API and the Instagram API to create an interface where the user's travel time counts down to reveal an Instragram photo from the destination. All of Brooklyn is rooting for you Ms. Ng!

Always Be Closing (on Mobile) Online design shop Fab just released a new mobile app.  Not that they need the help, the company says 30 percent of sales already come from its iPhone, iPad and Android apps, compared to 10 percent for most ecommerce companies. Fab’s mobile customers also purchase 20 percent more items per order than its web customers and have a higher lifetime value. "It is not an understatement to say that Fab is a breakout mobile retailer," founder and CEO Jason Goldberg enthuses. Stop it, you're making Zuck jealous.

Primetime Ponies Back in November we introduced you to your new addiction: Derby Jackpot. The site, which lets you bet real money on live horse races, was like a fever dream Mark Pincus once had about updating off-track-betting for the casual gaming set, except it was launched by three brothers working out of General Assembly. Today the site is open to the public and includes enhanced chat features and a Facebook connection. Along with the grand opening, Derby Jackpot is also now accepting all major credit cards, but you'll still have to provide the cigarette smoke and pitchers of beer yourself.

Fancy's fanciest fan. (Photo: wikipedia.org)

Ceci N'est Pas Une Sandy The affordable-art-dealing website 20 x 200 is now selling a print of a NASA satellite image of Hurricane Sandy. All proceeds from the sale will go to the Red Cross to help relief efforts. The striking image was taken at 9:02 a.m on Sunday, approximately 10 hours before NYC’s MTA shut transport service down throughout the tristate area. Hang it above your couch of a constant reminder of the grander universe and just how much you appreciate your wifi.

More Money, More Fancy Fancy, Pinterest's cooler older brother, has raised just over $26 million in additional funding. New investors include Celtics owner Jim Pallotta, Twitter and Square cofounder Jack Dorsey and Edward Gilligan, the vice chairman of American Express. This also ruins rumors that Apple was planning to acquire the company. No word yet on what their favorite user, Kanye West, thinks of the new influx of cash.

Santa Set to Make a Lot Of Web Boxes This Year Boxee, the New York rival to Apple TV and Roku, is planning to sell its $98 Boxee TV in Walmarts all across the U.S. The new device will be sold in 3,000 Walmarts. This is obviously a huge boost for the company, which sold 120,000 units last year. And unlimited DVR is about as American as Apple pie.

Zynga, What? Zynga may have picked some slightly unpronounceable Gibraltar-based startup to launch its foray into real-money gaming. But that hasn't hurt Betable's chances of becoming the Spotify of online social gambling. The platform, which is backed by investors like Path's David Morin and TechStars' David Tisch, lets developers build real-money games on its platform. Today, Betable announced that it will be lending its services to Slingo, Digital Chocolate and Murka. The company also just helped Big Fish launch a casino app called Big Fish Casino that lets U.K. users gamble with actual money.

NYC vs. SF, Finally Settled If you're ever stuck trying to decide whether to decamp to the Valley, then Versus IO is the site for you. It uses an algorithm to compare two alike things and show you points and counterpoints in a sparse layout. It currently can compare cities and a variety of tech products (think iPhone 4 vs. iPhone 5). But what about the immortal conundrum of pizza vs. Chinese?

Shiny New Doors Glassdoor, a California-based jobs site, has raised $20 million in a new financing round led by DAG Ventures. The round also included Benchmark Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Battery Ventures. The company told GigaOm that traffic to Glassdoor has reached 13 million monthly uniques and that revenue has increased 175 percent.

Get Your Game on GitHub has just announced a monthlong gaming hackathon on its blog. The GitHub Game Off will take place during November, and entrants will have to create a game looselybased on the concepts of forking (or forks), branching (or branches), cloning (or clones), pushing or pulling. There are five new iPads with Retina displays (64GB wifi models) available as prizes.

Big Conductor Conductor, an SEO platform, has just announced a big raise that it's calling "the largest venture capital round of funding in SEO technology." The company managed to scoop up $20 million, led by Investor Growth Capital. FirstMark Capital and Matrix Partners also participated.

Vimeo Workout Plan Reece Pacheco's video startup Shelby.tv, which is still in beta mode, has teamed up with workout site Nerd Fitness to create Nerdfitness.tv. The new site has a scrolling feed of videos to keep you motivated and to teach you how to work out. Let's hope no one gets caught up watching too many videos and forgets to go to the gym.

Dream It, Do It, Microsoft It Startup accelerator Dreamit Ventures has partnered up with Microsoft to give its startups access to the software development tools and networking of the BizSpark program. DreamIt also is planning to select one company from each of its programs to receive additional benefits as part of the BizSpark Fellow program. Fellows will get access to Microsoft expert engineers and evangelists to help build out their products. Qualifying startups can also access up to $60,000 in Windows Azure services over two years. FlagTap, an online capture the flag game that aims to increase web traffic, has been chosen as the first fellow of the program.

Ms. Higashi (Photo: GitHub)

If you're not having much luck with traditional dating sites and you're not a hardcore Star Trek fan, what's a smart single gal to do? If you're Noriko Higashi, a programmer at a social gaming company, you post a request for a boyfriend on the social coding platform GitHub. Gotta play to your target audience, right?

Ms. Higashi, a 30-something software engineer living in Tokyo, posted the file "boyfriend_require" to GitHub with the hope that she might be able to find someone who shares her goals and interests. Naturally, as an exacting programmer, she’s listed a fair number of standards that she hopes a potential mate can live up to, a few of which are listed below.

1. Someone who has at least 5 friends from elementary school, high school, or university that they still keep in contact with.
2. Someone who has professional relationships, which have lasted at least one year, with over 20 people (this includes relationships on Facebook).
3. Someone who can speak with his neighbors (regardless of their age or gender) for at least 30 minutes.
4. Someone who enjoys interacting with young children.
5. Someone who likes eating vegetables and natto.
6. Someone who does not become jealous of rich, beautiful or famous people.
7. Someone who does not compare himself to others, gloating or feeling a general sense of superiority.
8. Someone who can tolerate social gaming companies like Zynga, GREE, or Mobage.
9. Someone who prefers Mac/Linux to Windows.
10. Someone who does not compare me to my mother.
11. Someone who sympathizes with the work of Peter Drucker and who has adopted some of his "seven principles".
12. Someone who plays at most only 1 hour of videogames a day, or at most only 30 minutes of TV.

For interested engineers, there are additional caveats:

1. Someone who writes beautiful code--it makes me cry tears of joy. (Required)
2. Someone who maintains their own server (Required, Linux preferred)
3. Someone who will let me help them maintain their own server (Required)
4. Someone with public repos on Github (Required)

Despite the specification that interested partners meet at least 28/30 of her requirements, Ms. Higashi's post has inspired a fair number of responses. (We've reached out to her to ask if she's managed to meet any promising mates due to the post.)

It seems her request may have a few bugs, though. One user filed a pull request to translate the doc into Chinese. Under "issues" with the repo, a number of potential suitors noted Ms. Higashi's lack of profile photo. When she denied the request, one user replied, “wooo~~~~this bug gets no fixes?!”

Another user pointed out that some of her preferences may fundamentally conflict:

(Photo: Reddit)

Update 4:35 p.m.: Reddit appears to be slowly coming back up; Betabeat can access the front page but still gets a "Reddit is Down" alert when we click over to specific subreddits.

Update 4:15 p.m.: Sites using Amazon Web Service's EC2 are experiencing major network issues. After an issue with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud cropped up around 2 p.m. this afternoon, other services such as Amazon's Relational Database Service and ElastiCache began reporting problems. Amazon claims it is working on a fix, but major sites such as Reddit, Foursquare and Imgur are still being affected by these issues.

Office drones and journalists hungering for a web-friendly scoop are out of luck right now: Reddit, the massive link-aggregator site responsible for the vast majority of content on sites like BuzzFeed, is down. @RedditStatus tweeted the following: "The site is down right now. It appears to be a network-related issue. We are investigating." It was inaccessible when Betabeat tried to log on, serving us only that coyly smiling alien and the note "Reddit is down."

Upon further investigation, it appears that Amazon's cloud hosting service, EC2, is experiencing issues. A slew of startups began tweeting that they were experiencing network issues, including GitHub, Heroku, GameFAQs, Imgur, Turntable, Coursera, Airbnb, Flipboard, Branch, Foursquare, NakedApartments and MongoLab. Minecraft is also down, so people on the Internet officially have no idea what to do with themselves.

Maybe we should all like, go outside or something?

Amazon Web Service's health dashboard indicates that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has "degraded DBS performance in a single Availability Zone:"

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia):

11:11 AM PDT We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.

11:26 AM PDT We are currently experiencing degraded performance for EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. New launches for EBS backed instances are failing and instances using affected EBS volumes will experience degraded performance.

Amazon Relational Database Service (N. Virginia):

Small number of RDS database instances are experiencing connectivity issues in a single Availability Zone less
11:03 AM PDT We are currently experiencing connectivity issues and degraded performance for a small number of RDS DB Instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
11:45 AM PDT A number of Amazon RDS DB Instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region are experiencing connectivity issues or degraded performance. New instance create requests in the affected Availability Zone are experiencing elevated latencies. We are investigating the root cause.

Amazon ElastiCache (N. Virginia):

11:39 AM PDT We are currently experiencing connectivity issues for ElastiCache Cache Nodes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk (N. Virginia):

11:06 AM PDT We are currently experiencing elevated API failures and delays launching, updating and deleting Elastic Beanstalk environments in the US-East-1 Region.

11:45 AM PDT We are continuing to see delays launching, updating and deleting Elastic Beanstalk environments in the US-East-1 Region.

As one Twitter user put it, "Learning that 'degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes' means, in AWS speak, 'sorry, the Internet is broken.'"

TechCrunch notes that the AWS outage may be affecting Heroku, which in turn is affecting other sites: "All services hosted on Heroku’s virtual private servers are still down at the time of writing. GitHub, imgur, Pocket, HipChat, Coursera and others are affected."

We've reached out to Amazon and will update when we know more.

Amazon's dashboard says, "We are working on recovering the impacted EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region."

Is your site experiencing an outage? Let us know in the comments.

Update:

Amazon dashboard says:

"We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting EBS volumes in a single availability zone in the US-EAST-1 region. The AWS Management Console for EC2 indicates which availability zone is impaired.

EC2 instances and EBS volumes outside of this availability zone are operating normally. Customers can launch replacement instances in the unaffected availability zones but may experience elevated launch latencies or receive ResourceLimitExceeded errors on their API calls, which are being issued to manage load on the system during recovery. Customers receiving this error can retry failed requests."

This is a developing story. You can refresh for updates.

Isn't everyone at Oktoberfest, anyway? (Photo: flickr.com/maggiejane)

The government of Germany is urging citizens to stop using Internet Explorer--at least until a security hole you could drive a Volkswagen through is fixed. But who goes back to IE once they've switched, even for a couple of days? [Reuters]

If you must patent troll, it's important to get a few basic technological details correct. GitHub and Rackspace are different entities. [Wired]

It's official--tech companies including Amazon, Yahoo, and Facebook are joining forces to form The Internet Association, their very own lobbying shop. [TNW]

Do not shell out $1,600 on eBay just to have the iPhone 5 a few days early. That would make you a chump. [CNET]

A visit to the Ace Hotel: "'I’m just trying to figure out who those people are and do they have jobs,' said Chip Morrow, a lawyer from Memphis, staying at the hotel while trying a prescription drug case. 'I mean, I see laptops everywhere but I can’t figure out what everybody’s doing.'" [Marketplace]

TC Disrupt NYC 2012

The News In News It's a big day for Qwiki. When last we heard from the company, Qwiki was turning info from Wikipedia and elsewhere into multimedia visual presentations. After a brief period in San Francisco, the company has returned to New York City and adapted its technology to the news business. Today comes the announcement of the "Qwiki Creator," which turns web content--video and static pages--into a rich content presentation. Qwiki's partner for the launch? ABC News. Not too shabby.

Shop Right New to digital shopping list Ziplist: a free Meal Planner, a queue designed to act as a "Netflix for things you want to make sometime soon," the company says. Users can save recipes to specific days with an eye to when they'll have more or less prep time, then they can add the necessary ingredients to their shopping list. The planner can also be synced with family members' calendars. The planner, by the way, is the company's first big featured released since its Conde Nast acquisition.

Accepting applications The inaugural class of healthcare accelerator Blueprint Health is off and running. Organizers report that teams have already raised $4 million in seed capital. But time and tide wait for no entrepreneur, and so applications are now open for the second class, which launches July 23. Early-stage healthcare startups in search of mentors and money should investigate.

Park It Now available for download in the App Store: A social network for parking. Yes, you read that right. KurbKarma aims to disrupt parking by allowing peer-to-peer coordination, enabling users to find and even reserve available spots. The company is launching in San Francisco and New York, naturally.

Call Me Maybe AskYourUsers.com, which connects consultant-seeking businesses with pros sourced from LinkedIn for quickie consultations, had some announcements at TechCrunch Disrupt. It's launching in public beta, with a new private audio chat function.  Plus, the company has released some stats from its private beta and would like you to know that 25 percent of their "micro-consultants" are in director or exec-level positions, and 30.5 percent of them are currently making at least $110,000/year. Spiffy!

Look Out My Window Oh hey, look what Github made: A brand new native Github for Windows application. It'll run on Windows XP, Vista and 7, as well as, when it eventually comes out, Windows 8. Check it out.

Today, In Portlandia Austin has SXSW. Why shouldn't have Portland have XOXO? Some folks have turned to Kickstarter (but of course) to raise money to throw the city an arts and technology festival celebrating "disruptive creativity."

A Cool Mil Airbnb has just upgraded its "Host Guarantee," which previously promised to cover up to $50,000 in damages. The startup now says it will now cover up to $1 million worth of havoc wreaked. Their word is even backed by Lloyd's of London, a name that has long screamed, "we are hundreds of years old and by God we mean business."

Trippy We can't not mention this: Pitchfork is developing something called Soundplay with Intel, as what looks to be a promotion for the Intel Ultrabook. The site has commissioned five "immersive, music-based online games," based on tracks from Pitchfork-approved musicians like M83, Cut Copy, and Matthew Dear. Here's the first one, Street Song.

Got some startup news? Perhaps a new feature or an upcoming event? Let us know at bbroundup@gmail.com.