Congress Fail Whale (Photo: blogspot.com)

API Rate Limit Exceeded Back in April of 2010, the Library of Congress promised to add every tweet up to that date to its famous archives. But like anyone following too many people at once, it's just caused one big mess. The library now has an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets totaling to a compressed 133.2 terabytes. Now the librarians of Congress are planning to work with Gnip, the company currently organizing all of the data, to develop a plan for archiving all of the tweets.

Apparently there have already been more than 400 access requests to the Twitter archives from researches doing work on citizen journalism and political communications. Someone needs to teach the librarians how to make lists as soon as humanly possible.

Schools Get Cash The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has just pumped a bunch of cash into New York's tech universities. It has awarded a total of $15 million to Columbia University, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and High Tech Rochester to create three Proof-of-Concept Centers dedicated to helping inventors and scientists turn their high-tech, clean-energy ideas into successful businesses. Columbia will form a new accelerator, several upstate schools will work together on a new development center, and NYU-Poly will work with CUNY to create PowerBridge, an applied science research institute that focuses on challenges specific to an urban environment.

Drop The Ball, Up The Traffic The customized mobile site publisher Onswipe had lots of reasons to pop champagne on New Year's Eve. The company says that it has reached 44 million unique visitors in total for 2012 and now is reaching more than 10 million monthly active uniques on iOS devices. The publisher also saw a huge bump in traffic after people opened their gifts on Christmas morning. Most notably, in the two days after the holiday, total unique visits on its sites jumped 22 percent and Kindle Fire unique visitors increased 75 percent.

Get Glasses, Give Glasses Diane von Furstenberg is teaming up with the insurance company VSP Vision Care to run a contest on Pinterest to help benefit the NYC Mission Society. Every time an image gets repinned from the VSP Pinterest Board, a gift certificate for an eye exam and glasses will be donated to the New York City Mission Society. These repinners are in luck too--when a user repins that image, they are automatically qualified to win a pair of DVF sunglasses and a $500 DVF.com gift certificate.

Move, Drop, Shake Unpakt, the site that lets you compare movers, continued its “Innovators on the Move” series. It features tech entrepreneurs reflecting on recent moves in their lives. This week's video features VHX founders Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson talking about the move to its first offices in Brooklyn.

Innovators on the Move: Casey & Jamie from Unpakt on Vimeo.

Baby You're A Firework (Filter) The favorite photo sharing app of the Williams sisters, Mobli, just celebrated 2013 in the best way they know how--by adding two new filters to its app. Both of them are New Year's Eve themed. One has a fireworks overlay, while the other has "2013" glittering in gold. Siiiick.

Live Like 'Countdown' Just last month, Gojee was the site to go to for recipes based on what's in your pantry. But it's recently launched a slew of fashion verticals which include landing pages for lingerie, heels, dresses, jewelry and handbags. The recipe sites are still up, so there's no need to panic about your dinner just yet. This makes living your best Beyonce life ("All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time") all that much more possible.

More Style Buying Speaking of buying clothes based off the pretty images you find on Tumblr and Pinterest, there's now StyleSays -- a new fashion image sharing community that connects users’ favorite style images to purchasable content. It tags pictures of pretty outfits with links to purchasable items. Some might be the exact product and it could give you an affordable alternative.

AT&T Sucks If one of your New Year's resolutions is to ditch your phone provider once and for all, consider making a switch to T-Mobile. The company is now touting the results of its $4 billion commitment to improving service and says its reception in New York is better than ever. Neville Ray, the CTO for T-Mobile, said in a blog post that NYC customers "can also bring their unlocked AT&T smartphones to T-Mobile and experience a significant speed boost on our network with most devices, while also saving up to $50/month compared to AT&T."

Old dog learning new tricks, etc. Bluefin Labs, the social TV analytics company for advertisers, just added an important employee to its team. Scott Grunther, a former Nielsen executive, is joining the Bluefin team in 2013 as a senior vice president. He will also be the general manager of media products out of the company’s New York office. He's been in the industry for 20 years.

Yes, please. (Image courtesy of Gojee)

Hungry? The good folks at Gojee are launching a new mobile app, designed to replicate the aesthetic experience of the slick recipe site. It's now available for download on Android, iPad and iPhone; if you're a cautious downloader, check this demo first. The site now boasts more than 500,000 members and was a finalist for a 2012 Crunchie Award in Design--alongside Path and Pinterest.

Bro Down We're not sure what we could add to make this more perfect: Thrillist has hired Gene Newman, Maxim's digital editorial director, to serve as general manager, overseeing all web and mobile content. Let's hope the lad mags are paying attention, lest Thrillist drink their milkshake on the sly. 

Material Girl We first introduced you to Material Wrld--a fashion-forward online marketplace that aims to provide a non-hideous alternative to Ebay, back in March. After testing their concept with online pop-up stores in the spring, the founders have finally launched a beta version of the site. The announcement promises that "Material Wrld fills the gap between content discovery sites and online marketplaces." All sellers will be "screened and curated," meaning the wares look like this lovely dress, rather than this affront to good taste.

Heavenly Creatures Speaking of staffing up: We hear that AngelHack is looking for a (paid!) New York City organizer to TCB locally. The next hackathon takes place November 17 - 18; hit them up if you've got a taste for the role of impresario.

Watching the Watchers DailyMotion has introduced two brand-new ways to see the site: Mosaic mode, which you might recognize as basically Pinterest; and Feed mode, which--no great surprise, considering that name--looks more like the Facebook newsfeed. Perhaps best of all for all the commercial-haters out there (i.e., most of us), for now, during the beta stage, neither format will include pre-roll advertising. Not that we've got anything against adorable ads for Velveeta before our Nicki Minaj vids or anything.

Back to School Yesterday New York-based ecommerce company Quincy Apparel--which aims to offer customizable clothes at off-the-rack prices--debuted its first full collection, as well as a complete redesign of the website. Fortunately for our wallets, the company missed payday.

Get Schooled Timed to the thematically appropriate holiday of Labor Day, the Young Entrepreneur's Council debuted #StartupLab, which is described as "a free virtual mentorship program that will deploy America's top young startup founders to help retool and train the current workforce into a more entrepreneurial one." Featured mentors for the year include Rent the Runway's Jennifer Fleiss and Indiegogo's Slava Rubin. It's probably not time for the presidential candidates to quit worrying about their job programs, though.

Fashionable Streaming IMG Fashion has teamed up with Rightster and YouTube to offer live-stream and video on demand content from Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York. The partnership allows press to access and easily embed videos directly from one streamlined site.

This is a guest post by Brian Borger, director of content and strategy at Gojee. Follow him on Twitter at @BrianBorger.

When a sleepy 8:30 a.m. rolled around last Saturday, the labyrinthine co-working space that Cookstr calls home roared to life. Around 120 developers, designers, data crunchers, policy experts, and marketers participated in the Farm Bill Hack, hosted by Food+Tech Connect and Gojee to analyze and spread the word about the crucial piece of legislation that will be making its way through D.C. in the coming months. The bill determines funding for the agriculture industry, and influences which crops farmers produce, their quantities, and their prices.

Participants broke into teams to tackle 10 different topics tied to the Farm Bill, ranging from tracking government dollars to new farmers to facilitating communication between Hudson Valley apple orchardists. (Full list of proposed topics here.)

As tends to happen with research projects, a lofty analytical goal or two occasionally fell victim to the inherent difficulties of dealing with data. But as the deadline closed in, morale remained high and the hackers continued to fight the good fight. Ten hours in, each team was energetically pitching catchy ways to represent their findings.

In the end, the “Farm Bill of Health” walked away with top prize for the group’s accessible depiction of the funding disparity between commodity crops vs. fruits and vegetables. Second prize went to Meatlessly.com, a mobile app designed to encourage participation in Meatless Mondays.

For more information about the projects and winners from this amazingbunch of weekend warriors, read more at Food+Tech Connect.

Gojee, the double-pivoted startup that now delivers beautiful recipe suggestions based on what you have in your pantry, just announced a milestone and a new product: 200,000 registered users and a Drinks recipe finder to complement its Food recipe finder.

"Gojee Drinks features recipes from over 40 of the best drink writers in the world and introduces a sleek new experience," co-founder Michael LaValle said in an email. "There are also a few other surprises sprinkled throughout (try searching for 'vodka' in Drinks or 'chicken' in food)."

Tell Gojee Drinks your preferences and your supply ("I Crave" x, "I Have" y, and "I Dislike" z) and it can offer "drink recipes for all occasions, ages, and religious denominations."

"But don’t you worry, unlike other sites, you won’t find 400 of the same martini recipe," says the press release from Gojee, which was inspired in party by the shortcomings of recipe websites. "And if you find something you haven’t heard of, you can rest assured it’s not a Four Loko and Everclear abomination some frat brother decided to 'invent.' All of our bloggers are handpicked and each of their recipes are screened by real live humans before graduating to Gojee Drinksdom. You’ll find only the most drool-inducing, awe-inspiring and hyphen-warranting drink recipes here."

Gojee, which recently announced a $1.2 million funding round from Kapor Capital, is operating out of Projective Space in Soho. It's one of the larger tenants of the coworking spot, with seven employees.

The startup is also hosting a "Happy Mouth Explosion" party on Saturday at WeWork Lounge. What's the internet slang for drinks? Liquid noms?

(flickr.com/photos/ericwahlforss/)

STARTUP WEEKEND. Startup Weekend is now an affiliate of the Kauffman Foundation, the same entity that funds AngelList. "While Startup Weekend will continue to operate autonomously, becoming a Kauffman affiliate will allow the organization to increase its geographical reach, conduct more frequent events, and build long-term sustainability. Startup Weekend events bring entrepreneurs and supporters together and teaches them how to share ideas, form teams, build products and launch companies, all during a 54-hour crash-course weekend."

MORE STARTUP WEEKEND. "As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2011, a weeklong celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship, Startup Weekend events will take place in more than 50 [UPDATED --ed.] 20 U.S. cities, fostering new companies that change industries and create jobs. Two of these hosts will be in New York City and New Jersey." GEW takes place from Nov. 14 to 20.

RAISE CACHE FOR HACKNY. The highly-anticipated fundraiser is coming up. "Raise Cache has brought together more than 75 companies, from the hottest start ups, to the biggest corporations, to create a once in a lifetime event that highlights the power of our community and the passion of our city. On November 17th, we will bring together more than 1,000 members of New York tech, fashion, media, and arts under the roof of the State Armory to raise $100,000 in cache for hackNY."

THRILLIST APP. Thrillist Rewards NY will be available to download for free on iPhone and Android devices on Thursday (Nov. 10th). "Users will receive mobile notifications of new Thrillist Rewards in New York, each week, as soon as they become available, and can quickly, easily and securely purchase the Rewards through the app. Rewards can be redeemed by simply presenting a voucher built within the app to a participating merchant – no schlubby printed coupons required."

SECOND SCREENS. NYC-based Umami debuted an app yesterday, "a significant new second screen TV app for the iPad ... The app also serves as a scaleable publishing platform for TV programmers, with National Geographic Channel first on board."

LOCAL LAUNCH: CAPSULE. "Remember The Fridge? We learned about them just a week before they were acqui-hired but our product is vaguely familiar even though we're going at it from a different angle. Capsule is sorta like an Evite or Facebook Group... the way espresso is sorta like a cup of coffee. We're making it easier for people to share photos and memories in private groups centered around events rather than individuals (experience graph vs social graph). We're in private beta but here's a quick tour: http://bit.ly/v36QlN."

WHO'S HIRING? Want to work at SportsPickle.com? College Humor is looking for a PHP/MySQL engineer.

11/11/11. That's the date of the next Silicon Alley Talent Fair. So far 70 companies have signed up to meet job seekers at the Altman Building in the Flatiron. 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

CAPITAL FACTORY DEMOS. The Austin incubator is having a demo night tonight.

STARTUP BUS UNCONFERENCE. A six hour intensive workshop for entrepreneurs who like to think fast, and under pressure. Saturday, Nov. 19.

STARTUP PARTIES. This time it's Gojee, the recipe-suggester, on Saturday at WeWork; and SNAP Interactive kicking off the holiday party season with an office-warmer near Penn Station on December 1. With ping pong.

Om nom Gojee.

Gojee, the photo-heavy recipe recommendations app--think AllRecipes.com meets What the Fuck Should I Make for Dinner--started as Mint.com for food, then became Twitter for food, before its founders finally settled on the current conceit: suggestions based on preferences and allergies, plus what the cook has in his or her larder. It was a hit! And after some lovin' from the media and users, Gojee has picked up a cool $1.2 million from Kapor Capital along with Ustream co-founder Brad Hunstable as an advisor. 

Gojee found its investors through AngelList. The process took a few months, Gojee co-founder Michael LaValle told Betabeat in an email. "Awesome, awesome experience," he said.

With the money, Gojee plans to hire engineers and work on business development. "We don't currently make any money, and that's also a function of why the round is a bit on the large side.  There are a few coals in the fire regarding revenue, and we want to make sure we approach that decision very carefully and methodically," Mr. LaValle said.

"We'd like to expand the engineering team a bit (who doesnt :-) and we're working on some pretty cool features that we'll be launching shortly.  This money really gives us the runway and the capital to step on the gas a bit as we explore mobile, etc," he said.

Demos on deck range from food, drinks, stories, tasks and an "open source framework for creating machine vision appliances." Sweet! We've written about some of them before--Gojee, CalorieCount and Onepager--but others are news to us. Full lineup is below.

Drynks – Journals your experiences with wine, beers, and your favorite liquors, and allows you to share them with friends via Facebook. Presenters: Fernando Garza and Chevon Christie.  Twitter: @binaryred

Framey – Framey makes it offensively simple to integrate video recording into your site. Presenter: Chris Danzig.

Gojee - Curates recipes from top food bloggers around the world and lets you browse them in a gorgeous visual interface. Presenters: Tian He and Mike LaValle. Twitter: @gojee

Ingenuitas – Ingenuitas distributes an open-source framework called SimpleCV for creating machine vision appliances. Presenters: Katherine Scott & Nate Oostendorp. Twitter: @ingenuitasinc

Kikin – Touch browsing... the way it should be! Presenter: Brian Rogers Twitter: @kikin_inc

Moveable Feast Mobile Media - Empowers storytellers to craft richly illustrated, location-specific narratives, and easily publish them to the Moveable app. Presenters: Steve Schultz and Brad Heintz.  Twitter: @moveable_steve

Onepager – The easiest way for a small business to create and manage their website. Presenters: Matthew Moore and Matthew Shampine. Twitter: @OnepagerApp

StoryDesk – An outrageously simple web-based authoring tool for creating and maintaining elegant iPad catalog, presentation and story apps. Presenters: Jordan Stolper. Twitter: @StoryDesk

TaskRabbit – A web and mobile marketplace that safely and reliably connects people and businesses with others in their community to get everyday and skilled Tasks done. Presenters: Leah Busque, Kevin Cruz. Jamie Viggiano.  Twitter: @taskrabbit

Hack of the Month: CalorieCount - An award-winning health and wellness website with more than 2.9 million users that provides members with healthy-living advice, innovative tools and free mobile applications. Presenter: Igor Lebovic.

Mr. Lavalle.

Last week, the recently-launched curated recipe site Gojee scored a pick-up from swissmiss, a design blog and studio run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, which called Gojee "a beautifully designed new food lover destination." Swissmiss referred more users than a review by TechCrunch, co-founder Michael Lavelle told Betabeat this morning. "She put us up last Wednesday and it was pretty much insanity from that point on," he said, comparing the site's growth to the viral new music lover destination, Turntable.fm. "The post sent us 10,000 sign-ups in 24 hours, and it blew up from there."

But Gojee wasn't always a beautifully designed new food lover destination. 

1. Mint.com for food: Four months in development. Contract with a major New York grocery chain. Signed up 1,000 users in the first week. No one came back.

Once upon a time, Mike Lavalle and Tian He were two ordinary bankers at Morgan Stanley. They were bored, they were overworked, and they read in the news about the acquisition of Mint.com by Intuit for $170 million or so.

They decided to do the same thing for food. Mr. Lavalle met Nick D'Agostino at the gym and signed up the D'Agostino grocery chain as Gojee's first partner. The founders quit Morgan Stanley, Mr. He taught himself Ruby on Rails and "we pretty much built Mint for food. Lots of charts and graphs, budget, expenses, nutrition profiles." They launched and 1,000 users signed up in the first week.

"At the time we thought it was amazing," Mr. Lavelle said. "But then no one came back so we were like, uh oh, what's going on here... we took a big step back and said what did we do wrong?"

They decided there were three problems: people don't relate to food as quantitatively as they do to their banks statements, the design was poor, and people didn't like looking at the data--it didn't say what they wanted it to say.

2. Twitter for food. Four months in development. "Everyone just pooped all over it."

The pair decided it was time to switch things up. The data needed context, they decided.

"It was a stream of content that gives you stories or related qualitative context around your data, i.e. you went shopping for food, you bought chicken, mushrooms and onions, here's a recipe that uses chicken, mushrooms and onions," he said. "You bought this kind of peanut butter, here's a coupon for another kind."

This idea was hot, the pair thought. They'd been bootstrapping the start-up, but decided to raise a little scratch from friends and family and brought on two engineers, a designer, and a content manager and built a new site.

It bombed. There was overwhelming negative feedback from everyone they showed the site too. "This is getting pretty bad," Mr. Lavalle recalls saying to Mr. He. "We're nine months deep, blowing through all this money, and we have nothing to show for it. We just built two shitty products."

3. A new kind of recipe site. Three months in development. "We're afraid to touch it because people love it so much."

"It was March 3, at 3 a.m. We're trying to fix Twitter for food," Mr. Lavalle recalls of the pivotal conversation with his co-founder. "It's been nine months and we haven't done anything well. We have to build something amazing that's going to be fun for us too. We're tired of building things that we aren't excited about.

"We know we can crush recipes," he said.

They redesigned Gojee to be a curated recipe recommendation site, that suggests recipes from a hand-picked database based on what users say they're craving, what they don't want to eat, what they have in the pantry, and what their recent purchases were. They're still working with the data set they started out thinking about--food purchases from rewards cards--which Mr. Lavalle says has not been delivered to users yet in any form.

The layout is simple--it's basically giant pictures of food--with simple drop-down menus and an obvious experience. The designer, Adam Meisel, sent a link to swissmiss, and then it got picked up by Gizmodo and other blogs. User engagement is also high, with new sign-ups returning and using the site.

The team is waiting for the user growth to settle down before iterating, although they are working on adding filters for vegetarians and gluten allergies. Gojee is currently raising a round of funding and there is significant investor interest, especially on the West Coast, Mr. Lavalle said--with any luck, this will be the company's final pivot.