The very busy Mr. Berry

Soho TechLabs, the new incubator backed by a cabal of ex-HuffPosters, announced yesterday that they're hiring. But until today, the team has remained mysteriously mum about the projects they're backing.

Hilarious tweeter and Soho TechLabs CTO Ben Regenspan let slip over DM yesterday that the "CTO Technical Cofounder" position listed on the Lerer Ventures page is in fact for CasaHop, a social travel site the team is planning to launch within the next month or so. CasaHop is described as a "social home exchange," where you can "connect with people worldwide to trade homes for vacations and more. It's simple -- you stay in their house, they stay in yours."

"When I was thinking about my next move," Soho TechLabs CEO Paul Berry told Betabeat via phone, "it would've been easy to take another job as a CTO at another media company. But this is a much more fun and interesting challenge."

No doubt the team he's put together at Soho TechLabs, which includes HuffPo founders Jonah Peretti and Ken Lerer, and ex-HuffPo president Greg Coleman, is a force to be reckoned with. "We had a tremendous amount of fun building HuffPo together and we learned a lot from building it," Mr. Berry said. "It's an incredible fun time where we get to take a lot of the things we've proven and learned and apply them to different areas."

They've also culled a pool of global talent--from countries including Sri Lanka, Chile, Serbia and the Philippines--to help kickstart projects.

The team sees a unique opportunity in the way things go viral, which is unsurprising considering Mr. Peretti is also the founder of BuzzFeed, a site that arguably made "viral" a household term. "There's such a dramatic example in front of us right now with Draw Something," Mr. Berry told us. " The infrastructure of the web and the way we're all hyperconnected now, stuff like Kony 2012, Draw Something, and Pinterest go live and go viral in a way that literally wasn't possible a year ago. So we're living in that sort of acceleration of history and I couldn't be more excited about the team that we have to pull it off."

The Soho TechLabs team is focused on a very specific set of criteria when it comes to which startups and ideas they want to back. For instance, at least one member--though preferably all--must feel intensely passionate about a project. "We don't want to get into a broad group of stuff that we're not passionate about," said Mr. Berry.

Another notable criterion is a similar, easy to maneuver code structure. "We're looking for things that we feel are very close to each other in terms of underlying code base and social mechanics," he said.

RebelMouse and CasaHop, the two known Soho TechLabs ventures, both have overlying code architecture, making it easy to fix and scale. RebelMouse is a "social platform" that Mr. Berry said he needed "a month max" before he could discuss. CasaHop, on the other hand, is a project he was slightly less coy about.

"We have a very specific way to get into the social travel space," said Mr. Berry. "[CasaHop] is also in the sharing economies space and it's allowed us to have a very specific need there. It's one of these pieces where we think that the people who have been going at social travel so far have had too vague of a notion about it and we have a very specific entrance into something that will become a very specific travel site."

"We're going to be launching the first version of [CasaHop] soon," he promised. "We'll probably have the first version [of CasaHop] in a month or so."

As long as it's not an Airbnb knockoff, we think we can get behind it.

Mr. Berry

Soho TechLabs, the fledgling startup incubator formed by several Huffington Post refugees, announced via an inaugural tweet today that they're recruiting early founders and employees. The company, backed by Lerer Ventures, was originally announced in Ad Age in January; it will be lead by a team of ex-Huffpoers, including founders Paul Berry, Jonah Peretti and Ken Lerer, as well as former Huffington Post president Greg Coleman. As we previously reported, the new incubator will be housed at 560 Broadway, the current home of Lerer Ventures.

Mr. Berry certainly has his hands full, as he will serve as the CEO of Soho TechLabs, as well as the CEO of RebelMouse, a "social curation platform."

Soho TechLabs has defined itself as an incubator focusing on a slew of "minimal viable products" which will be released into the marketplace and then tweaked according to public reception. The project would sound a lot like Betaworks, if Betaworks wasn't so ideologically opposed to being called an "incubator."

"We're a NYC-based incubator working in the social space," reads one Soho TechLabs job description, adding that they're looking for employees for "an exciting well defined project." With so many tech bigwigs backing the venture, we'll undoubtedly be hearing a lot more from Soho TechLabs as they ramp up for launch.

But we can't help but wonder what Huffington Post Media Group president Arianna Huffington must think of her former coworkers' newest project; we only hope she'll weigh in after she's finished in the bathroom.

UPDATE:

Ben Regenspan, who is Soho TechLabs' "CTO, until they get annoyed at my tweets," tweeted at us with some important details that may entice potential hirees to apply:

Cute, LOL, Fail...Politics?

Just a few weeks after poaching star political reporter Ben Smith from Politico and scooping CNN at the Repulican Primaries, Buzzfeed announced a big new round of funding to build out their operation. The company is raising a $15.5 million series C from lead by New Enterprise Associates and followed on by Lerer Ventures, Hearst Media, Softbank and RRE Capital.

The funding, first reported by Alexia Tsostis at TechCrunch, also involves a couple of leadership changes. Ken Lerer is stepping into the role of executive chairman and former Huffington Post President Greg Coleman is coming on as an advisor. It seems like BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti is looking to reunite the dream team that helped launch HuffPo and aiming to use the 2012 elections as a springboard for BuzzFeed, much as Obama's election back in 2008 pushed HuffPo to new heights.

When BuzzFeed poached Ben Smith from Politico back in December, the reaction from the establishment was largely, "What is BuzzFeed?" But in the same way that the Huffington Post was one step ahead of old media in terms of its speed, aggregation and approach to search engine optimization, BuzzFeed hopes to be the next generation of viral news, using a mix of serious reporting and cat slideshows to reach the biggest audience.