Mr. Borthwick (photo: screencap)

Stand down, Instapaper fanatics: Betaworks has no plans to shut the service down. That was the first question out of Alexia Tsotsis's mouth this morning at Disrupt, when she took the stage to interview CEO John Borthwick.

Wearing his ubiquitous brown corduroy jacket, Mr. Borthwick told her no, followed by an awful lot of throat-clearing.

"It's a wonderful product, it's a wonderful brand," he said. "It is an important part of what I see as an emerging ecosystem of products, some of which we're building at Betaworks and some of which we see invested in, that relate to the future of news and the future of media. And so we're going to build."

That Instapaper acquisition, by the way, started with a 2 a.m. email from an anxious Marco Arment, which was trying to figure out how to juggle Instapaper with his other commitments. He wanted to grow the service, but he didn't want to, you know, manage people and raise the money. Then came the late-night bolt from the blue: Betaworks!

Mr. Borthwick declined to divulge the terms of the deal, other than to say that Betaworks has a majority stake and there's some revenue share involved. Apparently that app was making a million bucks a year, though, which explains how Marco's paying for all that fancy coffee.

Elsewhere in the Chelsea-based collective, a team is readying a new product due to launch mid-week, and Mr. Borthwick let slip that it's some sort of game. Sadly it's not Digg's much-anticipated (by bloggers, anyway) Google Reader replacement, which "we're dashing to get done in time."

"We were blindsided a little bit by the timing of the announcement" from Google, he added, though a reader product was already on their roadmap at the time. "It's an important part of the puzzle."

Mr. Borthwick sure likes that image. He refused to pick a favorite Betaworks production, too, telling Ms. Tsotsis, "All these products are related in my mind, and so it all fits together in that puzzle. It's the puzzle that fascinates." What schemes are brewing under all that hair, John?

Ditching the suit for a swimsuit. (Photo: Flickr.com/gpaumier)

Hawaii Zuck-O Look who ditched the hoodie (but kept the Adidas sandals). Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was recently spotted indulging in a little Hawaiin R&R with wifey Priscilla Chan. US Weekly reports the pair “looked excited to be spending quality time together,” which makes sense since it's pretty easy to be happy when you’ve escaped the maw of Silicon Valley. The Zucks also “chowed down” on something called “beachside burgers” at a “picnic table.” Stars: they're just like us (but rich).

Instaparty Former Tumblr engineer and prolific blogginghead Marco Arment officially sold his company, read-it-later app Instapaper, to NYC-based Betaworks yesterday. Though he will stay on indefinitely as an advisor, Mr. Arment appeared to be celebrating the occasion by tweeting uncharacteristically adorable things about his followers:

https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/327636666787454976

Of course, this aroused the wry suspicion of Mr. Arment's followers:

https://twitter.com/meaghano/status/327637122309828608

Mr. Arment, as it turns out, appeared to be rightfully celebrating his Betaworks deal with a delicious cold beverage. "I can’t feel my face much anymore," he admitted. "I’ve had one beer. Granted, it’s about 20% ABV. It’s a hell of a beer." Lightweight!

So maj It's become somewhat of a celebrity rite of passage to participate in the ever-meta act of snapping a photo of yourself with Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, then plastering it onto--that's right--your Instagram profile. Stylist, fashion designer and Bravolebrity Rachel Zoe is the latest victim of this trend, snapping the below photo of her and Mr. Systrom. Sorry, Rach, but Kev is much better at smizing.

(Photo: Instagram)

Cult of Steve Erin Caton, a former project manager at Apple, took to Medium today to lament the growing number of douchey startup CEOs, who--in their attempt to emulate Steve Jobs--end up growing ever-douchier and unwilling to listen to peer feedback. To illustrate her story, she shares two anecdotes of her experience with Mr. Jobs: one, in which he cut in front of her in line at the Apple cafeteria (rude!), and another in which he blamed the Mobile Me team for a shoddy launch.

She writes:

Once it was up, we (at least a hundred of us) got called into a meeting with Steve Jobs. We all walked over to the building like we were headed to the guillotine. He stood in front of us and yelled at us, told us that we should be mad at each other, said we could have done a staggered launch and complained that we didn’t even try to do all the things that we (those on the ground floor of production that actuallymake the fucking products of the world) had been begging to do. It was the world’s best de-motivational speech.

We look forward to Ashton Kutcher's dramatic reading of this Medium post.

Must love Martha Poor Martha Stewart. You could give her a bag of cotton balls, used gum and a Razr phone and she’d craft the most beautiful centerpiece perfect for any Bat Mitzvah. But the one thing she can’t master is the art of filling out her Match.com profile, because it’s too damn hard. “It was, like, impossible,” the 71-year-old told Today bully Matt Lauer. You don’t have to use your words on Tinder, Martha.

https://twitter.com/todayshow/status/327751873564114944

Wows all the way down Storied VC Marc Andreessen took a break from annotating hip hop lyrics this week to gush about the potential transformative nature of Google Glass at the she++ Conference, when he jokingly claimed to already be beta testing Google Contact Lenses. Mr. Andreessen also took time to preach on the life-changing wonders of Google Glass, with a twinge of Valley girl thrown in. “You put it on and you’re like ‘Oh my God, I have the entire internet in my vision. Where have you been all my life?’” Andreessen said.

Andreessen and his firm are known for showing Glass some lovin', having already invested heavily in startups focused on building apps for Google Glass. But Mr. Andreessen is probably so gung-ho about Glass because he's hoping they'll help him finally solve the mystery of Silicon Valley Cougar Night at the Rosewood Hotel.

Get Dorsey Man of few emotions Jack Dorsey showed a flicker of excitement this week. No, he didn’t discover a new train yard to stare at--rather, he’s mildly excited about the new Daft Punk album. He attached a picture of the Get Lucky song art to prove to us that he knows how to take a screenshot or something. Maybe this was all ploy to subtweet us for not giving a shit about Twitter #Music.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/327796327931076609

Mr. Parker. (Photo: Flickr/Le Web)

NYC-based non-incubator Betaworks has acquired a majority stake in the article-bookmarking service Instapaper. Creator Marco Arment wrote on his blog that he will slide into an advising role "indefinitely" as Betaworks oversees operations and expands Instapaper's staff. [PC Mag]

CISPA, the controversial Internet bill, is (probably?) dead. An anonymous source said that "there is no possible plan" to bring it up in the Democratic-controlled Senate because it faces little support from the party. [Daily Dot]

Some big names, like Sean Parker, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates, are joining Mark Zuckerberg's political action committee, FWD.us. We would love to be on those brunch-planning emails. [AllThingsD]

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer has joined the board of Jawbone, the hardware maker behind those groovy wireless headsets and speakers. [AllThingsD]

A study of Bitcoin exchanges revealed that 45 percent of them fail, often taking peoples’ money with them. And the exchanges that don't shutter are more likely to be the target of cyber attacks. [Wired]

(Photo: twitter.com)

Instapaper, the hugely popular read-later app, recently announced on their blog that they have made their app compatible with the iPhone 5 and iOS 6. Along with that news, Instapaper founder Marco Arment revealed that users would now have the option to use Open-Dyslexic font, an open source font that makes things easier to read for people with dyslexia.

In his blog post, published yesterday, Mr. Arment asserts Instapaper's commitment to help the disabled:

Many people use Instapaper for improved accessibility, especially customers with low or no vision. Given what Instapaper does — capture any web page and present it in a consistent, adjustable, customer-controlled environment — it’s a natural fit for bringing improved accessibility and legibility to anyone who needs it.

Other similar apps, like the Android version of Pocket, have taken a big leap forward as well and gave their products text-to-speech capabilities.

Fortunately the iPhone has a wealth of tools for the visually impared. Along with Siri's dictation abilities, the iPhone also includes a feature called VoiceOver, a touch-to-speech software that reads your phone out loud for you.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated in the headline and text that Apple didn't have sufficient options for disabled readers. In fact, Apple has a lot of options for disabled readers and Instapaper can in fact use text-to-speech in conjunction with VoiceOver. Betabeat regrets the error.

Basically. (Photo: flickr.com/cameronparkins)

We leave the Internet for 24 hours, and this happens: Something is seriously wrong with Apple's app store. As in, if you updated Instapaper or Angry Birds Space HD Free yesterday, there's a good chance it just crashed upon launch. Users are having to perform clean installs, while developers are dealing with annoyed users who assume the fault lies with the app itself.

No one wants to do either of those things while recovering from a holiday hangover.

Instapaper creator Marco Arment kicked up the initial fuss with a rather disgruntled blog post. As he tells it, no sooner had Apple approved the latest Instapaper update than Mr. Arment received a flood of customer complaints that the app was no longer working. He wrote:

This didn’t make sense — obviously, Apple had reviewed it, and it worked for them. My submitted archive from Xcode worked perfectly. But every time I downloaded the update from the App Store, clean or not, it crashed instantly.

Lots of anxiety and research led me to the problem: a seemingly corrupt update being distributed by the App Store in many or possibly all regions.

So much for that vaunted review process.

Mr. Arment immediately emailed App Review and, while he hasn't heard anything back, within a couple of hours anyone attempting a reinstall got a working version.

The developers at GoodReader, a PDF-reading app, confirmed the troubles in a blog post and added, "It appears that Apple has recently changed something in their app distribution engine, and ever since that change there are ongoing problems at Apple's end."

We've reached out to Apple for comment and will update if we hear anything.

It's not clear what created the problem, which means we've got no way of knowing whether it's been fixed. Several apps now appear to be updating properly, but as of last night, the Verge found at least a couple of the apps on Mr. Arment's list still demonstrating the aforementioned wonkiness. And as of this morning, Mr. Arment is still warning developers via Twitter that, "if you can help it, DO NOT release app updates today. The corruption is widespread and ongoing," adding later than the list of corrupted apps currently stands at 73.

Every developer that ever had problems getting an app approved is cackling so hard right now.

(Photo: howardstern.com)

Instapaper's Marco Arment just made his first big advertising buy with a spot on Howard Stern's satellite radio show, which aired last week. "I am a huge fan by the way, and this for real, of Instapaper," Mr. Stern says in the spot. "I have Instapaper on all my devices... I love you Instapaper. I want to make out with you."

Mr. Stern then walks his co-host through the app, explaining that she can save articles and even recipes without clutter. The ad lasts more than a minute during the news segment of the show.

Mr. Arment and Dan Benjamin addressed the ad on their podcast, Build and Analyze. "That was so much better than I would have expected," Mr. Arment said. "So I bought my first big ad." He laughed nervously. "That is a paid ad. I spent way too much money on it, I think, but I don't know."

"You're ascending to new levels," Mr. Benjamin said later in the show."

Instapaper has run ads on geeky podcasts and web shows before, Mr. Arment said, but the app is reaching near 100 percent awareness in that market. "I think this audience of geeks and apple fans who kind of like me, or read one of my blog posts, or, according to commentors, on the Verge, hate my guts... I've probably already saturated that market," he said.

Mr. Arment also considered buying ads on commuter trains in New York, which were the inspiration for Instapaper in the first place, but they were too expensive. "The Howard ad was very attractive to me. I know who listens to the show. I listen to the show. People underestimate The Howard Stern Show audience," he said. "The radio show is a four-hour long discussion and humor show... it really is a great show."

The Howard Stern ad runs for two weeks. On the first day, Mr. Arment's servers went down just before the show started; luckily, he got them back up before Mr. Stern plugged the app.

The ad hits around the same time as a major Instapaper release and rumors of the Android version of Instapaper.

To pull the right articles from the social media deluge, News.me's iPhone app analyzes the links shared by your friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook to determine what's relevant to you, using some metadata from Bit.ly (another Betaworks company) to help figure that out.

News.me already has a pared-down email product (of the top five links a day) and an iPad app that launched last April, albeit without the Facebook connection. But as general manager Jake Levine told us yesterday, the iPhone app is where things get social. The clean interface displays a nicely-formatted photo, headline, and, immediately below that, what your friends have said about the article, including their tweets and Facebook status updates as well as reactions on News.Me.

To make responses sound more meaningful than a generic "Like," the startup offers a shortlist of other one-word responses, including Ha!, Wow, Awesome, Sad, and Really? As much as it makes us groan a little inside every time a startup thinks slapping on some social = $$$, in this case, it sounds utilitarian. Seeing your friend's response is a great indicator of the likelihood that you'll want to click through--depending on the friend, of course. When Mr. Levine demoed the product to us via Skype, for example, we saw reactions from Reuters newshound Anthony De Rosa (alongside his sister and other Betaworks employees.)

How long did it take them to choose those five little words? "Oh my god a long time," Mr. Levine responded with a combination laugh/groan. "We actually decided on this the day before submissions." He said News.me reached out to five people to brainstorm ideas, including Wall Street Journal and Nieman Labs alum Zach Seward, who offered the following inspired suggestions: Woah, Huh, Damn, Uhhhh, and tl;dr.

The new iPhone app also supports offline reading--phew--and saves articles to your News.me Reading List (you can automatically import your Twitter favorites, as well as integrate with Instapaper and the News.me iPad version). One can always tell which products are built in New York vs. San Francisco, said Mr. Levine, based on how much they care about how it works underground.

News.me's six-man team has a strong technical bent, steeped in news and discovery, including CTO Michael Young, the former lead technologist for the Times's R&D lab, as well as the iOS developer behind Epicurious, and the designer behind Wired's iPad app. Which may be why they offer a thoughtful approach to modern media consumption. "We’re of the philosophy that Twitter and Facebook will kind of form foundational layers of the social web on which purpose-built social networks and applications will emerge," explained Mr. Levine.

"Instagram and Foursquare are the best examples of that," he added. "These are networks that are built for one type of conversation, one type of sharing. We think news is a similar category in that it's big enough to be interesting as a business and it’s a big enough part of people’s day, it helps make important decisions, but its small enough to benefit from a focused network."

News.me competitor Summify was recently acquired by Twitter, and some of its users migrated over to News.me. With other players like Percolate and XYDO moving over to the enterprise side of things, by offering their news curation products to other companies and brands, "We’re the lone vestige for actual consumers," said Mr. Levine.

As for the Summify acquisition, Mr. Levine anticipated that, "The challenge [Twitter] is going to face is that people build their networks on Twitter for a bunch of different use cases, which means that people are sharing a bunch of different types of content so to make meaning out of that content is incredibly challenging from a discovery perspective."

True enough, which made us wonder if you could limit News.me to a particular Twitter list (to keep your movie and food friends, say, out of your tech stream)? Not yet, said Mr. Levine, but they're working on it.

Jeremy Lin may be the most popular athlete in history whose physical skills are equally proportional to his consummate nerdiness. One example: The Landry Fields/Jeremy Lin "Nerdshake." For another, just look to his fanbase, which apparently includes coders and the tech-savvy users they cater to, both of whom are expressing their Linsanity through popular web apps.

Instapaper, Marco Arment's original "reader" app, has now been transformed for the Jeremy Lin-obsessed into—yes—Linstapaper, which collects all the Jeremy Lin-related reads obsessives would want to pore over, all in once place, in one nifty URL, which "Read Later" tags attached to them. The man behind it? Jeremy Singer-Vine, a journalist-programmer who's written and programmed for Slate and the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic Wire points to Mr. Singer-Vine's Twitter, where he notes:

Wow—In the few hours since linstapaper.com launched, it's had visitors from 30+ countries, including Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia.

— Jeremy Singer-Vine (@jsvine) February 20, 2012

Not bad. He's also been taking recommendations over Twitter for what to aggregate into Linstapaper; it's an impressive case study in crowd-sourcing moving in the opposite direction it usually does.

Elsewhere, there are LINSTAGRAMS: Code for Instagrammed photos tagged with the word "LIN" and aggregated on Hashgram (which picks up various Instagram tags). There's no cute URL for it yet, but there's more than enough to keep the tag moving.

Meanwhile, SF Gate's Tech Chronicles blog notes the Lin Effect on social networks.

Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian recently attempted to explain the nerd-crush on Jeremy Lin as best he can at Wired on how Jeremy Lin's success is so exciting for him and his "fellow geeks" (he offered Betabeat the same takeaway a day before):

Jeremy Lin is a validation of our worldview: Ignore expectation, follow the data.

...which, as evidenced, said geeks will be continuing to provide on many a medium in the coming months until the NBA season ends, and probably long after that. Linsanity—especially on the Internet—isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Like Instapaper, Readability scrapes text from web pages and strips it of ads and tangential content for a more pleasant reading experience on the iPhone, iPad, Nook or Kindle. “First, we wanted to better distinguish the difference between having access to features and supporting content creation,” CTO Chris Dary wrote on the Readability blog.“Second, we wanted to keep Readability as open as possible so that third-party integrators to our service can access all of our features as well, without limitations.”

Readability distinguishes itself from Instapaper by shuttling subscription fees back to publishers. The subscription fee is now optional, and "the dollars you can now optionally pay are purely for supporting us and writers." No premium, no freemium; just a suggested donation.

Last year Readability got into a tiff with Apple, which before then had loved Readability so much it integrated the technology into Safari, after the App Store policy changed to disallow subscription-based apps that did not use Apple's in-app purchase system. Making the app free is one way to get around the problem.

Tao of Steve

Instapaper creator Marco Arment is an Apple acolyte who pointedly and repeatedly refuses to develop an Android version of his popular reading app. In fact he often takes to his blog to bash Google's mobile OS, berating its commercial potential and enumerating the woes he would have should he someday have the misfortune of developing for Android.

But last night the guys from Shift Jelly, a mobile development shop in Australia, managed to get Mr. Arment's attention. They wrote a blog post, "Standing Up For Android", that laid out how much more money they had made from Android than iOS. They didn't attack Mr. Arment or call anyone a "fanboi". Instead they offered this:

Finally, we’d like to publicly challenge Marco Arment to bring Instapaper to Android and drop the negative attitude. We’ll bet you one large cup of our finest Australian Coffee that you’ll be pleasantly surprised by just how great the Google Market is. In many ways it’s a better place to be than iOS, since so many developers are ignoring it, and yet there is a massive install base waiting to give you their money.

We can't say if it was the dollar signs or the offer for some premium java from down under, but Mr. Arment's heart grew three sizes larger last night. He still isn't going to "waste his time" learning how to build an Android app, some of those Google germs might rub off on his Macbook Air, but he did give other developers his blessing to take a crack at making Instapaper for Android:

If you make the first great Android Instapaper client that:

• uses the official API
• contains a significant portion of the iOS app’s features, the details of which we’d work out privately
• runs on a wide variety of Android devices and OS versions including modern smartphones, the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, and whichever 10” tablet matters at the time of completion
• is priced at $2.99 or higher in the U.S. with approximately equivalent pricing elsewhere, and satisfies requirements to be sold in the Google Marketplace, Amazon Appstore, and whatever B&N uses for the Nook Tablet

I’ll call it the official Instapaper app for Android, I’ll promote it on the Instapaper site, I’ll drop the subscription requirement for its API access, you’ll answer all support email that comes from it, and we’ll split the net revenue 50/50.

Any takers?