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?

Mr. Williams. (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

Power Literary Hire: Twitter cofounder Ev Williams's new publishing tool, Medium, just added an impressive member to its team. Kate Lee, a former literary agent from International Creative Management (ICM), has joined Mr. Williams's startup as the director of content. Ms. Lee was responsible for plucking several bloggers out of obscurity and giving them book deals. The Observer announced her leave from ICM back in April. In a blog post on the site, Mr. Williams described her job as "encouraging, soliciting, commissioning, and contextualizing interesting ideas, authors, and institutions" and noted that she would be building a small team in New York to help her do that.

Branch Finally Lets You Hang Out With Your Friends: Branch, the social conversations site, just launched a groups feature yesterday. In an email to Betabeat, Branch cofounder Josh Miller described it as "Branch's equivalent of a Follow button." The idea was inspired by the conversations that people have at dinner parties, in which smaller groups form to discuss topics that they care about. On Branch, these groups can be added into a conversation. Branch's example site includes a group featuring Mr. Miller, Medium's Ev Williams, John Borthwick from Betaworks, Michael Sippey from Twitter and Facebook's Sam Lessin. These groups have a possibility to create Bloods and Crips-like warfare in tech. Choose sides wisely.

Christmas Swag on a Million: BaubleBar, the discounted jewelry online megastore, is going all out for the holidays. In addition to its Soho pop-up shop The Bar, the company is partnering with nail polish giant Essie and teaming up with Elle magazine for a guided shopping experience. On Cyber Monday, BaubleBar will be giving customers a free product for every $40 they spend in what it calls its Cyber Monday Gifting Suite. And the "20 Days of Buried Baubles," in which 20 style influencers will offer a daily BaubleBar deal to their fans,will begin on the 30th. You're going to need a new jewelry rack.

Like the Song From Legally Blonde: Peek, the Eric Schmidt- and Jack Dorsey-backed travel site, is launching a new feature called Perfect Days. It allows users to share their ideal 24-hour game plan for a city. Users looking for places to recommend can pull from their Foursquare and Google Places accounts. The site already has some celebrities that have made their own Perfect Days, including designer Tory Burch and prolific tweeter Piers Morgan.

Designers Should Apply to This:  The investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) has announced that it's starting a design fellowship program to help young designers get acclimated to working with startups. The three-month program will pair up designers with some of KPCB's funded startups like Coursera, Flipboard, Klout, Square and Path. Applications are being accepted now and will be taken until January 31.

Makeup Ladies Go to the Net: Chloe + Isabel, the e-commerce jewelry brand, just announced the launch of its new online platform. Instead of just a regular store, the company is now employing an Avon model for direct sales, through which its users can now sell products to their friends and profit. These users can pull photos from their Instagram accounts to better display their products. Prepare to be spammed by your friend's hip mom.

Let's Pretend We're Rich: Zaarly, the online marketplace for goods and services, has just launched a virtual pop-up shop for Thanksgiving. If you burn the turkey, just hire a local chef to cook the meal for you. Or perhaps you're not a very good cleaner: just pay someone to do it for you. Hire a fleet of professional help to impress your out-of-town guests and say, "Oh them? They're here year-round!"

Don't Forget to Rate, Comment and Subscribe: Rightster, a service that helps content providers maximize revenue from online video, just announced that it has broken into the top 10 of the U.S. comScore YouTube rankings. It now owns around 300 YouTube channels. John Dillon, a former software ad exec at Alcatel Lucent, just joined Rightster as its new vice president of marketing.

A Really Pretty Junk Drawer: If your inbox is maxed out with daily deals and coupons from your favorite stores, then Sift is the new iPad app for you. It sorts your junk emails into a scrollable shopping experience. The YouTube demo is an EDM shopping party. Go nuts.

Companies Love Paying for Mobile: Usablenet, the company that makes mobile sites for big businesses, has just been named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, a power list that rates the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America. Started in 2000, Usablenet claims that its revenues have grown 861 percent in the past four years.

Mr. Rose (Photo: flickr.com/joi)

In the winter of 2004, soon after the husks of once-great dot-com startups had dried and shriveled, a 27-year-old college dropout named Kevin Rose deployed a barebones new site, simply named “Digg.”

It was one of the first social networks in existence. Back then, the term “social networking” hadn’t shouldered its way into our lexicon yet. Facebook was a nascent, walled platform for college gossip; Google was still idly toying with its search algorithm; Twitter wouldn’t launch for another two years.

News itself was a hierarchical affair, largely produced and disseminated by trusted broadcasters and editors. Journalism’s democratizing forces hadn’t congealed, yet; bloggers weren’t sitting front row at fashion shows or making a living off of Google Ads. The idea that a community of Internet geeks could manipulate the news cycle would’ve elicited howls of mocking laughter from the Conde kingmakers.

Mr. Rose, then an occasional tech TV talking head, launched Digg with the notion that it would change all that. Digg wants “to give the power back to the people,” proclaimed Mr. Rose in a 2005 preview of the website on the tech TV show The Screen Savers. By “digging” or “burying” links, users could effectively weed out the detritus and let the news they liked best filter its way to the top. The site’s functionality gave users the power to decide what deserved to be seen, and they were rewarded by spotting links early that would eventually become popular. Diggers garnered further clout by interacting with each other. Real power users began to emerge, enabled by their nimble maneuverings on the platform.

These days, stodgy publications like The New York Times pen fawning profiles of BuzzFeed bloggers and Business Insider newshounds, seemingly entranced by their mystical ability to foresee what will go viral. But Digg’s power users are the predecessors of keen-eyed bloggers, and Digg gave them the platform to broadcast their Internet soothsaying abilities. “The service forced me to get very good at finding news and interesting stories — and doing it fast,” wrote one-time Digg power user, former tech reporter and current venture capitalist M.G. Siegler in a recent blog post. “It also forced me to hone my headline writing skills.... Without Digg, I almost certainly would not be where I am now.”

“It was the first iteration of social news and social sharing,” Aubrey Sabala, an early employee of Digg, told Betabeat by phone. “In a lot of ways it was ahead of its time.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Internet revolution: following a handful of hefty capital rounds, mounting investor pressure put the focus on monetization. And some of Digg’s power users turned to the dark side, allowing advertisers and publishers to pay them for “diggs” so that their content could make it to the front page. In 2009, Digg rolled out a clunky ad experience, much to the chagrin of its fan base, which began to jump ship for Facebook and Twitter. A buggy overhaul of the site released in 2010 was the final straw: Digg crested the hill on its final decline, the majority of the site’s devoted users eventually decamping for Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

But now Digg, the sleeping--or is it dead?--community giant, is getting the chance to redeem and recreate itself in the moneyed bosom of the New York tech scene, thanks to an acquisition by startup incubator Betaworks. Betaworks, nestled in the Meatpacking district steps away from the Highline, purchased Digg’s core assets just a handful of weeks ago, and set out to recreate the Digg experience from the ground up. What’s left of the Digg brand will be revived by the News.me team, another Betaworks social news startup that has been tapped to resurrect Digg’s decrepit corpse. And they've done it in just six weeks.

It’s an opportunity few startups ever get: to atone for their sins and start from scratch in a safety bubble, protected from the pressures of monetization and investor interests. They can build a purer product this time, learn from the lessons of Digg’s former incarnation, and hone in on accurately catering to the way users consume news.

But with its one-time competitor Reddit miles ahead in the race for relevancy, is it too late?

***

Mr. Borthwick with Mr. Siegler (Photo: flickr.com/techcrunch)

Less than 24 hours before the launch of the new version of Digg, Betabeat arrived at the Betaworks office, an airy, sprawling labyrinth of Apple products and side-by-side desks occupied by work crazed young people. We’d arrived just in time for a chocolate covered banana cart to show up, heralding a quaint office gathering celebrating the new Digg. Jake Levine, the former manager of News.me who became manager of Digg following the acquisition, told us that before the acquisition went through, he talked about Digg in codewords to his teammates. “We called it the banana stand,” he said, referring to a beloved Arrested Development plotline.

“Digg is one of the great iconic web 2.0 brands,” said Betaworks CEO John Borthwick in a clipped British accent, after we’d settled into a corner conference room littered with Betaworks stickers. (Sadly, there would be no frozen bananas for this Betabeat reporter.) Through the glass doors, we could see a red pole strung up with a Guy Fawkes mask, the universal symbol for the hacker group Anonymous. “It helped define a whole new wave of company creation and innovation," Mr. Borthwick went on. "But also this idea of socially curated news is something that they helped create.”

It was a pure idea, but the infusion of capital, coupled with the inherent drawbacks of the Digg voting model, ultimately led to Digg’s demise. “The company raised a lot of money maybe a little bit too fast and couldn’t figure out how to make money and then sort of went through a painful process of growing downwards,” Mr. Borthwick admitted. “Sometimes companies get pumped up like athletes full of steroids, so much so that they’re really strong and fit but they can’t actually walk any longer so they kind of fall over on their own weight.”

In short: mo’ money, mo’ problems.

Mr. Levine (Photo: Twitter)

Digg’s rebirth will also happen in a very different media environment. “It’s 2012, it’s not 2004,” emphasized Mr. Borthwick. “So what Digg needs is to change a little bit.” By scrapping the old code and rebuilding the infrastructure, Mr. Borthwick said that the new Digg will operate at 1/15th of the cost that the old Digg was running at just last month.

Additionally, now media companies that previously mocked the power of online communities are clamoring to plaster their links all over social news sites. Conde Nast snapped Reddit up back in 2006, hoping to expand its web properties, but its DNA never really fit the Conde mold, due to the site’s unwavering dedication to its community and refusal to cater to publishers. Social news communities like Reddit have grown from a barnacle on the side of the Internet to one of its primary content generators. Traffic-hungry blogs like BuzzFeed source a substantial amount of their content right from the trenches of Reddit. And with 2.5 billion pageviews a month, the amount of traffic Reddit can drive to a site in a single day could trounce pageview targets for an entire quarter. (Previously: Loving the Alien: How Erik Martin, King Bee of Reddit's Hivemind, Harnessed the Buzz)

For its part, Digg may have spread itself too thin, attempting to simultaneously placate disparate groups with competing interests. “I feel like when they moved to version 4, they were trying to serve too many constituencies: publishers, the users and the advertisers,” Erik Martin, Reddit’s general manager, told Betabeat by phone. That 4th version, which launched in 2010 and introduced publishers to the site, was so buggy that it crippled Digg’s functionality for weeks. "Many people will tell you that v4 of Digg was the tipping point, and I agree, for a simple reason," Miguel Lopez, a former Digg power user, told Betabeat by email. "It alienated the hardcore users and the community that had formed around the site.... They drove their most loyal users away, and for any 'social' site that is plain suicide."

“The front page went from interesting, to a bunch of corporate sponsored ads and a few threads that managed to squeak through,” wrote one Reddit user in a recent post about what killed Digg. “I didn’t come to Reddit because it was better or because it replaced digg for me, I came here because digg had a sudden heart attack and died.”

So how did Reddit avoid the same tragic fate as Digg? Its algorithms don’t allow users to collaborate and game the system, for one. “The frontpage we designed was a constantly rising and falling list of links (not like how digg and all of its clones just had a chronological format where once something got enough diggs it became #1 on the frontpage--an easily exploitable way to get a ton of traffic),” said Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian in an email. “It's not perfect, as we're always fighting cheaters, but we've also had to explain to an unsettling number of publishers that reddit, unlike its past competition, is not designed to be ‘gamed.’ We've had to reprimand quite a bit of bad behavior that used to be the status quo.”

In a way, Reddit is immune from many of the pressures that Silicon Alley startups are forced to contend with. Being scooped up by Conde did have its privileges. Unlike Digg, Reddit didn’t have to rely solely on ad revenue to sustain itself. Had Digg curbed its hubris and accepted Google’s offer of $200 million for an acquisition in 2008, it may not have had to roll out so many of the premium features--like “Diggable ads”--that drove users away. “We’ve been lucky in a sense with the Conde Nast situation,” admitted Mr. Martin. “It did protect us from having to quickly monetize.”

The new Digg, which will be tweaked with scientific precision at the lab-like Betaworks, won’t have any ads at all--at least not in version one. It will also be free of the clutter that has bloated Digg for years: with no Digg navigation bar and no “Newsroom” feature, it will be image-friendly, lightweight and easy to use on your cell phone. The interface looks a lot like a typical news blog, with a large image and headline dominating the top half of the screen, while other stories collect in neat boxes beneath it.

In a nod to the dominant forces of social media, the number of “Diggs” on a story will also account for the times it’s been shared on Facebook and Twitter, in order to provide a more holistic portrait of what’s popular across the web. This move also has the added benefit of making it much harder for power users to game the system. For version 1, users will have to login using Facebook Connect in order to "Digg" a story, a temporary move that already has some legacy users riled up.

“There’s a lot of attention and pressure and visibility for tomorrow,” Mr. Levine told us of the version 1 launch. “But what we care about is not launch day, it’s the 14 days or 28 days after launch and the iterations that follow.”

“We could have spent six months on it or a year, but we realized that if this was going to be a good product then we needed to get it out the door as quickly as possible,” he added. “The six week time frame forced really hard decisions, to focus on what is the single thing that Digg does well and that users expect from Digg, and how we could do that well.”

***

A few weeks prior to the launch of the new Digg, the Betaworks team published a survey to their blog soliciting user feedback. The consensus was unanimous: 92 percent of those surveyed would not recommend the old version of Digg to a friend. Users wanted the simpler Digg back, the one that surfaced interesting content and enabled a community of diverse individuals to post and respond to stories they cared about.

“I spent a weekend reading through all of the responses, and time and time again they said, ‘I came to Digg to find great stories. I came to Digg to find stories I couldn’t find elsewhere, the weird and the funny and the geeky,’” said Mr. Levine. That’s where the new Digg will start. From the belly of Betaworks, it will eschew revenue models and investor interests and focus on remaking Digg into the kind of site Internet users used to love.

Digg once went in search of monetization, but now the new team behind it wants what the platform was offering all along: a snapshot of the hivemind, a place capable of measuring the Internet’s pulse. Now, the new Digg team has the same advantage that Reddit obtained when it sold to Conde.

“Part of what we want to do is stay as small as possible for as long as possible,” said Mr. Levine. “So that we can continue to be beholden to just our users, and not incentives for monetization.”

On the back of his iPhone case, a black and white “Fuck it Ship it” sticker caught the lamplight just right.

(Photo: Rethink Digg)

On an aptly named new website called Rethink Digg, the Betaworks and News.me teams proposed a rather ambitious plan today: completely rebuild the ghost town-like social news aggregator--which saw many users decamp for Reddit--from the ground up. Oh, and they're going to do it in six weeks.

"On August 1, after an adrenaline and caffeine-fueled six weeks, we’re rolling out a new v1," starts a post on the site. "With this launch, we’re taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet."

Frankly, we're more inspired by the first graf of that post than we are by anything we've seen come out of Digg in the last five years.

Startup incubator Betaworks acquired Digg just eight days ago. At the time, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told Betabeat, "We are reverting digg to a startup, expect more things like paperboy."

Digg will be rebuilt by the team at News.me, a Betaworks startup that delivers a daily digest of the news stories tailored to your interests. According to the post, Digg and News.me will eventually be rolled into the same product, and you can expect personalization similar to what News.me offers from Digg in the upcoming months. This matches with an account from a Betabeat source, who told us last week that “News.me will be folded into Digg, but not sure what that timeline looks like or if that’s been absolutely decided.”

The New York-based team plans to adhere to four core concepts while working towards their August 1st launch date, which has a countdown displayed in the right-hand corner of the website:

1. We make it easy to find, read, and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet.
2. The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit.
3. Build an experience that is native to each device: smart phone, inbox, Web page. Stories must find the user, wherever they are.
4. Users must be able to share where they and their friends already are — on networks like Facebook, Twitter and email.

The good news is that nothing can really be worse than the old Digg, so the expectations are set pretty low. Plus, we're guessing that bringing transparency to the process will endear a lot of ex-Digg users--and current Redditors--to the new team.

Could this be our last chance to use this wonderful image?

Just a couple of months after the Washington Post poached most of its staff, Digg proper--the "core assets," anyway--finally has a fate: It's been purchased by New York's own Betaworks, to be combined with News.me.

As for what to expect: Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told Betabeat by email, "We are reverting digg to a startup, expect more things like paperboy," a feature that lets you automatically update whenever you leave your house.

As for the price tag, well, that's a little unclear. Mr. Borthwick refused to comment. However, someone with knowledge of the deal told Betabeat said that ballpark number of $500,000 had been floating around and that was the only figure the source had heard. That's a long way from the $200 million Google is rumored to have once offered for the service, before an acquisition fell through.

Our source speculated that News.me "wanted was more users and traffic," adding that they hadn't necessarily been looking for any deals in particular, but "when it came up it seemed like a potential solution to that problem."

Our source added that the service is "doing very well with their target audience, but I think it wasn't growing enough beyond that to more mainstream users." And while having that core audience is great, "John really wants to see explosive growth for anything we do."

The deal was announced on Digg's blog, in a post by CEO Matt Williams. He explained:

Betaworks is combining Digg with News.me, a Betaworks company with an iPad app, iPhone app and daily email that delivers the best stories shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Digg will join a portfolio of products developed by Betaworks designed to improve the way people find and talk about the news.

Mr. Williams added that Mr. Borthwick will become Digg's CEO. For his part, Mr. Williams will be headed to Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

A companion announcement on the Betaworks blog gave a little more insight into what the News.me team will be doing with Digg:

We have spent the last 18 months building News.me as a mobile-first social news experience. The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now.

We're avid users of the News.me app and email service, so we're excited to see where this goes.

Mr. Borthwick

After a brief interlude, wherein an organizer appealed to whichever publicity-seeking startup might have released the still-chattering bird high aloft in the rafters, TechCrunch marched onward. M.G. Siegler (formerly of TechCrunch, currently of CrunchFund) opened with what sounded like an invitation to coffee, rattling off the overlap between their respective organizations' portfolios and concluding, "We should probably talk more." Betaworks CEO John Borthwick didn't bite: "We probably should, but we're doing just fine." He also added rather pointedly that, "as you know, we are not a fund," though Betaworks, of course, has investments.

Mr. Borthwick proceeded to, at Mr. Siegler's inquiry as to how they work with investors on the sunnier side of the country, essentially dismiss any notions of conflict: "This bicoastal thing, I think it's fun and games" but added that "the market is bigger because of the complementary skills that both coasts offer the market and entrepreneurs and so it's not, it's fun to sort of pit one coast against the other, but companies are better for having East Coast and West Coast investors." Some companies might be a better fit for one coast or the other or both, but regardless, more options are better. 

Well, there went our high hopes for another massive East vs. West linkbait shitstorm.

But wait! He did have a little bit of comparing and contrasting to offer. Asked about the investment scene at the moment in New York (loaded question, much?), Mr. Borthwick basically suggested that while New York is very busy, the scene isn't as... inflated as the Valley. To wit:

"What happened last time in 1998, 1999, 2000, sort of the incredible flood of capital brought a lot of lazy entrepreneurship," he said, continuing, "I haven't seen that yet." "I think that New York is still not as heated as the West Coast, which I think is a good thing."

"We've got a ton of things we need to build, right, in this market. At the end of the day we're, at Betaworks, we're makers. We love building stuff," he added. "I think we're just at the beginning of this. We've got so much more to build. And when you think about how to humanize the computing experience... I think there's a lot more than has to be done."

Mattias Swenson, one of Bloglovin's cofounders. (linkedin.com)

New York-based startup non-incubator Betaworks announced today that it's making a new investment in Bloglovin, the fashion and design lover's answer to RSS, according to GigaOm. Bloglovin is a Swedish company that curates blog posts, much like an RSS reader, but with a strong focus on aesthetics. It also can notify you via phone or email whenever one of your followed blogs updates.

GigaOm reports:

New York-based Internet company Betaworks is announcing today that it, along with former Glam CFO and Microsoft executive Bruce Jaffe, is making a “significant” investment in the startup....the companies said the funding is meant to accelerate the growth of the product, including its mobile presence. By the end of the year, they said, the company could add about five more developers and, potentially, a monetization-focused hire in New York.

Betaworks already backs several companies hinging on engagement, including stats trackers Chartbeat, Bitly and Socialflow, so Bloglovin seems like it will fold into the Betaworks family nicely.

“The category is something that makes a ton of sense for us at Betaworks," Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told GigaOm. “We look for engagement at Betaworks and there’s real engagement here.”

Mr. Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks. (betaworks.com)

Ever since news broke last year that satirical news source The Onion was shutting down their New York office and heading to Chicago, The Atlantic reports that the core team of staffers has pursued every avenue to keep the company from heading west. One bizarre but apparently legitimate option was to have startup non-incubator Betaworks buy The Onion.

According to The Atlantic, head of digital at The Onion, Baratunde Thurston, sought out an interested buyer in Betaworks, despite their seemingly disparate business visions. An editorial staffer at The Onion told The Atlantic, "[Betaworks was] an ideal buyer because you had this nurturing technology company that would let us expand in New York and do the things we wanted to do." Another editorial staffer corroborated the report, saying that Onion owner David Schafer seriously considered the offer for two weeks before turning it down.

John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, refused to confirm the failed deal to The Atlantic. Immediate requests for comment to Mr. Borthwick from Betabeat were not answered. (He is allegedly on vacation.)

The duo would certainly make for strange bedfellows, since Betaworks' ventures like Bit.ly and Chartbeat are more focused on data than editorial verticals. But it's kind of a shame the deal fell through. We'd rather have a Betaworks-owned Onion than a city without them at all.

Branch cofounders via bulletin.branch.com

When you've got Evan Williams, John Borthwick, and Max Levchin chatting it up on your "curated discussion platform," it's probably just a matter of time before the high-powered investors, incubators makers, and other loosely-defined collectives come a' calling.

Today, Branch, the startup that initially launched in New York City as group blogging service Roundtable, announced that is now partnered with Obvious Corp and picked up investments from Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. Although Branch has been working out of Obvious headquarters since the beginning of this year, the startup will move to Betaworks this summer. Cofounder Josh Miller's announcement is somewhat obliquely worded, but it sounds like Rick Webb, Lucas Nelson, Ryan Freitas, and David Tisch also joined the round.

The size of the round wasn't disclosed. However, this Form D SEC filing for Roundtable Media (the startup's original name) filed by Joshua Alexander Miller, seems to indicate that the size of the round was $1,999,997 and fully subscribed. The address on the Form D, for example, is the same address as Obvious Corp. According to the Form D, the funding was an equity round with seven investors and the date of first sale is listed as February 15th. We have reached out to Mr. Miller for confirmation.

In Obvious Corp's post about the new partnership, the company makes it sound like a Quora for experts:

The prototype, called Branch (formerly Roundtable), enables a smart new brand of high quality public discourse. Curated groups of people are invited to engage around issues in which they are knowledgeable. This service holds the promise of a new platform for dialogue on the web—a necessary departure from the monologues we have grown so accustomed to reading online. Obvious is thrilled to be partnering with such a friendly, gifted team on this project.

The "Branch" about the partnership announcement, for example, includes Obvious Corp's Evan Williams, Mr. Miller, and tech journalists like Eric Eldon, Sarah Lacy, and Claire Cain Miller. What, no Betabeat? Ms. Lacy didn't waste any time pointing out the competitive landscape:

"seems like several companies have tried to do closed, high-brow conversations as a reaction to mass communities that don't scale. none of them seem to catch on. thinking of things like gather and that one in so. cal now that i have used so infrequently i can even remember the name of it."

Mr. Miller's response:

"I spoke with Brian (Namesake) and Cody (Nerd Collider) months ago, and learned a lot about the hurdles they faced. One way we're different: we're focusing on the interaction between participants, not the interaction between participants and viewers.

But the starting point for us is this: every other publishing platform is centered around monologues, the conversation is always secondary. That doesn't seem right to us. So we're flipping that dynamic on its head."

Not invited to the conversation, but still wondering what sets Branch apart? You'll have a chance to pepper Mr. Miller and his cofounders Hursh Agrawal and Cemre Güngör when they move back this summer. As Mr. Miller writes, "We could not be more excited to rejoin the New York tech community."

Well, as TechCrunch reported yesterday, we weren't the only ones to take note. Betaworks quietly acquired Vibe back in December. According to the blog, the deal was "likely in the low six figures, with Betaworks now owning a majority of Vibe." In a post on the Betaworks Tumblr this morning, CEO John Borthwick wrote, "There’s no better feeling than falling in love," noting that Mr. Sayed will stay on to run the company.

Unlike Twitter, Vibe offers iPhone users the ability to limit their messages, photos, or videos to a specific, geo-fenced location, ranging from a "whisper" (so only those people 165 feet around you can see) up to a "bellow" (visible to the whole wide open). What's more, the service also offers a temporal option, so that posts can expire in 15 minutes or 30 days. Starting to see why it was so popular with the OWS crowd?

"Freedom of expression while mobile is what Vibe offers - whether at political protests, Q&A at conferences, group communication among students and coworkers, etc.  All are equally important," Mr. Sayed said in an email to Betabeat this morning, adding, "Social anonymity will always be an optional and important part of Vibe."

"Here was a simple, real-time, social application with an amazing ability to connect people, friends and strangers alike. In other words, just our kind of thing," Mr. Borthwick wrote of the acquisition. Mr. Sayed told Betabeat, "Vibe fits in with betaworks' interest and work in the real time social web - enabling it and making it more accessible."

As TechCrunch pointed out, there are still some snags in the service. In order to see "vibes" on a map, for example, you have to download another app by Mr. Sayed called AskLocal. "I suspect betaworks is throwing additional engineers at Vibe to improve it beyond its basic concept," said Erick Schonfeld.

Judging by Vibe's stream of tweets once the news broke, the team had been just waiting to exhale. Fellow Betaworks companies like Chartbeat are already slapping their newest family member on the back.

after close analysis, we found it's ON FIRE! MT @VibeApp @chartbeat Can you give us metrics the reach of this article? chart.bt/zjlz3U

— chartbeat (@chartbeat) February 23, 2012

Here's what the Vibe projector looked like in Zuccotti Park: