Mr. Vinh. (Photo: Tumblr.com)

Shopping Site Goes Shopping Back in 2011, Khoi Vinh, the former design director for The New York Times’s website, attempted to launch an iPad collage maker called Mixel that even Taylor Swift would love. The interface was kind of clunky, and the company soon pivoted to a smoother iPhone product, which became fairly successful. And now Mixel has been acquired by the custom product giant Etsy.

No, you won't be creating any collages of your twee collectables any time soon. According to AllThingsD, The Mixel team is being acquired for its stellar mobile talents. Mr. Vinh and his cofounder Scott Ostler, along with employees Akiva Leffert and Roy Stanfield, will all make the move to Etsy's Brooklyn offices. Mixel will be shutting down the social side of its app, but will leave up its collage-making tool. In an email to Betabeat, Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea explains, “We expect our mobile traffic to surpass desktop traffic by the end of 2014." 

Not Even Punking You Kanye West's favorite Pinterest-like site, The Fancy, just expanded its subscription box service, originally a monthly plan that gives you $60 of curated goods for $30. Now everyone, not just the minds at Fancy, can choose a bunch of items to send out to their adoring fans. Fancy gets to split the profits with you, of course. The first partner is Ashton Kutcher with his A+ Box, which includes brain-shaped ice cubes and mustache-shaped Band-Aids.

Iowa Now Trendiest State Dwolla, the fast-growing money transfer app, reached a pretty big milestone this week. The company announced its partnership with the Iowa state government to help modernize the state's tax system. Starting soon, businesses will be able to use Dwolla to pay the cigarette stamp tax, which accounts for about $100 million of Iowa's revenue each year. In a blog post, the company seems to be looking to the future already: "And while you may not be able to pay your taxes using Dwolla today, you are going to start seeing our logo pop up here and there as the state looks to modernize the payment experiences and do better business for the 21st century taxpayer and economy (e.g. mobile payments, low-cost transfers, and real-time notifications, etc.)."

Norman Mailer Badge Foursquare recently partnered up with Voice Media Group, the company that was spun off from Village Voice Media, now without the icky Backpage.com. The Voice's Places event data will now be syndicated on Foursquare and the company's highly popular "Best Of" will be integrated into the service as well.

Let's All Go to the Lobby: Dogfish Accelerator, the first accelerator program for film producers, launched this week. Started by a former TechStars associate, James Belfer, the accelerator puts film teams in a three-month intensive training and networking program and gives them $18,000 in seed funding, along with free office space. But why wouldn't you just try a Kickstarter and go to Sundance?

Award Tour See.Me, the social network for artists, is currently running a bunch of contests for its 600,000 users. There's $125,000 in grants and awards up for grabs. The site has just announced that founding Tribe Called Quest member Q-Tip is going to serve as a judge for its music competition. In a press release sent to Betabeat, William Etundi, founder and CEO of See.Me, said, "Our simple goal is support creative people with recognition, shows and grants and we are super excited to bring Q-Tip into that process.”

Fund My Relationship Coming Soon If you've ever wanted your neighbors to pick your next significant other, then you should try ChainDate. The site is billing itself as the world's first site that uses crowdsourcing to find you a match. Every user gets "Wingpeople," users who like the same type of person that you do. The site matches you up with people that these similar-minded users thought were cute too. Sounds a bit competitive.

Nothing Really Matters The mobile analytics firm Adeven claims that over 435,000 new apps will be added to the iOS app store in 2013. That's too many apps to fit on your tiny phone, but don't worry, you won't even notice most of them. The firm also reports that 60 perecent of apps are "zombie apps," or apps that go completely undiscovered by iPhone users. A Zombie App Survival Guide is surely forthcoming.

Stuff Michelle Obama Likes  Whole Kids Foundation, PACT and Indiegogo are teaming up to help build urban sustainable gardens across the country. Leaders raise $2,500 on Indiegogo pages and Whole Kids Foundation will provide additional help like gardening materials. Crowdfunding kind of saves the day again.

Help Out, Y'all LuckyAnt, the crowfunding platform for small businesses, is hosting a very large crowdfunding campaign for 9 South Street Seaport businesses to help them out in the enduring disaster of hurricane Sandy. There's 19 days left in the project to rebuild historic Front Street and over $10,000 has already been raised.

Wake Up, Loser If waking up to the blaring sound of beeping or shocking radio static isn't for you, then you should download Mood O'Clock. It's the first emotional alarm app for Android, which lets you choose what kind of mood you want to wake up to. Depending on what you choose, the app will play you a corresponding morning soundtrack. We need a setting to help us wake up feeling like a brogrammer for those special Saturdays.

What the hukk?

Lala Land When you plunk down $18 million in hard-won settlement earnings on an 8,000 sq. ft. manse with "a jetliner view of L.A." you don't just around on the couch watching Bravo. Especially not if your names are Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

The strapping venture capitalists recently hosted two parties at their new Hollywood Hills home. The first was feting Katie Finnegan and Erica Bell, cofounders of the fashion startup Hukkster, which recently scored a $1 million seed round from the duo. Guests included actor Jason Lewis (Samatha's boyfriend to the rest of us). 

They followed that up with a fundraiser for Los Angeles mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti, a Democrat. According to LA Weekly, Mr. Garcetti is, "the candidate who pulls out his iPhone and brags that he 'has an app for that.'" Something tell us Silicon Beach found its new mascots.

Movin' on up Looks like fledging startup Branch is taking a flying leap from its betaworks nest. Founder Josh Miller took to Instagram to share the following picture of the company's spacious new digs. The new office is on 23rd Street and 3rd Avenue, and though it will technically be the Branch office, employees of Ev Williams' new startup Medium will also work out of it. "Say hi!" tweeted Mr. Miller. "We have extra desks for creative engs, designers, & writers."

Anti-Social Media  Mixel cofounder and former NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh has 295,000 some Twitter followers and plenty of clout/Klout. Startups take note: this is not how you want him to tweet about your company. 

Disrupt litter The employees at Square--who apparently refer to themselves as "Squares," because that's the kind of place Silicon Valley is--gave their neighbors a little holiday present earlier this week. Jack Dorsey reported on Twitter that 30 people spent 30 minutes collecting trash around their office. "Over 300 pounds cleaned up," he added proudly.

Please note that a filter was used in the making of this picture.

Your own dog food Speaking of filters: While doing a little casual perusing of Instagram's relatively new web profiles, we noticed something interesting: It appears that in the month of December, Kevin Systrom has posted exactly one photo (a snapshot from Paris) to the service he founded.

Holidays, Google Style Say what you will about GOOG, but the company knows how to throw a swanky ass party. This year's New York holiday party was a carnival-themed soiree at the Waldorf Astoria, and featured glow in the dark games like Pacman and foosball 3D glasses as party favors. "Google knows how to throw down, wrote one attendee. "Masquerade masks, ridiculous decor, & epic food/booze selection."

(Photo: Instagram/Shaila)

But first we had to ask, based on evidence, would he consider Taylor Swift something of a personal muse? "Isn't she a muse to everyone?" he wondered. Betabeat mentioned a surprisingly rousing rendition of "Fifteen" performed by some (adult) friends at karaoke night over the weekend. "She won't be denied," Mr. Vinh concluded.

As for the app at large, "Remixes are very popular," noted Mr. Vinh, "Some of the remix threads get very long." The last time we spoke, Mr. Vinh had pointed out that, for your average amateur, an art-making app without a social element was doomed to fizzle. "The threads are conversations, and when you open one up, it's a little like walking up to a few people chatting at a party. People feel compelled to jump in and join."

"They create a spur-of-the-moment opportunity to create something," he added, "Because you have pieces and ideas to work with and add to or subtract from."

He also noticed that early users were not reusing individual pieces as much as he and his co-founder Scott Ostler had expected. "Most of the images that go into mixels are pulled from the Popular tab or the Web Image Search tab (within the edit screen)...What we had thought was that people would also browse other people's mixels and say, 'Hey, I want to use that in a mixel of my own.'" A possible solution to that, he proposed a 'drawer feature', "So that when you're looking at someone else's mixel, and you see a piece you like, you can tuck it away for later."

Mr. Vinh declined to share the number of users just yet, pointing out that, "We're a creation app on iPad, so we don't get the exposure that people will get to a Web site." In that same vein, times of usage also differ, "We see a lot of activity at night, as people leave their iPads at home during the day, for the most part. And a lot of activity on Saturday, too. So it's very different from the Web, which a lot of people will surf during work. We've also heard a lot of people say, 'I'm having Mixel withdrawal' when they leave their iPads at home.'" (That reminds us, we have some Words With Friends games to dominate . . .)

If you're suffering from Mixel withdrawl yourself, here are five of Mr. Vinh's favorites, followed by five of our own.

via Mixel

Back in July when Betabeat talked to design guru Khoi Vinh, the former design director for the NYTimes.com, Mr. Vinh criticized publishing companies whose approach to the brave new world of the tablet was limited to replicating a magazine experience within an app. Building an app, he said, only makes sense when there's real utility: "I would build social features and sharing that really resonate with people."

Well, Mr. Vinh's stealth project made its debut in the App Store today and it appears he's done just that. Mixel is a free collage-making app aimed at democratizing the creation of art the same way smartphones with cameras and apps like Instagram and Picctu have turned us into a nation of photographers.

This summer, Mr. Vinh and his co-founder Scott Ostler of Dump.fm, picked up $600,000 in funding for their startup, called Lascaux, from betaworks and Polaris Ventures. Since March, they've been working out of Dogpatch Labs in Union Square. We stopped by Dogpatch last week to talk to Mr. Vinh about why he felt compelled to venture into Startupland, how Mixel is avoiding IP issues, and how he plans on mainstreaming art-making into a new category of activity.

"I noticed that this is really the perfect art-making device," said Mr. Vinh, explaining the genesis of his idea as he fiddled around with his iPad. "For the first time in computing history you’ve got an ideal, super-powerful art-making device in the hands of mainstream consumers. Because no one ever bought Wacom tablets before and even Photoshop had a limited audience because of how technical it was."

Mixel, on the other hand, gives users intuitive tools for playing around with photos from the web, Facebook, etc. You can crop, scale, duplicate and basically remix images into a collage that then becomes part of a conversation with other users. They in turn can see how you put a particular Mixel together and take images that you used and add their own. Click on any particular image within a collage and you can see all the other Mixels that used that same image. That kind of functionality means social is more deeply integrated than just the usual following and liking and ability to share Facebook and Tumblr, although Mixel has that too.

"When I looked at all the art apps in the App Store, I thought they were all great and really powerful, but I also realized that they were all single-player, they were not social," said Mr. Vinh. "Unless I’m already convinced I can make art, whether I’m a professional artist, designer, or committed hobbyist—only those people are going to stick with these apps. All the barriers for non-artists remain."

"Our thinking is that we can combine social with making art, so we can renew that social context, so that you’re encouraged, so that you’re having fun, so that it’s very low personal risk, so that it’s very rewarding—you can create a whole new category of activity . . . and turn all these non-artists into people having fun making art before they realize that it’s art," he explained. Basically, time warp back to elementary school art class.

As we sat on a stool in Dogpatch, Mr. Vinh casually created a few Mixels with photos of trees and head shots from the lead singers of Hall & Oates. That's sort of the idea. "We want people to make this stuff really quickly. We don’t want them laboring over crops—really simple, fast tools is what we’re trying to do."

It's easy to see how the app would be a big hit with bloggers and Tumblrs, although Betabeat was admittedly disappointed the app doesn't yet have drawing. Mr. Vinh explained that's partly to maintain the integrity of the images. "We want to create a really family friendly-environment, so you have to sign in with Facebook and use your real name. We’re leaving painting and drawing out of it for now, because we don’t want people defacing the content. Even though you can cut it up, you can't really mutilate the images. We have some ideas about how we can add brushes in the future, but now we’re focused on collages."

Hence the PG-rated promotional video:

Introducing Mixel for iPad from Mixel App on Vimeo.

Mr. Vinh said the reason behind keeping the images positive didn't have to do with copyright issues, although he thinks he has a great argument for fair use because Mixel users are creating new works and adding value. "But we’d also comply with the DMCA—a takedown approach. We filed all the papers and stuff so if somebody has a complaint about their images in here, we’ll take them down. That’s definitely going to be something to watch as we scale the business. But if we try to square every copyright, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to do this at all."

Another tool left out of the app is the ability to add text, although we saw crops of images of text as Mr. Vinh gave us a tour of the app. That was a purposeful decision to take a different approach than, say, 4chan or LOLcats. "What we saw was when you have the ability to add text in the same editing environment as you’re composing an image, the vast majority of cases people stop thinking visually and move into a captioning mode and think of a funny line to add to a piece instead."

Mr. Vinh said they decided to keep the app free to use because they think the potential is huge, "But no one is sitting around and thinking: 'I need a social art making experience.'" The focus now is on building an audience, but a freemium model, in-app purchases and working with brand marketers are all possibilities for monetization down the road.

Whether or not the app takes off, Mr. Vinh, who paid $10,000 out of pocket to build a demo and even flew out to Palo Alto to get feedback from Sand Hill Road, has no regrets about venturing into the startup world. At the Times, he said, "What frustrated me was that sometimes the final call on user experience or details of a product were made by some project manager somewhere who is not qualified to do that, but they’re in charge of the schedule. I realized the only way I could do this was if I owned the final product, meaning, I built it from scratch, I built the company around it."

"I definitely wanted to get into a startup and I definitely admire the startup culture," he added. "But I feel like the core motivation is there’s a product that I wouldn’t be able to build any other way."

Mr. Subtraction himself.

For this week's cover story about Condé Nast's struggle developing for the iPad, Betabeat had the opportunity to talk to Khoi Vinh, former Design Director for NYTimes.com. On his widely-read design blog, Subtraction, Mr. Vinh has repeatedly expressed his skepticism toward publishers like Condé Nast and Hearst and software companies like Adobe for thinking that what iPad readers want is a magazine replica app that takes a print-centric approach to tablet design. But we didn't get the chance to include some really interesting predictions Mr. Vinh made about the direction he thinks consuming content on the iPad is heading (in short: back to the browser) and what readers really want.

Mr. Vinh, who recently released a book on web design, seem to have contracted that start-up fever making its way around the city and is currently working in stealth mode on an app of his own. He compared the bells-and-whistles of the current magazine app rush to the CD-ROM bubble and advised publishers to think more like Netflix.

Do you still believe Condé and Adobe are leading the industry in the wrong direction?

I do believe that in general, though I found that I’ve been using The New Yorker app a lot. I’m a lifetime subscriber to the print edition, so I get access to the app for free. I still find it frustrating, but I think its okay in that sometimes I’m traveling and can’t get my hands on the print edition, so it's nice to have that. It’s what I’d call a nice reader. I don’t think it taps into the potential of what you can do with that brand online. I have constant problems with it crashing.

Because of problems with the size?

I wouldn’t speculate as to a specific cause. My general guess would be they just tried to get too fancy. What I like about it is that it's just the text from the magazines presented very simply. I ignore all the other extras. I don’t think the stuff I care about is what's causing it to crash, which is just the text.

Do you think the replica approach is going to make it hard for publishers to get iPad subscribers?

To me the question is not what’s going to get them to subscribe but rather what’s going to get them to engage. I think trying to get readers to subscribe is a very difficult proposition that I think very few brands are going to be able to succeed at. Engagement is something else. I think there’s all kinds of great stuff on NewYorker.com [Ed note: Agreed!] blogs and extras and stuff. It’s bizarre to me that the app hasn’t tapped into that stuff. I guess it’s frustrating to me that so many of these Condé Nast apps address a problem that’s already been solved.

The website is a perfectly good delivery mechanism for the content and takes better advantage of the medium. These apps tend to set aside those benefits that users have already said that they want for this illusory benefit of being able to control the typography and the layout and being able to make things look more print-like.

So if you were in charge, you'd focus on optimizing the mobile web experience?

If it were up to me, I would focus on new technologies like HTML 5 that let a website cache inside of a browser more readily, so people can have better offline access to it. But there’s a finite amount of resources that any organization can spend on these projects and I would rather double down on the website because in my view in a couple of years most content delivery is going to go back to the browser anyway. I mean I love apps and I feel like there’s a real use for apps. But I feel like it’s mostly for things that require the horsepower of the device and take advantage of the specific capabilities that Apple built into the operating system. You don’t need that to deliver content, you just don’t.

Do you think it's possible to monetize a mobile website on the iPad?

I’m not privy to the numbers, but I would imagine there’s better long-term potential in a huge audience through a browser than a limited audience through an app. They could be making good money off the app, but my guess is they’re not. My guess is it's mostly people like me who are subscribing through print, right?

When does an tablet app make sense?

If I were to build an app, it would be because I found some piece of the functionality that made sense with the brand. Whether it's some video or multimedia or some utilitarian reason like a calculator or a productivity app or something--some feature set that really made a compelling case for building a new audience and was a complement to the brand. And if I found that feature set then I would build it with native tools, meaning on the iPad using Apple’s development environment, Xcode and so forth.

Are you skeptical about the future of the iPad adoption?

I’m bullish on the device in general. Apple sold 15 million last year, the projections are 55 million this year. I think that might be a conservative estimate. It's conceivable that we’ll have a 100 million of these devices by the middle of next year, which is a huge number, a tremendous adoption rate. I think within five years they are going to be an accepted norm for most computing tasks. So I think it’s a fantastic device to the point where I’ve started a new venture that is focused on an iPad app. I’m building an app that takes advantage of properties that are unique to the iPad. It's not that I’m a skeptic about the device, I’m a skeptical about the use of the device to deliver content that’s just as well delivered in a browser.

Do you think publishers need to use interactive designers to really get at the potential of the iPad?

Absolutely. Even in so far as all the extras that they put it, it’s not just that they’re centered around delivery of text from the print edition. It’s like things that they think are going to be interesting to people are very much in the mold of what somebody thinks is going to be interesting if they come from a print world. "Oh, we’ll have some video extras and be able to rotate the photo, you’ll be able to get extra audio clips." That stuff is fine. But it takes such tremendous amount of incremental labor and expense that there’s no upside to it. People want the core content. They’re not going to say no to the extras, but most of the time they’re not going to use them and most of the time they’re not going to care about them. Netflix is a company that totally gives you just the core content. They decided to do this after a decade of all this value-add in DVDs thinking that’s what sells stuff. Then Netflix demonstrates, people just don’t care about the extras. That to me is part of the print-centric approach.

There’s a clear precedent in the CD-ROM bubble from 20 years ago where they tried to deliver content in this very fancy value-add way and people just didn’t buy it. If you just at look at what it takes to put these magazines together, you come to grips with the fact that you’re not shipping content, you're shipping software and it costs you $10,000/month to produce an iPad edition. Let’s just say it only takes one incremental staffer to build an iPad app, they cost $120,000 to $150,000. Why would you spend that amount of money just getting the content out there? Why wouldn’t you invest that money in building better software around what users want? If you spend that much money to deliver the content, you’re not improving the content. To me it just doesn’t make sense.

When does it make sense to build an app?

I would build an app that has utility. I would build social features and sharing that really resonate with people and have longer shelf-life than just a month’s worth of content.