(Photo: The Yard)

No Sleep 'Til Back in July, Betabeat revealed that Williamsburg-dwelling coworking space The Yard would be launching a General Assembly-like roster of classes--and at "Brooklyn prices," no less. Well, the curriculum site is now live, with a full list of offerings. Examples include iOS app development for beginnings and Intro to Makerbot. A course on Kickstarter makes the joke about would-be creators of mason jar cocktail shakers almost too easy.

Your Digital Newsstand Now live: DuJour, an ultra-luxe magazine targeted to the rich and fabulous. Glossy photo shoots are all well and good, but DuJour hopes to distinguish itself by thoroughly integrating print and digital--meaning readers can finally click through to featured items that strike their fancy. Giving the pub a long leg up: A partnership with Gilt Group, which'll allow the magazine to launch with a subscriber base of three million.

Learning with Friends Ed tech platform Lore is now open to students, taking yet another stride toward being a social network, rather than simply a platform for classes. Rather than awaiting an invite from an instructor, anyone can now create a profile and start poking around. “We created Lore to make education better by connecting people.” said CEO Joseph Cohen in a statement, adding, “This is the next step. And we’re excited to see the new relationships and communities students form on Lore.”

Don't Miss the Bus Earlier this month we introduced you to Readyforce's Hacker Tour 2012 and its mission to recruit talent for startups, rather than Google or Goldman. Since then, the campaign has racked up even more sponsors, doubling the amount of support from VC-backed companies. Organizers are also offering two "pro-bono" spots for non-profit tech companies, plus three for early-stage companies. The tour kicks off September 12 at Cornell.

Summon the Stylistas Mark your calendars, people of fashion tech: On October 11, StyleCaster and the 92nd Street Y are holding their second State of Style event, on the heels of a sold-out February event. The idea is to "unlock the potential of new media in the style space." Speakers include designer Rebecca Minkoff and Buzzfeed president Jon Steinberg.

New Hires Jewelry startup BaubleBar has secured itself a VP of digital marketing, poaching from the tastefully appointed halls of the established fashion world. Previously, Shilpa Shenoy headed up digital marketing at Barneys New York, where she oversaw a site redesign and the launch of barneyswarehouse.com. Prior to that, she did stints at Helmut Lang and Theory.

Acquisitions Private equity firm Catterton Partners has acquired thirteen-year-old online promotions company ePrize. Terms weren't disclosed, but the company did rake in $53 million in revenue in 2011 and it has almost 500 employees. Because ePrize is profitable, CEO Matt Wise told Betabeat, the acquisition wasn't about operating capital, but rather having deeper pockets for strategic acquisitions.

3-D Printing We hear that Makerbot, New York's one-company manufacturing revival, recently signed a lease on its very own storefront. The Wall Street Journal reports the company will set up shop at 298 Mulberry, between Houston and Bleecker. Go ahead and update your Christmas shopping to-do list; we'll wait.

Meet the new Lore. (Photo: Screencap)

The latest from edtech startup Lore: Today the company debuts a rebuilt platform, designed to function more like a social network and less like those dreadful discussion forums you might remember from your educational days.

The rebrand fits with the vision CEO Joe Cohen was excitedly evangelizing when last we spoke. Back in April, the company shucked its original name (Coursekit) and christened itself Lore, a move meant to provide the team with more wiggle room. “Our vision is to be a platform for learning in whatever form,” he told Betabeat, but refused to divulge any details on what that might mean, product-wise.

In a phone conversation yesterday explaining the changes to Betabeat, Mr. Cohen was every bit as irrepressibly pie in the sky:

“Our ambitions are bigger than kits or courses,” he told us. “We want to be this underlying software platform for the whole of education.”

That's a big ambition, all right.

Lore's approach: social networking, but specifically for education. The revamp introduces profiles, so that rather than the platform privileging a particular class, students and instructors will be individual users who happen to be participating in a class. The company has also merged the newsfeed-style stream and the class calendar, as well as adding a library to serve as a repository for course content.

"If you think about companies like Yammer, LinkedIn, they've validated this idea that you don't just have Facebook. You have situation-oriented social networks. And we're trying to do that for education," Mr. Cohen told Betabeat.

He described the results as analogous to LinkedIn: “We think we’ve got the largest connected community of instructors and students ever put together so far,” he said (even as he confessed there’s no real data to support that feeling), and the revamp is "the next step in making that fabric stronger but also more pervasive,” he added.

After a semester up and running at 600 schools across the country, Mr. Cohen confessed that he just “didn’t see the platform scaling” into the future to meet that broader goal. Hence the redesigned user interface.

Besides the more social changes, Instructors landing on the homepage are now prompted with the question “What do you teach?” They can choose from one of twelve areas where the platform has worked best, ranging from social studies to engineering. Once they select an area, they’ll get an explanation of how Lore works best for that particular discipline.

To date, Lore has raised $6 million in venture funding, including support from the king of higher-ed skeptics, Peter Thiel.

But back in the day, those first 23 companies were all the rage. Like shiny new toys, they were exciting and fascinating. There was even a reality television show about them. So even though their three-month, highly-competitive startup accelerator program has ended, these companies are still around. They didn’t just vanish into thin air. (Well, some of them did).

But all of this begs the question, where are these companies now? How have they fared in the big, bad world? Did they flop? Or surpass expectations?

We didn’t know, so we decided to find out. And it turns out that we weren’t the only ones who were curious about what these companies have been up to.

“When we launched, everything was a concern,” managing director David Tisch told Betabeat in an email. “We were new, a startup.” New York City, he said, brought a unique set of challenges and advantages to these first two classes, but you never how things might turn out. So, Mr. Tisch, what’s the verdict? Have the first 23 New York City companies done TechStars proud?

“The progress shown so far is very promising,” Mr. Tisch said, “and I expect a few very big companies to emerge. There are some early standouts who have shown progress on the product side, revenue side, and team side.”

In the last year, about half of the companies raised over a million dollars in funding from investors (in addition to TechStars's initial $18,000 in each company) and only two companies failed. A third company, FriendsList, also failed, but its two cofounders shifted gears and transformed into another company, Timehop, a popular app that has since raised $1.1 million.

“I think the quality of the people we funded stands out to me,” Mr. Tisch added. “[And] as I look back at the companies from our first two classes at TechStars NYC, I am confident we have funded some amazing teams who are building big businesses.” -Jess Schiewe

Mr. Cohen. (LinkedIn.com)

Coursekit, which bills itself as a social network for higher education, is Coursekit no more. Henceforth the company will be known as "Lore," a name which offers a little more flexibility for a fast-growing, still-evolving startup.

The company released a statement saying that the change “reflects the company's ambition to be the global network of learners, instructors, and educational content.”

Also included in the announcement: Peter Thiel recently invested, via the Founders Fund. He offered a few remarks to explain the move:

The Internet is reshaping how people learn, and Lore is one of the companies making that happen. My course at Stanford is using Lore and we can see dynamics changing already.

Mr. Thiel’s investment is especially interesting, given his famous antipathy toward traditional higher ed and the fact that the rebrand seems to open the company up to a broader notion of learning. Nor is this the first sign of ambition beyond straightforward classroom learning management--back in February, CEO Joseph Cohen talked NYU Stern professor Aswath Damodaran into opening up two of his popular classes to nonpaying Internet denizens via the platform.

In a brief phone conversation, Mr. Cohen told Betabeat that his team had come to feel the name “Coursekit” was too confining. He and his cofounders started the company while in school, as a way for professors to better manage their courses and for students to connect outside of the classroom. But since then, they’ve covered a lot of ground--they’ve dropped out, they’re at $6 million in venture funding and in 600 institutions--and along the way, their thinking has evolved. “Our vision is to be a platform for learning in whatever form,” whether a course-specific study group or broader school community, Cohen explained.

“We don't think there are many inspiring brands in the area, and we want to be that,” he explained. “We’re looking to build a big company here, and we felt that our name was limiting.”

So why Lore? Well, there are the practical aspects: “It’s short, simple, sweet, but we could also fill it with meaning because not that many people use the word very often.” But the term also has bigger implications: “Lore means knowledge shared between people, which is what we do.”

Despite the name change and the seeming broadening of focus, Cohen refused to reveal any upcoming alterations to the offering itself: “As of today, we’re not announcing any product changes.” That said, “you should expect things to get better and bigger and evolve over time.”

Sounds to us like there’s something in the works.