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.

A few of the featured apps.

There's clearly quite a lot of creative talent being devoted to the creation of iOS apps. Even hipsters are flocking to the craft. But does something like Path really rise to the level of art? Yesterday, Betabeat ventured downtown to the Internet Week-pegged gallery opening for “The Art of Apps,” to hear the argument out.

By the time Betabeat arrived at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art (the name stencilled sternly in white against a revolutionary red background), the party was winding down. We stepped inside to find a dimly lit gallery studded with high-definition flat-screen televisions, each offering up some element of iOS user design, attempting to recontextualize it as art, not just app.

The first screen offered a note from gadget blogger and host Peter Rojas, which explained a bit about the curatorial philosophy at work: 

Great apps often feel complete and polished in a way that websites often don't, sometime which obscures the process of experimentation, iteration, and (sometimes) failure that goes into making them. Creating an amazing user experience for an app--one where the device itself almost melts away--requires a thoughtfulness and cleverness that can be hard to find.

It concluded by laying out the exhibition's mission: "We wanted to showcase examples of some of the smartest, best-designed apps we could find, as well as give a peek into how they get created in the first place."

Some apps benefitted more from this treatment than others.

Up close and magnified to the size of a dorm-room poster, Path looks lovely. You can see the subtle textures of its red welcome screen; the moon-filled sleep screen looks gorgeous rather than oversharey. Meanwhile, Tweetbot’s interface serves basically the same function--serving up the content created by moment-to-moment status updates. But place them side-by-side, and it’s like comparing Anthropologie and Old Navy. Whatever the latter’s virtues, the aesthetics are underwhelming.

Further back were the creativity-facilitating apps. You know, the ones that are almost painfully calibrated to the Platonic ideal of the Apple user: Young, hip, design-savvy. Here the presentation was scattershot. Some displays, like social collage social collage iPad app Mixel, privileged art produced on their platform. Social video-making app Cameo (currently in beta, as per its website) injected a little whimsy, explaining the process with arrows stuck to the wall space between its two allotted screens, labeled "this" and "make." Repping for creativity suite Paper was a borderline motion-sickness-inducing POV video of the app in use.

After browsing the screens, struggling with whether to view what we were seeing as artwork or giant advertisement, we decided to investigate a sign pointing downstairs, which promised a Mixel. Given the app's display had some of the most eye-catching images upstairs, we bit. The display that greeted visitors at the foot of the stairs definitely landed on the commercial end of the spectrum: A table on which sat a great big washtub full of the hangover cure Berocca. Beyond that was the bar, stocked by a sponsor pushing a fluorescently lit liquor. (It looked like the type of thing that would require a hangover cure.)

In between was an enormous floor-to-ceiling screen, clearly connected to the demonstration. We finally found it nestled under the stairs, in prime opposite-the-bar real estate, we found the Mixel demonstration. A rep was explaining the concept to the lone holdout, demonstrating on an iPad connected to the aforementioned enormous screen. When the fleet of bartenders began breaking down the room, we felt it best to take our leave.

Upon arriving home, this reporter explained the concept of Internet Week using the event as an example to her boyfriend, who responded: “Oh, so it’s like Fashion Week, but for the Internet?” Pretty much.

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."