(Photo: Circa blog)

In recent months, LOLcat emperor and  Bravo TV star Ben Huh has systematically leaked handfuls of details about his news startup, Circa, to the press. Back in April, Circa raised $750,000 from a slew of investors (many of whom were named David). In May, Nieman Lab caught up with Mr. Huh at ROFLCON, where he provided buzzword-laden answers and metaphors involving newspapers and teenagers to their questions about the startup. But today, Mr. Huh's efforts have finally solidified into a cohesive company: Circa is an iPhone app that wants to change the way readers consume news.

Circa isn't just a news aggregator. It employs teams of editors who curate and synthesize news stories into digestible bites, optimized for reading on mobile devices. The point is to write stories that are designed exclusively for mobile, instead of repackaging stories released on other platforms and trying to fit them into a mobile setting.

According to the Circa blog:

Instead of articles, Circa presents news as a collection of details about a story: the facts, stats, quotes, pictures, maps, and more. These are the full stories, not summaries; summaries tend to compress stories and therefore lose details. Instead, each story on Circa has the same details you’d find in traditional articles, but broken down into individual chunks of information that are much easier to consume. It’s the facts, without the fluff.

The details, or points, are presented in an interface that works a little like the flash cards like we used in school to learn and retain new information. Flash cards improve  comprehension, retention, as well as speed of learning. Each point within a Circa story is presented on its own “card,” so it’s easy to swipe through and read a whole story in less than a minute.

Unlike a leisurely tablet reading experience where beautifully templated longform stories are embraced and pored over, reading on a mobile device is all about the quick and dirty. Circa aims to provide those digestible factoids for users to quickly absorb on-the-go. (It kind of reminds us of The Skimm, but not in a newsletter format.) Users can also follow stories and topics, and the Circa app will alert them when there are any updates.

“Once you start to think of news as happening in these ‘atomic units,’ rather than as things that need to be wrapped up and shipped in an article, you can start to do different and unique things such as let people 'follow' a story, provide different context based on what a reader has consumed before, bridge from one point to a story that provides background, and so on," Circa's editor in chief, David Cohn, told GigaOm.

Because the team of journalists tasked with writing the content for Circa is basically synthesizing other publications' reporting into a simple news for dummies flashcard, there's bound to be some grumbling about sourcing. Circa argues that proper sourcing is close to its heart, however. "We know that truth and trust are paramount in news, and that’s why we work hard to provide the source to every single point that we write within a story," reads the blog post.

No word yet on how adorable cat pictures will factor into the Circa newsgathering process.

A newly news-centric MSN.com will roll out with the official launch of Windows 8 on October 26. The software giant's Bob Visse says things are amicable with the ex partner in reportage, but Microsoft really needed to do Microsoft:

"We still have a relationship with MSNBC, but we're going to have our own news product called MSN News," Bob Visse, general manager of product management at MSN, said in an interview with Mashable.

Coverage will be 24/7 and will come out of Microsoft's home base in Redmond, WA. Articles will be brief and combined with newswire reports. Mr. Visse also told Mashable that Microsoft's news staff will be as large as the staff that once ran MSNBC.com.

Considering the nearly half-billion visitors surfing MSN.com monthly, the new operation won't have trouble sustaining itself, which is great because it's like no one is really covering news anymore.

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)

Looks like the ambitious and hardworking folks behind Rethink Digg have their work cut out for them. On Friday, the team--which is tasked with revamping the ailing social news site in the next eight days--released a survey to gather user feedback on the current and future status of Digg. The results? "92% of survey respondents said that they would not recommend the current Digg to a friend." Ouch.

Luckily Rethink Digg--a team stationed in startup non-incubator Betaworks--is taking that data in stride, penning a manifesto of sorts that provides a glimpse into the massive amount of work they have to do before v1 launches on August 1st:

This level of dissatisfaction does not call for incremental improvements. It does not call for an evolution of Digg. The problem we are trying to solve with v1 — how can we deliver the best of what the Internet is talking about right now? — calls for something else. V1 shouldn’t be a better Digg, it shouldn’t be a better Reddit, and it shouldn’t be a better Hacker News. It has to be different.

So... rebuild and rebrand a famously limping product by next Wednesday? Sounds good.

It does seems like Rethink Digg's determination and transparency have endeared some users to them: "The Internet is rooting for you," insisted one survey respondent. But like, no pressure or anything!

News you can use (if you are a hedgehog).

Coming soon to a Newsroom episode near you: The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports today that people are increasingly turning to YouTube for news. Walter Cronkite it ain't, but what are you gonna do?

The report illustrates its findings with the example of the  2011 Japanese tsunami. In the seven days after the disaster, "the 20 most viewed news-related videos on YouTube all focused on the tragedy," and they were viewed more than 96 million times. That's pretty impressive, but it's not exactly eclipsing the evening news:

"Twenty-two million people on average watch the evening news on the three broadcast channels each night in the United States alone, and larger numbers watch local TV newscasts."

Pew insists the tsunami is a representative example, noting that, "in 2011 and early 2012, the most searched term of the month on YouTube was a news related event five out of 15 months." But the study also noted that,

The most popular news videos tended to depict natural disasters or political upheaval-usually featuring intense visuals. With a majority of YouTube traffic (70%) outside the U.S., the three most popular storylines worldwide over the 15-month period were non-U.S. events. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami was No. 1 (and accounted for 5% of all the 260 videos), followed by elections in Russia (5%) and unrest in the Middle East (4%).

In other words, the news videos that blow up look a lot like the Internet's typical viral content.

And it sounds like news organizations are smart enough to realize that and borrow a little bit of YouTube's rocket fuel, too. For all the talk of citizen journalism, the report points out that much of the citizen-shot footage was uploaded to YouTube by news organizations. The overall most-watched video (CCTV footage from the Sendai airport) prominently features a Russia Today logo in the lower third.

Hey, wait a minute--hasn't "if it bleeds, it leads" been a news cliche for decades now?

A number of tech companies, including Hype Machine, Wanderfly, Mobile Roadie and Uber are already working out of the space, as well as a few startups still in splash page mode, like Gander TV and Spotflux. Somewhere between 60 to 70 percent of The Yard's residents are techies, although that wasn't exactly the owners' intention. "We knew there was a need in Williamsburg/Greenpoint for something like this, but we didn’t realize the tech scene was happening here and that that was the direction it was going to go," Mr. Levy told Betabeat by phone.

Now that the startup syngery is under way, however, The Yard has been "planning strategic alliances" with angel investors whose portfolio companies might be interested in working there. For example, Mr. Levy said he's currently in talks with Brooklyn Bridge Ventures founder and First Round Capital alum Charlie O'Donnell, who launched a Kings County-centric seed fund last month.

And what about the name? "Um, I dunno, it’s where you work, 'I work in the Yard.' It’s a space to work, so that’s what we call it," said Mr. Levy, whose thick Brooklyn accent would not sound out of place in a Goodfellas remake.

Mr. Levy said he and Mr. Beyda got the idea to open a coworking space after looking at the possibility of working out of one of Manhattan's suddenly-ubiquitous office-sharing arrangements. The same day he crunched the numbers, Mr. Levy happened upon the location, at 33 Nassau Avenue. "Being developers, we kind of overdid it with our Internet," he said, referring to The Yard's 100 megabit-per-second pipe. "A lot of people in other places were experiencing problems with their Internet and you know if you’re an Internet business, you can’t have an outage, so we have a lot of bandwidth here."

We first heard of The Yard from from Simily and vReddit founder Brandon Root, who wrote us a tip emphasizing The Yard's  "potential to become something like Brooklyn's General Assembly."

"I certainly looked at GA when I was trying to find some office space, and certainly would consider it in the future, but I found it to be a bit...pretentious?" Mr. Root,  who works out of the space, explained by email . "Unlike its Manhattan-based cousins, I've found people at The Yard to be just as talented but far more approachable. Maybe I'm just more comfortable with the Brooklyn vibe than the highly-caffeinated Apple-everything crowd in the city."

"I don't mean to be unfair to GA, they have accomplished something incredible," he continued. "But The Yard struck me as more practical and comfortable."

Although The Yard has been hosting events, like the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, the General Assembly comparison seems far-fetched for now. "I’m a firm believer in not trying to be anything other than what you are," said Mr. Levy. "As far as I’m concerned we’re done and the place is humming."

Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin actually signed up as a tenant before construction on The Yard was complete. "We were looking for space in the fall (our first office ever, in our 6 bootstrapped years!) and I happened to see the new sign while cycling through Greenpoint as it was still being built," Mr. Volodkin said by email. "Turned out it was an upcoming coworking space inside a beautiful industrial space, much of the great textures were preserved, so the place is modern while retaining bits of the old character.  Many of us live around here, and there are lots of good coffee places around."

Before The Yard, Hype Machine's seven-person team worked from home or in coffee shops with the "occasional 'office days,' where we'd all meet up in my living room in Williamsburg," he said.

Unlike the typical open floor plan, The Yard has about 100 offices to offer more privacy, although we're not sure if that takes the "co" out of coworking. The space also offers 24-hour access. Mr. Levy said he is "on the selective side" in terms of what kinds of companies or workers he allows in to The Yard, but is open to anyone who could be who would identify as creative. "Some of my competitors are like, 'If you’re not tech or a nerd, you can’t come in,'" said Mr. Levy. "We’re not that harsh."

Birds do it, bees do it, portals up in silly trees do it

Earlier this week Yahoo announced a major integration with ABC. The struggling internet portal finds its stock in the gutter, its internal management in shambles and bankers circling like vultures to break it into pieces they can sell off to the highest bidder. The one thing Yahoo still has in spades is a massive audience.

What's really interesting, however, is that ABC is not just interested in connecting with the vast number of eyeballs Yahoo can send from its 25 million daily visitors. It's also intrigued by the kind of social traffic that the big news networks are keen on tapping into. As The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal points out:

Here at the Washington Ideas Forum, the heads of ABC, NBC, and CBS took to the stage for a panel moderated by our James Fallows. Alongside the discussions of international reportage and the politicization of news, ABC president Ben Sherwood provided an interesting rationale for his outfits expanded partnership with Yahoo. Here's the thing. As explained by Sherwood, the deal was not an effort to reach (large) Yahoo's audience per se.

Yahoo, he said, was the largest provider of news items that were shared on Twitter and Facebook. Ergo, "If we are the primary news provider to Yahoo, we'll be the primary news provider on Facebook and Twitter," Sherwood said.

What Yahoo needs is a clear path forward. Embracing its role as portal and building out better tools and analytics for the news properties to which it drives so many visitors doesn't sound like a bad plan. Better than trying, and failing repeatedly, to build its own brand of original content that connects with an audience advertisers will pay a premium for.

“If we ask somebody on the street, ‘What’s the top news brand?’ Would they say Yahoo news?” Mickie Rosen, the senior vice president who oversees Yahoo’s media properties, told the NY Times. “The honest answer is they probably wouldn’t.”

"My time is split between helping portfolio companies out, like giving them advice on the product, and also being the ears and eyes in New York City," Mr. Karnjanaprakorn told Betabeat, although he'll still be spending the vast share of his time on his company. Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley is also an advisor to the fund.

Collaborative Fund is also seeking an "apprentice" in the city, a junior employee who can help Mr. Shapiro--currently the fund's only full-time employee--with everything from administrative duties to due diligence.

Collaborative Fund invests in start-ups that encourage resource-sharing instead of consumption or seek to fundamentally improve quality of life, which Mr. Shapiro believes will become increasingly important in the decisions we make how and what to consume. The fund is invested in Skillshare, Kickstarter and BankSimple, among others.

Collaborative Fund is looking for creative entrepreneurs who are changing the world, Mr. Karnjanaprakorn said. "There are companies in the world that are for-profit, especially in the tech start-up space, that also have a social mission," he said--but he's not aware of any investment groups in the city that do the same. Alexis Ohanian--a Kiva fellow--comes close with his self-described "uncorporation" Breadpig.

Your week in New York start-ups starts here.

LOL. The New York Tech Comedy Ball, which promises a 50-50 girl-to-guy ratio and featured tiered pricing to that end, is TONIGHT. Open bar, comedy, "surprise celebrity guests," sponsor giveaways and a VIP afterparty are in store. Step and repeat! Red carpet experience! 8 p.m., Greenhouse. Hint: Password can be found via Google.

YO, INNOVATE FOR US, YO. Aviary is hosting its first API contest, a free-for-all for the "best app" created with the company's new Effects API. Grand prize is an iPad 2, runner-up gets an F-Stop Watch, and the honorable mention will score some t-shirts or some such things with Aviary's fancy logos.

LAMESTREAM MEDIA. SeatGeek co-founders Russ D'Souza and Jack Groetzinger were on Fox News this morning for Small Business Spotlight--ooh, who does your PR?--while Foursquare's Dennis Crowley learned how to read a teleprompter at MSNBC.

DRINKS WITH THE PRESIDENT. Tech@NYU's new president, Vivek Patel, is boozing with techies Thursday at 8 p.m. at Vapiano's. Maybe we can make it over after the New York Business Entrepreneur's Network panel on media and start-ups.

BRR, IT'S COLD IN HERE. What's up with the Fridge? We heard a Betabeat request for tips was reposted in the WeWorkLabs Fridge, and apparently Y Combinator and Dogpatch Labs New York and San Francisco are using the private social network as well. The app is also being used in high school classrooms and at NYU as well as by HackNY fellows. Parsons School of Design is using the app for the entire MFA incoming class of 2013.

#HIREME. Want to work for one of the most dubious and overexposed start-ups in the New York tech scene? Hashable is seeking an experienced Data Visualization Engineer to design and develop a system that will allow us to analyze user-generated data and data from other systems and databases to facilitate decision making, product development and content offerings.

WHAT ARE YOU READING? Remember Sitesimon (sites-I'm-on) from their debut at New York Tech Meetup a few months back? The app, which broadcasts what sites you're browsing in real-time, now has a Chrome add-on that lets you easily turn the service on and off and share what you're seeing. The app has also switched to a follower model, so you can make it so only your friends see what you're doing. Also, they're ready for more users now! Invites are now being encouraged.

Got news for the start-up news roundup, which posts Wednesday afternoons? Email tips@betabeat.com.

Quriky is part of a cadre of New York start-ups taking advantage of advances in 3D printing and the power of social networks to fuel crowdsourced funding. 

Founder Ben Kaufman calls there approach social product development. Users pay $10 to submit ideas and awards influence points for contributing ideas and opinion on everything from engineering to branding.

User Matthew Flemming, for example, has earned $9,730 based on his contributions to 52 different products, including one idea he submitted that was selected for production.

Quirky gives back 30% of what each product's sale to the community based on the percentage of influence they earn.