Build me some apps to distract from the fact I've missed the train, again. (Photo: flickr.com/anniemole)

Your smartphone is useful for more than Bejeweled now that there's Wifi in many stations, and the MTA is trying to use that connectivity to make your commute better. (Just don't ask when your train is getting a countdown clock.)

This weekend, techies gathered in Brooklyn at NYU Poly's MetroTech Center campus for the first official, MTA-approved transit hackathon. Participants threw together a total of 17 submissions judged by authorities like Rachel Haot, General Assembly cofounder Matt Brimer and AT&T New York president Marissa Shorenstein.

The winner, taking home a not-too-shabby $5,000 (fronted by AT&T): SubCulture.FM, which would make it easier for you to find singles from your favorite subway buskers. Musicians who sign up for the program get QR codes that'll direct fans to a downloadable link.

Unfortunately, that woman who plays the Love Story theme on a recorder on the N train probably hasn't released a single, and as yet, there's no app for IRL muting your least favorite musicians.

Taking second place was MTA Sheriff, an app which would allow you to report subway problems like that one perpetually broken-down escalator, and third went to Accessway, which helps wheelchair-bound and visually-impaired folks get around the system.

This hackathon was actually just a kick-off. The winners are also now in the running for the App Quest competition, a virtual challenge that'll run until late August, also sponsored by NYU Poly, AT&T and the MTA. Anyone who's willing to work with an MTA data set or API can compete for an additional $40,000 in prize money.

Word to the wise: Anyone who hacked a way to block the urine smell would be idolized citywide as a hero.

The Real Nerd Prom 

Who Doesn't Want To Take More Pics? If all the apps out right now aren't filling your photo-taking habit, start up company Wander's new app Days may be for you. Days, which was released last week for iPhone, aims to create a digital photo journal, where all your pictures are uploaded and categorized by day, with the hope that its users will take pictures of their entire day and not just what they're eating for dinner.

Mobile Gift Delivery Are you ever running late and wish you had more time to select the perfect gift for your significant other? Online floral service H. Bloom is here to help, with their new mobile gifting app released yesterday, which will help its users send a variety of gifts no matter where they are. The H.Bloom app offers a "curated selection of the highest quality chocolates, cupcakes, candles and macarons, as well as H.Bloom’s own luxury floral arrangements." The app is currently available on the Apple App Store, and is launching in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Dallas.

Songza Updates Music curator, streaming app and party playlist savior Songza yesterday released its most recent update, version 3.0, which supplies some new features and shortcuts to the award winning service. Version 3.o cleans up the user interface, while also allowing users quicker access to playlists with a long tap on the home screen or by shaking your phone. Other improvements include better audio quality and new search tools and new artist playlist options.

New Inno/vators NYU-Poly announced on Monday the winners of its Inno/Vention competition, which challenged students to create and pitch a buisness or startup that solves real world problems. The winner, Ex-Vivo Dynamics, is a new technology for patients who suffer blood transfusion iron overload, which pulls free iron from blood, reducing the number of blood transfusions that patients need. The runner-up, HuddleUp, is a crowdsourcing platform that lets users buy group rate tickets without having to find a group.

Congress Fail Whale (Photo: blogspot.com)

API Rate Limit Exceeded Back in April of 2010, the Library of Congress promised to add every tweet up to that date to its famous archives. But like anyone following too many people at once, it's just caused one big mess. The library now has an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets totaling to a compressed 133.2 terabytes. Now the librarians of Congress are planning to work with Gnip, the company currently organizing all of the data, to develop a plan for archiving all of the tweets.

Apparently there have already been more than 400 access requests to the Twitter archives from researches doing work on citizen journalism and political communications. Someone needs to teach the librarians how to make lists as soon as humanly possible.

Schools Get Cash The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has just pumped a bunch of cash into New York's tech universities. It has awarded a total of $15 million to Columbia University, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and High Tech Rochester to create three Proof-of-Concept Centers dedicated to helping inventors and scientists turn their high-tech, clean-energy ideas into successful businesses. Columbia will form a new accelerator, several upstate schools will work together on a new development center, and NYU-Poly will work with CUNY to create PowerBridge, an applied science research institute that focuses on challenges specific to an urban environment.

Drop The Ball, Up The Traffic The customized mobile site publisher Onswipe had lots of reasons to pop champagne on New Year's Eve. The company says that it has reached 44 million unique visitors in total for 2012 and now is reaching more than 10 million monthly active uniques on iOS devices. The publisher also saw a huge bump in traffic after people opened their gifts on Christmas morning. Most notably, in the two days after the holiday, total unique visits on its sites jumped 22 percent and Kindle Fire unique visitors increased 75 percent.

Get Glasses, Give Glasses Diane von Furstenberg is teaming up with the insurance company VSP Vision Care to run a contest on Pinterest to help benefit the NYC Mission Society. Every time an image gets repinned from the VSP Pinterest Board, a gift certificate for an eye exam and glasses will be donated to the New York City Mission Society. These repinners are in luck too--when a user repins that image, they are automatically qualified to win a pair of DVF sunglasses and a $500 DVF.com gift certificate.

Move, Drop, Shake Unpakt, the site that lets you compare movers, continued its “Innovators on the Move” series. It features tech entrepreneurs reflecting on recent moves in their lives. This week's video features VHX founders Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson talking about the move to its first offices in Brooklyn.

Innovators on the Move: Casey & Jamie from Unpakt on Vimeo.

Baby You're A Firework (Filter) The favorite photo sharing app of the Williams sisters, Mobli, just celebrated 2013 in the best way they know how--by adding two new filters to its app. Both of them are New Year's Eve themed. One has a fireworks overlay, while the other has "2013" glittering in gold. Siiiick.

Live Like 'Countdown' Just last month, Gojee was the site to go to for recipes based on what's in your pantry. But it's recently launched a slew of fashion verticals which include landing pages for lingerie, heels, dresses, jewelry and handbags. The recipe sites are still up, so there's no need to panic about your dinner just yet. This makes living your best Beyonce life ("All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time") all that much more possible.

More Style Buying Speaking of buying clothes based off the pretty images you find on Tumblr and Pinterest, there's now StyleSays -- a new fashion image sharing community that connects users’ favorite style images to purchasable content. It tags pictures of pretty outfits with links to purchasable items. Some might be the exact product and it could give you an affordable alternative.

AT&T Sucks If one of your New Year's resolutions is to ditch your phone provider once and for all, consider making a switch to T-Mobile. The company is now touting the results of its $4 billion commitment to improving service and says its reception in New York is better than ever. Neville Ray, the CTO for T-Mobile, said in a blog post that NYC customers "can also bring their unlocked AT&T smartphones to T-Mobile and experience a significant speed boost on our network with most devices, while also saving up to $50/month compared to AT&T."

Old dog learning new tricks, etc. Bluefin Labs, the social TV analytics company for advertisers, just added an important employee to its team. Scott Grunther, a former Nielsen executive, is joining the Bluefin team in 2013 as a senior vice president. He will also be the general manager of media products out of the company’s New York office. He's been in the industry for 20 years.

Mr. Ohanian (Photo: Twitter)

r/findmeaparkingspace ParkWhiz, the Chicago company that enables users to find and reserve guaranteed parking spaces before reaching their destination, today announced that it has closed a $2 million Series A round of funding led by Hyde Park Venture Partners. Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian also took place in the round along with Hyde Park Angels, Amicus Capital, and others. In a press release sent to Betabeat, the company said that since its launch in 2006, it has driven $10 million in parking revenue to parking operators and provided access to 3 million parking spaces nationwide.

Fab Goes To India Jason Goldberg, the founder and CEO of Fab, took to his personal blog yesterday to announce that his company had acquired new funding. Times Internet, the digital arm of The Times of India Group, India’s largest media company, has chosen to invest in the company. Mr. Goldberg notes in the post, "As part of this investment Fab will be working with Times Internet to explore and execute on our India market strategy in the coming years." Since launching in June 2011, Fab has raised over $150 million from investors.

Tumblr For Your Tablet Tumblr just updated its Android app to support use on tablets that run on Android. So if you've taken some cool black and white pictures of ladders next to lakes, you can now upload them straight to your Tumblr with ease. Thank the artsy lord.

Disruption Gets You On The Nice List Harold DeLucia, a 27-year-old New York City public school teacher from Astoria, Queens, and Josh Lanzera, 29, a construction foreman from the upper West Side, are the founders of NYC Trees Direct, an online Christmas tree ordering service. The two New Yorkers saw a open market and went for it, investing $6,000 of their own money into the seasonal business.

Go Back To School NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in Downtown Brooklyn announced this week that the New York State Education Department has approved its curriculum. Now that New York believes it's a real school, the University is now accepting applications for the fall semester of 2013. CUSP's website has the application up now. Please post videos of yourselves opening your acceptance letters to YouTube.

The September App Bloglovin', the blog reader for fashion and lifestyle blogs, just launched its first iOS app. The company says that it has 1.8 million members as of this December. The company raised $1 million back in July in seed round funding from investors such as Betaworks, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Bruce Jaffe, Hank Vigil, Fritz Lanman and others. In a press release sent to Betabeat, Bloglovin' cofounder and CEO Mattias Swenson said, "Our goal with our seed-round was to build an fantastic app that would bring people an optimized and highly visual reading experience. So it’s great to finally see it in the app store!”

Bosses Are Really Happy Charley Polachi, a partner from Polachi Access Executive Search recently polled tech CEOs and found out that they all think the futures is extremely bright. 85 percent of respondents had a neutral or positive outlook for hiring in 2013, 79 percent said they had a neutral or positive outlook for hiring from 2013-2017, 84 percent had a neutral or positive outlook for expansion in 2013, and 81 percent had a neutral or positive outlook for expansion from 2013-2017.

Learn About Your New Hood Spun is a news discovery app that shows you stories based on your location. It was recently launched by the same team that made Broadcastr and Electric Literature. It could definitely be useful to fresh New York transplants. AOL gave the new version of the app a nice tour and it looks pretty cool.

School Mascot Is The Rose H. Bloom, a subscription based flower delivery service, is expanding its efforts to educate its employees. Right now they have the SEED (Startup Education and Entrepreneurial Development) Program, that shows current employees to make a big local impact. But starting this week, the company is using a new program called H.Bloom University, a six-month program that educates current employees in leadership and business.

The Customer Is Always Right Gripevine, a site where you can complain about customer service and review companies, just launched an updated version of their site. It now includes ratings and reviews. The same team also launched Resolution 1, a tool for businesses that lets them manage feedback from multiple sources at once.

NYU's initial proposal for a tech campus at 370 Jay St.

UPDATE: Read our liveblog of the Mayor's press conference about the NYU's new Brooklyn campus here.

Well that was well-timed! Hours after The New Yorker posted a profile of Stanford that tore at old wounds about the innovation engine's decision to drop out of building an engineering campus in NYC--blame sour grapes or Seth Pinsky, depending on who you ask--the city is finally ready to make an announcement about a secondary initiative.

According to Mayor Bloomberg's schedule, it looks like the second-place winner is a bid from NYU and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly). In its initial proposal, NYU wanted to transform the derelict former MTA headquarters at 370 Jay Street into a Center for Urban Science and Progress. At 1pm this afternoon, the Mayor will be joining NYU President John Sexton to announce a partnership to create a new "applied sciences center in Downtown Brooklyn." 

A quick refresher: Back in December, when a joint submission from Cornell-Technion was named the winner of the New York City Economic Development Corporation's competition to build an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island, Mayor Bloomberg also teased the possibility that a secondary winner would be named among the three remaining proposals: NYU (Downtown Brooklyn), Columbia (Manhattanville), and Carnegie Mellon (Brooklyn Navy Yard).

The only hangup? The entire $100 million grant from the city for the campus contest had been allotted to Cornell-Technion, meaning the new project (or projects, the city said they would love to build all three) would likely have to rely on philanthropic donations or some creative financing on the city's part in terms of incentives. That's probably why this announcement took months longer than expected.

It's unclear whether NYU's proposal, which also got hung up on the MTA's buyout price for 370 Jay St., will still be at the same location and cover the same scope as initially proposed. But we'll be live-blogging the presser and let you know as soon as we find out. Brooklyn politicians--and real estate developers!--have been lobbying hard for this to get approved, so expect plenty of self-congratulatory back-patting.

Mayor Bloomberg at last night's Shorty Awards. (Photo credit: Ben Weitzenkorn)

It appears ex-Wall Street wantrepreneurs may make good entrepreneurs after all. The Varick Street Incubator, a collaborative project between the City of New York and NYU-Poly, announced today that it will have graduated 22 companies by the end of July, supporting more than 300 jobs in the process.

“New York City is a magnet for the top entrepreneurial talent in the world, and Mayor Bloomberg is committed to accelerating the development of our start-up sector by encouraging promising new companies at the City’s network of incubators,” said Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel in a press release. “We’re not only confident in the future of today’s graduating companies but also in the long-term trajectory of New York City’s innovation-driven economy.”

The incubator was launched in 2009 as a way to establish New York as a technology hub through low-cost office space, training and network opportunities. The initiative is one of many formed by the city to encourage entrepreneurship and create jobs around compelling technology ideas.

Despite the fact that the project was designed to buoy New York's reputation as a growing bastion of technical innovation, the city's initial attempts to woo the tech elite kicked up some tension. But as the number of incubators has multiplied, and the NYCEDC has begun to fund grassroots efforts like the General Assembly, whatever controversy that initially cropped up has largely died out.

Considering how many ex-Wall Street suits are now full citizens of Startupland, we can kind of see why.

Not a fan of start-up fever.

If the tenants at the city's NYU-Poly incubator are any indicator, Wall Street is soooooo 2006. A number of the 20 tenants working out of 160 Varick Street are now wantrepreneurs who have given up finance salaries--by force or choice--for "fin-tech" start-ups.

These former suits are leveraging what they learned on the Street to create financial products and services that, in theory, their old employers will have to compete with, or buy into.

Crain's New York points to Michael Chuang, who used to sell bonds and mortgaged-back securities for Lehman and then UBS. In March 2008, he founded iTB Holdings, an online brokerage dealing exclusively with bonds, relying on his parting gift from Wall Street ($3 million in savings) as well as funding from friends, family, and angel investors. He now has five full-time employees at the Varick Street incubator and ten more in Eastern Europe.

Raj Udeshi, a Latin American derivatives broker laid off in late 2008, now operates HiddenLevers, a market analsyses start-up for small investment advisers, along with his three full-time staffers. Mr. Udeshi told Crain's that “Meritocracy is absolutely dead on Wall Street,” citing his own dismissal while senior, but less productive workers were retained. He says there are no hard feelings, pointing out that his new firm is designed to help the old guard.

With this sector bubbling up (for example: CB Insights, another Varick St. start-up--this one launched by a former Amex business strategist--was one of six local start-ups awarded funding and mentoring through the city's FinTech Innovation Lab) and another round of layoffs on the horizon, Wall Street might want to be extra careful not to leave future innovators with an ax to grind.

Strictly varsity, ya'll.

. . . You gots to put a shingle up to attract the start-up talent. With a 1.7 percent acceptance rate for its last class, TechStars NY already bested the Ivy League at its own game: the enviable aura of exclusivity. But New York's glut of incubators, accelerators, and co-working spaces—all loosely-organized around the goal of mentoring, housing, funding and growing baby start-ups into big companies—have led to a noticeable distinction between the varsity and JV leagues of support networks.  Admission into TechStars vaunted ranks, of course, comes with $18,000 in funding—and exposure. And even General Assembly is known for having VCs saunter-through its effortlessly cool coworking space, which has led to some investment deals.

This coming Monday, less-proven concepts like NYU-Poly, one of NYC EDC's earliest booster investments (before they went the more grassroots, General Assembly-route), as well as Hive 55, NYDesigns, and WeWork Labs, are hosting a "Incubator Showcase" to show-off what they can offer. It's free for NYTECH members and sponsors, but $20 for non-members.  Hey, no one wants to look cheap.

OFFICE SHUFFLE. Many tenant shakeups at the NYU-Poly incubator today, we hear from a source, "mainly because the biggest tenant, Ecological, moved in to their own office." Finally--Ecological announced its intention to move months ago; companies had been itching to move into their old space. The freshly be-officed start-ups include Weeels (carpooling, "social transit"), BestVendor.com (social recommendations), and "Two Lines and a Dot," a consulting company that uses NYU-Poly students as labor. "Not really a tech company, as I understand," source tells us.

MORE FROM THIS IS MY NEXT OFFICE: The Engadgeteers have a shiny new empty office in Union Square, Twttr taught us! We don't know exactly where it is, but the former tenants had a strict "no kitties in the kitchen" policy. (Tumblr's old server closet?)

SQUABBLES OF GAWKER?: Editor Jason Chen is getting pushed out of Gizmodo, a source told us last week, due to power struggles with editorial director Brian Lam. Minutes later, Mr. Chen announced he will be sitting in his same office, wearing his same clothes, but writing instead for Lifehacker and "doing some pretty interesting things over there—things that aren't quite what you would expect" with no explanation for the move. What happened? Betabeat asked the first blogger to review the leaked iPhone 4. "Don't know who you talked to, but I can tell you that going to Lifehacker was my choice. Should be exciting!" Mr. Chen said in an email.

OH TO BE A TUMBLR MOGUL: Tumblr's editorial director Chris Price--that's Topherchris, btw--wouldn't tell Betabeat how many Tumblr followers he has (we're guessing it's about 62,735) but today he told the Tumblrs how many blogs he runs: at least 164. That's some heavy viral firing power! But with great power comes great responsibility. "I have 164 blogs under my main topherchris account. I usually only run a handful at a time," he admitted to users today.

WHERE TO FIND REDDITORS: Reddit co-daddy Alexis Ohanian will be shmoozing around the Radegast Hall and Biergarten in Williamsburg this weekend at the pre-launch party for Zach Weiner's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the latest book o'comics funded by Mr. Ohanian's uncorporation Breadpig. BUT: The party is taking over the usual bi-weekly Reddit gathering organized by New York readers via Meetup.com, a commoner event that luminaries Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Weiner do not usually attend. One Redditor had to politely request that Mr. Weiner RSVP on Meetup, and another commenter grumped: "You two should consider coming to our other meetups as well. We're good people."

Heard a tech-y rumor? Email us at tips@betabeat.com. Rumor roundups post Monday and Friday afternoons.