Hakuna matata, guys! (Photo: flickr.com/jolieodell)

We're entering a new age of ubiquitous surveillance, when you can't even embark on a wild night out in Brooklyn without worrying about some Glasshole uploading your embarrassing antics to YouTube. It's enough to make you wonder whether maybe we ought to worry about what governments and corporations will do with the technical ability to track, oh, everything.

But do you know what Google chairman Eric Schmidt says to that? No worries, ya'll!

CNET reports that in a talk at NYU promoting his book The New Digital Age, he told the crowd:

"A world where everything is going to be tracked is 'highly unlikely to occur because people will be upset about it,' Schmidt said during an event with New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini and Jared Cohen, director of Google ideas.

'Governments won't allow it, and it will be bad business," he said. "In a competitive environment, businesses actually want their consumers to be happy.'"

If you say so, Mr. Schmidt!

(Photo: Deviantart)

Turns out having a book on the top of Amazon's bestseller list does not make you an automatic millionaire. [Salon]

After the announcement that Google Reader would shut down in July, more than 500,000 users have already migrated to Feedly. [The Verge]

Foursquare is reportedly close to closing a Series D round that would value it at less than the valuation from its Series C. [TechCrunch]

According to his lawyer, Matthew Keys' legal defense is going to be that he was doing work as an undercover investigative journalist. Oh, we can flout the law under the guise of “journalism!”? Brb, going to loot the Apple store. [The Next Web]

An NYU student has invented a gel that can help stop bleeding in wounds. But can it mend college’s primary injury: broken hearts? [New York Post]

(Photo: flickr.com/rob-young)

Now that we've got all this data lying around in great snowdrift-like heaps on our servers, what are we supposed to do with it? Enter the data scientist, which suddenly every startup simply must have. And where there are jobs, universities are sure to follow: NYU announced today the launch of an Initiative in Data Science and Statistics, which involves both the creation of both a Center for Data Science and graduate-degree programs in the field.

The masters program will begin accepting applications later this month. In case you are considering applying and wondering how much math is involved, the center will live within NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

The announcement notes that, "The United States faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of big data." Gotta love graduating folks into a field with real, money-paying jobs.

Curious about what these brainiacs will be working on? Well, according to the new center's director, Yann LeCun:

“By making better use of the enormous amount of readily available data, we will be better equipped to address a range of vital questions: How does the brain work? How can we build intelligent machines? What is the structure of the universe? How do we find cures for diseases? How can we predict human behavior?”

Just your basic superhero-origin-story research projects, no big deal.

(Photo: Dvice)

Advanced 3D printing technology is getting close to resembling replicators from Star Trek and iPads look a whole lot like the gadgets Geordi was always carrying around. Now, physicists have taken another step towards making Starfleet technology a reality by inventing a working tractor beam, which is essentially a laser that can move things. Sure, currently it can only move itty bitty molecules, but the fact that it works at all opens up all sorts of exciting possibilities.

NYU professors David Ruffner and David Grier have developed a way to harness Bessel beams in order to pull particles towards a laser source. The result is the beginnings of a very tiny tractor beam capable of moving silica spheres suspended in water.

According to Geekosystem:

Rather than a single beam, Bessel beams are transmitted as concentric circles that converge around the point they’re directed at. This gives the beams a unique quality. If you place a small object between the source of the beam and its destination, the concentric rings of the Bessel beam can reform around the object. That makes it possible for Bessel beams to pull or push objects — a quality of the beams that had been hypothetical until now.

Mr. Ruffner and Mr. Grier discovered that by overlapping two Bessel beams and slightly distorting them through a lens they could create enough energy to move the molecules.

Phys Org, which originally posted the discovery, argues that this type of tractor beam would need such a hulking amount of energy in order to allow it to move large objects that it "likely would destroy those objects in the process." But, they add, "it does suggest that such a device might be possible using another less energy intensive source."

In Star Trek, tractor beams are used to manipulate cargo, guide ships into the landing dock and damage enemy ships. In real life, we just hope we'll be able to shine a laser on the TV remote across the room and have it magically float over to us. Dream big.

From left to right: Mr. O'Donnell, Mr. Tisch, and Mr. Penenberg.

New York University's premier tech club, Tech@NYU, is in the midst of its annual Startup Week. This year's series of panels featuring familiar faces from Silicon Alley are all organized under the theme "Hacking as a mentality."

Hence last night's event starring Charlie O'Donnell, partner of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, and David Tisch, the former managing director of Techstars NYC was dubbed, "Hacking the Future."

Moderating the panel, hosted in the auditorium of NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, was NYU professor Adam Penenberg, who also happens to be the editor of PandoDaily.

Despite the future-facing title, most of the talk consisted of the two panelists walking the student-filled audience through the history of their careers. Mr. Penenberg asked what they hated to see demoed. Mr. O'Donnell said that he wasn't comfortable with video because "it asks too much of its user."

When asked how his portfolio companies can get his best attention, Mr. Tisch said, “I tend not to sleep, I'm on Gtalk from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. It's the companies awake at that hour that get a lot of attention. I don't have any distractions at that time.”

But the most educational--and surprising--moment of the evening came when the floor was opened up for questions, and the first person asked about pivoting.

"Paul Graham has this philosophy that's like, 'Keep pivoting until you find an idea,'" Mr. O'Donnell said. "I don't know when that became a thing."

At this, Mr. Tisch shook his head in agreement and said, "I don't think you can pivot after raising money. I think you fail."

Mr. Tisch emphasized the fact that some pivots were were incredibly beneficial, particularly in cases where teams live out their passions. He pointed to the Burbn team using their love of photos to create Instagram, the Turntable.fm boys realizing that their love of music was more interesting than the QR codes of Stickybits, and the founders of Fab harnessing their love of design and shortening Fabulous.

It's a different story, he explained, for founders switching to a new idea they care nothing about. In that case, Mr. Tisch said, "If you're thinking about pivoting, you should think about getting a job. That's a pivot."

Added Mr. O'Donnell: "The one thing that doesn't change in a pivot is you. Maybe you didn't have project management skills or sales skills. Maybe there's something you should've learned to be a better executor. Maybe you couldn't close a deal, maybe you should get a job that would make you better at closing a deal."

Nervous students in the audience who thought they could just pivot on their startup idea until they came up with the next Facebook quickly pivoted to an entirely different train of thought.

 This post has been updated to add additional statements from last night's panel.

Dom's Demo

This weekend, students from all over the east coast descended on NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to participate in hackNY's fall student hackathon.  HackNY is an intercollegiate organization designed to keep the tech talent off Wall Street and interested in startups. The students spent 24 coding in order to impress judges like former TechStars NY managing director David Tisch and Chris Poole, aka Moot.

A large number of the hacks presented used Tumblr’s API, including one smut-filled surprise. Naturally, three of the projects also incorporated GIFs.

The most impressive showing of the day was definitely Dom, a video game "on top of the Internet." The game turns the layout of any website into a 3D landscape where players have to shoot away oncoming robots. Their fully-functional demo drew actual gasps from the crowd as 3D characters climbed all over Vimeo's homepage to destroy some bad guys. The game also uses Tumblr’s API to alternate between changing background images of outer space. Dom won first place and a cash prize of $1,001 to split between the team’s five members.

Another hack presented this weekend was Pulp, a cross between Mad Libs and the game telephone, where users add three words to a story at a time and corresponding popular "related images" pop up via Tumblr’s API. The team's demo hit a major snag when the word "naughty" was used and a picture of a girl fingering herself filled the screen. The crowd went wild and made jokes about this throughout the rest of the demos. A text to meme service called Cap'n Meme spoofed this later on by creating a Bad Luck Brian that said "demos hackathon, shows porn."

A couple of Princeton guys created Memepath, something that resembled a Jonah Peretti fantasy. Using the bit.ly API, their site tries to pinpoint the exact moment something becomes a meme. They used the example of "Gangnam Style" to show that Katy Perry's August 21st tweet was the moment that the video turned into a worldwide sensation. Although the science here isn't completely correct, not everything passes through bit.ly, it's a good start.

When asked if it had a more practical use, creator Santhosh Balasubramanian said that it could be used to analyze serious things. The team tried to analyze the Kony 2012 video but there wasn't enough data to go around. They also aspire to add a geo-grouping element to it, to figure out which country helps the meme machine hit its tipping point.

Lisa Li and Daria Jung from Columbia created the simply designed Have My Babies, or HMB for short. You search for a celebrity and you're instantly able see how many tweets there are asking said celeb to have the tweeter's babies. The number of tweets is represented by a corresponding number of wiggling sperm cells naturally. "It was started from an offhand comment about Justin Bieber," Ms. Li said. "It's just meant to be funny."

A team from Rutgers built Settlers of Silicon Alley, a web app of Settlers of Catan themed to the New York tech scene. In the game, developers represeted the original game's wood and designers filled in for wheat. This got a few chuckles from the crowd and it seemed like everyone wanted to play.

Henry Clifford, a student from the United Kingdom interning at content sharing network Spling this semester, was the last presenter of the day. He created Gifs With Captions, which ranks the popularity of posts from single-serving Tumblr sites like What Should We Call Me. The Internet-obsessed crowd clearly found Mr. Clifford's idea appealing. The admiration went both ways. He praised the event and told Betabeat that all of the ambassadors, employees from some of New York's tech companies that stay overnight and advise the students, were "brilliant."

Kartik Mandaville, Himanshu Pandey, and Bryan Wade created Charfit, a practical hack with real-world potential. It allows you to track fitness participation through Foursquare check-ins. If you don't keep up with your regimen, the app uses the Venmo API to donate money to your favorite charity, then Twilio bugs you about going back to the gym and to notifies you about your donation. For the final humiliation, it publicly shames you by auto-posting a message to your Tumblr about your lack of dedication to your health. Public shaming for fitness is a campaign that we can see Mayor Bloomberg getting behind--as soon as he learns to code at least.

(Photo: flickr.com/classicchanelhandbags)

Healthy Hills? Everyday Health, the SoHo-based and more successful version of WebMd, has acquired EQAL, the creators of Lonelygirl15 and the owners of LaurenConrad.com. Everyday Health's ad revenue grew 40 percent in the first quarter, compared to WebMD’s decline of 20 percent. This coincides with Everyday Health's announcement that they're moving beyond YouTube and launching a version of it's web show "Recipe Rehab" for ABC stations around the country.

Diller Brings Back Dog Ben Silverman's multimedia entertainment studio Electus, part of Barry Diller's IAC, just sold ten episodes of a new show starring Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife Beth to CMT. "Dog and Beth are not only great television characters," said Electus CEO Chris Grant, "They are the best bounty hunters in the world, and this show is a natural evolution of their life story.”

Exit This Way Indeed, which describes itself as "the #1 job search engine worldwide," has been acquired (for a rumored $750 million to $1 billion price tag) by Recruit Co. Ltd, a large-scale Japanese HR company with over $10 billion in revenue. Rony Kahan, co-founder of Indeed, says that half of the site's traffic comes from outside the U.S and that they see this buyout to further that.

Thrillist on the LES Jackthreads, owned by Thrillist, just launched Goodale's Fall 2012 collection. Swedish singer/songwriter Sebastian Mikael modeled the clothes at the Lower East Side's Hotel Chantelle. There are a few days left of the heavily discounted sale. What, no Asher Roth seasonal playlist to shop by this time?

Shop Local Smallknot, the site that lets backers help small businesses get off the ground in exchange for rewards, had a pretty busy couple of weeks. They launched their first three Los Angeles businesses this week. The company partnered with Accion USA, a microlending company, to help fully fund A7, a Brooklyn-based shop that makes handcrafted leather camera straps. The team at Smallknot is also hard at work at a new product that will help small business owners get the word out about their products.

But It's So Dead At Night The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) launched a competition called “Take the H.E.L.M.: Hire + Expand in Lower Manhattan." The contest invites all companies that plan to either open or expand office space in Lower Manhattan in the next 12 months to apply for the opportunity to win a grand prize of $250,000. Twenty finalists will also will also receive $20,000 each. David Tisch and former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt will join Reddit's Alexis Ohanian as judges to pick the winner.

Will Hack For Food NYU's Courant Institute will be holding a hackathon this weekend with over 300 hackers already planning to attend. It starts this Saturday at 2 p.m. and goes until Sunday at 2 p.m. Appetude will be providing free food at the event for sleep-starved participants.

Mongo Matriculation 10gen announced today that it will offer free online training courses for its parent company's key product, MongoDB. The courses are open for registration now--there's one for developers and one for administrators. Lead MongoDB developer Dwight Merriman will teach the first class that starts in early October. Learning MongoDB is apparently the second most wanted skill companies are looking for right now.

Très Fab Custom design shop, Fab, just expanded the site's European version, which already has 2 million members. These updates essentially make the site just as fully functional as the U.S. version. There are already 200 million Fab employees overseas. The company says that Fab Europe is on pace to represent about 30 percent of the company's 2012 sales.

Changing That Ratio Women 2.0, a media company that offers resources for aspiring women in tech, just announced its partnership with Google. Their first effort together will be pumping up Women 2.0's signature event, Founder Friday, a monthly networking meetup. Detroit and Mexico City will host the event on November 16th, followed by Sao Paulo, New Orleans, and Moscow later on. Mary Grove, head of entrepreneurship outreach at Google, said, "We're looking forward to hosting these important gatherings in Google offices around the world and working together to help female entrepreneurs turn their ideas into innovative, sustainable businesses." No word yet on whether the gift bag includes What Would Marissa Mayer Do? bracelets.

Zach Sims (Photo: Twitter.com)

With UPenn making moves on the title of "Stanford of the East" and Eric Schmidt advising Cornell on the evolution of its new tech campus, NYU doesn't want its students left behind in the college tech revolution. Hence the school's new partnership with Codeacademy. Students in the Steinhardt School’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) can now opt in to a ten-week course where NYU professors and Codecademy instructors will teach them how to code.

This reporter can attest that on NYU's campus, there's a definite attitude that startups are where the jobs are. Students and recent grads are flocking to community manager and marketing positions at startups. Two of our sophomore year roommates made the switch to computer science and both said, "If I know how to code, I'll be fine when I graduate." Tech@NYU, one of the school's fastest growing clubs, now hosts weekly HackDays and DesignDays where members can collaborate on their own products.

The program will cover HTML, Javascript and Python, and students will also be able to attend monthly talks with leading industry insiders. Sessions start next week and run until the end of the semester. Visiting assistant professor Liel Leibovitz will teach the classes with coding instructor David Hu.

“We’re very excited to help NYU teach scores of students to learn to program--it's great to work with a world class institution like NYU that thinks on the cutting edge and wants to teach its students the skills and creativity that the labor market require,” said Zach Sims, CEO and cofounder of Codecademy, in a press release sent to Betabeat.

"It's cool that things like this are around more," said Cody Brown, NYU graduate and founder of Scrollkit. "I imagine it will be as much a learning experience for Codecademy as it will be for the students." He further explained that this would be new for them, because "they are going irl."

In 2011, NYU's journalism department announced a digital journalism concentration designed by Jay Rosen. But the program hasn't really taken off yet, perhaps because it requires journalism students--who already have to have a double major--to take several additional credits.

Besides the Code Academy initiative, the plans for NYU's Applied Sciences Center in downtown Brooklyn are still in motion--which is a good sign for the university. Wouldn't want to get stuck as the plain old "Berkeley of the East," now would we?

Ms. He's sign

On a mild, sun-dappled Sunday, Betabeat applied our sunscreen and ventured to the Long Meadow in Prospect Park for an event aptly named "The Internet Picnic." A few weeks ago, a friend of ours named Nicole He had won the Listserve lottery and was tasked with sending an email out to 20,000 random Internet strangers. Ms. He works in community at the crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter. "What should I write??" she frantically gChatted us, before eventually deciding to invite all 21,288 subscribers to a picnic yesterday in Brooklyn.

"I have a mole under my eye and I'll be wearing red," she wrote, and then posted the same invitation to her Tumblr, where it received almost 300 notes.

Back in April, Betabeat introduced you to The Listserve, a project out of NYU ITP that allows a different user each day to send an email to a list full of subscribers. The idea is to give one randomly chosen person daily the opportunity to expound upon whatever's important to them to a platform of over 20,000 apt listeners. "This project makes every-day people think — and talk — about the internet," one of the Listserve's cofounders, Alvin Chang, told us at the time. "It makes people aware of the medium.”

Though Mr. Chang now lives in Boston and couldn't attend the event, his comment turned out to be especially prescient. When we arrived, Ms. He had positioned a hand-painted sign that read "#internetpicnic" (hashtag included) to rest upon a memorial rock. About 50-75 people (we're terrible at estimates) were spread out on blankets across a hill at the end of the meadow, eating fruit salad and drinking beer and laughing.

Just in case you weren't entirely sure that the people at the picnic were "from the Internet," a tan and white corgi named Tartine pranced about, provoking awws as she tried to nab some of the picnic food. (For the unaware, corgis are arguably the favorite mascot of certain corners of the Internet.) We wondered how many BuzzFeed posts Tartine might inspire.

All of the attendees at the picnic appeared to be under 35 and most of them worked on the Internet for a living. Many lived in New York, but a fair amount came down to the city just for the event. A couple of Yale computer science students who had traveled from New Haven took up residence on the extra space we had on our blanket. A guy throwing a frisbee around said he had come from Maryland. The youngest attendee was a 15-year-old boy, sporting the accessory so common among teens that age: a full set of braces. He was visiting from San Diego, and had heard about The Listserve through Twitter.

Tartine the corgi

But the majority of attendees worked in tech in New York: we spotted employees from Kickstarter (including cofounder Yancey Strickler), Foursquare, Etsy, Tumblr, Timehop, AppNexus and ScrollKit. It was basically a New York Tech Meetup, but with more pie.

John Skylar, a scientist with an organization called Better Worlds, introduced himself to us. Mr. Skylar also moonlights as a sci fi writer and asked that we use his pen name. We asked him why he decided to spend his Sunday afternoon fraternizing with Internet strangers. "Besides a general spirit of adventure, I run a lot of events geared towards getting people to talk to each other, and I was like, 'Hey, I could have discourse in real life!'" he said.

Next to us, we heard a snippet of conversation: "Troll has such a dirty connotation." Another person behind us was saying, "I blocked Henry Blodget on Twitter." The sun grazed the trees and began to spoil the fruit that was splayed out on blankets that had been abandoned for a group game of Cards Against Humanity, which--yes--was a successfully funded Kickstarter project. We also detected a hint of weed in the air, but it could've been coming from the cricket players across the lawn.

The Listserve's creators, minus Mr. Chang, also made an appearance. "It's pretty phenomenal," Zena Koo told Betabeat. "I wasn't sure how many people would come, but it's nice to see how many people actually showed up. I think The Listserve attracts a lot of people yearning to have conversations online, so this is the perfect evolution of all that coming together full circle."

"This whole thing keeps surprising me every day," added Greg Dorsainville, another Listserve cofounder.

A couple hours into the festivities.

Mr. Dorsainville and his fourth cofounder, Josh Begley, told us that they've never had to censor an email, except for a spammy one that broke the terms of service. Though, many Listserve emails do have a similar theme: "Everyone turns into Deepak Chopra," quipped Mr. Begley.

Behind him, someone started playing "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid on an acoustic guitar. A startup cofounder with a Dali mustache joined our circle and asked us what low-cost superpower we would have, if we could choose. We picked the power to have the subway arrive at the exact moment we hit the platform, every single day. A guy from AppNexus said he wanted the ability to never burn his food.

The acoustic guitar wasn't the only instrument to make an appearance. Ms. He had brought her ukulele, but demurred when we asked her to serenade us. As a girl began to play Gotye on an accordion, and people began to fold up their blankets, we decided it might be time to take our leave. We hugged Ms. He goodbye.

"See you on gChat!" she called, as we headed back, sun-tired and socially drained, towards the F train. A long night of socializing--on the Internet, naturally--lay ahead of us.

High praise.

Today is the online debut of Forbes' "Top Colleges" issue. Only they should have called it the "Top College" issue, because--though the rankings aren't online yet--that big splashy profile of Instagram founder Kevin Systrom makes it pretty clear that Stanford is coming out ahead. Apologies all around to Cornell, Technion, Columbia, NYU, MIT, Harvard...

Mr. Systrom's debt to his alma mater is no secret, and Ken Auletta's New Yorker profile is really patient zero in this epidemic of Stanford Fever, but Forbes takes it to the next level, devoting a fair bit of the piece to crowning the Palo Alto Trade School as king of the academic hill, tech-wise. The feature is full of lines like this:

"These windfalls, serendipitous as they seem from the outside, are almost never accidental. In Systrom’s case his good fortune can be traced directly to Stanford."

And this:

"It was on the Palo Alto campus that Systrom got his first look at the worlds of tech and venture capital, his first internship at a startup and his first job at Google."

And this:

"Systrom’s Stanford dividends continued long after graduation."

Oh, and here's a whole video on the subject, titled "How Stanford Made Instagram's Kevin Systrom a Silicon Valley Star":

We like to imagine that Michael Bloomberg is, this very minute, summoning university officials from all over the East Coast to a top-secret summit in the abandoned City Hall subway stop, like a team of academic Super Friends.

In fact, maybe it would look a little something like this:

Bloomberg: "I thought we agreed this could not be allowed to happen," his icy gaze sweeping across the room. (Unlikely enforcers David Karp and Dennis Crowley stand next to him, cracking their knuckles meaningfully.) NYU president John Sexton is the first to look away; Cornell-Technion Innovation Institute Director Craig Gotsman stares him down. Notably absent is Harvard University president Drew Faust.

Or at least, that's how we like to imagine it.