Photo: Fast Company

HopStop, Now With Complaints On Monday, transit app HopStop released its new social app HopStop Live!, which lets users update each other in real time on transit issues and changes. (Because the only thing more fun than dealing with transit issues is hearing other people complain about transit issues.) The app is also designed to create communities around specific subway and bus lines, which could help cities identify which lines need improvements or additions. Although this is great for HopStop users, we still prefer the simplistic istheltrainfucked.com.

The MTA Wants Next Generation Apps And in other transit news, the MTA is partnering with AT&T  for a hackathon and AppQuest challenge with NYU Poly and Challenge Post in order to develop the next-generation of public transportation apps. Some of the goals of the challenge include developing tech solutions to navigating time tables and alerts, helping travelers navigate inside stations, integrating with other apps, and developing user generated data. The hackathon will take place May 4 and 5 at NYU Poly in Downtown Brooklyn, with winners sharing $10,000 in prize money. They'll also be automatically entered in the AppQuest challenge, which is scheduled to conclude in early September. Hopefully the developers of istheltrainfucked will enter with an expanded site, "isthemtafucked.com."

Foursquare Version 6.0 Makes Stalking Your Friends Even Easier Today saw the release of Foursquare's newest update, version 6.0, which streamlines the geolocation service to more easily access the app’s core features. Now when you open Foursquare, the search function is at the top, while a map with your friends' most recent locations and personalized recommendations (based on a newly developed search algorithm) displays along with the signature check-in button at the bottom.

Jason Rapp Joins Science Inc. Digital business developer and technology studio (and owner of the most unoriginal company name ever) Science Inc. announced Monday the hiring of Jason Rapp as the company's Managing Director. Mr. Rapp previous experience includes time as president and member of the board of directors at educational app and video compnay Mahalo.com, senior executive in Barry Diller’s IAC corporation, where he served as CEO of Gifts.com, and as an executive at The New York Times Company. The Santa Monica-based company has more than 13 investments with companies such as DollarShaveClub, DogVacay, Ellie, Uncovet and others. Maybe the first thing Mr. Rapp should do at Science Inc. is work on a new company name.

People Like Reading Tech on Their Tech Mobile publishing developer OnSwipe released their most recent user data, and it looks like people can't get enough of reading about their technology. With 16 million unique iOS users per month, technology was the most popular topic on the OnSwipe platform both in terms of page views and average time spent on its apps. Other popular topics included men’s and women’s fashion and general news and politics. My, OnSwipe's users are a versatile bunch.

Barkbox, The Birchbox For Dogs (Really?) You know the monthly delivery craze is reaching its zenith when Barkbox, a Birchbox-style doggy treat and toy delivery service, not only has 35,000 subscribers, but just received $5 million in investments from venture firm RRE Ventures. The new funding is on top of the $1.7 million the startup recieved last year from a similar group of investors.Barkbox plans to expand its efforts after rebranding the company to Bark & Co., with BarkPost, a website which CEO Matt Meeker describes as “a dog-specific version of BuzzFeed’s 'animals' site,” according to allthingsd.com, and BarkCare, a $200 annual vet consultation service that  gives dog owners 24/7 access to vets by phone. Pet startups: the new tech bubble!

AppNexus Is All-In Today the adtech platform AppNexus announced an "all-in" commitment to mobile advertising by extending its technology to mobile platforms. “We built the technology foundation that unlocked unprecedented innovation and spend in display. Now we’re taking the same approach to mobile, allowing our customers to do business ‘full spectrum’ seamlessly across display and mobile,” said CEO Brian O' Kelly. The announcement comes after AppNexus raised $75 million in January in Series D round investments, led by Technology Crossover Ventures.

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.

(Photo: DeviantArt)

2012 was quite a year for the New York tech community. Several NYC startups scored monster exits, while others raised millions to up their chances of scoring a ping pong table for the office. Whether or not that hotly debated bubble bursts, we imagine 2013 will be another exciting year for NYC's tech set. Here are some New Year's resolutions from some of the NYC tech community's boldest names.

Rachel Haot, NYC Chief Digital Officer

1.      Cook more meals at home (FreshDirect and BlueApron)

2.      Shop local (local goods on Etsy: http://on.nyc.gov/ZPpbIp)

3.      Read more books (both physical and digital: all three NYC public library systems now offer e-books)

4.      Volunteer more often (http://www.nycservice.org/#s)

5.      Learn a new skill – like middle eastern cooking or how to use a letterpress.

Ryder Ripps, Cofounder of OkFocus

Work more, vroom bye haters.

Mallory Blair, Cofounder of Small Girls PR

Identifying our year's wins and losses and using that information to create defined roles for new team members to hire in the first quarter. Then the rest of 2013 is  about running the business instead of being the business.

Cindy Gallop, Founder of Make Love Not Porn

1. To champion and help every entrepreneur who wants to change the world through sex....This is the one place with enormous potential for innovation, disruption, and colossal financial returns, that the tech world refuses to go. I want to help drive more open-mindedness in the tech community around startups to do with sex.

2. To identify and use anything that is the future of money and payments. This resolution is born out of the frustrations and difficulties we've had setting up our payments infrastructure for MakeLoveNotPorn.tv.

Those difficulties led us to spend a lot of time and effort researching and talking to fintech startups, with the result that I am now passionate about working with and using anyone/thing inventing the future of money, finance and payments, both in an MLNPTV context and also a personal context.

Paul Berry, Cofounder of RebelMouse

My resolution is to keep focused and clever and build the fundamental culture for RebelMouse to grow from.

Christina DiRusso, PR Manager at Livestream

More: Reading, Engineering (currently learning to be a Livestream Encoding Engineer), Entertaining in, and exploring, my new Brooklyn hood, and Reality-TV watching. Less: Emailing, English (honing my Italian skills), Gchatting with my dad.

Josh Miller, Cofounder of Branch

Figure out how to get my (non-techie) roommates to be addicted to Branch, and learn how to rap so I can complement A-Flock's beat boxing (one of our engineers).

Dave Winer, Software Developer and Writer

My resolution for the New Year is: I will do what I can to make tech writing more literate. (Ed. Note: Read more about Mr. Winer's resolution here.)

Ricky Robinett, Hacker at Ordr.in

Be the first hacker in XXL.

Jason Baptiste, Cofounder of OnSwipe

On a personal level, I really want to get back into writing and blogging.  It's why I started Onswipe and lead to my book coming out.  On a professional level?  It's growing Onswipe in a revenue generating machine.  It's an aggressive goal and year, but we have the team + traction to do it.

Jose Mejia, Editorial Director at Huge

One of my resolutions, which I think a lot of people can relate to if they're honest with themselves, is to stop using work/being busy as an easy excuse for what are really just basic character flaws that I need to fix. If I can avoid issuing  "Sorry I'm running late, something came up at work" texts like they're stock in the Shitty Friend IPO, it'll be a good year.

Alex Taub, Biz Dev Builder at Dwolla

My New Years resolution is to be faster and better at creating relevant pop culture twitter parody accounts- a la @invisibleobama

Suri Ratnatunga, Community Lead at Sidetour

To take no cabs in 2013 unless I'm stranded/drunk in Brooklyn.

Crystal Fawn, Community Engagement at Atavist

To read all the books that Stanley Kubrick based his films on.

Taylor Lorenz, Social Media Specialist at McGarryBowen

Stop and think before including emoji in every text message.

Nitasha Tiku, Editor of Betabeat

Make friends based on charger compatibility.

Scary sky

With mass transit closed and dangerous storm surges set to wallop the city, New York startups aren't messing around when it comes to hurricane prep. Most, like Usablenet, Kickstarter, HowAboutWe and SideTour, are urging employees to work from home due to the closure of the MTA system.

"We have a simple rule of thumb that if the subways are shut down, the office is closed and people can work from home," Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told Betabeat over email. "A few of us are actually crashing here over the weekend - myself and a few engineers. We built the place to be like a home, so it's a great place to be stuck for a few days :)."

"For those that are staying here, we have ample food, beverage, and entertainment. More iPads than flashlights," he added.

Hey, we're sure there's a flashlight app.

"The offices are closed; we're working from home," a developer at Etsy told Betabeat. "We put the Brits on point for Ops, though, in case the power goes out."

Many startups are also thanking their lucky stars that their data centers are out of the line of the storm. "Usablenet's platform is cloud-based and none of its U.S. data-centers are likely to be affected," a rep for the company told Betabeat.

"We're on Amazon Web Services, but we're in different data centers for redundancy," Mr. Baptiste said. "We're not worried about downtime."

Of course, startups with businesses that revolve around reliable delivery services are rolling out massive contingency plans to combat the bad weather and get the goods to their customers on time. H. BLOOM, a subscription flower service that delivers luxurious bouquets monthly to homes and corporations, is well-versed in the weather troubles heaped upon delivery startups.

"Unlike a lot of other technology businesses in New York, a pretty big component of our business is dependent on touching tangible products, receiving it, making something beautiful out of it and then actually delivering it, so there’s no question that a situation like this has an impact on the business," said Sonu Panda, COO of H. BLOOM. "The thing that is comforting to us is having external things impacting our operations is a regular occurrence. We have a bit of a scale--like if President Obama visits the U.N. and eastern Manhattan is turned into a traffic mess, that has an impact. This is a much more significant event and requires a lot more preparation, but in general we’re sort of used to these fire drills."

Mr. Panda

"We got through hurricane Irene just fine," he added.

By beefing up operations workers and having them start their shifts earlier, H. BLOOM intends to fulfill all delivery requests tomorrow. "We’ve got teams that will be getting in as early as 3:30 a.m. tomorrow morning to be able to facilitate deliveries before the storm hits New York," Mr. Panda said. "So the expectation is that everyone will be as delighted as they normally would be. In the instances in which deliveries can’t be done, we’ll be communicating early and often about what our alternative plans are."

Seamless, the popular food delivery service that keeps many New Yorkers from starving on a daily basis, is also working hard to ensure that users not only receive their orders in a timely fashion, but that they also know what to expect when ordering delivery in inclement weather. Likewise, the company is working with those restaurants who request it to close down their ordering service on Seamless during the storm.

"We have the ability to customize neighborhood delivery times so that our customers are able to see most of the times with relatively accurate estimates," Seamless' VP of marketing, Ryan Scott, told Betabeat. "It’s not always perfect just because of the thousands of restaurants we have across the country, but we do our best to look at the neighborhoods that are going to be mostly impacted and use those data points to come up with a plan of attack."

Mr. Scott said that users ordering in areas affected by the storm will also soon see a message crop up when they navigate to Seamless, letting them know about possible delivery delays.

We wondered if the site had seen any spikes in service over the past few days as New Yorkers brace for the storm, but Mr. Scott said that data wasn't available yet. "Without seeing the data until tomorrow I wouldn’t know if tonight produced some sort of a record number, but I'm sure it will be a good day," he added.

Of course, Seamless also urges you delivery lovers to tip your deliveryman well--it's probably not very fun to brave a superstorm just to bring you some pizza.

Mr. Bloomberg. (Twitter)

Time Warner Still Sucks On Friday, Mayor Bloomberg made a big move toward ing promise to expand broadband in New York. He launched ConnectNYC, a contest for small businesses that will award free fiber cable wiring (overall value of up to $12 million) to 240 local businesses across the five boroughs over the next two years. But will it make slow cashiers go faster?

All Your Dwollas Belong To Us Dwolla, the way to pay people via smartphone, just rolled out a cool feature called MassPay. It allows you to pay up to 2,000 people at once, which is great for business owners or degenerate gamblers who have a lot of friends. Payments under 10 dollars are free, while anything higher than that requires a small fee of 25 cents per transaction. Parking Panda, VHX and Major League Gaming have all pledged to start using the service immediately.

Finna FinTech Startup Weekend is teaming up with the FinTech Innovation Lab and the NYC FinTech Startups meetup to put on the first ever FinTech Startup Weekend. It's set to take place on November 2 to 4 at Alley NYC. Throughout the weekend, there will be mentors, including VCs, lawyers and designers, stopping by to give teams advice on what they're doing.

Nick Gavronsky, an OpenFin employee who helps run Startup Weekend with Frank Denbow, spoke to Betabeat and said that he was surprised by the response the event is getting. "We've noticed over the last year or so that FinTech is growing and there's a need for engagement and bringing that community together--as well as around enterprise in general," Mr. Gavronsky said.

FinTech weekend, he said, is "not really like a hackathon, it’s more for first-time people” who want to start building something.

Costumes for a Cause! WeWork is organizing a Halloween party this coming Monday, October 29th benefiting Charity: Water that cofounder Matt Shampine promises will be a "crazy" good time, including "a lot of surprises and five hours of open bar." Better yet, you can feel good while throwing them back: WeWork will be matching everyone's donations to the event. WeWork generously offered Betabeat readers a 15 percent discount off the ticket price, which starts at a $35 donation. Just enter the discount code "betabeat" when you RSVP. While you figure out your binders of women vs. bayonets costume choice, here's a video WeWork put together to get you in the party mood.

Sexy Canadians Songza, the music streaming app that has a playlist for every mood, just reached 1 million users in Canada. To celebrate, we're going to listen to the "cold" playlist. The Songza team used its data and found that Canadians and Americans both chose "Mellow" more than any other mood. Americans' next most popular category was "Happy," while Canadians' second choice was "Sexual." The sexual playlist only works correctly if you're sleeping with Canada's finest export, Ryan Gosling.

Group Talk IRL Group messaging service GroupMe just launched a new service called Experiences. It lets you meet up and plan adventures with your groups and even helps you split the bill. The first round of experiences include a brunch at one of Todd English's restaurant and a zombie survival practice on Halloween. Sounds spooky enough for us.

Chatroulette With a Purpose Onswipe held its hackathon this weekend, and the overall winner created something really awesome. BlahBlahLearning is a language learning platform that works over video chat. A pair of speakers who are each learning the other’s native tongue are given five minutes to speak in one language, then five minutes to speak in the other. Take some notes, Airtime, these guys have the right idea.

Man Starts Blog internet gadfly Rex Sorgatz has just launched a personal project called Viewsource. He's posting one YouTube video a day and sharing his thoughts about it. The site has a really pretty layout, and Mr. Sorgatz's commentary is pretty spot-on. This one about Michael Richards is a pretty good read.

You Owe Us One Foursquare is hiring a PR director. If you get this job and you first found out about it through Betabeat, then you have to give us exclusives for the entirety of your career. It's only fair.

Publicidad Jun Group, the opt-in video advertising platform, has announced that it has new capabilities to specifically target the much-coveted Hispanic audience on the web. Jun Group says that it can now prescreen users to determine if they’re Hispanic and/or native Spanish speakers. In total, the company provides ads to 10 million Hispanic or Spanish-speaking users.

Advertise More, Save the World Pontiflex, another advertising platform, just released a new tool called AdLeads that helps nonprofits advertise themselves to prospective donors. The best part about the service is that organizations only have to pay when a person actually signs up to hear from them. They never waste money on wasted clicks or impressions.

College Admissions Suck Applying to college is the worst process in the world, but luckily things just got a bit easier thanks to Unigo. The site gives a free 15-minute private consultation to set you up with a plan, and then users can subscribe to Unigo's online college counseling services. If your child's guidance counselor is a total idiot, then this looks like a good option for you.

(Photo: Onswipe)

Hey you, what are you doing next weekend? Would you like to flex your HTML 5 and Javascript skills with the potential to win some sweet prizes? If the answer is yes, Onswipe has a hackathon for you! If the answer is no, what's your problem anyway?

On October 19th, Onswipe is holding its first ever 48-hour hackathon at the company's Union Square-based HQ. The startup assures us, in bolded font, that there will be beer. The theme of the hackathon is HTML5--unsurprising given Onswipe's own underlying code infrastructure.

According to a post soon to be published on the Onswipe blog:

We know that [HTML5] covers a broad range of web apps, libraries, and general hackeries. That's the point! We're looking forward to creating cool HTML5 stuff with you, whatever it is you can think of.

Keep in mind you'll have Onswipe's arsenal of 30+ touch devices available for you to develop on, if you want. We have everything from iPads, to Galaxies, to Kindle Fires. In general you'll have the whole Onswipe office at your disposal, plus a bunch of Onswipe's best hackers.

The hackathon is a leadup to Empire.js, an event that will feature speakers and projects from New York's Javascript community. Hackathon winners will have the chance to win tickets to Empire.js, as well as some sweet iPads. You might even get to meet Onswipe's adorable office dog, Johnny.

"We've wanted to do a hackathon for a while and figured now was the right time to do it," Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told Betabeat. "Apps are clearly still bullshit and we think an HTML5 hackathon is a great way to get passionate engineers to build some awesome things for the web. Onswipe was originally started as a weekend hackathon-like project and maybe the next Onswipe will come out of this hackathon."

Interested participants can register here.

(Photo: twitter.com)

Non Hustlers Need Not Apply Lerer Ventures is looking to hire a new analyst. The job requires one or two years of experience at a venture backed startup or major tech company. You have to also be "a sweet and cool person," so no mean losers need apply. According to the listing, they’re looking for “A hustler and/or hacker who works smart.” We're sending this to Cassidy right away.

Playing Hooky Not Cool On Friday, AT&T and NYC Digital will kickoff a hackathon designed to help Mayor Bloomberg's Truancy Task Force. Designers and coders will be given the challenge to create a mobile app to keep kids in school. The first prize is pretty sweet and includes $2,500 in Gift Cards for the team to split, a $5,000 donation from AT&T to the team's choice of non-profit organizations, and one year of the "Small" service from Github for each team member. No word on whether college dropouts are allowed to compete.

Buy Us Pretty Things BaubleBar, the online marketplace for designer jewelry, is launching its first full-time retail storefront, The Bar. It will be located off their offices at 230 Fifth Ave and will be privately tested from October 10th-16th and then will have its official public launch on Wednesday, October 17th. With their store's opening, they join the ranks of online shopping destinations going IRL--Piperlime’s new Soho store, Warby Parker’s showroom, and MakerBot’s Mulberry store, to name a few.

Growing Branch Ian Ownbey, a backend engineer at Twitter, has just been poached by Branch. He joined Twitter in 2009 when the company was only had 80 employees. He's the company's first hire since getting out of private beta mode just over a month ago. Branch founder Josh Miller said on the company's blog that he's excited to work with Mr. Ownbey because they both share the not-so-unique distinction of both being college dropouts.

Watching Baseball Is Boring If the MLB postseason just isn't exciting enough for you, then PrePlay, a NYC based predictive game startup, has the app for you. They just updated their MLB PrePlay app which allows fans to predict plays for every postseason game. You can call what you think will happen on every pitch or spend time before the game picking out how individual innings will go or how specific players will perform. So basically, it's like Nicotine for degenerate gamblers.

The Funny (Web)Pages Crowded Comics, which was selected for the SXSW Accelerator earlier this year, is a news site that tells the day's big stories through comics. The site has five cartoonists that take turns creating an image of the day and users try to top each other to create the funniest caption. It's like a more democratic version of The New Yorker's back page--and a whole lot less stuffy.

Cool Tablet Site, Bro Onswipe, the TechStars grad that lets publishers create custom tablet sites, just launched support for Google’s Nexus 7 and has plans to expand to more Android devices in the near future. CEO Jason Baptiste told The Next Web, "We believe in supporting modern hardware coupled with modern browsers that support the best of the web. Nexus 7 is great hardware combined with the great browser of Chrome that lets us bring the web to the bleeding edge."

Better Than A Greeting Card If a casual "happy birthday" wall post just won't cut it this year, you should try making a handmade HTML 5 birthday card on Scrollkit, the service designed to make website creation easy for people who have no coding experience.Since its start, the site has been used to make pages for friends and lovers and now they're doubling down on that fact. They've added tools to make sending finished products easier, as well as beta Firefox + Safari support. Ukelele hero and Kickstarter employee, Nicole He stars in a video that shows off what Scrollkit can do. The video got us pretty emotional, but we're a sucker for a ukelele love story.

Hungry, Hungry, Hackers This weekend, TechStars alumn Ordr.in, a site that helps restaurant take online orders and manage their web presence, hosted a food hackathon at Pivotal Labs to celebrate its rebuilt developer portal and the expansion of its service to New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. The winner of the competition was a project called iFridge, a service that keeps track what's of your fridge and has kitschy alerts like texting you when someone takes your beer or playing celebratory music when a bottle of champagne is popped open.

Vaminos! Planning your high class European vacation is so exhausting, but thanks to Vive Unique, aka "the upmarket Airbnb," things just got a bit easier. The company has just expanded its listings of handpicked boutique apartments and homes to include locations in Barcelona. Cofounder Claire Whisker promises that more cities will be added soon.

Do-Gooder Glasses Everyone's favorite glasses company, Warby Parker, just announced that they're doing something really nice. They've partnered with Pencils of Promise, a non-profit devoted to building schools in the developing world, to create two pairs of sunglasses that will generate some cash for the charity. $30 from each purchase of the $95 glasses will go toward supporting Pencils of Promise operations.

Charlie Bit My Hires Rightster, a service that helps content providers maximize revenue from online video, announced three new hires this week after their announcement they will be responsible for bringing the Charlie Bit My Finger show to life. Jonathan Bates, former Head of Multiplatform Video at ITV, is joining Rightster as the Director of Content and Partnerships. Another former ITV guy, Ben Freeman, will be Rightster's new Head of Rightster Studios. Most notably, they have scooped up Donagh O’Malley, the former director of content at Google TV.

QLabs (Photo: Foursquare)

Good news, Silicon Alley denizens. After much demand from fellow gossip-mongers, Betabeat has decided to resurrect your favorite recurring Friday feature. Welcome back to Rumor Roundup! Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com

THE SUN SOMETIMES SETS ON THE AOL EMPIRE Multiple sources have told Betabeat that AOL Ventures plans on shutting down QLabs--the press-shy experimental think tank in Soho located at 670 Broadway. "The time frame must be darn near immediate," one source told Betabeat, alluding to some urgency around winding down existing projects. "It's dead," said a source with indirect knowledge of the decision. "Their funding ran out," the second source added, speculating that the initiative had a set funding size, but "nothing yielded."

During a rare visit to QLabs in May, Betabeat discovered that the 4th floor space functioned as sort of the yin to AOL Ventures' investment yang--with both organizations trying to keep their corporate parent nimble.

QLabs hired a number of hackers who collectively decided on ideas to pursue. After some market research, the team, which operates non-hierarchically, churns out a prototype in six to eight weeks. If the minimum viable product fails to take off, it gets scrapped. The unspoken expectation, QLabs director Chris Danzig told Betabeat in May, was that it would produce a hit within two years, or roughly five months from now. “It’s very possible it could be a successful business with a few tweaks,” Mr. Danzig said back then. “But I’d much rather throw away something that has potential than burn away time on something that’s not working.”

In an email, Mr. Danzig said, "As a general policy we don't discuss the lab with the press (only the lab products)."

QLabs managed to get traction on at least two products, the incubator told us in May: Framey, which lets users post video comments on websites, and Brom.ly, an events recommendation service that pivoted into an events recommendation tool for the Huffington Post.

The recently launched HuffPost Labs, which operates like a startup for online news experiments within the Huffington Post, also works out of QLabs.  (Codecademy and Turntable.fm were working out of the spacious environs this spring.) But HuffPost Labs director Connor White Sullivan told us that the two incubator-like organizations are distinct. "We get our budget from HuffPost," he said of his budding four-person team. "All I can tell you is they're excellent engineers that built good products."

"As we refine our strategy, we have become more focused on our innovation agenda," an AOL spokesperson told Betabeat. "This was one component of a broader portfolio in AOL Ventures.”

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS A cadre of Silicon Alley citizens–including Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste and CNET columnist Ben Parr–headed to Vegas two weeks ago for some end-of-summer partying and ended up having a meet cute with Ron Jeremy. Turns out that the notorious porn star likes hanging with the tech set. He showed up to the same mid-day party Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Parr were attending. "Ron Jeremy just came to our private party," one source told Betabeat. "He told us about his rap song with Lil' Wayne who the Hipset guys are close with.” Oh Mr. Carter, say it ain't so?

WWJD? Apparently some trolls have signed Instapaper founder and bombastic blogger Marco Arment up for an email newsletter he certainly didn't authorize. "Thanks to whichever of the trolls signed me up for all of these Jesus email newsletters yesterday," Mr. Arment tweeted. "Not a good week for liking other people." Following a very public spat, perhaps it was someone at The Verge?

SECRETS OF THE SOUL Whoever said ladyblogs are just for ladies clearly hasn't met NYU journalism professor Clay Shirky. Professor Shirky copped to enjoying advice columns on the women-focused site The Hairpin at a reading at HousingWorks Books. “My favorite bit of anonymity on the web is this thing that Edith Zimmerman runs on the Hairpin, called 'Imperfect Advice from Strangers,'" he said. "Which is the best name for an advice column, ever.”

Onswipe’s office. (Photo: Michelle Young, Untapped Cities)

A few weeks ago, Betabeat caught wind of a handful of attempted robberies that had taken place at startup offices around the Flatiron area. On a visit to his office, Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told us that a few men who looked to be in their early 20s had come to Onswipe claiming to be soliciting money for a sports team. Instead, they attempted to steal some of the company's iPads.

According to a police report filed by Onswipe and obtained by Betabeat, three men entered Onswipe's offices on West 14th Street on Thursday, July 26 at 4:40 p.m.

Onswipe's office is essentially one big loft-like space, with a few conference rooms scattered around the periphery. The company has iPads displaying various websites that employ the Onswipe experience lined up in the reception area. According to the report, the alleged thieves lifted four iPads and attempted to conceal them before an office manager asked for them back. The thieves returned them and left. According to the report, one suspect, a 19-year-old male, was arrested a few weeks later on August 15.

Onswipe isn't the only startup office in the area to be hit with an attempted robbery. Shelby.TV also experienced a similar issue. Were these robbers watching TechStars or something?

"From what I know of the situation, they came in, said they were raising money for their football team or something, and tried to look around quite a bit," Shelby CEO Reece Pacheco told Betabeat. "Luckily my team is very alert and just said 'not interested' and sent them on their way before they were able to do anything."

Mr. Pacheco said that those at Shelby believe the perps to be the same ones who hit Onswipe. "They came to our office the same day that they hit up the seventh and eighth floors in our building," he told us. "And one of the people on those floors knew of them because of a connection to Onswipe."

The attempted robberies seem particularly noteworthy in light of recent escapades by Silicon Swindler Shirley Hornstein, who duped Valleyites in part by relying on the tech scene's trusting and collaborative atmosphere. It's convenient to think of Startupland as a happy, shiny place where people focus on iterating their butts off, slinging business cards as effortlessly as they throw back mugs of Lost Tribes beer. But there's a fine line between being open and being gullible. Luckily, both Onswipe and Shelby were able to successfully protect their businesses from what could have potentially turned out to be thousands of dollars in property loss.

Has your NYC office been the target of an attempted robbery? Let us know: tips[at]betabeat[dot]com.

Mr. Baptiste (jasonlbaptiste.com)

The first sound we heard upon ringing the doorbell at the Onswipe offices just off of Union Square was the pitter-pattering of puppy footsteps. "Is that a dog?" we asked aloud to the well-dressed man who was also waiting to be let into the office. Sure enough, an Onswipe employee opened the door and a scruffy white dog excitedly greeted us.

Once we were in the loft-like offices, out came TechStars alum Jason Baptiste, Onswipe's colorful founder, who after introducing himself made the dog (named Johnny) sit and shake. Johnny refused to do a spin though. "He'll do anything if you have food," acknowledged Mr. Baptiste, wearing a dapper grey suit and pink tie.

We were at Onswipe to discuss the company's recent growth, which has been on an impressively upward swing since February. Onswipe's staff has quadrupled to 25 in the last year, with plans to grow to 48 employees by year's end. The company also recently added two new executive level positions: former VP of AOL Video Richard Bloom as its first COO, and former VP of sales at Jumptap Jared Hand as its first CRO.

Onswipe is a platform for publishers to transform their presence on iPad, iPhone and Kindle Fire--and soon other devices--into beautiful experiences. By serving up both the content and the ads, Onswipe can anonymously collect data about the browsing habits of users, and use that information to better target ads based on interests. The number of page-views Onswipe's platform powers has increased by 344 percent since January, Mr. Baptiste told us.

"The mission of Onswipe is still the same," said Mr. Baptiste, once we'd settled into a conference room. "Apps are bullshit. A lot of companies love to pivot and change ever so slightly to something vastly different. Our mission from day one is to be the platform to power the way the world experiences the web on touch devices, reimagining it for devices that aren't built for onclick but for onswipe."

On an iPad, Onswipe renders web pages beautifully. They take on the appearance of glossy magazines--swiping through articles becomes a luxury. But Onswipe also serves ads in between articles, which have taken on a more print-like feel, boosting the bar for ads on the web. "Most ads on the web, they're not about emotion--they're about algorithm. They don't give you the storytelling that a print ad gives you. We think that's finally going to change," said Mr. Baptiste.

"I hate bad ads. Our altruistic mission is to fix ads on the Internet," he added. "In print they get ads that are so beautiful people rip them out and put them up on their wall. Why can't we do that with online ads?"

Toward the end of the meeting, Mr. Baptiste pulled up his own website so Betabeat could get a good look at Onswipe. A quote from Joan Didion's essay "Good-bye to All That," written in chalk on a patch of asphalt in Washington Square Park, dominated the screen.

"I love New York," said Mr. Baptiste. "That's why we've succeeded. There's just a certain energy. We hire people that are raw talent, hungry; they have a Silicon Valley-esque energy and hacker talent mixed with New York's own secret sauce. Onswipe takes the best of what New York does: emotion."

We wonder what Ms. Didion would have to say about that.