(Photo: Mr. Berry)

Back in April 2012, the HuffPo cabal-backed Soho TechLabs launched a social travel site called CasaHop that allowed users to "connect with people worldwide to trade homes for vacations and more." Now, Soho TechLab's CEO Paul Berry told Betabeat that the incubator is shutting down CasaHop in order to focus more on RebelMouse, a tool for building social webpages that has seen explosive growth in recent months.

"CasaHop never gained the traction it needed," Mr. Berry told Betabeat by phone. "The timing was off. Airbnb is really in a winner takes all situation in this area. I hope one day someone is going to break out and make this an enormous idea because I love home exchanges, but too few people feel comfortable with other people staying in their place while they're away."

Mr. Berry said that CasaHop only spent a third of its investment money. It will be returning the remaining two thirds to investors in cash, and the other third will be accounted for in RebelMouse stock. "Only Lerer Ventures and I will get diluted," he added.

Despite this setback, Mr. Berry was eager to emphasize the success of RebelMouse, another Soho TechLabs venture, which aggregates users' social posts onto one main homepage.

"We’re reaching 1.5 million uniques a month, so just six months out it’s this feeling of traction," Mr. Berry said. "With hosts like GoDaddy, .01 percent of people actually like what’s on their domain name and RebelMouse has the opposite percentage. 98 percent of users with RebelMouse-powered domains are thrilled by it." Mr. Berry added that everyone from influential journalists to big companies to small businesses have adopted RebelMouse as their homepage.

"RebelMouse is the chance to build a CMS from everything we’ve learned about what’s happened to social and to build it ancitipating what’s coming and make it so that the people that understand social are the ones that can power the website," Mr. Berry said, adding, "It’s also a very direct reflection of who I am and what I've learned."

Despite all this excitement for RebelMouse, Mr. Berry acknowledged that it is a "bummer" to close CasaHop. "I wish CasaHop was bigger than Airbnb, but I think you have to be able to realize when something’s not working," he admitted.

Wise words.

(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.

RebelMouse.

Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry has been working on a new startup since January, when Betabeat broke the news that he was leaving HuffPo. We knew it would be called RebelMouse and that it was a "social platform." But we didn't know much else about the stealthy site until today, when RebelMouse launches to the public.

RebelMouse is an easy personal website builder similar to About.me, which pulls in information from sites like LinkedIn and Wordpress, where a user may already be established. RebelMouse does the same for social sites—the goal is to be your "social front page."

Log in with Twitter or Facebook, and RebelMouse creates a page annotated with your photo, name, bio and follower stats, and pulls content from your Twitter and Facebook streams. Tweets and status updates are laid out in newspaper columns, creating a Pinterest-y collage of photos, video and text. You can also post directly to RebelMouse and share to Twitter and Facebook. Items can also be dragged around and rearranged as you decide which photo should be front and center and which of your recent witty tweets should take lead left.

"People struggle way too much with their websites and still hate them. they are getting good on facebook, good on twitter and embarrassed of their sites," Mr. Berry said in an email. RebelMouse is an attempt to make it simple and easy to keep a page "fresh, updated and social," he said.

While RebelMouse doesn't feel very rebellious, its particular mix of features and user-friendly dashboard make it pretty fun. But it's not all games. RebelMouse has a miniature stats page for each post that tracks pageviews, clicks and distribution. RebelMouse's stats team is "working on awesome stuff to help you understand how things are performing on each network" and that users can expect "a series of launches around that" over the next several weeks and months, Mr. Berry said.

And although a RebelMouse page is free and will always be free, Mr. Berry said, he's charging $3 a month for individuals who want a custom domain and $3 a week for businesses. Sponsored content and ecommerce will be integrated into future releases.

Asked about the pricing, Mr. Berry explained that is wife is the CTO for Avaaz.org, which has done testing on the issue of recurring payments. "$3 is the price of a cup of coffee. its nothing. for individuals to pay that once a month and for businesses to pay that once a week is a no brainer."

We wondered if the stats page alone would be enough to pull fashion brands from Tumblr, as they've been requesting an analytics feature for a long time. "We have influencers signed up in tons of verticals," Mr. Berry wrote, adding that "the fashion boutique industry will get really interested when the ecommerce platform launches later this summer."

Also in the works: mobile apps and "a very powerful discovery and consumption platform," Mr. Berry said.

Ultimately, Mr. Berry has high hopes RebelMouse can achieve that ultimate marker of authoritativeness: "we do think that people will change their email signatures and twitter bio's etc to point to their rebelmouse pages."

Mr. Lerer (lererventures.com)

Do the guys over at Soho Tech Labs ever sleep? It would appear that the answer is no. Not only are they busy incubating social home exchange service CasaHop, which soft launches this week, but they're also working on a video news startup aimed at the "Jon Stewart set." Today, RebelMouse CEO and ex-HuffPo CTO Paul Berry told Business Insider that the previously-unnamed video startup has been giving a working title: Planet Daily.

According to an article published last month in AllThingsD, "the service, which will launch this summer in advance of the U.S. presidential elections, will use a mix of livestreaming video and taped reports, and a mix of professionally produced segments along with contributions from amateurs."

Planet Daily will be a collaboration between Lerer Ventures and Bedrocket Media, a video startup that Mr. Lerer invested in last year.

The only issue with the idea of starting a live news network dedicated to the young and the liberal? According to a profile in Esquire, Mr. Stewart apparently wants to do it himself--and we have a feeling there's only room for one "Roger Ailes of veracity" on the Internet.

The name "Planet Daily" is apparently a working title, which is good because if the team wants to nab the URL planetdaily.com, it appears they'll have to fight a middle-aged mom named Penny for it.

The very busy Mr. Berry

Soho TechLabs, the new incubator backed by a cabal of ex-HuffPosters, announced yesterday that they're hiring. But until today, the team has remained mysteriously mum about the projects they're backing.

Hilarious tweeter and Soho TechLabs CTO Ben Regenspan let slip over DM yesterday that the "CTO Technical Cofounder" position listed on the Lerer Ventures page is in fact for CasaHop, a social travel site the team is planning to launch within the next month or so. CasaHop is described as a "social home exchange," where you can "connect with people worldwide to trade homes for vacations and more. It's simple -- you stay in their house, they stay in yours."

"When I was thinking about my next move," Soho TechLabs CEO Paul Berry told Betabeat via phone, "it would've been easy to take another job as a CTO at another media company. But this is a much more fun and interesting challenge."

No doubt the team he's put together at Soho TechLabs, which includes HuffPo founders Jonah Peretti and Ken Lerer, and ex-HuffPo president Greg Coleman, is a force to be reckoned with. "We had a tremendous amount of fun building HuffPo together and we learned a lot from building it," Mr. Berry said. "It's an incredible fun time where we get to take a lot of the things we've proven and learned and apply them to different areas."

They've also culled a pool of global talent--from countries including Sri Lanka, Chile, Serbia and the Philippines--to help kickstart projects.

The team sees a unique opportunity in the way things go viral, which is unsurprising considering Mr. Peretti is also the founder of BuzzFeed, a site that arguably made "viral" a household term. "There's such a dramatic example in front of us right now with Draw Something," Mr. Berry told us. " The infrastructure of the web and the way we're all hyperconnected now, stuff like Kony 2012, Draw Something, and Pinterest go live and go viral in a way that literally wasn't possible a year ago. So we're living in that sort of acceleration of history and I couldn't be more excited about the team that we have to pull it off."

The Soho TechLabs team is focused on a very specific set of criteria when it comes to which startups and ideas they want to back. For instance, at least one member--though preferably all--must feel intensely passionate about a project. "We don't want to get into a broad group of stuff that we're not passionate about," said Mr. Berry.

Another notable criterion is a similar, easy to maneuver code structure. "We're looking for things that we feel are very close to each other in terms of underlying code base and social mechanics," he said.

RebelMouse and CasaHop, the two known Soho TechLabs ventures, both have overlying code architecture, making it easy to fix and scale. RebelMouse is a "social platform" that Mr. Berry said he needed "a month max" before he could discuss. CasaHop, on the other hand, is a project he was slightly less coy about.

"We have a very specific way to get into the social travel space," said Mr. Berry. "[CasaHop] is also in the sharing economies space and it's allowed us to have a very specific need there. It's one of these pieces where we think that the people who have been going at social travel so far have had too vague of a notion about it and we have a very specific entrance into something that will become a very specific travel site."

"We're going to be launching the first version of [CasaHop] soon," he promised. "We'll probably have the first version [of CasaHop] in a month or so."

As long as it's not an Airbnb knockoff, we think we can get behind it.

Mr. Berry

Soho TechLabs, the fledgling startup incubator formed by several Huffington Post refugees, announced via an inaugural tweet today that they're recruiting early founders and employees. The company, backed by Lerer Ventures, was originally announced in Ad Age in January; it will be lead by a team of ex-Huffpoers, including founders Paul Berry, Jonah Peretti and Ken Lerer, as well as former Huffington Post president Greg Coleman. As we previously reported, the new incubator will be housed at 560 Broadway, the current home of Lerer Ventures.

Mr. Berry certainly has his hands full, as he will serve as the CEO of Soho TechLabs, as well as the CEO of RebelMouse, a "social curation platform."

Soho TechLabs has defined itself as an incubator focusing on a slew of "minimal viable products" which will be released into the marketplace and then tweaked according to public reception. The project would sound a lot like Betaworks, if Betaworks wasn't so ideologically opposed to being called an "incubator."

"We're a NYC-based incubator working in the social space," reads one Soho TechLabs job description, adding that they're looking for employees for "an exciting well defined project." With so many tech bigwigs backing the venture, we'll undoubtedly be hearing a lot more from Soho TechLabs as they ramp up for launch.

But we can't help but wonder what Huffington Post Media Group president Arianna Huffington must think of her former coworkers' newest project; we only hope she'll weigh in after she's finished in the bathroom.

UPDATE:

Ben Regenspan, who is Soho TechLabs' "CTO, until they get annoyed at my tweets," tweeted at us with some important details that may entice potential hirees to apply:

Mr. Peretti.

Jonah Peretti’s office has two glass walls, two white walls and no decoration except for a giant, multicolored rectangle, with blue and violet hues fading upward and coalescing into a tight little rainbow wheel at the top. The Brooklyn artist Cory Archangel, a friend of Mr. Peretti’s, makes these “gradient paintings” with one click in Photoshop, blows them up and sells them for lots of money, Mr. Peretti said. It is, in his words, “kind of a joke.”

Mr. Peretti, 38, a navy-eyed, wavy-haired nerd-king with a machine-gun giggle, was a cofounder of the Huffington Post before he moved on to other things. He likes these gradient paintings a lot. His Twitter page is also a gradient. Mr. Peretti, a career mischief maker with a “great, sort of trollish sense of humor,” as one former employee put it, likes jokes best when they’re subversive. He’s infamous for arguing that Mormonism is superior to Judaism because of its growing numbers, a shtick he uses in presentations. As a grad student at MIT in 2001, he ordered a pair of custom Nikes embroidered with the word “sweatshop,” extracting a series of awkward emails from an unlucky customer service rep. He forwarded the emails to a few friends, who forwarded them to their friends, and so on. Literally millions of people have read them.

“I didn’t really know anything about the sweatshop issue, but I ended up on the Today show with Nike’s head of global PR, debating sweatshop labor,” Mr. Peretti told Betabeat on a recent Friday afternoon at the shiny new Flatiron headquarters of his company, BuzzFeed, which has spent the past three years cornering the market in items along the lines of “The 30 Best Taco-Related Crimes Ever” and “Sexist ’60s Coffee Ads.”

In December, BuzzFeed announced a surprise move that furrowed brows throughout the media industry. The site was bringing on a news reporting team and had poached Politico superstar Ben Smith to run it. “It was, to many, a bit as though Jane Lynch, at the height of her popularity on Glee, had announced that she was leaving the cast to participate in a season of Celebrity Apprentice,” wrote Tom McGeveran at Capital New York.

Mr. Smith was impressed by Mr. Peretti, who took the reporter out to lunch at techie canteen Lure in Soho and battered him with visions of BuzzFeed 2.0: serious news scoops vying for attention with the web gags. It would be a site that resembled the dizzying editorial mix readers find in their Twitter and Facebook feeds, a sticky alternative to all those tired “commodity news” sites, with their comprehensive self-seriousness and dryly logical architecture.

Reporters often try to feed readers their vitamins; as journalism professors are fond of saying, “Don’t give ’em what they want. Give ’em what’s good for ’em!” The new BuzzFeed wants to give ’em both. “The Facebook News Feed and your Twitter stream are filled with fun items, personal updates and news,” Mr. Peretti wrote in an email to Betabeat. “As social sites become the way people discover content, readers expect a very diverse mix. News on BuzzFeed is part of a much larger shift in the media industry toward social content. The shift has already happened, but we are just starting to understand what it means.”

Mr. Smith scoffed at the notion of editing such a beast, but he was intrigued enough to recount the conversation later to his wife, who asked him: Wait, why don’t you want to do this? After a bit more waffling, he did—largely because he was impressed with Mr. Peretti. “He actually has his arms around the media ecosystem, how information is distributed, at a level of sophistication that is hard to fake,” Mr. Smith told Betabeat.

Mr. Peretti is personable and energetic. He tends to reposition dramatically when the conversation turns to a new idea: from excited, with his hands behind his head, to thoughtful, with his tightly crossed, to relaxed, propping himself up with one arm as he absentmindedly scratches an ankle. The man David Carr described as a “viral marketing hotdog” is an exalted member of the New York viral media mafia, the group of internet noisemakers that includes people like video entertainer Ze Frank, uber blogger Jason Kottke, virtual stuntman Alex Blagg, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Texts From Last Night cofounder Lauren Leto, and Chris “Moot” Poole, the god of the greatest meme factory of all, 4chan, many of whom mingle incestuously through hubs like the MIT Media Lab, the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and the Free Art and Technology Lab.

Mr. Peretti’s sudden fame with the Nike sweatshop emails was an accident. But he wondered if it would it be possible to make viral happen, again and again.

Perhaps you remember BlackPeopleLoveUs.com, the website of a white couple who protested too much? Or maybe the Rejection Line, a fake phone number that let suitors down easy with a soothing voicemail? Both were weekend projects Mr. Peretti cooked up with his sister Chelsea, a standup comedian and writer for Parks and Recreation—experiments designed to see if he could replicate the viral effect. “When we were doing our early joint projects, people kept asking us if we were making money off our ideas,” Ms. Peretti wrote in an email. “We kept having to tell people no.” She added, “It feels great to know how far we’ve come and that now we are both millionaires. And by ‘both,’ I mean just my brother.”

Mr. Peretti angled his expertise into consulting jobs and teaching gigs at NYU’s ITP lab and the Parsons School of Design, and the Huffington Post, where he invented what he called the “mullet strategy”—smooth, professional content on the front page, with messy, user-generated stuff buried in back—honed the site’s SEO, and created FundRace.org, a searchable database of campaign contributions.

In 2003—which, on the timeline of internet memes, would be four years before LOLcats, five years before Stuff White People Like, and seven years before People of Walmart—Mr. Peretti opened his “Contagious Media” class at NYU’s ITP lab by drawing two curves on the board: a spike followed by a plateau, versus a spike followed by a drop. Useful technology tends to spike, then flatten out, but it holds because it’s useful, he told the class. Viral media has an even faster growth rate, but plummets into obscurity after it peaks (although “Black People Love Us” is still in the top 10 Google results for “black people”). “You got your kicks, and you’re off to the next thing,” explained Paul Berry, a former student Mr. Peretti eventually recruited to be CTO of Huffington Post. (Mr. Berry recently left to launch a viral media incubator, in which Mr. Peretti is an investor.)

Sketching graphs and tracking email forwards isn’t as fun as, say, clicking on BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle. But intentional virality takes work. BuzzFeed’s white-walled, bullpen-style office is quiet, with 20-somethings hunched over in office chairs, pacified by headphones, clicking and clicking. We tried to peek—what were they looking at? Photoshop. A website we didn’t recognize. Was that Facebook? These editors employ the spaghetti-to-wall strategy, posting a wide variety of items rapidly throughout the day while watching BuzzFeed’s internal metrics to see what hits.

Check out BuzzFeed's new office [SLIDESHOW] >>

The site has become adept at repackaging content in creative ways. Perhaps the best way to present the contrasts between presidential candidates, for instance, is not an article but 20 captioned photos. BuzzFeed employee Andrew Kacyznski, a 22-year-old student who seems destined for The Daily Show due to his compulsive C-SPAN trawling, is making an art of telling stories through video mashups.

That said, the goal isn’t for everything on the site to go viral. “You could have that as your goal, I guess,” Mr. Peretti said, “if you like to be a delusionally positive thinker.”

It wasn’t too much to ask of his class in 2003, though, who were told to build viral websites. Whoever got the most traffic got an A. “The point of this class is not useful technology,” Mr. Peretti told his students.

Mr. Berry, who was in that class, teamed up with another student to build a website called Dog Island, a paradise for canines whose fictional creator, “Linda Reyes,” believed passionately that dogs should be removed from Manhattan for their own well being. The site had an elaborate backstory suggesting Chinese dog meat processors might be involved, and included a link to the “Dog Exportation Act” on a fake version of the New York City Council website. Hours after Mr. Berry put up a few posts for Dog Island apartments on Craigslist, it went viral. Craig Newmark, overwhelmed with inquiries and furious emails, sent a confused note two days later; next the students received an email from a justice on the New York Supreme Court who said her cell phone was ringing off the hook with complaints. “She was so pissed off at Linda,” Mr. Berry said.

Dog Island got the most hits in the class, something like six million pageviews. One other project got close: WhatIsVictoriasSecret.com, which was just pictures of girls vomiting.

The failures were as instructive as the successes. Mr. Peretti fondly recalled “gangster henna,” a fake website about hardcore prison tattoos created with henna, which flopped.

Why did Dog Island go viral, while gangster henna did not? There are no rules, but there are guidelines. “Most things aren’t viral” is one of Mr. Peretti’s catch phrases. The thing can’t be too complicated, and it almost always has to be original. “Oftentimes when people see something that was viral, they will copy it, and then that thing will be less viral,” he said (like those books that are made from Tumblrs?). Novelty is viral; humor is often viral, as are things that inspire awe or a strong emotion other than sadness. “For the most part, if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it,” he said. “You don’t want to upset all your friends. I’ve met activists before who come to me and say, ‘Help me make my campaigns viral.’ And then I’ll say, ‘OK, let me see what you’re working on,’ and then their campaign is literally pictures of starving children that are literally about to die.”

A lot of Mr. Peretti’s strategy has to do with appealing to people’s vanity: You want them to feel good about themselves for discovering a thing and proud to be the first one to show it to their friends. That means that some things aren’t “shareable”—sex tapes, nasty stories and celebrity dross, for instance, which Mr. Peretti calls “guilty pleasures.” Those tend to be spread by email and word of mouth, which are much less contagious than social media.

Nostalgia does well, though—“25 Foods You’ll Never Be Able to Eat Again” was a hit. But a wacky premise isn’t as key an ingredient as one might think; the all-time most viral post on BuzzFeed is “The 45 Most Powerful Images of 2011,” which might offer a clue about the motivation behind Mr. Peretti’s shift into straight news.

BuzzFeed is more than a blog, though. It’s a testing-ground for technology that monitors the web, scanning for content that is about to blow up, using a proprietary algorithm that watches the type of traffic heading into a story, photo series or video and acts as an early-warning system when something has the potential for exponential popularity. At that moment, BuzzFeed flows the item into a rotation of prominent positions on the site, helping to catalyze its rise. It does the same thing for advertisers, making millions of dollars in revenue a year, the company says, by running sponsored content from brands like Coke, Kraft and Disney, and supplying its sponsors with a dashboard and metrics.

There’s something chilling about all this—the systematic monetization of the internet’s forest of delights in the service of corporate marketers. It all used to be so innocent: a hallucinating hippie makes an unintentionally funny video of a double rainbow and uploads it to YouTube, where it lies, a diamond in the rough, until it’s stumbled upon by an internet explorer. Serendipity is the great magic of the internet; distilling it into a formula seems wrong.

Then again, it might be just what the media business needs. BuzzFeed recently announced a $15.5 million round of outside funding, is up to about 70 employees, and Mr. Smith is hiring reporters.

Check out BuzzFeed's new office [SLIDESHOW] >>

We tried to get Mr. Peretti to give us a peek at the crystal ball. Why news? Why now? Are memes over—just a phase we all went through, like a collective adolescence of the internet?

“Novelty items, memes and cute kittens all have a bright future on the social web,” Mr. Peretti reassured us, “but increasingly they will have to share the stage with substantive content, original reporting and breaking news.”

In early January BuzzFeed broke the news of John McCain’s endorsement of Mitt Romney, forcing CNN to admit “news of the endorsement was first reported by BuzzFeed Politics.” (LOL.) BuzzFeed’s arrival has resulted in some grumbling from political hacks, but it’s largely been greeted with optimism. Media critic Jack Shafer, now at Reuters, hailed BuzzFeed in a column as “the daily newspaper … reborn again.”

Of course, what BuzzFeed is doing—original reporting of serious issues alongside aggregation, listicles, snark and video mashups—is not so new. The Huffington Post has a similar mix, as does Gawker and … everyone. A recent headline on The Atlantic’s website read: “Science Can Neither Explain Nor Deny the Awesomeness of This Sledding Crow.”

“They’re very aggressively carving out parts of political news that has even a faster metabolism than Politico,” Mr. Shafer marveled of the politics team. “I imagine the entire staff is heavily dosed on Adderall.”

He’s a particular fan of mashup wizard Andrew Kacyzinski, he added. “That kid is the greatest thing since garlic toast.”

[Want more? Full transcript of the interview with Mr. Peretti is here.]

Tech Wiz, Poach Perfect

The news broke today that Paul Berry, the longtime CTO of Huffington Post credited with their legendary SEO and early adoption of social networking tools, was leaving the company. Betabeat has learned that Mr. Berry will be reuniting with the old gang, Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti, as he builds out a startup called Rebel Mouse and a new incubator focused on viral and social startups. 

"I can't say too much right now, but Rebel Mouse will be a social platform and I'm working with Lerer Ventures, Kenny and Eric, very closely on that," Mr. Berry told Betabeat by phone.

The other half will be a incubator at 560 Broadway, the old home of the Huffington Post, and current home of  Lerer Ventures. Thrillist was formerly housed there and is now just down the street at 568 Broadway.

"That is going to be space where we can just throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks," Mr. Berry explained. "It will be focused on social and viral, experimenting to see what kind of business can really scale."

Along with Lerer Ventures, former HuffPosters and current BuzzFeed crew Jonah Peretti and Greg Coleman will be part of the new incubator. Thrillist CFO Eric Ashman was another name Mr. Berry mentioned as being part of the project. All very fitting for a guy who's Twitter handle is @teamreboot.

Not to pat ourselves on the back but we did put Mr. Berry on our list of most poachable tech folks. Not sure if this exactly counts (he poached himself?) but clearly he has moved on, so we'll score one for the list on that front. All of it has to be frustrating for AOL, which is watching a talent exodus from a company it recently paid $315 million for.

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka "The Guy with the Red Tie"), Founder of GarysGuide, Mentor at ER Accelerator and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Just Peachy
It starts off innocently enough with buzzwords like platform, brands, game mechanics, engaging clients, social graph ... yada yada yada ... being thrown about. And then suddenly this ... "We've been thru a ton of together. I know her mood swings, I know when her blood sugar gets low." Wait, whaaa...? Yup, thats Betabeat's very own new reality show, of course. ;) It's called "The Pitch" and as Betabeater Ben Popper recently tweeted, it's got everything from college seniors and corporate bankers to toy makers and fashionistas trying their hand at the startup lifestyle. And yes, plenty of baseball metaphors. So go grab some popcorn, lean back and press the play button already.

Deals, deals & more deals
As always, we got a bunch of cool deals for y'all including classes at General Assembly, the Raise Cache tech fashion show, 500 Startups Warm Gun conference and more.

And now, lets take a peek behind the curtains to see who's performing (and who's showboating) in the Flatiron production of Silicon Alley this week...

Social Media World Forum North America
In case you had been wondering, yes, you just found the event where you can pow-wow with social media experts, strategists, maestros and gurus all-day-long. ;)
Tuesday, 8 a.m. @ Jacob K Javits Convention Center, 655 West 34th Street

HTML5 Live in New York 2011
Been stressing out dealing with the complexities of Objective-C and inanities of Android fragmentation? Hoping the rest of the world would hurry up and get with the HTML5 program already? You, my friend, needs to head on over to this event ASAP.
Tuesday, 9 a.m. @ New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street

Hacks & Hackers: How We Made Our Maps
Like to geek out over all things cartographic? Then u're gonna like this one. With John Keefe (WNYC Evacuation Zone Map), Albert Sun (WSJ Census Map Maker) and Jeff Larson (ProPublica).
Tuesday, 6:30 p.m. @ Aol HQ, 770 Broadway 5th Floor

Girl Develop IT: JavaScript/JQuery: November Section
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Girls + Coding = Plain Awesome :)
Tuesday, 7 p.m. @ Hive at 55, 55 Broad Street

New York Android Software Developers Happy Hour
For those who like cupcakes, donuts, eclairs, gingerbreads and ice cream sandwiches. And of course beer.
Tuesday, 7 p.m. @ O'Lunney's Times Square Pub, 145 W 45th Street

Open Hardware Breakfast & Panel Discussion
Had enough of software? Hoping to hang with the hardcore hardware crowd for a change? Then this one is for u, pal. Panelists include Bob Pasker (CTO-in-Residence, Accel Partners) and Kelsey Nix (IP Partner, Willkie Farr & Gallagher).
Wednesday, 8:30 a.m. @ The New York City Investment Fund, One Battery Park Plaza 5th Floor

Ad Age Happy Hour
Throwing back martinis with the Don Draper & Peggy Olson crowd.
Wednesday, 6 p.m. @ 13th Step, 149 2nd Avenue

How to Build a Company with a Multi-Million Dollar Exit
Building a startup is cool. But u know whats cooler? Having a multi-million dollar exit. Thats what. With Laurel Touby (Founder, Mediabistro) and Mark Wachen (Founder, Optimost). Moderated by Joe Chin.
Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. @ NYU Stern Kaufman Management Center, 44 West Fourth Street

GA + GLabs present: Ben Lerer, co-founder and CEO of Thrillist
Learn how to build a multi-million dollar, multi-platform brand. Bonus: Learn how to throw awesome parties.
Wednesday, 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

November 2011 NY Tech Meetup
I am super excited for yet another awesome edition of the NY Tech Meetu... oh wait, did u say its all the way uptown? Noooooooo!
Wednesday, 7 p.m. @ 92 Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue

SEGD Xlab 2011: Design of Location
Where the real physical world and the online virtual world collide and explode. With John Geraci (CoFounder, Outside.in), Kiyo Kubo (Founder, Spotlight Mobile), Greg Tran (Harvard School of Design), Philip Stanger (CEO, Wifarer), Vivian Rosenthal (CEO, GoldRun), Linda Perry-Lube (Chief Digital Officer, American Museum of Natural History), Colin Ellard (Waterloo Lab for Collaborative Virtual Environments), Patrick Hofmann (Google Maps), Mark Shepard (Artist, Architect & 2011 Eyebeam Fellow), Abby Suckle (Founder, CultureNow and Museum Without Walls) and more.
Thursday, 8 a.m. @ Eyebeam Art+Technology Center, 540 West 21st Street

Occupy Wall Street & the Role of Social Media
Whats more fun than occupying Wall Street? Why, learning about how to use social media to occupy Wall Street of course. With Paul Farkas (Social TV), Andrew Weinreich (MeetMoi/sixdegrees.com) and Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media).
Thursday, 6 p.m. @ Media Training Worldwide, 34 W 38th Street

Women In Wireless Present: Public Speaking: How to Rock an Audience
Tara Hunt (she of The Whuffie Factor fame) will teach u how to speak in public. More importantly, later on she'll teach u how to karaoke like a pro at the Rock & Rose karaoke afterparty.
Thursday, 6 p.m. @ Lowenstein Sandler, 1251 Ave of the Americas

Collaboration Nation: From Napkin Idea to Reality: Best Practices or Innovation.
Cuz its about time u converted those napkin doodles into real startup gold, no? With Jason Baptiste (CEO and Founder, Onswipe), Danya Cheskis-Gold (Community Manager, Skillshare), Brandon Evans (CEO & Founder, CrowdTap) and Peter Lehrman. Moderated by Jodi Jefferson.
Thursday, 6:30 p.m. @ WeCreate NYC, 58 East 11th Street 8th Floor

Mashable Media Summit 2011
A rockstar speaker lineup of Paul Berry (CTO, Huffington Post Media Group), Emily Chang (Anchor, Bloomberg Television), Anthony de Rosa (Reuters), Tony Haile (Chartbeat), Alex Iskold (CEO, GetGlue), Alexis Maybank (CoFounder, Gilt Groupe), Andrew Nash (Google), Jesse Redniss (USA Network), Faris Yakob (MDC Partners), Brian Stelter (NY Times), ..... what's that? well yes of course Pete Cashmore is going to be there. Will he sign ur boobs? Errr, well u'll have to ask him that but if u bought a ticket, I'm sure he will.
Friday, 8:30 a.m. @ TheTimesCenter, 242 West 41st Street

EcoHackNYC
Global Environmental Change + Scientists/Hackers/Designers/Hobbyists + Hack.Hack.Hack!
Friday, 7:30 p.m. @ ITP, 721 Broadway

Reinventing Local: A General Assembly Hackathon
Attention all ye So-Lo-Mo hackers, designers, developers and entrepreneurs. Time to get ur local hack on, yo.
Saturday, 9 a.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

More on the horizon...
Future of Web Design (FOWD) Conference on Nov 7 @ New World Stages
Ad:Tech NY on Nov 8 @ Javits Center
CNet Gotham Live on Nov 9 @ Openhouse Gallery
Brands Conf on Nov 9 @ 92 Street Y
ERA Giving Thanks to NY Startup Community Party on Nov 10 @ Goodwin Procter
Raise Cache: A Celebration of NY Tech and A Benefit for hackNY on Nov 17 @ State Armory

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends!