(Photo: theybf.com)

Real Genius Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Rap Genius to help its Ivy League cofounders to annotate the Internet. But how much will they have to pay to rein in the braggadocious Mahbod Moghadam?

In a recent issue of Wakefield, a newsletter covering "tech and startup insight not captured elsewhere," Maboo was up to his old shenanigans, volunteering information about a “feud” with Mark Zuckerberg, who also happens to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Apparently, Mr. Moghadam was at Ben Horowitz’s home, “chilling” with Zuck and Nas as is the new mode of Silicon Valley socializing. (Mr. Horowitz happens to be close friends with Steve Stoute, Nas’ former manager.) Despite Zuck's heightened privacy concerns (it's complicated?) Rap Genius cofounder couldn't resist Instagramming his good fortune.

Apparently Zuck never leaves his house because he’s so afraid of people photographing him, and then our investor – his house is one of the only places where Zuck feels safe – so our investor invited Zuck and Nas over. They were chilling together, and I asked if I could take a photo. He was like “Let’s hold off, let’s hold off,” and I just couldn’t resist – I was drunk, and I went paparazzi and Instagrammed it, and I didn’t even think it would be a thing.

But then the press picked it up and apparently Zuck gets home and his whole PR crew is calling him every five seconds, and he told us to take it down. We wrote a letter of apology and I feel sorry. I regret taking it, I hope this has taught me some maturity, it certainly got me in a lot of trouble. But then on the other hand, fuck that fool – that’s Nas the Don.

Asked by Wakefield if there was anything else he wanted to discuss, Mr. Moghadam again volunteered:

Alright so I told you the New York Times is Carlos Slim’s ho, I told you Zuck can suck my dick, what else is there?

When Betabeat asked Mr. Moghadam about the tenor of those comments on gChat, he said, “i am so sorry, i love zuck, i think he should've made the photo w nas his fb profile pic. I talked to nas, nas loved him and loved the photo.” It was all “tongue in cheek,” he added, “but obvi this offends mark, he got me my last girlfriend, i feel terrible!”

Later, Mr. Moghadam requested that we note that he had taken a Vyvanse to prepare for a UC Berkeley Rap Genius colloquium after the Wakefield interview and was therefore “being negative on the come up." He also noted that he was “not surprised that the ‘guy’ (pun intended) who runs [Wakefield] went to harvard since havartis (as i call them) are little bitches. Also ‘harvard = illuminati, yale = KILLuminati (princeton = chilluminati).’”

Wonder what he calls Andreessen Horowitz?

Bloglords Never Worry In Emily Nussbaum's review of "Girls" for the New Yorker this week, she defined "concern trolling," as "the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry." Valley regulars don't seem too familiar with the term. So for a fine example, let us direct you to Sarah Lacy's comments about her former coworker Alexia Tsotsis on Jason Calacanis' This Week In Tech. Whatever happened to putting the blog first?

The Bachelor: Silicon Valley Congratulations to investor Peter Thiel, who made Out magazine's third annual list of "Most Eligible Bachelors." Local suitors, please let us know if you get an invite to his raging Upper East Side dinner parties.

Nap Time Bre Pettis is a busy guy. Between running MakerBot Industries and traveling around for meetings and conferences, he has to get his zzz's in where he can. "Parking lot nap," he wrote alongside an Instagram of his car with a bridge in the background. Perhaps MakerBot should invest in some sweet nap pods a la Google.

(Photo: Instagram)

Be Mine If you didn't get enough fill of Valentine's Day yesterday, perhaps this tool for determining your Twitter crush will come in handy. Twitamore analyzes who you follow, @-reply and favorite to figure out who your Twitter Valentine is. Our favorites? The ones who love themselves.

Belly up the bar Wired editor Ryan Tate has a bone to pick with the makers of the bourbon Maker’s Mark, who recently announced they’d be adding just a little more water to their product. Quartz took questions for the company’s COO via Twitter, and here’s what Mr. Tate demanded to know: “What will you do for a living after burning the American bourbon industry’s reputation to the ground and destroying your company?” Two words, Mr. Tate: Woodford Reserve.

Attention, please Consider this a cri de coeur from your friendly neighborhood scolds: Please, please, please stop making these Harlem Shake videos. Rumor has it that even Sheryl Sandberg is somewhere in this Facebook video. It’s nice to break up the workday with a little caper, but unfortunately, tech companies seem to have trouble rounding up employees with rhythm.

There’s only one exception to this blanket condemnation, and that’s the dude who appears front and center in Google’s version, thrashing about in what appear to be lederhosen. He looks like he’s on serious party drugs, and he is mesmerizing, and he is now a GIF:

For those who read and run? When Atlantic Media launched Quartz, it positioned the digital only business publication as the news source for the new global elite: the type of jet-setting professionals more likely to read a news story from a tablet while sipping complementary champagne at 30,000 feet than to hunker over a desktop PC. It stood to reason then that Quartz would be an early adopter of the smart-watch Pebble.

Quartz reporter Christopher Mims also brushed off concerns that nerdlinger arm candy might look pretty goofy once it actually hit the market.

Rappers will gold-plate their iWatches and Google Glasses, and some guy will wear a phablet on a chain around his neck. You'll see.

— Christopher Mims (@mims) February 14, 2013

We think we know just the fella.

Mr. Lyons traced the start of Apple's whisper (in a reporter's ear) campaign back to TechCrunch blogger, investor, and Apple stock holder MG Siegler, who called the time it takes to pull an all-serving computer out of his own pocket "insane." That was followed by an impromptu treatise on the iWatch's ability to "fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem" from Cupertino's former interface designer.

Rumors graduated to reports with Mr. Bilton repeating the same Dick Tracy reference as Mr. Siegler, except with better access:

Bilton even got an interview with the CTO of Corning Glass Technologies, the company that supplies Apple with glass for the iPhone. The Corning guy doesn’t talk specifically about making a watch, but he says that it could be done. What’s noteworthy here is that this is one of Apple’s big suppliers talking to the press, on the record, about something that brushes up against Apple. If you know anything about Apple you know that this doesn’t happen without Apple’s permission. Don’t believe me? Go try to get an interview with Foxconn, about anything, and see if they’ll do it without Apple’s permission.

Wouldn't you know, things are already looking up.

That's not the only theory as to why we've suddenly been treated to details about futuristic new product. Watching the iWatch also coincides with Pebble buyers--who fronted the Kickstarter project $10 million--finally receiving their smartwatch orders.

https://twitter.com/AlexJamesFitz/status/300984700808347648

Buyers who haven't yet received Pebble arm candy are already considering jumping ship . . . for an unavailable product.

It's hard to imagine Apple is seriously threatened. Ben Kessler, Crowdtap's director of marketing, says Pebble is fun, but still feature light: "Just controls music and shows incoming calls and SMS on iOS." Mr. Bilton predicts that "Pebble would be to iWatch as Kindle was to iPad."

But status-obsessed startup types still need something to Instabrag about. So behold! The unboxing is upon us. (Fuelbands are so 2012.)

(Photo: Kickstarter)

When the marketing peg for your Kickstarter project is that your product is less annoying to use than its competitor products, you probably want to deliver on that promise. The Portland-based Elevation Dock surpassed its funding goal back in February, raising almost $1.5 million, almost 20 times more than its $75,000 asking goal. The project's premise was that, unlike other iPhone docks on the market, the Elevation Dock allows your iPhone to be easily lifted from the dock, without all that annoying shaking and yanking characterized by other docks. But according to Droplr cofounder Josh Bryant, the Elevation Dock is just as annoying to use as its competitors.

Mr. Bryant tweeted a video of himself attempting to remove his iPhone from the Elevation Dock, a product which was advertised as "simple to use, quick undocking, and it works with or without a case." But judging from the video... not so much. Mr. Bryant is seen struggling to undock the iPhone, just as he would with regular iPhone docks.

"The first and the last time I pledge a @kickstarter project," he tweeted. "Weren't these supposed to ship back in April too? #underwhelmed #lameproduct."

Indeed, the Elevation Docks were reportedly supposed to begin shipping in April, so Mr. Bryant should at least count himself lucky that he's received his. According to a raging debate in the comments section of the project, many backers are still waiting on their docks. A quick search for "Elevation Dock" on Twitter turns up a handful of posts, most of them referencing the fact that users are still waiting on their docks.

But backer Brad Covey chimed into the comments with a little sanity: "I hope people start showing a little more patience (and respect) and realize that as some have stated, Kickstarter is not a store front," he wrote. "Items will not be done when the project ends and that the end of a project is actually the starting point."

Far surpassing your fundraising goal is a huge accomplishment, but it can also delay manufacturing and shipping. At least there were no dead jellyfish with this one.

UPDATE: Casey Hopkins, the creator of Elevation Dock, wrote in to clarify:

I have a dozen docks in front of me and I can easily undock them all without the dock moving.  Our connector is mounted 7 degrees back so it is comfortable see and read. You simply need to pull it out roughly at that angle. He is bending the phone forward and pulling out, this sandwiches the connector and can make it stick no matter how low friction we designed the connector to be....this is a massive project to scale, especially with the complexity and time involved in manufacturing these....We should be assembling, QC checking, and shipping 450-700 per day this week as we continue to ramp up.

Ms. Hu (lark.com)

Imagine that you invented this really cool wristband alarm clock, and you think it could be a real 'disruptive' technology. You spend months mocking up a presentation to give to investors at TechCrunch Disrupt, but on the morning of your demo, rich assholes incapable of summoning empathy shit all over your startup, simply because it's a hardware idea.

That's pretty much exactly what happened to Julia Hu, the cofounder of Lark, according to CNN. Napster bad boy Sean Parker literally laughed her off the stage:

"That was a charmingly quirky presentation, but I'm not sure," said Sean Parker, a serial entrepreneur and partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund. "I mean, is this a company?"

Hu's pitch, made at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, didn't dazzle any of the investors on the panel. Almost laughing, Parker added: "I just have a hard time believing you're serious."

Ms. Hu picked herself back up and took her project to Kickstarter, where she raised all the necessary funds and even gained the attention of Apple, which now sells her product in its stores.

CNN reports that hardware startups--like the infamous Pebble--are swarming Kickstarter in impressive droves, due in part to the risk factors associated with hardware that tend to keep VCs at bay. As CNN writes, "SV Angel partner David Lee puts it bluntly: Venture capitalists are 'allergic to hardware.'"

We reported on this phenomenon last month, when we noticed that spots for Disrupt's Hardware Alley filled up much faster than usual. CNN puts it more succinctly: "We're becoming our own venture capitalists."

Of course, not everyone can be as successful as Ms. Hu or the Pebble crew, but sometimes it's worth a shot. After all, we're getting so sick of apps.

(supermechanical.com)

Oh, the Pebble. We're almost getting tired of writing about it. The little e-paper gadget hit the "most-funded Kickstarter project EVAH" mark about six million dollars ago. Today, it surpassed $10 million in pledges and sold out of all 85,000 of its offered watches.

Seems like a good time to announce its second software partnership, right?

That's exactly what the team did. The Next Web reports that another well-funded Kickstarter project, Twine, announced today that it had partnered with Pebble to offer real-time alerts to the watch.

According to a blog post from the Twine team:

We’re pleased to announce that Twine will talk to the Pebble smartwatch. In Twine’s web app, you’ll be able to relay word of real-world events, like a basement flooding or a door opening, to the Pebble on your wrist. Welcome to the future!

Welcome to the future, indeed. In a short 15-second clip, Twine showcases the power that this partnership could wreak upon the world: a man is shown working on his computer, and when someone knocks at his door, the Pebble smartwatch alerts him. (Because doorbells are so pre-21st century.)

This is Pebble's second partnership, and the project still has eight days left to go. Who wants to bet that they'll be acquired before the campaign even ends?

Mr. Migicovsky

The Pebble e-paper watch still has 16 days of funding left to go, but today the team already announced its first partnership with run tracking software startup Run Keeper. Because between cycle tracking, running and golf range tracking, you can never have enough self-quantifying apps, right?

"We know that many of you are always looking for ways to make your fitness tracking easier, and with Pebble integration, you won’t ever have to pull the phone out of your pocket or armband – you can just see and do everything you need right from your watch," wrote the Run Keeper team.

Since we noted a few weeks ago that Pebble is Kickstarter's most funded project ever at $4.6 million, it has almost doubled its funding, quickly creeping towards the $8 million mark. Apparently 53,267 people really want some nerdy wrist candy.

Integrating with Run Keeper is definitely mutually beneficial, but considering many overfunded Kickstarter projects' issues with living up to their promises, we're skeptical that the Pebble will be able to churn out $8 million in watches without some sort of snag. We wouldn't be surprised if backers didn't receive their watches until 2014. How fast can 53,267 hardware devices really be built, anyway?

We don't mean to hate on a cool idea just for hating's sake, but people should probably wait and see how the project turns out before they keep calling Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky "the next Steve Jobs."

Better than writing a note on your hand.

The last time Betabeat checked in with Pebble the smartwatch, Y Combinator alum Eric Migicovsky had raised some $4.6 million on Kickstarter for an idea that struggled to find venture capital backing despite, you know, actually making revenue. (For those of you keeping track at home, Pebble has added $3 million on top of that for a total of $7.6 million--and counting!--with 17 days left to go.) Yesterday, Mr. Migicovsky got The New York Times treatment.

Now, all the fuss seems to have migrated over to the agenda for TechCrunch Disrupt. The conference just announced that for the first time in New York, the event will feature something called "Hardware Alley" alongside its standard "Start-up Alley" showcase on May 23rd. "We’re looking for promising hardware startups," writes TechCrunch. "Got a disruptive Kickstarter project?" Gee, wonder who they're talking about there.

Spots for Hardware Alley are apparently filling up fast. But does that mean that VCs will reconsider the manufacturing headache and low retail margins of backing hardware plays? Not not necessarily, says John Battelle. On his blog, Mr. Battelle wondered why mainstream VCs shrugged off Pebble, even after its potential became clear. He speculated that it might have something to do with a little behemoth with a $556 billion market cap. After all, Mr. Migicovsky is planning a Watch App Store and software development for Pebble to let developers build apps.

If we’ve learned anything about Apple over the years, it’s that Apple is driven by its hardware business. It makes its profits by selling hardware – and it’s built a beautiful closed software ecosystem to insure those hardware sales. Pebble forces an interesting question: Does Apple care about new form factors for hardware? Or is it content to build out just the “core” hardware platform, and allow anyone to innovate in new hardware instances? Would Apple be cool with someone building, say, a larger form factor of the iPhone, perhaps tablet-sized, driven by your iPhone?

I don’t know the answer to that question (and doubt Apple would answer my call asking such a question), so I’ll toss it out to you. What do you all think? Is Pebble playing with fire here? Would Apple ever change its developer terms of services to cut the new company off?

Regardless of whether Apple played a factor in investment decisions, we imagine the Cupertino contingent probably isn't hot on the idea of Mr. Migicovsky already being compared to Steve Jobs.

Mr. Migicovsky

Yesterday, we called it. The fact that Pebble the e-paper watch had raised $3.5 million with more than a month to go meant that KickStarter had hit the tipping point, surpassing even Double Fine Adventure's previous high-score of $3,336,371. Maybe we shoulda waited awhile. Between now and then, Pebble has raised another million and change. The new total is $4,625,453 from 32,120 backers with 30 days to go.

At this rate, Pebble is going to raise $34 million before the jig's up and Kickstarter should just secede from the Union and start minting their own currency. Maybe cfundrs or crowdsies™ or something.

As Bloomberg noted yesterday, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky hit a roadblock before trying his hand on Kickstarter. In fact, Mr. Migicovsky went through the same Y Combinator class as Tutorspree and even "outperformed others by actually generating revenue." That got Pebble to the next stage, raising $375,000 from four angel investors, including Google alum and Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit and DFJ cofounder Tim Draper. But venture capitalists balked at the manufacturing headache of a hardware project.

Betabeat heard the same thing from Reddit cofunder Alexis Ohanian last night. At a book party on the Gawker rooftop, Y Combinator's "Ambassador to the East" said people were already drawing comparisons between Mr. Migicovsky and Steve Jobs for his astounding attention to design. Pebble's notion of opening up a Watch App Store and software development kit to let coders build apps for the watch certainly sounds Jobesian to us.

But if that's not enough hype for you, how about the fact that Pebble made $23,585 in the time it took us to write this post? Actually, make that $26,550. Okay, we're going to stop now.

Now this crazy touchscreen smartwatch project, Pebble, is taking Kickstarter to the next level. It raised $1 million in 28 hours (Double Fine hit $1 million faster) and with so much time to go, it boggles our tiny little minds to think of what the final total might be. Especially with those eight more stories we're going to write about it.

Looking at the project, it's easy to tell why it hit so hard. The creators have a proven track record, a long list of glowing reviews from the press, and the product basically makes the watch relevant again: a touchscreen wrist-computer synced with your smartphone that can control iTunes from across the room and track your bike ride or your run. The watch will have a Watch App Store, and the creators plan to release a Software Development Kit (SDK) so that independent developers can code up new watch apps.

The creators have already released Pebble for BlackBerry. They need the money to make their product compatible with iPhone and Android.  "I started throwing money at my computer screen while reading this," one user wrote on the Android forums.

Pebble, in action.

The money comes from 24,582 backers. Double Fine got more than 87,000. The number of people with wrists and an Android or iPhone has got to be at least equal to the number of people who play adventure video games, right? If Pebble got the same number of backers as Double Fine, it could conceivably hit an absurd total, like (gulp) $10 million. Has Kickstarter hit some kind of crazy tipping point with these blockbusters?

Kickstarter has been growing "pretty consistently," said Kickstarter rep Justin Kazmark, although the Double Fine project led to a few high profile video game campaigns. Shadow Run Returns has raised $1.7 million with 11 days to go.

If you look at Kickstarter's funding hall of fame, you can see that other categories have much lower records. For Art, the record is $116,270; for Dance, it's $26,270. Blue Like Jazz, still the most-funded Kickstarter film ever and in 100 theaters around the country as of last week, raised only $345,992 even though Film & Video has historically been the "dominant" category of projects, "accounting for $60 million of the over $175 million pledged." (And this year, 12 Kickstarter-funded projects are in the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival lineup.)

Kickstarter has more than 4,500 projects running. That's a lot, but it's not mainstream. But with superbreakout projects like Double Fine for video games and now Pebble for design recruiting record numbers of dollars and commanding ever-more press, it looks like Kickstarter could be hitting, category by category, that magical tipping point where a popular thing becomes truly mainstream.

It's a simple idea, but one that takes true technological sophistication to build: what if all of the important things your cell phone can do could be transferred over to a watch via Bluetooth? The concept has that futuristic Google Glasses waft to it, but it's a product that is real and actually works, and eager technophiles are all but throwing money at the team who invented it.

Pebble, an e-paper watch for iPhone and Android, is "infinitely customizable, with beautiful downloadable watchfaces and useful internet-connected apps. Pebble connects to iPhone and Android smartphones using Bluetooth, alerting you with a silent vibration to incoming calls, emails and messages."

Umm--awesome.

Apparently the entire Internet thought so, too, as the project--which still has 35 days left to go--has been funded a stunning 20 times over. It has over $2 million pledged, an amount well over the team's $100,000 goal. To date, 14,428 people have backed the project in hopes of scoring a sleek little wrist doodad of their very own.

The Pebble does resemble a previous record-breaking Kickstarter project for a watch that used an iPod Nano as the timepiece. The difference is that the Pebble's screen is made of e-paper, and is compatible with both iPhone and Android devices.

Today's Top Thing claims that the Pebble is the fastest growing and most successful Kickstarter project to date. Justin Kazmark, a spokesperson for Kickstarter, told Betabeat, "I can confirm Pebble is the fastest project to hit $2 million." When we asked if it was the fastest growing Kickstarter project ever, Mr. Kazmark said that it depends on how you measure it--one project reached $1 million slightly quicker than the Pebble, but the Pebble reached $2 million faster than any other project.

Hopefully the Pebble team can follow through on the thousands of people who now expect a watch from them. Hey, at least we don't have any dead jellyfish to worry about with this one.