(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.

(Photo: Opening Ceremony)

Opening Ceremony There hasn't been much fashion fun in tech since last year's Raise Cache fashion show, but now Opening Ceremony has partnered with Gin Lane Media to create an interactive iPad application as a companion piece to Opening Ceremony's new annual print magazine. Here's a video of what this thing looks like (très chic!) and if you're iPad-less, then you're free to try it out in all of Opening Ceremony's stores. Note: Chloë Sevigny still not available for download.

Back to School It's September, which means the kids all over the country are hitting the books once more. Despite the gnashing of teeth over the importance of STEM education, however, many students are returning to schools with shaky or nonexistent computer science programs. That's where Codecademy comes in. The company recently debuted After School Programming, a package allowing schools to, at the very least, get an extracurricular club up and running.

Blammo Scrollkit, the service designed to make website creation easier for those without years of web design experience, has just added new effects for CSS3 and HTML5. Now on the table: blur, grayscale, warp, bomb, fade-in, rotate, and flip. But don't take our word for it. Watch this video featuring a fire-breathing panda with rainbow lasers shooting out of his eyes.

Do Something Nice Charity: Water, a favorite non-profit of Anil Dash, Michael Kors, Sarah Lacy and Pete Cashmore, just turned six-years-old this week. They're celebrating by launching a $1.7 million dollar fundraising campaign to help give 26,000 people in Rwanda safe drinking water. They've produced a video that makes us feel way more charitable than Kony 2012 ever did:

DIY Mobile Brit + Co, the creators of recyclable wonders like the Hitch Clock (made from a repurposed DVD of the Will Smith movie), have now turned their DIY. blog--headed by creator Brit Morin--into an app. It's only available on iOS for now, but not to fear Android users! The site's mobile version was given a facelift as well, so you can still learn how to "make your cooler the coolest" while you're on the go.

No More Stealing Getty Images has partnered with SparkRebel, Pinterest's fashionable and celebrity-obsessed cousin, to create the terribly-titled PicScout ImageIRC. The two companies describe the new platform as "the world’s largest index of image fingerprints and metadata that assures every image gets its credit." In short, it's a legal way for SparkRebel to use Getty's images, while Getty's photographers get their much deserved credit and compensation. Win-win.

Bono Swag Knewton, the digital learning startup that just last year raised a $33 million Series D, is now one degree of separation closer to Bono and Bill Clinton, via their favorite policy stomping ground: The World Economic Forum. Perhaps you've heard of a small annual gathering they host called Davos? Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira is featured in a video posted this morning on the Forum's site discussing key educational challenges.

Who Gon Stop Me, Huh? HopStop recently passed two million total app downloads, only eight months after announcing one million total apps back in January of this year. The company also recently discontinued their Blackberry app, they say, "due to the complexity of maintaining native apps across several different mobile platforms (as well as due to the lack of advertiser demand for this particular platform)." The remaining Blackberry users left in New York can use HopStop via the mobile site of course.

A Nice Experience for U Usablenet, the creator of mobile and multi-channel experiences for brands, have built a new platform for for their services called U-Experience. If you take a look at UatFashionWeek.com from your mobile browser, you can see what the U-Experience is capable of--a seamless exposure to all of a brand's social media platforms at once in a tight-looking interface.

Ads Mean Money Republic Project, a service that lets anyone create mobile and web ad campaigns in about 45 minutes, has announced $1 million in Series A funding led by Google Ventures. 500 Startups, Venture51, Ludlow Ventures, Maneesh Arora and Andrew Reis also participated in the round. Their first big client is Capital One and they have established partnerships with Buzzfeed and Pandora.

Ms. He's sign

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tartine the corgi

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

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

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

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

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

A couple hours into the festivities.

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

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

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

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