HIRING. As activity marketplace SideTour prepares to leave the TechStars offices for greener pastures this Friday, the startup has officially started hiring for a lead engineer and "host development manager." Business Insider is looking for a biz dev intern.

FREE PIZZA. Foursquare competitor SCVNGR is still at large; the company had several holiday-themed promotions and badges. Founder Seth Priebastch launched LevelUp, a mobile payments app complementary to SCVNGR, in October. Now LevelUp is announcing its first brand partner: Villa Pizza, which will offer $10 of free pizza in Times Square New Year's Eve.

SYNERGY. Fab.com has started selling Makerbots! "Fab.com will be selling two MakerBot 'Thing-O-Matic' products at two price different price points, one being the kit and one that is already assembled." The sale is on today and tomorrow.

MEETUPS. East Village Techies on Thursday; Android developers tonight and Dumbo Tech Breakfast Friday.

THIRD PARTIES. Public service announcement: there is a new Hype Machine app from Boston."We @ Dirty Water Labs in Boston have recently released our second music application is called 'uberHype' - social music discovery app built on The Hype Machine music platform. If you like reading music blogs and discovering new artists through that medium then this app should be the one."

THE RETURN OF THE SILICON VALLEY DIASPORA CONTINUES. Qwiki comes back, back, from Cali, Cali.

STARTUP BUS. There will be 12 regions up for the Startup Bus hackathon competition this year, and only those with popular support will participate. Last we heard, New York (which tied for first place with San Francisco last year) was in 13th place for the qualifying round—just shy of making it into the competition.

(catalystmarketers.com)

Boston-based location check-in game SCVNGR has a lot of overlap with Foursquare, but SCVNGR's main feature is the ability to create treasure hunts. Founder Seth Priebatsch, subject of this great New York Times piece from last year on entrepreneurs and hypomania, started the company to build "a game layer on top of the world."

SCVNGR and foursquare are similar enough that it's not clear yet whether the smartphone world has room enough for the both of them. Users checking in on SCVNGR often have to complete tasks at each check-in point, such as uploading a photo. The startup also introduced check-in discounts in March. This reporter has seen exactly one person use SCVNGR, because Foursquare was "boring now" and mayorships had become too competitive.

But somebody up there likes the Boston underdog. SCVNGR raised $15 million at a $100 million evaluation in January, and now BostInnovation is reporting that Facebook tried to buy the company for its Places and Deals platform and the proposed price was between $60 and $80 million. It wouldn't surprise us if Facebook had made a similar offer to foursquare.