(Photo: Amazon)

Front Page Printed Pages of the Internet Just before taking stage at SXSW to talk his crowdfunded Internet 2012 tour, Alexis Ohanian emailed out a link to his new book, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed.

Since you asked, Mr. Ohanian, we dig the cover, but "without their permission," sounds a little iffy in the context of Reddit's Creepshot scandal, no?

Last week, we wondered when Mr. Ohanian was running for office already. “Alas no,” he emailed back. “I'm not going to rule anything out but right now I'm having too much fun (and impact) from my place in the private sector.” However, as the Young Entrepreneur Council founder Scott Gerber pointed out, Mr. Ohanian does happen to own the domain name ohanian2013.com.

Just checking in 525,600 minutes. How do you measure a year in the life of a (defoundered) man? Earlier this week, on the anniversary of his abrupt departure from Foursquare, cofounder Naveen Selvadurai posted a recap of the last 12 months. Don't expect to learn much about what he's been working on, though. Think more in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights and cups of coffee.

Mr. Selvadurai lost the founder 15; he traveled; he saw his family and friends; he traveled some more; he read books; he went to Disney and rode Space Mountain many times; he learned to drive stick; he went to the Olympics. "I always kept saying 'year 30' wouldn’t be such a big deal and that it’s just like any other. it turned out to be so much more and i’m grateful for that," he reflected.

Oh, but he might have picked up a bit of a gloomy streak, too:

this is how the war will start - "ohio man charged with shooting robot" singularityhub.com/2013/03/04/ohi…

— naveen (@naveen) March 6, 2013

(Photo: Instagram/Dens)

So (proto)typical Google Glasses are now just popping up everywhere, it seems. The latest sighting comes via Digg community manager Veronica De Souza: "SPOTTED: A skater bro wearing google glass in bedstuy. Who are you?" she tweeted. Betebeat welcomes any intel as to the identity of this mystery man, so we can pester him until he lets us try his specs on.

Maybe Dennis Crowley knows the guy. The Foursquare cofounder recently, "lost my Google Glass virginity."

(Photo: Instagram/Fred Benenson)

Spotted! Our friends at Quora--the erudite agoraphobe’s answer to Yahoo! Answers--never got the memo that print was dead. Thus earlier this year, the site opted to publish a 441-page hardcover book called “The Best of Quora,” featuring 131 primers. Forbes called it a “fascinating, enchanting, exasperating book,” and wondered if the inquiring minds of Quora were “too clever” for their own good.

Author Clive Thompson and Kickstarter’s Fred Benenson got to thumb through the pages and see for themselves when they spotted a copy “in the wild” at Lil Frankie’s Pizza in the East Village. Mr. Thompson said on Instagram that he received an advanced copy this week. As Bill Couch, a front-end product engineer at Twitter explained in the comments, “[Quora] issued them as gifts to the authors of those answers at the end of last year, then provided it as a PDF online.”

Guess the question about Betabeat didn’t make the cut.

:( Guys, we think Tumblr really hurt Shelby.tv cofounder Reece Pacheco feelings. He recently published a long, sad blog post announcing, "Tumblr I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down." Nothing says heartache like LCD Soundsystem! So what set Mr. Pacheco off? He logged into Tumblr the other day, as he does regularly, and found himself subjected to a laborious, drawn-out attempt to get him to follow more blogs. Then, he was given a few hovering tool tips--on a service he's been using for years.

He did not like this!

Thing is, I wouldn’t be so frustrated with you, Tumblr, if I didn’t love the platform so much. If you were just some other social network, I’d say “Do whatever you want. I don’t care. Your only value is your scale.”

But that’s not you, so don’t treat me like some number. You know I’m active. You know I’m a creator more than a reblogger. Treat me that way and show me some added benefit, rather than just trying to get more mindless engagement out of me.

Sorry, Reece--those revenue targets aren't gonna hit themselves.

Mmm, cake Happy birthday to GroupMe cofounder Steve Martocci, who got quite the gift in celebration. There's a Vine of the festivities, but here's a teaser:

Looks like a party, alright!

High fashion Huffpo cofounder Kenny Lerer is well known around Silicon Alley as an investor. But did anyone know he is, as his son Ben Lerer put it on Twitter, "fcking fashionable"? Mr. Lerer the Elder recently appeared in a New York Times profile of Laurent DeLouya, "the amiable proprietor of a hair salon that over 50 years has amassed a following that is kind of a cultural Core Club." Papa Lerer told the Times he'd "walk over hot coals for Laurent,” and apparently Mr. DeLouya performed baby Ben's first haircut at age 3.

We yearn to someday achieve that kind of rapport with a stylist.

User #279 Your user number can be a figure of pride among the tech set. If it's low enough it signals that you're an early adopter, and makes you feel cool, which is kinda sad if you think about it cuz like, look at your life.

"I'm User No. 279," humblebragged New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton in a recent Twitter back and forth. "I got @dens drunk and [sic] Nick Denton's house and made him give me a beta account."

Whatever works.

The robotics demo, billed as "Talos: Personal Robot" was a late cancellation after Columbia University's Jason Ravel was denied the go-ahead to take his technology off campus. Meetup sponsor MLB Advanced Media helped fill the gap, giving meeting-goers a virtual tour of the control room and data centers that let the company stream 1.5 petabytes of digital content every baseball season. That is ... a lot, and a worthy point of pride that the bulk of that content is being stored and served from MLBAM's Chelsea facilities.

As for the future identity of the company, which started out as the live-streaming arm of Major League Baseball, but now functions as a technology firm serving video content for dozens of providers, a shift may eventually be in the offing. "We're now starting to pick up momentum in getting to other businesses," senior vice president Joe Inzerillo said. "At some point in time, we'll have to deal with the branding issue, but at this point it hasn't prevented us from growing."

Also very cool: Tactonic founder Gerry Seidman showed off his company's next-gen pressure-sensing tech, a sensor-and-software package that can turn any surface into a keyboard or joystick. Other potential applications: dashboard control for the 21st-century automobile (the intelligence of the sensors might mean a cruise control button that follows you left thumb, wherever your hand rests on the wheel) and floor tiles potentially capable of everything from medical diagnostics to helping retailers determine which shoppers are demonstrating the body-language of a person ready to buy.

Meanwhile, a team from Citia, a company dedicated to "reinventing the media experience," showed off a neat trick with a Leap Motion controller, using hand gestures to page through content. Next up for the company: getting a collaboration with Leap Motion and Snoop Dogg ready in time for SXSW.

If there was any complaint about the presentations, it's that they focused on the products' respective reaches, rather than the underlying tech: more than one meeting-goer told us they wanted a deeper dive into MLBAM's and Tactonic's engineering. Then again, the feeling probably wasn't universal. NYTM executive director Nate Westheimer seemed to spend the evening prodding someone, anyone in the audience to go ahead and ask demoers some technical questions.

It wasn't all flashy hardware. Just in time for Valentine's Day, How About We unveiled its new website, which adds a new membership service for couples to the site's first-date model. Now on offer: curated experiences such as discounted movie tickets, dessert tastings and catered dinners at home. Still to come? Targeted recommendations based on criteria such as the night of the week and past preferences. "Because," as co-CEO Brian Schechter told the meetup, "there's falling love, and there's also being in love." Awwww.

When Shelby.tv presented at New York Tech Meetup in May 2011, CTO Dan Spinosa showed meeting-goers a photo of cofounder Reece Pacheco's bikini-clad sister. This time, the company demoed a product that let's users program their own channel of video: As  proof of concept, Mr. Pacheco showed off fredwilson.tv, which compiles all the video that the Union Square Ventures investor has shared on a single platform. Which might be another Valentine's Day idea, if you and your special someone consider peering into the mind of your favorite venture capitalist a cultural experience.

Lastly, we wouldn't miss a chance to note that NYTM managing director Jessica Lawrence reminded meetup community members to provide input on the meetup's recently released slate of proposals for New York's political hopefuls.

"As Mayor Bloomberg is stepping away from his post," she said, "he's done so much to help us become a city that's really know for technology innovation, and we really want to keep that going."

Fancy's fanciest fan. (Photo: wikipedia.org)

Ceci N'est Pas Une Sandy The affordable-art-dealing website 20 x 200 is now selling a print of a NASA satellite image of Hurricane Sandy. All proceeds from the sale will go to the Red Cross to help relief efforts. The striking image was taken at 9:02 a.m on Sunday, approximately 10 hours before NYC’s MTA shut transport service down throughout the tristate area. Hang it above your couch of a constant reminder of the grander universe and just how much you appreciate your wifi.

More Money, More Fancy Fancy, Pinterest's cooler older brother, has raised just over $26 million in additional funding. New investors include Celtics owner Jim Pallotta, Twitter and Square cofounder Jack Dorsey and Edward Gilligan, the vice chairman of American Express. This also ruins rumors that Apple was planning to acquire the company. No word yet on what their favorite user, Kanye West, thinks of the new influx of cash.

Santa Set to Make a Lot Of Web Boxes This Year Boxee, the New York rival to Apple TV and Roku, is planning to sell its $98 Boxee TV in Walmarts all across the U.S. The new device will be sold in 3,000 Walmarts. This is obviously a huge boost for the company, which sold 120,000 units last year. And unlimited DVR is about as American as Apple pie.

Zynga, What? Zynga may have picked some slightly unpronounceable Gibraltar-based startup to launch its foray into real-money gaming. But that hasn't hurt Betable's chances of becoming the Spotify of online social gambling. The platform, which is backed by investors like Path's David Morin and TechStars' David Tisch, lets developers build real-money games on its platform. Today, Betable announced that it will be lending its services to Slingo, Digital Chocolate and Murka. The company also just helped Big Fish launch a casino app called Big Fish Casino that lets U.K. users gamble with actual money.

NYC vs. SF, Finally Settled If you're ever stuck trying to decide whether to decamp to the Valley, then Versus IO is the site for you. It uses an algorithm to compare two alike things and show you points and counterpoints in a sparse layout. It currently can compare cities and a variety of tech products (think iPhone 4 vs. iPhone 5). But what about the immortal conundrum of pizza vs. Chinese?

Shiny New Doors Glassdoor, a California-based jobs site, has raised $20 million in a new financing round led by DAG Ventures. The round also included Benchmark Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Battery Ventures. The company told GigaOm that traffic to Glassdoor has reached 13 million monthly uniques and that revenue has increased 175 percent.

Get Your Game on GitHub has just announced a monthlong gaming hackathon on its blog. The GitHub Game Off will take place during November, and entrants will have to create a game looselybased on the concepts of forking (or forks), branching (or branches), cloning (or clones), pushing or pulling. There are five new iPads with Retina displays (64GB wifi models) available as prizes.

Big Conductor Conductor, an SEO platform, has just announced a big raise that it's calling "the largest venture capital round of funding in SEO technology." The company managed to scoop up $20 million, led by Investor Growth Capital. FirstMark Capital and Matrix Partners also participated.

Vimeo Workout Plan Reece Pacheco's video startup Shelby.tv, which is still in beta mode, has teamed up with workout site Nerd Fitness to create Nerdfitness.tv. The new site has a scrolling feed of videos to keep you motivated and to teach you how to work out. Let's hope no one gets caught up watching too many videos and forgets to go to the gym.

Dream It, Do It, Microsoft It Startup accelerator Dreamit Ventures has partnered up with Microsoft to give its startups access to the software development tools and networking of the BizSpark program. DreamIt also is planning to select one company from each of its programs to receive additional benefits as part of the BizSpark Fellow program. Fellows will get access to Microsoft expert engineers and evangelists to help build out their products. Qualifying startups can also access up to $60,000 in Windows Azure services over two years. FlagTap, an online capture the flag game that aims to increase web traffic, has been chosen as the first fellow of the program.

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.

Lights, camera, Tisch! (Photo: Leap Year)

When the Techstars reality show on Bloomberg TV gets too intense (What will happen to To Vie For!?!), award-winning producer Wilson Cleveland has a solution for you. His web series Leap Year, presented by Hiscox Insurance, chronicles the personal and professional lives of several employees at a startup called C3D, which is "like Skype with holograms." The show follows the ups (but mostly downs) of building a startup, with a wry comedic voice and plenty of inside jokes for the tech set. In fact, the show garnered so many Startupland fans that a couple of  New York’s better-known tech glitterati make appearances in this season.

Today, Mr. Cleveland and the Leap Year team released an episode featuring none other than Techstars cofounder Dave Tisch, Shelby.TV cofounder Reece Pacheco, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and Change the Ratio cofounder Rachel Sklar. Quite the star-studded cast.

Mr. Tisch plays himself and introduces a competition, the winner of which will get to go through the Techstars program. Mr. Ohanian offers some unsolicited startup advice: "Follow the crowd. We are all herd animals and one way or another that cute video of the old people trying to figure out their web cam or some cute little piglet running around in galoshes is just Mark Zuckerberg's way of hunting us down and eating us. Think about it." Is this some obscure reference to the hive mind?

Ms. Sklar's hilarious self-referential cameo--including a "Change the Ratio" t-shirt, an unnecessary fist bump and a "Girl power!" declaration--were all pretty spot on.

Poor Mr. Pacheco--who played a lowly bus boy clearning off a table where the main cast was sitting--had no lines whatsoever. Do you think that performance qualifies him for a SAG membership?

You can check out the whole episode below.

The Shelby team hard at work on... something? (Photo: Reece Pacheco, Artwork c/o http://sirmikeofmitchell.com/ )

Apparently something's up over at Techstars alum Shelby.TV. Cofounder Reece Pacheco just emailed Betabeat to say that the team would be shutting down the current iteration of Shelby in order to focus on rebuilding the product.

"It's no secret that we're building a new version of Shelby, rebuilt from the ground up, but we're going to shut down the current version in the interim," he wrote. "No big deal really, just a matter of focusing on one product at a time."

According to a blog post published on Shelby.TV's site, the team is working on rebuilding the backend entirely. "To be clear, this isn’t just an update. This is an entirely new build, freshly coded from the ground up," it reads.

The rebuild will help make room for the following features:

• Speed. Shelby’s faster every step of the way.
• Discovery. Better processing power means more videos.
• Community. More ways to connect, share, and curate.

Shelby.TV has seen its fair share of pivots. Reigning King of the Internet Mr. Pacheco entered the TechStars 2011 program with a different idea altogether: a sports-focused app named Homefield which TechStars mentors suggested he scrap in order to begin anew with a concept that was more scalable. That decision led e and his partner Dan Spinosa to Shelby.TV, a video sharing and discovery platform that includes integration with iPhone and iPad.

Shelby has garnered Mr. Pacheco and Mr. Spinosa a fair amount of attention in Startupland. It was named one of the Top Buzziest Brands at SXSW and the duo has raised a total of $1.725 million from investors like Avalon Ventures and Tim Draper.

This move doesn't sound like a complete pivot for Shelby, but instead a move to build a new iteration with better functionality based on user feedback.

Shelby is set to go dark this weekend. "The Chrome Extension, iOS apps, bookmarklet, and weekly emails will also be shut off soon," reads the blog post.

But back in the day, those first 23 companies were all the rage. Like shiny new toys, they were exciting and fascinating. There was even a reality television show about them. So even though their three-month, highly-competitive startup accelerator program has ended, these companies are still around. They didn’t just vanish into thin air. (Well, some of them did).

But all of this begs the question, where are these companies now? How have they fared in the big, bad world? Did they flop? Or surpass expectations?

We didn’t know, so we decided to find out. And it turns out that we weren’t the only ones who were curious about what these companies have been up to.

“When we launched, everything was a concern,” managing director David Tisch told Betabeat in an email. “We were new, a startup.” New York City, he said, brought a unique set of challenges and advantages to these first two classes, but you never how things might turn out. So, Mr. Tisch, what’s the verdict? Have the first 23 New York City companies done TechStars proud?

“The progress shown so far is very promising,” Mr. Tisch said, “and I expect a few very big companies to emerge. There are some early standouts who have shown progress on the product side, revenue side, and team side.”

In the last year, about half of the companies raised over a million dollars in funding from investors (in addition to TechStars's initial $18,000 in each company) and only two companies failed. A third company, FriendsList, also failed, but its two cofounders shifted gears and transformed into another company, Timehop, a popular app that has since raised $1.1 million.

“I think the quality of the people we funded stands out to me,” Mr. Tisch added. “[And] as I look back at the companies from our first two classes at TechStars NYC, I am confident we have funded some amazing teams who are building big businesses.” -Jess Schiewe

(Source: Warby Parker)

PERFECT TEN. Last Wednesday Time Inc. brought together editors from many of their news properties to bestow upon us the "10 NYC Startups to Watch." Only in the startup picking game since lat year's Internet Week, Time Inc. has already picked winners like GroupMe, which was purchased by Skype for a supposed $85 milion.

The startups that made the cut for 2012 are Adaptly, a social advertising platform; Art.sy, the Pandora of art; Codeacademy, an interactive self-paced tool to learn to code; Enterproid, a mobile platform to segregate work from personal information on a single mobile device; Fab—you already know what Fab does; Fancy Hands, a provider of virtual personal assistants; Loosecubes, a matchmaker for workers and workspaces SideTour; a community marketplace for booking and hosting adventures, Stamped; a five-star-only mobile rating app and Truth Art Beauty; an online platform where users can custom-create skincare blends.

FOUNDER POWER. This Friday Women 2.0 is hosting their New York Founder Friday at 16 East 34th Street. Featured founders Cheryl Yeoh of CityPockets and Eloise Bune of GraciousEloise will begin speaking at 7 p.m. but the event will kick off at 6 p.m. with an introduction by Matt Wolfrom of Makovsky and Company, the event's sponsor. Founder Friday is free, and open to people of all genders, unlike the LOL-inducing "Jews against the Internet" rally, which is $10 and closed to women. Unfortunately, Founder Friday is already at capacity. Add your name to the wait list and cross your fingers.

RALLY IN THE ALLEY. The Association for a Better New York Foundation and Mayor Bloomberg honored the city's technology leaders in Union Square last Thursday including Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley, Greycroft's Alan Patricof, ideeli CEO Paul Hurley and NYTM cofounder Dawn Barber. The Lew Rudin Founder's Award went to New York City deputy mayor for economic development Robert Steel.

MEDIUM MAYHEM. Shelby.tv sat squarely at the intersection of social media and video and last week they began making strides to kick to competition down the block. At The Next Web 2012, cofounder Reece Pacheco unveiled Shelby GT, currently operating in private beta. "Rolls," a tool for organization, curation and the sharing of videos by way of tweets, Facebook posts and other social platforms, make up the centerpiece of this latest social video iteration. Request a private beta invitation to the virtual viewing party here.

DESIGNBOX. Last week LayerVault, an online, unlimited storage space for design files, underwent a redesign adding color extraction and an ability to measure mockups. The "Github for designers" has also introduced "Wormhole," a way to search art files visually by highlighting different design components. That recent shell-out for CS5 might feel a little worse now.

CLOTHES BUY YOU. New York fashion ecommerce company Ruby Ribbon got a $3 million go ahead from Trinity Ventures to launch, sell and market a fashion line "exclusively through social commerce." The company plans to connect to customers on a highly personal level through a national network of stylists who will introduce customers to Ruby Ribbon products at private social functions and in their homes. Ruby Ribbon has been operating stealthily, without so much as a landing page, until today.

PURCHASEST. Ever come across something on Pinterest that you wanted to buy? Well now you can! Sort of. The Fancy wants to treat your eyeballs like a lady while and your wallet like... well pretty much how everyone else treats your wallet. "Everything you see on the site is for sale, or can be for sale, in a function that operates like Groupon in reverse," a press release said. "If someone posts something that develops a huge following -- merchants can come online to sell that item and meet the demand." Fancy just hit half a million users and has big name backers like Square's Jack Dorsey and Facebook's Chris Hughes.

WARBY DARKER. Online prescription eyewear retailer Warby Parker just launched a new line of snazzy prescription sunglasses. At $120 they're a little pricier than their non-polarized counterparts.

COMMUTE. Spotify is on the hunt for a senior product manager with at least five years of experience to drive user revenue. App management platform Appboy wants to add a developer to its small team to provide the server backend for mobile client SDKs and the developer dashboard.

Earlier in the day the story broke over Twitter:

Consigliere's Mike Duda sent out his support, "Need anything? In the city right now?"

Mr. Pacheco kept his sense of humor, "@MikeDuda not unless you have a deep discount with Apple :-/"