(Wikipedia.)

The National Rifle Association unpublished its Facebook page in the aftermath of the tragic shootings in Newtown, Conn. [TechCrunch]

Did Instragram CEO Kevin Systrom perjure himself when he testified under oath that his company hadn't received any other acquisition offers at the time it sold to Facebook for $1 billion? Had there not been a verbal agreement on a deal with Twitter weeks earlier? [NYT]

Apps like Timehop, Rewind.me, excavate social media history, further diminish the need to remember anything. [NYT]

Or you can just download your old tweets directly from the source. [The Next Web]

Everybody's favorite futurist is going to work on "machine learning and language processing" at Google. [Ray Kurzweil]

Soundcloud CEO Mr. Ljung (Photo: Twitter.com)

SoundCloud Busts Out Of Beta At this point, SoundCloud is basically the audio version of YouTube. A private-beta version of the site launched earlier this year called Next and the newest version integrates a bunch of those social features that the company hopes will help its users discover new music. “From today, ‘Next’ is now simply SoundCloud,” said Alexander Ljung, founder and CEO of SoundCloud in a press release sent to Betabeat. “It’s a platform for people to discover new, original music and audio, for creators to build audiences, and for everyone to share what they hear whether online or on mobile.”

The company claims that users now post over 10 hours of music and audio every minute while reaching over 180 million people. That’s a staggering 8% of the entire internet population, every month. On December 6th, mobile users will be able to enjoy reposts, updated mobile search, and UX updates on both iOS and Android SoundCloud apps.

Birds Do It, Bees Do It Online dating site HowAboutWe is now partnering with AARP to launch a new dating site for 50+ adults. Although millenials might find it the concept hard to swallow, it has potential to be one of the biggest sites out of HowAboutWe’s 32 partnered sites. The 50+ demographic is a huge growing dating demographic because of a huge increase in the divorce rate for people over 50. Hey, everybody needs some love!

Remember, Remember, The Facebook Of Last December Timehop, the app that reminds you of all the social media memories you made in your not-so-distant past, has a bunch of updates dropping in its latest update. You can now share pictures from your camera roll in your Timehop feed. First Foursquare checkins are now integrated into your memories too. Just when everyone forgot you were once mayor of Tom and Jerry’s…

You Must Be This Rich To Ride Free Valet, the travel membership site that offers you rewards and guides for $199 a year, told Betabeat over email that it's now in more than 52 cities and more than 100 hotels. They've offering free rides to the airport until February 1st for members staying at any of their New York hotels. The deal is also being offered to New York members who are on their way to stay at a Valet site somewhere else.

We Like To (Watch Them) Move It Move It Yesterday, Unpakt, the site that lets you compare movers, kicked off its "Innovators on the Move" series. It features tech entrepreneurs reflecting on recent moves in their lives. The first video in the series features the wedding planning tool, Lover.ly, founder Kellee Khalil. Lover.ly is moving into a brand new New York office and the video chronicles the move.

Innovators on the Move: Kellee from Unpakt on Vimeo.

Etsy Goes Full Mobile Etsy has officially released an Android version of its mobile app, after last week's launch of the company's iPad app. In a press release sent to Betabeat, Etsy said that nearly a quarter of its mobile web visitors come from Android devices all over the world. To celebrate the occasion, you should buy yourself this Android mascot cookie jar.

Big Money To Nice People Google is trying hard to tip the scales more toward good than evil. The company has just launched the Global Impact Awards, which honors nonprofits using technology to tackle problems. The inaugural recipients include a $5 million gift to charity: water, a $5 million prize to Donors Choose, and $2.4 million to Givedirectly, a much younger company than the others.

Lose That Basic Black Jackthreads and designer Adam Gianotti have just released the new collection of their line, Viveshirt. The team has also just put their fall collection from their line Goodale on sale. There's a lot of French terry in both collections and some perfect pieces for that "fancy hoodie" look.

Tweeters Be Shopping Some of those absymal Black Friday stats may be misleading. While IBM reported that 0.34 percent of all online sales over Thanksgiving weekend came from social sites, Jirafe, an ecommerce analytics platform found much higher numbers. Using their unique analytics, the company found that 1.27 percent of sales come from social sites like Facebook and Twitter. A key difference between their analytics is that Jirafe looks at the social media profiles of shoppers. Say for instance a customer buys a product after clicking through from a tweet featuring a new deal. Jirafe can track this data while IBM only looks at ads.

Consumer Cash Flow Consmr, a mobile app that provides ratings and reviews for products, announced earlier this week that it has secured $565,000 in seed funding. The round was led by Lerer Ventures with participation from IA Ventures and MESA+. In a press release sent to Betabeat, CEO Ryan Charles said, “Consmr is well positioned to mobilize the wisdom of the crowds and extend it to everyday product decisions.”

Cute, sure, but also a squatter? (Photo: Twitter)

Abe Stanway is a simple man. He doesn't ask for much, just one good taco in this godforsaken metropolis. But there's another thing the Etsy developer really wants--something that the vindictive, nostalgia-hungry startup Timehop has denied him for almost a year. It's the @Abe Twitter handle, which is currently occupied by Timehop's dinosaur mascot.

Mr. Stanway first noted that the handle was taken when Timehop announced its funding back in January. "My heart skipped several beats as I realized my personal brand was being hijacked by a dinosaur," he lamented to Betabeat over email, his frustration palpable. "I watched my career prospects dwindle by the hour, alongside my professional relationships which shortly crumbled and burst into flames."

Mr. Stanway said he initially brought his concerns to Timehop, where his plea for the handle was callously rejected. "For my silence, I extended an offer to Timehop for 20 percent of their company," he wrote. "I was turned down. That is why I'm going to the press. This oppression shall not stand."

Jonathan Wegener, Timehop's CEO and a close personal friend of Abe the dinosaur, told us that the startup has no interest in placating the pitiable Etsy developer and acquiescing the handle. "NEVERRRR," Mr. Wegener replied, when asked if he would ever consider giving up @Abe.

Indeed, the tension between the two startup kids threatened to burst open this reporter's inbox. "I once stayed at Jon Wegener's house for Airbnb. I almost brought it up, but didn't for fear of sleeping on the streets that night," Mr. Stanway said.

We asked Mr. Wegener what Mr. Stanway would have to do in order to nab the precious three letter Twitter handle. What if he 3D printed you a real dinosaur to display in the Timehop office? we asked. Or developed arm extensions that would give dino Abe the dexterity his little T-rex heart so desires?

"We're having too much fun playing the @timehop and the @abe accounts off each other," he admitted. "That said, a life-sized robotic dinosaur version of abe might go a long way in swaying our feelings."

For now, Mr. Stanway will have to be contented with his current handle, @abestanway, as a certain backpack-toting cartoon T-rex viciously watches the Etsy developer's personal brand go extinct, like so many of his friends.

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.

Timehop has always passed the explain-your-startup-in-a-sentence test with aplomb. It's a daily email that shows you what you were doing a year ago today through Foursquare checkins, Facebook posts, and tweets. But simplicity isn't its only charm. The service, which started out as a Foursquare hack by TechStars alums Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong, switches out of social media's only gear (realtime--i.e. what's next, what's new, what's now) to look back fondly at the past.

Call us raging solopists, but it's one of the few newsletters (old news letters might be more apt) that gets opened on arrival. The self-aware copy--upbeat, not cheesy--certainly helps, especially when they accidentally email you multiple times on the worst day of the year. 

Recently, the startup tweeted out news of a big, impending update. It's currently in private beta and won't be released until next week or so, but Mr. Wegener gave Betabeat a little preview via gChat. "Basically the product is gonna become a lot more social as Timehop transitions from a lonely consumption experience of re-reading your past and moving towards a social place to discuss the past."

"Well, lonely isn't the right word haha," he added, correcting himself, "A 'one player' consumption experience."

That means a friend graph, tagging, and a (year old) newsfeed. "It makes it really easy to poke a friend and say 'Remember THIS?' and connect around those shared memories."

The new product moves Timehop away from email and more towards a web experience, Mr. Wegener explained. In the new version, users have friends. But it's not going full-on social network, the user profiles will be "pretty lightweight," eschewing a Facebook-style questionnaire about your interests.

Facebook may have made a big push towards organizing the past with Timeline, Mr. Wegener noted, but Timehop keeps the focus on what you were doing a year ago. You can browse a friend's Timeline on Facebook, but the experience of liking, say, old photos is sort of "awkward," he admitted. (As someone who has come close to commenting, "I continue to like this photo I liked in 2010," we concur.) On Facebook, "It's not really clear that the past is there for you to interact with, whereas that's our entire focus. So everyone on the service is reliving the same moment in time."

Less like solitary stalking, more like shared nostalgia.

Since the service is synched to different social media accounts, Mr. Wegener said Timehop has been particularly mindful of privacy settings. "For example if you uploaded a Facebook photo and only shared it with three friends, we won't show that to your entire graph."

So does moving to the web make it easier to monetize? "We're entirely focused on product development right now," Mr. Wegener, shrugging off the revenue question. "First we need to concentrate on making the right product so Timehop gets millions and millions of users! Once THAT little task is done, we'll think about how we can make money."

The startup has a bit of runway. In January, Timehop raised $1.1 million from seasoned Silicon Alley founders, including Foursquare's Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai and GroupMe cofounders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, as well as angel investor Rick Webb.

The way Mr. Wegener sees it, the opportunities in this market have just begun. "There's still a LOT of unexplored stuff to do in this space," he said. "Digital memories/personal Internet history is really, really unpaved. It's only recently that the world is routinely taking tons of photos, capturing their locations, and typing their 140 character thoughts into a little box."

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

(techstars.com)

TechStars New York has had three classes for a total of 37 startups since it launched in the beginning of 2011. The guys at social media sentiment analysis startup Buellr have arranged a ranking of the top ten of graduates from all but the current class.

"What we're doing now is culling together sentiment analysis from a variety of data providers," cofounder Adrian Grant explained. "We then combine them in hopes of normalizing the dataset. Then we rank them by positive mentions, number of mentions, who is saying the comment and various other components that have their own respective weights assigned to them."

Unsurprisingly, the popular Foursquare app Timehop came in first, even though cofounders Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong were working on another idea entirely, FriendsList, during the first session of TechStars back in January of last year.

Speaking of working on another idea entirely, that's how Buellr came about. "We viewed this product, social media reviews, as a 'day off' kind of project, in the vein of the movie 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,'" Mr. Grant said in an email.

The rest of the rankings are:

10. Onswipe, which makes publishers' content look good on mobile browsers
9. Wantworthy, a bookmark list for fashion.
8. SideTour, the marketplace where amateur tour guides, chefs and art buffs can curate activities for travelers and idle locals.
7. Nestio, the apartment hunt organization system.
6. Shelby.TV, which creates a video playlist by pulling links out of your social media streams.
5. CrowdTwist, a consumer loyalty analytics tool.
4. Coursekit Lore, the socially-enhanced classroom management platform.
3. Contently, the marketplace for mercenary bloggers and content-hungry publishers to find each other.
2. Ordr.in, which turns any website, app or device into a menu and a way to order food.
1. Timehop, an email reminder of where you were a year ago today.

CORRECTION, April 25: An earlier version of this post said the rankings include all three classes of TechStars NY; that is incorrect. The original rankings also included TechStars graduate Red Rover--but used data for an unrelated company by the same name. "We are building Buellr lean and thus far have gotten some solid feedback. That being said, our internal processes clearly still need to be refined," Mr. Grant wrote in an email. Betabeat regrets the errors.

Wow — I'm feeling like I must be @timehop's Valentine today — they keep emailing me!twitpic.com/8jvt8p

— Andy Welfle (@awelfle) February 14, 2012

Timehop, the app that shows you where you were a year ago today, just blasted out as many as four copies of its daily email to users. Problem? It's Valentine's Day, arguably the best holiday for making yourself feel bad (except for maybe Earth Day). While some users were reminded of being showered with candy and kisses, others spent V-Day last year watching Watson on Jeopardy or being sober. "Timehop REALLY Wants You to Remember Your Last V-Day. (Hope It Was a Good One!)" How About We's dating life blogger Michelle L. Dozois wrote.
Apparently the repeats were due to a bug that tunneled its way into the code this morning. "We heard you love timehop so much, we decided to send you a few extra for Valentine's day!" Timehop customer service wrote back to users. "Just kidding...we got hit with a bug this morning, it should be fixed very soon-sorry about that."

"It's a giant press stunt! Jk, we're working on it.." Timehop co-founder Jonathan Wegener wrote in an email.

As far as we know, no one has abdicated the service due to unwelcome memories of unfaithful lovers or dates with Ben and Jerry. Users were mostly bemused by the unlucky coincidence, including one who informed Timehop: "I got this email 4x today, guys. I'd prefer to get it <3 times (eg: 1). #rimshot."

UPDATE: Timehop has fixed the bug. "Graciously, the V-day gods had mercy on us," the app wrote to users. "We're all set now and the issue is now fixed! Timehop is still a young service, and we're continuously changing and trying new things. We're not perfect — but hopefully we improve with each and every day. Thanks for sticking around for the ride! Happy Valentine's day. We love you guys."

Social media's dominion over the Internet tends to skew conversation toward the real-time. Facebook may have dropped the What are you doing right now? but the emphasis remains. Investors, however, are eager to back something that bucks that trend. Timehop, an app that culls your Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter history to answer the question What were you doing a year ago today?, just announced that it picked up $1.1 million in funding. The round was led by OATV and joined by Spark Capital. Also participating? TechStars, where co-founders Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong worked on a Craigslist competitor called Friendslist, which flopped.

Fittingly for the app, which was born as 4 Square & 7 Years Ago during a Foursquare Hackathon at General Assembly last February, the round featured some bold-faced names as angel investors, including Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai, and Alex Rainert from Foursquare, GroupMe co-founders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, as well as Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin.

The funding will be used to add two or three more more engineers to Timehop's "small team of hotshots," Mr. Wegener explained by email. Mr. Wong, "a true Ruby on Rails master" and Timehop's CTO, "came from Gilt Groupe where he single-handedly build the entire Gilt City product and then built the engineering team around it too," he said. Lead designer Rachel Nash is a veteran of both The Barbarian Group and Big Spaceship. As for Mr. Wegener himself? He was "formerly doing product management for a bunch of awesome startups and launching awesome subway apps."

Mr. Wegener's Foursquare connection—Timehop initially only pull check-ins from the app—started before that fateful hackathon. "I had a whole series of apps I called Moresquare that I presented at the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club once," he explained. Months before building the first iteration of Timehop, "I showed them to a friend who worked at Foursquare and he thought I should come present them to the team. So I did!"

It took awhile for Mr. Wegener and Mr. Wong to realize they needed to switch gears away from Friendslist and toward Timehop, "an easy to understand product that's simple yet powerful."

"Timehop wasn't intended to be giant and ambitious—it was almost an artistic expression at first, a tiny little one-day fun project. Benny and I doing what we're good at which is hacking together something quick that excites people!" Mr. Wegener wrote. The encouraging tweets and "love letters" to the product were constant. "But it was only months later that we started to realized we had accidentally solved a really important thing that hadn't been done before: we had made a compelling product that lets people reconnect and re-experience with their digital pasts. And there's a big opportunity in that."