Someday! (Photo: CornellNYC Tech)

Fast money, fast people. Venmo Payouts is now saving businesses time and paper (as in checks, not cash) with an API designed for  sending money directly to service providers. Any phone number or email address can be used to pay babysitters, dog walkers or masseuses via a single API call. Venmo acts as the middle man, collecting your top-secret bank information and using it for the transaction.

Buzz-Feed us business. BuzzFeed has a new business editor for its coming-soon business section. Peter Lauria, former editor-in-charge of U.S. technology, media, and telecom coverage for Reuters, will lead Buzzfeed’s expansion into Wall Street later this spring. Look out for “13 Most Daring Corporate Investments Announced Using These Great Photos of Cats.”

Kids Say the Darnedest Things. StoryBots has three new apps launching, including KidQuoter for iPhone. Since your friends already love the adorable Instas depicting your kid holding a cookie, or a baseball, or a tissue full of snot, why not also share every brilliant thing your kid says? Let the world in on Timmy’s latest potty training insights using a custom background and custom costume.

Campfires for adults. No, ITP Camp is not an opportunity to toast marshmallows and sing Kumbaya around the fire. This camp is for adults: For a small fee, non-students and working professionals are invited to participate in a month-long summer program designed to facilitate the sharing of skills, criticisms and passions between members. Who needs formal grad school? Anyone who joins can propose and lead sessions like “Startup Fundraising Basics,” or “3D Printing.” Maybe proposing a “Nature Hike” isn’t completely off the table?

Hacker Roundup. Retouch your headshots and update your resumes because the FinTech Hackathon is swiftly approaching. Beginning on April 6, developers and designers working individually or in teams will have 24 hours to code and demo hacks to a pro panel. While we do love fun-but-pointless hacks (like one that lets you replay your favorite YouTube video over and over with absolutely no effort), this hackathon will focus its energy on financial technology platforms.

Congratulations are in order. IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program has named True Office a 2013 Laureate. The award honors organizations that have utilized technology “to promote and advance public welfare, benefit society or change the world’s business for the better.” True Office, with compliance games made to help companies save money by identifying risk, has probably advanced the public welfare of somebody, somewhere.

Chronicles of Campus Expansion. The City Planning Commission has approved Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island Campus Plan; now it’s the City Council’s turn to review the idea. If the City Council agrees to move the plan forward, Cornell Tech will break ground on Roosevelt Island in 2014.

Tee-rific news. Adam Schwartz of Busted Tees and Josh Abramson of CollegeHumor are joining forces to launch TeePublic, a Kickstarter-like platform specifically for t-shirts and newbie (or even professional) designers. Find out how you too can become an Internet-famous t-shirt designer with this nifty video:

Last August, Silicon Alley darling Venmo, a mobile app that lets you split bills and pay friends, was acquired by Braintree, a PayPal competitor, for $26.2 million. At the time, Braintree emphasized the shift towards mobile commerce. And it looks like having a consumer-facing brand like Venmo is helping in that department.

Today, they announced the launch of Venmo Touch, which should help lower the barrier to buying things on mobile by avoiding the hassle of having to enter your credit card information with every new app . . . as long as it's part of the Braintree family.

Enter your credit card info on the TaskRabbit app (a Braintree client), for example, and an option pops up to "save card with Venmo." If you opt in to the service and then open the HotelTonight app (another Braintree client), it will ask if you want to use the same card on file. All you need to enter is the CVV code.

Of course, the mobile payments market is plagued by fragmentation. For example, how is the average consumer supposed to know that Best Buy and Walmart are on the same network, whereas Duane Reade is with Google Wallet and Starbucks is with Square?

Braintree has an advantage there because it happens to be a popular payment platform with the kind of apps you might actually make purchases on. Venmo Touch is debuting in private beta on HotelTonight, TaskRabbit, Wrapp, and more and Braintree expects that other clients like Uber, Fab, and Livingsocial will take advantage of it, as they have one-click check out.

Now that Venmo Touch has launched maybe cofounder Andrew Kortina can finally get some sleep?

(Photo: AngelList)

AngelList, the Facebook for startups, just did NYC job seekers in the tech sector a major solid. Today the company released a graphical breakdown of the average salaries of tech companies, drawn from data collected through its jobs portal, which helps match startups with prospective talent. The information is quite revealing, and much more detailed than what you'd find on a site like GlassDoor.

First thing's first: the average salary of a startup employee in Silicon Valley is $101,000, whereas those in New York average only (lol) $90,000. We probably shouldn't complain, though: there are a host of cities with lower average salaries than us, like Denver and Houston (though those cities have a much lower cost of living).

According to PandoDaily, the average salary for a dev across all the job postings is naturally higher than for other positions, at $93,000; for marketers it's slightly less at $92,000 and designers are earning $88,000 on average.

As for the NYC companies with the highest average salary: Stylecaster boasts an average salary of $176,000, so if you have any friends who work there, they better not even think about asking you to split the brunch bill. Rewind.me, Bonobos and Bookish dole out an average salary of $126k, while Venmo's average is $123k. Most jobs fall into the $80-90k range, with an average salary of $87,000: Fitocracy, Seatgeek and Skillshare all fall into this category.

It's worth noting that these averages are only based on job listings posted to AngelList, so if a company is only advertising developer positions on the platform, its average salary will probably appear higher than it actually is. Still, the tool is helpful both for the job seeking and the cripplingly nosy: you can also break down average salaries by role, like developer, or skills, like specific programming languages you know.

Now go, Betabeat readers. Tell your boss you deserve to be paid more! But once you get that raise, we hope you'll remember the little people.

Jon Carin rocks (Photo: wikipedia.org)

Brain Boost This morning, Braintree, a Chicago-based online payments company announced, a $35 million series B round of funding. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). By investing in Braintree, new investors join Accel Partners and others and the company’s total funding is now set at $70 million.

Braintree acquired the beloved bill splitting app, Venmo, back in August and has kept it independent so far. Braintree allows businesses to accept payments from costumers, but Venmo allows consumers to make payments to anyone. It's a natural fit for both parties.

Braintree's client list includes fast-growing startups like Uber, Fab.com, Airbnb, who use it, "through periods of rapid growth without disruption to their ability to accept payments," the company said in an email to Betabeat. They also name-checked competitors like Stripe and PayPal, noting that one "big difference is that merchants receive their funds typically in two days with Braintree, vs. seven days with Stripe."

Be A Fellow The New York City Economic Development Corporation is now accepting nominations for its third class of “NYC Venture Fellows.” Previous fellows of the program include Foursquare, Etsy, and Warby Parker. Winners will be set up with mentors like Ben Lerer and the President of MTV, Stephen Friedman, to guide them through the next stage of their business and to connect them to powerful insiders. Submissions are being accepted now and the deadline is November 30, 2012.

Trippy Ted Talk TEDxSiliconAlley 2012, will be held on December 3rd, at Terminal 5. "How to Create a Mind" author Ray Kurzweil will be headlining the event and thhere will be keynotes by Makerbot founder Bre Pettis and philosopher Francessca Ferrando. Pink Floyd keyboardist Jon Carin will perform some of his music live, which is sure to make this the first TED Talk that makes people want to spark up a joint.

Side Piece SideTour, the company that sends you on fun group adventures, has now expanded its efforts to Chicago. CEO and co-founder Vipin Goyal told VentureBeat that the company is now booking three SideTours a day and plans to launch their service in Washington D.C. by the end of the year. Private chef dinners and small group art tours are ready for the masses!

Buy Everything Now Landlord is a new game that uses Foursquare to let you "buy" any location that your adventurous checking-in heart desires. Owners of property get rent paid to them based off of the number of checkins to the venue, so that they can buy more property and expand their empire. We're going to rush out to Staten Island and buy out the entire island, so then we can come back to Manhattan and rule the world.

We Love Those Lady Pilgrims Hacksgiving, the Thanksgiving themed Hackathon, will take place on November 9-10^th. Technology and design firm, The Control Group, is putting the event with Hack'n Jill and it will be the first hackathon with NY Tech Meetup that has at least 50 percent females in attendance. You can register on Hack'n Jill's website. Startups in search of tech talent should try to cop a ticket, these ladies can code.

A Personal Assistant With Your Pepsi? Pepsi is partnering with TaskRabbit to bring an extra hour of the day to drinkers of their new soda, Pepsi Next. Over the next four weeks, the two companies are giving 200 people a dedicated TaskRabbit for one hour to tackle errands of their choosing. This can include waiting in line for something, cooking dinner, or a bunch of other really helpful things. TaskRabbits show up with a can of soda for you too which is a bonus if you're thirsty. All it takes to enter is a simple registration.

Like For Old Ladies, But Better If you're into planning your shopping trips from home snagging deals while you shop, Shopkick already had you covered. But if you're into browsing Sunday circulars, then the app's newest update will make you happy too. The app just got a complete redesign that now features themed lookbooks that resemble glossy coupon circulars. They should just partner with TLC and make "Extreme Shopkicking" already.

Watch Those Tweets Fly HootSuite just launched a new product for their Enterprise clients. It's called the HootSuite Command Center and it functions like a virtual situation room for all of your company's social media efforts. So ChartBeat for the Twitter and Facebook set? Every social media manager in New York just swooned.

Look Here Cheap Bros Buystand, a startup which uses a name-your-price model for active lifestyle goods, launches in beta today. Customers browse merchandise from from brands like Burton, Vans, and Puma, and then name what they want to pay. Buystand sets up the customer with a retailer willing to pay that price. Instead of using wholesale markdowns, the company gets to have sales on customers terms. Mark October 17th in your calendars as the days that outdoor bros started saving money.

Jordan Cooper, left, and Ben Lerer (Photo: via The Pitch)

Roughly a year-and-a-half after closing its second $25 million seed stage fund, Lerer Ventures is in the processing of raising money for a third. An SEC filing, first noted by TechCrunch, says the size of the round is $30 million.

Although the Form D indicates that the early-stage venture capital firm has yet to sell, expect the round to close quickly.

Last May, it only took Lerer Ventures "a matter of weeks" to raise that $25 million from individuals and family offices. And that was before the highly-regarded New York City firm--launched by Huffington Post cofounder (and Betaworks and Buzzfeed chairman) Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, cofounder of Thrillist--boasted a handful of exits. 

Indeed, Lerer Ventures, whose team also includes partners Jordan Cooper and Eric Hippeau as well as advisors Jonah Peretti and  Christopher Poole, aka Moot, has been humming along since last August when portfolio company GroupMe*, a group messaging service, was acquired by Skype for $41 million.

In February, Groupon purchased Mr. Cooper's startup Hyperpublic-- an open database of location-based info on people, places, and things--which was funded by Lerer Ventures. This March, AOL purchased the photo sharing app Hipster. In July, Airbnb acqui-hired DailyBooth, the startup that lets you share webcam photos. And last month, Venmo, the mobile payments startup, was acquired by Braintree for $26.2 million.

Thrive Capital*, helmed by Josh Kushner, also recently a new $150 million fund after a number of exits, including GroupMe.

SEC regulations prohibit discussing private placements while fundraising is still in progress, but we will update you when we know more. In the meantime, please enjoy the odd couple stylings of Mr. Lerer and Mr. Cooper, courtesy of Betabeat's 2011 web series, The Pitch.

The Pitch, Episode 1 from Spinks on Vimeo.

*Disclosure

Mr. Kortina (Photo: Twitter)

A source familiar the deal told Betabeat yesterday that Venmo, a New York City-based mobile app that lets you split bills with friends, is in the process of being acquired by Braintree, a Chicago-based online payments company and PayPal competitor. The New York Times broke the news this afternoon, reporting a $26.2 million acquisition price. On the company blog, Venmo said the deal closed in mid-June and that its payment-sharing service "will remain unaffected" and continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Venmo and Braintree share an investor, Palo Alto powerhouse Accel Partners, which also invested in Facebook.

The two startups do seem to be in the midst of a mutual appreciation society. Last week, Braintree's community manager Kristi Lynch tweeted, "I know it sounds weird, but the @Venmo app makes me wish I owed more people money." Two Venmo employees favorited the tweet.

Venmo was founded in Philadelphia in 2009 by two former college roommates, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismai. The duo eventually moved the company to New York City, where Venmo become one of the early stars in the city's growing tech orbit, embraced by early adopters for making it easier to split the cost of dinner, drinks, monthly cable bills--or any of the innumerable costs of urban life--over their phones. There were even cutesy, customizable receipts, eagerly tweeted out by the Alley in-crowd.

However, Venmo took awhile to introduce itself to the public and didn't emerge from private beta until this March, when it made the service available on iOS, Android and online. By that time, other players like PayPal and Square were aggressively angling for dominance in mobile payments, although not in the bill-splitting niche. Venmo raised a comparatively modest $1.2 million over the last three years, but from a number of notable investors. According to Crunchbase, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and RRE Ventures all participated in its 2010 seed round, along with Facebook mafiosos Dave Morin and Dustin Moskovitz. Last year, Venmo raised a Series A from existing investors Lerer and RRE, along with Greycroft Partners and Accel Partners.

The Times reports that Venmo's 23-person team will not relocate from New York City to Chicago, but will continue to operate out of the East Coast.

Braintree, which was founded in 2007, got a huge influx of cash last June when Accel Partners, which backs a number of mobile payments startups, plowed $34 million into the company. The Chicago startup powers online payments for businesses, providing a merchant account, payment gateway and credit card storage, all in compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. Accel partner Ryan Sweeney, who joined the startup's board, described the payments company as providing a core foundation for Braintree clients, a list that includes high-profile, fast-growth businesses like Airbnb, LivingSocial, OpenTable, Shopify, GitHub, 37Signals and more.

In a TechCrunch post about Accel's investment, Mr. Sweeney predicted that the online payments industry would "consolidate dramatically" as payments became bundled into other services. In the past few months, however, the industry seems to be marked by increased fragmentation, with everyone from Verizon to Walmart to AT&T rushing to offer their own app, grasping for a chance to lead the payments evolution.

Braintree signaled its interest in mobile--Venmo's playground from the start--back in February, when it released tools for mobile app developers that would let merchants accept payments within a smartphone or tablet app. TechCrunch reported that the new tools help developers "avoid PCI compliance issues by encrypting sensitive credit card data when it is entered by the user on their mobile device." When merchants pass encrypted data from their server to Braintree for processing, Braintree uses a private key to decrypt the information, thus keeping credit card data out of merchants' hands.

A number of mobile payments companies, including Venmo, which uses a 256-bit encryption, have run into compliance issues with an obscure, broadly written law called the the California Money Transmission Act. As BusinessInsider reported, even PayPal had trouble with the law before it was acquired by eBay. As of last month, Venmo, Square and Amazon all had applications pending with California's Department of Financial Institutions. (It's worth noting that Robert Oswald, a Braintree ecommerce consultant, is one of the 16 people who follow the question, "How concerned are Venmo investors that it is not registered as a money transmitter in every US state?" on Quora.)

As Venmo co-founder Andrew Kortina told Betabeat in March, unlike other payments startups that try to get vendors to sign up in order to increase distribution, Venmo has taken a different approach, relying on friends to encourage friends (the few you'd normally split a bill with) to sign up. PayPal is great for strangers, he argued, but Venmo is optimized for people you know and trust. Initially the startup, which was merely SMS-based--leveraging a user's phone contacts--covered credit card fees for its users as it slogged through the arduous process of interfacing directly with banks.

When it emerged from private beta, however, Venmo required new customers to make payments from their bank accounts (or their Venmo balance) if they wanted to use the service for free, otherwise users had pay Venmo a 3 percent fee for using a credit card after the first $500. In March, Venmo told us it was processing $10 million in transactions a month and growing 30 percent month-over-month. Mr. Kortina predicted Venmo would do $250 million in transaction volume this year. Not long after  the app was released to the public, Venmo stopped losing money on credit card transactions. As we wrote back then, "By Silicon Alley standards, that’s killing it."

This is a breaking story, we will update the post when we know more. 

Previously:

What’s a Little App Between Friends? Venmo Only Cares About You and the People You Split Lunch With

Hello Venmo! Peer-to-Peer Payments Startup Picks Up Steam

Cutesy Venmo Receipts Are Now a Thing

• Is Your Dating Site Selling Your Profile?
To keep membership high, niche sites get sly.

• Marissa Mayer on Misconceptions That Hold Back Women in Tech and Why She Doesn’t ‘Believe in Burnout’
"My theory is that burnout is about resentment."

• Branch Cofounder Josh Miller Returning to NYC Because ‘San Francisco is Just Too Nice’
Hard to be heads down in a sweet town.

• OMGPOP Founder Charles Forman Made ‘Way More’ Than $22 M. in Sale to Zynga
If not for Draw Something, OMGPOP might have run out of money by May.
• Language Learning Startup Voxy Raises a $4 M. Round from ff Venture Capital, Contour, and Seavest
A filing says the startup has already closed $2.3 million towards its $4 million goal from previous investors.
• What’s a Little App Between Friends? Venmo Only Cares About You and the People You Split Lunch With
Venmo is processing $10 million in transactions per month and growing 30 percent month-over-month.
• Inaugural Blueprint Health Startups Pitch Investors on Disrupting Health Industry
Nine companies from the health-tech incubator presented to investors in Soho today. 
• Oh, So Here’s Why Kickstarter Lets Projects Get Overfunded
It brings in so many freakin' new users.
• The Startup Rundown: Size That Matters and a New Mobile Music Concierge

• The Only OMGPOP Developer to Say No to Mark Pincus: ‘Zynga Asked For Too Much’
He did it all for the values.
• Meet OkFocus, the PR Stuntmen Behind WhoDat.Biz
OKFocus is also behind Is the L Train Fucked? and Dump.fm.
• 83-Year-Old Grandma Breaks Nose on Glass Door of Long Island Apple Store, Sues for $1 M.
"They have to realize that the elderly generation are their customers, too.”
• If New York City Doesn’t Put Down Its Pom-Poms, We’re Gonna Become a Startup Stereotype
Nasdaq and the city release a video.
• ‘Vaporware Is the New Minimal Viable Product,’ Declares Hype Up Weekend
San Francisco vaporware vaporathon elegantly illustrates exactly how hackathons have jumped the shark.
• Former Facebook Social Design Evangelist Says Facebook Model Is ‘Self-Serving, Egocentric’
The Internet is the Wild Wild West, after all.
• Caught in the Webb: JOBS Act Jitters 

You can also get this review via RSS or as a weekly email by subscribing here.

Mr. Kortina. (Twitter)

Betabeat visited our local pay-with-your-phone startup Venmo yesterday in the company's overcrowded, underdecorated Chelsea office. It's two floors above a spa and reminds us of a high school computer lab with the accompanying young people, T-shirts and computers, although the Macbooks were a bit nicer than the monstrous HP desktops we remember from class. We followed cofounder Andrew Kortina down two flights of stairs to a space Venmo has annexed on the second floor, scooted past an intern in Venmo's bright blue shirt, and kicked a few employees out of a small conference room, where Mr. Kortina propped open the window with an umbrella. A DIY piece of art made out of nails and what appeared to be a piece of the ceiling spelled out "magic room."

Venmo will probably outgrow its little office soon, although Mr. Kortina likes its proximity to both Penn Station and Whole Foods. Venmo is processing $10 million in transactions per month and growing 30 percent month-over-month. At that rate, give or take a few variables--Mr. Kortina is a data nerd--the company will do $250 million in transaction volume this year.

Perhaps that's why Mr. Kortina seemed so laid back as Betabeat peppered him with questions about his competitors. But what about Dwolla? What about PayPal? What about Google Wallet? Mr. Kortina is tan and lean, eats kale salads and rides a bike, speaks evenly and takes unhurried pauses. He wishes Whole Foods would take Venmo, but in general, he is not worried about the competition.

People keep talking about how changing the way people pay for things is a "big opportunity," he said. Journalists, he said, are approaching him more and more "just to talk about the whole payments thing" because the space is so hot. Venmo doesn't want to mess with all that. "The reason we did it was because we thought cash and checkers were annoying so we want to solve a problem that we had," he said.

The real reason Mr. Kortina isn't worried about competition is because if you've ever used Venmo, you realize there is no real competition for Venmo. Here's why:

Unlike the payments startups that are targeting vendors right away, Venmo only wants you to convince a friend or two to join the service. Mr. Kortina has crunched the numbers, and 90 percent of payments of each Venmo user's payments are made to the same five to ten close friends. While PayPal is optimized for strangers on eBay, Venmo is optimized for people you already trust and even like. We'll just excerpt from an old pre-Betabeat piece, "Cutesy Venmo Receipts Are Now a Thing," a reference to those automated Venmo tweets we keep seeing about paying people for "friendship fee" and whatnot.

Friends and money, they don’t always mix. But they have to: Exchanging money with friends is impossible to avoid. Drinks, taxis, dinners and cable bills are just some of the things for which we become financially indebted to each other, sometimes for substantial amounts (thanks, expensive City).

...

Venmo fans around the city have repeatedly told The Observer how much they love and depend on the app, and it seems to be the social element that’s made Venmo sticky. You can’t say “fuck you, pay me” to a friend. With Venmo, you send a personal note with each charge and payment, which you can share on Twitter or Facebook. That note might say “fuck you, pay me,” but it’s okay, because now it’s on the internet and it’s social media and those things are fun.

“We actually will not let you make a payment without including a personal note,” Mr. Kortina said. “We hope that all of the complexity, emotion, and feeling involved in a social gesture start making monetary transactions more personal, more fun, and simply a better experience that feels more like getting a gift or a high five than exchanging money.”

Exchanging money with friends almost always indicates a share-able moment. You're splitting lunch (one of Venmo's top use cases), or you're out to eat with a group, or you're at a bachelor party and buying the groom drinks. With Venmo, users are sending each other money in amounts that signify dates: $11.04 for your November birthday or $19.79 for an anniversary. "There are other ways to send money for a utility bill, but they're just not as fun," Mr. Kortina said. Surprisingly, people seem to find Venmo attractive because it lets them capture the moment of settling up, rather than because it allows for more precise bill breakdowns. "The motivations for why people do this are weird," he said.

It's the sticky, social, "fun" element that keeps Venmo in a class of its own. Eventually, Venmo will target restaurants and other vendors. But for now, the company is happy just to have you going dutch on dinner or splitting the beer funds with your roommates.

And good news: Mr. Kortina was able to report that with the recent launch to the public and the switch to processing payments with bank accounts, Venmo is no longer losing money on credit card transactions. By Silicon Alley standards, that's killing it. We say it's time to murder out the computer lab.

Mr. Kortina. (Twitter)

Venmo, the peer-to-peer payments app startup that moved from Philadelphia to New York over the summer, just made two big back-to-back announcements.

The first is the resolution of a long-running challenge for Venmo. In the past, it was too complicated and time-consuming to get Venmo to interface properly with the banks, so the company gritted its teeth and offered to cover credit card fees for its users. Relying on credit cards was the only way the startup could offer fast and simple money transfers while the team worked slowly and painfully to introduce proper bank transfers, which was "just not an easy thing to do technically," cofounder Andrew Kortina told Betabeat. The strategy was serviceable, but unsustainable.

Now new customers must now make payments from their bank accounts in order to use Venmo for free. Existing customers have until May 1 to switch. Customers can still use a credit card to make payments but Venmo will charge a 3 percent fee.

The second big announcement came yesterday: Venmo, which has been invite-only for more than a year, is opening up to the public. "We want to make it really fun and easy for people to pay with their friends," Mr. Kortina said, although in the future the company may start serving merchants.

The Venmo team is up to 23 "young, passionate people," as Mr. Kortina said, in an office in Chelsea and is processing $10 million in transactions a month. (Investor Ben Lerer predicted the startup will handle $250 million next year.) "It's not really stuff that would be captured somewhere else," he said. "Like if someone's friend had a bachelor party and they couldn't go, they could Venmo $20 to get drinks on them because they couldn't be there. People are using this to share the experience they have when they go out with friends."

In the long run, Mr. Kortina said, Venmo's competitors are Visa and American Express. "We see ourselves as a way to pay for something... we think that by making our product social and fun we're going to build something that people will choose to use over Visa and Amex."

Venmo lets users tweet their payments; see Betabeat's (now broken) "Cutesy Venmo Receipts Are Now a Thing."

Just paid @BaconIsMyCoffee for magazines from Chinatown. wink wink wink wink wink wink wink venmo.com/s/7qjB

— crispylettuce (@crispylettuce) March 19, 2012

Foursquare's second hackathon.

Foursquare hosted its second hackathon over the weekend at General Assembly, a surprisingly gender-balanced affair at General Assembly fueled by Pepsi products and beer from Sixpoint Craft Ales. Developers in Paris demonstrated more than 20 new foursquare apps; hackers in Japan demo'ed eight or nine. The New York hackathon produced about 25 apps, hacks and mashups.

Let's just say there are a lot of new ways to play foursquare. Hackathon savant and newly-anointed Twilio evangelist Jon Gottfried and his team created Loo Review, a game for photographing and rating the city's public toilets. Betabeat also liked CRawsome, a hack from Yipit's Vinny Vacanti and Steve Pulec that texts venue managers when regulars and "social influencers" check in.

Perhaps 200 attendees were strewn across the floor, couches, and extra tables that had been set up in the main room, but only 50 were checked into General Assembly when Betabeat arrived in the afternoon for demos--probably because hackers had been checking in all day (about eight had stayed overnight to work on their projects). Just ten percent were present at the first foursquare hackathon in February, according to a show of hands.

As we checked in, foursquare asked if we were there for the hackathon. Checking into the event was necessary in order to view the list of presentations and vote. Voting for the global champion will take place over the rest of this week.

The grand prize is the foursquare title belt and dinner with foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and investor Bryce Roberts.

"Where are you going to take the winner for dinner?" someone in the audience asked.

"I've been thinking about that," said Mr. Selvadurai, a notorious East Village foodie. "I've been writing in my diary. If you have a place you want to go, I'll take you there. But make sure you get dressed up real nice."

The winners of the popular vote in New York? Veteran fourquare hacker Jonathan Wegener and Jason Pope took third place for FacePlace, an app that changes your foursquare profile picture based on the type of venue you've checked in to. Second place went to DigiDJ, a mobile jukebox created by Christine Horvat and Brian Yang, assisted by Venmo employees. DigiDJ, which also won for best use of the Spotify API, lets patrons pay $.99 to add a song to the playlist and $5 to have it play next.

First place went to Yipit employee Tal Safran and former foursquare employee Max Stoller for their Census data hack, "How ____ are you?" Authenticate the app with foursquare and it'll tell you how black, white, Asian, male, female, married, divorced or single you are based on the zip codes you check into.

Hackers also built two scavenger hunts, a Dealburner-esque app that shows when Yipit has tagged a deal at the venue you've checked into, and an app that shows you the most recent New York Times articles that mention the venue you've checked into.

Other hacks of note:

-Bimbimbob: a platform for motivation, the app lets you set a goal-say, get in shape--and have friends pledge money via Venmo. But the pledge doesn't charge until you've checked into the gym 15 times, for example.

-Homefield Advantage: looks at check-ins at baseball stadiums and tallies up where fans are from.

-PickSq: allows users to vote on a venue. For example, where to go for the hackathon afterparty.

-Hoppin or not: Christina Cacioppo of Union Square Ventures presented her first hack, which displays happy or sad bunnies depending on how many people are checked into the venues that surface after a keyword search

-Fourguide: Created by Will Vanderhoef, Josh Ross, Jackie Li, Shaun Bava. "Create a Foursquare list of places along your Runkeeper activity routes; then use your Android device to automatically check in to places on your lists."

There can be only one winner.