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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 

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Mr. Gollash (via twitter/paulgollash)

Voxy, the New York City-based language learning startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, is in the process of raising a Series A-2 round of equity financing. In a Form D filed with the SEC today, the startup indicated that it had already closed $2.3 million towards its $4 million goal from previous investors including ff Venture Capital, Contour Venture Partners, and Seavest Capital Partners, which all participated in Voxy's Series A.

Founder and CEO Paul Gollash told Betabeat that Voxy plans on announcing two more "exciting" institutional investors in the coming weeks. The round was actually oversubscribed, "But we'll limit the demand and allocate what's available as best we can," said Mr. Gollash, noting that he didn't want to raise more capital than was necessary. Admirable restraint in these frothy times.

Voxy teaches English to Spanish and Portuguese speakers using what Mr. Gollash calls mobile immersive learning. Through partnerships with the Associated Press and Bloomberg, for example, its smartphone app highlights important phrases, offering audio pronunciation and translation and then tests users with reading comprehension and vocabulary quizzes. The app also allows for image recognition, "turning your photos into flash cards," and a geo-located phrase book targeted to whether you're in a coffee shop or hair salon.

"Voxy is attacking a huge market for language learning, which is something that’s not very conducive to learning in a classroom," said Mr. Gollash. "Basically we have an experiential learning platform, where we can take content from your life--what you’d actually be interested in reading." Its iPhone app is ranked the top-rated education app in 20 different countries, he said.

Sixty percent of consumers in the $80 billion language learning market are interested in learning English, said Mr. Gollash by way of explaining why 85 percent of Voxy's users are outside the U.S. Twenty-five percent of Voxy's user base is in Brazil, where the "rapidly growing middle class have an insatiable appetite for language education." The fact that Voxy has been able to get that kind of adoption in Brazil with just one Brazilian employee in its Soho office is "a testament to how fluid the mobile app economy is," he said. But Voxy has domestic users as well, including 15 percent from the U.S. Hispanic population.

Longterm, the company plans on offering other languages as well. However, the new financing will go towards hiring more engineers and accelerating product development.

Straphangers need only to look up at the Living Language ad campaign currently plastered all over the walls of the C train to get some sense of the competitiveness of the market, which Mr. Gollash called highly fragmented. Rosetta Stone, perhaps the best-known player, only reported revenues of $268 million last year

Naturally, Mr. Gollash sees that as an opportunity for Voxy. "It’s our goal to become the first billion dollar language learning company," he said.

We'll update you on those exciting new institutional investors once Mr. Gollash is ready to spill the beans.

Mr. Swartz. (Photo: Facebook)

AARON SWARTZ ARRESTED. "Shocking news: Moments ago former Demand Progress Executive Director Aaron Swartz was indicted by the US government," Demand Progress's David Segal said in an email blast yesterday. "As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading so many journal articles constitutes felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison." Mr. Swartz helped create RSS and whose company was once bought by Reddit. He faces up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines and pleaded not guilty. Eeepo. Why he wanted 4.8 million journal articles is beyond us. There is a petition for signing and you can donate here.

GROUPME ON THAT PHONE 7. Last week GroupMe released a preview--"meaning only a few features are available with more to come"--of its Windows Phone 7 app. "You may not hear a lot about the whole WP7 platform compared to others BUT fascinatingly it has become the second most common request to have from GroupMe users," a PR rep writes. We were just talking to someone about how WP7 is kind of indie-cool now.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF DAILY DEAL INNOVATIONS. Everyone and their mom has a start-up and Juice in the City, the "Groupon for moms," just launched the $3 million Groupmom Fund. WTF is that, you say. Crowdsourced merchant deal-making, that's what. Instead of employing a salesforce, JITC is recruiting "a workforce of moms distributed across the country" that will "visit and sample the products and services of local merchants and then sets up deals with the businesses based on a positive experience."

TOUT SNUGGLES UP TO LINKEDIN. Folks have been saying LinkedIn should buy this little New York start-up launched by Tawheed Kader. That hasn't happened yet, but Tout just announced LinkedIn integration that "not only will allow you to access your LinkedIn connections from within Tout, but will also let you send personalized/templated messages to your LinkedIn connections right from Tout."

MEDIA MEAT MARKET! VC and start-up scene personality Charlie O'Donnell is hosting a "Media Meet Startups" event "where we just put 50-100 companies in a room and threw about 50 reporters in the mix." Companies participating include... Fab.com! Birchbox! GroupMe! FanBridge! Sonar.me! SinglePlatform! Fancy Hands! Gamechanger.io! At the Frying Pan on 26th St. for happy hour on Wednesday next week.

INSIDE BASEBALL. Also, Charlie O'Donnell, Josh Kushner, and Fred Wilson invested in a batch of tickets to Citifield to see the Mets play the San Diego Padres on August 9 and invited everyone! Tickets went fast and are now sold out. No doubt there will be plenty of pitching, har har.

Also, DEVS WANTED. Voxy and Whuffie continue to scout for hacker talent; The New York Observer is also seeking a full-time developer among other positions. SNAKES ON A BAR. Python in a Pub is tonight, in Brooklyn. IPAD? IPAD. The New Yorker starts offering the tablet edition to its subscribers as Conde Nast experiences technical difficulties.