Sorry for the late rumor round-up, New York techland! Maybe if you all knew how to use the tips@betabeat.com email, we might be able to get these things up more quickly in the future! Without further ado, some nuggets from Twitter, Bnter, Gmail and the field.
Totally not sour grapes. Members of the DUMBO Tech Breakfast Meetup think Facebook is dead. Okay!
Geek sweat. It’s the first warm day in recent memory, and we hear General Assembly is a sweat lodge–but they had the fans on! Wonder what it’ll be like in the summer?!
Blind item! Which New York start-up was so desperate to hire a hacker who presented at the HackNY marathon that they offered to double the offer he had received from a major (LIKE REALLY MAJOR!) media production company? Not sure, but we’re thinking he said no. 🙁 He had declined to work on the New York start-up’s A.P.I. because the service was “too slow.” Ouch!
That’s… hot? Did hipster writer Bret Easton Ellis really once offer to publish Ronen Verbit’s novel in exchange for sex? “FUN FACT,” Mr. Verbit claims on Bnter. “During an interview. Which was being recorded.” So, was that disillusioning, or like, perfect?
Overcrowding. Applications for TechCrunch Disrupt were sent in last week, and the hackathon is looking at having to host 500+ hackers. More challenging than the venue: Judge attention spans. Investors and other judges aren’t going to want to sit through three hours of demos, the organizers fear, and some sort of run-off may be necessary.
Giggle city. The dead horse-beating Winklevi don’t know which one is older! That and more fun facts in 10 Things the Media Either Gets Wrong or Doesn’t Know About the Winklevoss Twins, by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, here on Betabeat. They’re also going to continue beating that horse with a Petition for Rehearing. Go for it!
Pretty apps make waves. Homegrown playlist-maker 8tracks posted a pitch to AngelList recently and now one of the co-founders is out on the West Coast, being all tight-lipped about why. The start-up continues to kill it, as the iPhone app was featured today by TechCrunch’s number one Apple sycophant and proprietor of the Paris Lemon expressway to pageviews, M.G. Siegler.
