PEOPLE OF KLOUT. Obnoxious Twitter pyramid scheme Klout–the “social score-keeping” company that moved into Twitter’s building in order to spam its platform in real life–was blessed with the opportunity to pass out Spotify invites, which brought so much traffic that the site was up and down throughout the morning. But the start-up botched the partnership further by failing to test the usability of the process it forced Spotify wannabes to go through in order to get the coveted Spotify invite code. Instead of continuing to Spotify’s chipper Hello America page, users were dropped into Klout’s wormhole of “perks” and demands that you give the company more of your data; other users found their invite codes failed to work. Poor Klout had to spend the day doing damage control–“Apologies for the inconvenience!” “We’re aware of this issue!” “Investigating now!”–on its Twitter feed.
NATION OF BITCOIN. It’s been two weeks since Bitcoin Show host Bruce Wagner was startstruck by a phone call. “Wait till you guys HEAR who just now called me!” he wrote to the Bitcoin People Google Group. “We are all in shock and can barely breathe right now! I’ve called Ed to tell him. I’ll be able to tell you all soon.” Guesses ranged from Mark Zuckerberg to Lady Gaga, but Mr. Wagner shot them all down. “Bigger,” he said. Who could it be? Some users in the group are convinced it’s Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, but we’re under the impression it’s someone else who has a talk show.
DUMBO MIGHT BE TURNING INTO MARIO WORLD. There’s a crepe place on Front St. next to techie hangout reBar that has a sign saying “cash or Bitcoin,” according to Etsy-er Cemre Güngör, although he’s “not sure if serious.” Betabeat could go for a crepe, but crepe, we’re in #$^% Midtown. Someone! Go try!
CRUNCH IT? “I just heard Mike Arrington is launching the ‘Crunch Fund‘… an angel fund,” Arrington rival Jason Calacanis tweeted this afternoon, and TheNextWeb says there’s reason to believe he’s not kidding.
FROM THE DEPT. OF ‘CAN I CHECK IN HERE?’ The entire Foursquare team took the day off today, boarding two loads of Denny’s Magic Schoolbus en route to Rockaway Beach for a last-minute field trip. “Er, anyone know how to rent a bus?” general manager Evan Cohen tweeted on Wednesday. Rumor is they’re headed for his grandmother’s house. We hope they made sure the servers were running like butter before ditching–it’s about to be Friday night and we’re trying to get our ostentatious oversharing on.
WHAT TWITTER TAUGHT US. Laptop-loser and threewords.me founder Mark Bao, now CTO of OnSwipe, lost his macaroni and cheese virginity today. Silicon Valley Banker Shai Goldman is going to see Rihanna. Before settling on Pivotal Labs in Union Square, TechStars almost shacked up on the edges of the Meatpacking District at Bloomberg Ventures. General Assembly’s first all-day conference, despite featuring the same people who talk at start-up events in New York all the time, is almost sold out omg, according to Fashism founder Ashley Granata–but when we followed the link after “last tickets here,” Eventbrite said we could still purchase at least 30 tickets ($10,638.30). Okay!
