Non Hustlers Need Not Apply Lerer Ventures is looking to hire a new analyst. The job requires one or two years of experience at a venture backed startup or major tech company. You have to also be “a sweet and cool person,” so no mean losers need apply. According to the listing, they’re looking for “A hustler and/or hacker who works smart.” We’re sending this to Cassidy right away.
Playing Hooky Not Cool On Friday, AT&T and NYC Digital will kickoff a hackathon designed to help Mayor Bloomberg’s Truancy Task Force. Designers and coders will be given the challenge to create a mobile app to keep kids in school. The first prize is pretty sweet and includes $2,500 in Gift Cards for the team to split, a $5,000 donation from AT&T to the team’s choice of non-profit organizations, and one year of the “Small” service from Github for each team member. No word on whether college dropouts are allowed to compete.
Buy Us Pretty Things BaubleBar, the online marketplace for designer jewelry, is launching its first full-time retail storefront, The Bar. It will be located off their offices at 230 Fifth Ave and will be privately tested from October 10th-16th and then will have its official public launch on Wednesday, October 17th. With their store’s opening, they join the ranks of online shopping destinations going IRL–Piperlime’s new Soho store, Warby Parker (WRBY)’s showroom, and MakerBot’s Mulberry store, to name a few.
Growing Branch Ian Ownbey, a backend engineer at Twitter, has just been poached by Branch. He joined Twitter in 2009 when the company was only had 80 employees. He’s the company’s first hire since getting out of private beta mode just over a month ago. Branch founder Josh Miller said on the company’s blog that he’s excited to work with Mr. Ownbey because they both share the not-so-unique distinction of both being college dropouts.
Watching Baseball Is Boring If the MLB postseason just isn’t exciting enough for you, then PrePlay, a NYC based predictive game startup, has the app for you. They just updated their MLB PrePlay app which allows fans to predict plays for every postseason game. You can call what you think will happen on every pitch or spend time before the game picking out how individual innings will go or how specific players will perform. So basically, it’s like Nicotine for degenerate gamblers.
The Funny (Web)Pages Crowded Comics, which was selected for the SXSW Accelerator earlier this year, is a news site that tells the day’s big stories through comics. The site has five cartoonists that take turns creating an image of the day and users try to top each other to create the funniest caption. It’s like a more democratic version of The New Yorker‘s back page–and a whole lot less stuffy.
Cool Tablet Site, Bro Onswipe, the TechStars grad that lets publishers create custom tablet sites, just launched support for Google’s Nexus 7 and has plans to expand to more Android devices in the near future. CEO Jason Baptiste told The Next Web, “We believe in supporting modern hardware coupled with modern browsers that support the best of the web. Nexus 7 is great hardware combined with the great browser of Chrome that lets us bring the web to the bleeding edge.”
Better Than A Greeting Card If a casual “happy birthday” wall post just won’t cut it this year, you should try making a handmade HTML 5 birthday card on Scrollkit, the service designed to make website creation easy for people who have no coding experience.Since its start, the site has been used to make pages for friends and lovers and now they’re doubling down on that fact. They’ve added tools to make sending finished products easier, as well as beta Firefox + Safari support. Ukelele hero and Kickstarter employee, Nicole He stars in a video that shows off what Scrollkit can do. The video got us pretty emotional, but we’re a sucker for a ukelele love story.
Hungry, Hungry, Hackers This weekend, TechStars alumn Ordr.in, a site that helps restaurant take online orders and manage their web presence, hosted a food hackathon at Pivotal Labs to celebrate its rebuilt developer portal and the expansion of its service to New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. The winner of the competition was a project called iFridge, a service that keeps track what’s of your fridge and has kitschy alerts like texting you when someone takes your beer or playing celebratory music when a bottle of champagne is popped open.
Vaminos! Planning your high class European vacation is so exhausting, but thanks to Vive Unique, aka “the upmarket Airbnb,” things just got a bit easier. The company has just expanded its listings of handpicked boutique apartments and homes to include locations in Barcelona. Cofounder Claire Whisker promises that more cities will be added soon.
Do-Gooder Glasses Everyone’s favorite glasses company, Warby Parker, just announced that they’re doing something really nice. They’ve partnered with Pencils of Promise, a non-profit devoted to building schools in the developing world, to create two pairs of sunglasses that will generate some cash for the charity. $30 from each purchase of the $95 glasses will go toward supporting Pencils of Promise operations.
Charlie Bit My Hires Rightster, a service that helps content providers maximize revenue from online video, announced three new hires this week after their announcement they will be responsible for bringing the Charlie Bit My Finger show to life. Jonathan Bates, former Head of Multiplatform Video at ITV, is joining Rightster as the Director of Content and Partnerships. Another former ITV guy, Ben Freeman, will be Rightster’s new Head of Rightster Studios. Most notably, they have scooped up Donagh O’Malley, the former director of content at Google TV.