According to founder Rajat Suri, the average usage is at 150,000 users (annually), and its adoption is increasing by 50% month-over-month. And the El la Carte team has grown, too, from 5 to 35 people over the past year.

“People sometimes think that restaurants are slow to move, but it turns out that once a few start to move, everyone else sees them and there’s a huge herd mentality,” says Suri. “If you’re a restaurant, how do differentiate yourself from the guy next door?, he asks. “People are looking at this and thinking ‘this is how I could improve the guest experience.’”

But it’s not just the guest experience that’s being improved, Suri says. The company also reports its restaurants are seeing a 10% higher check average, which, with restaurant’s tight margins, is a huge boost. Plus, table turn time is reduced by 7 minutes, as it takes 55 seconds to pay with the company’s “Presto” tablet compared with 8 minutes through the traditional process.

I'm a proud investor! And was sold when I learned Raj had spent time working as a waiter to really understand both sides of his product. It warmed my heart, which Pizza Hut warmed for a couple years through high school as I cooked & waited.

“I want priority inbox for my Twitter stream,” said Shah, calling the process of trying to set up the perfect arrangement of columns in Tweetdeck a “poor man’s prioritization algorithm.”

The idea is to filter updates and mentions by their importance, including things like the credibility of the source (judged by SEO rank).

And, like Tweetdeck, SocialInbox isn’t just about Twitter. In fact, Shah’s goal is to create the single best 3rd party LinkedIn app in existence.

Shah showed the audience how SocialInbox could recommend 2nd degree connections on LinkedIn, and suggested that the system could eventually learn which of your contacts you actually know well enough to ask for an intro and then improve recommendations even further.

Score. I'm waiting with bated breath to replace that broken app....

But it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia entries' recent vintage. Others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale. The faded newspaper pages looked artificially aged. The Wikipedia articles had been posted and edited by a small group of new users. Finding documents in an old steamer trunk sounded too convenient. And why had Lisa been savvy enough to ask Reddit, but not enough to Google the names and find the Wikipedia entries on her own? The hoax took months to plan but just minutes to fail.

Splendid! Upvotes for skepticism.

No wonder the Silicon Valley crowd loves it—these are people who grew up navigating constant multiple streams of information. "So many things are happening in life that make me end up with more data," says early Evernote devotee Jason Freedman, who co-founded FlightCaster, a Web-based travel-information service, and recently launched an online real estate start-up, 42Floors. "Evernote is the technology version of what the Container Store does for my bedroom," he says. "It's a simple solution that brings sanity to the situation."

With soundbyte from a portfolio company CEO, Jason Freedman of 42 floors!

Creative work portfolio-building startup Behance has grabbed $6.5 million in its first round of funding.

Behance is a marketplace for creatives — artists, graphic designers, web designers, writers, and the like — to showcase their work for companies that are looking for talent. Anyone can create a portfolio to show off their work on the site. The company also helps creative professionals promote their work and manage the responses they get from potential employers, like a LinkedIn for artists.

After watching the Behance team build something people love without any funding, I'm thrilled to be part of the investor team helping this great NY startup turn the volume up to 11.

Kicksend’s main mission is to make it easier for people to send anything from anywhere to anyone. The newly redesigned Kicksend Web interface sets out to provide a more intuitive (and aesthetically pleasing) way to send, receive and organize personal digital files.

Privacy in photo- & video-sharing? Yes, please!

Can't deny it. Oatmeal knows his demographic.

If you’re close-reading a text, no matter what the text is, you’re automatically doing a more intellectual exercise than if writing generalizations about the King James Bible,” Moghadam says via Skype from his home in Malibu. “Rap Genius is just a way to introduce people to close reading. And once you get on it, you get hooked.

Close-reading is for everyone! Music is art, which is open to interpretation. Lyrics mean different things to different people -- including the artists who originally wrote them, who are now getting the chance to discuss them with fans for the first time.

The AT&T Park campaign is the latest stunt by the Exec team to test out different scenarios and use cases, and to get users more familiar with the app. According to founder Justin Kan, the biggest hurdle isn’t getting downloads and installs of the new app — it’s getting those who have downloaded to use Exec for the first time. So educating users on practical applications of the app, and showing them how easy it is to use, will be tantamount to the future success of the service.

See what I did there? Great promotional idea, Justin & team. #proudinvestor

Tagstand, the YC-backed company focused on making NFC a more mainstream technology, is getting some action at a pretty big black-tie event in New York this weekend which will see its technology used to enable some nifty actions for the 3,500 guests, like tapping to tweet, posting pictures to Facebook and registering “likes” for the cocktails they’re drinking. Sounds like (kind of geeky) fun!

Here comes the seersucker! Grats to the team at Tagstand for pulling this off and thank you to Bonobos for the swag. I'll never have been this preppy before in my life -- and I went to UVA.

An urban legend says eating large amounts of carrots will allow one to see in the dark. The legend developed from stories of British gunners in World War II, who were able to shoot down German planes in the darkness of night. The legend arose during the Battle of Britain when the RAF circulated a story about their pilots' carrot consumption as an attempt to cover up the discovery and effective use of radar technologies in engaging enemy planes, as well as the use of red light (which does not destroy night vision) in aircraft instruments.^[4][5] It reinforced existing German folklore and helped to encourage Britons—looking to improve their night vision during the blackouts—to grow and eat the vegetable.

That is awesome. Excellent use of propaganda, Brits.

The study, “New Tech City,” conducted by the Center for an Urban Future, concluded that the technology industry is growing faster in New York City than anywhere else in America and that the city now trails only Silicon Valley as a hub for the development of new technology companies. The study’s authors, Jonathan Bowles and David Giles, identified 486 technology companies that had been founded in the city since 2007 and determined that the financial crisis and the recession that followed did not slow the industry’s growth.

These streets will make you feel brand new //
Big lights will inspire you //
Let's hear it for New York

Yes. I went there.

I'm with sans_serif on reddit, "Let's hope it will be reposted in a year as 'Overall Pretty Typical Love.'"

And it's not even my birthday
But you wanna put your name on it
And it's not even my birthday
And he's tryna put his name on it

Spoiler: It's not a song about birthday cake, or even cake.

Should be an interesting next year for mobile video. It's definitely not as frictionless as pictures (video takes time to shoot, isn't as quick & easy to grok, and people are currently just less comfortable taking video compared to photos).

The Beauty of ROFLCon
My favorite thing about the gathering of the memes – I’ve attended each year in some incarnation since its inception in 2008 – is that it feels almost like a support group, being surrounded by people with the same kind of intrinsic knowledge and hobbies. It’s a rare and magical validation of the hours sunk into laughing, recoiling in horror and sharing things online. It is especially true because most of us experience the Internet physically alone, even though we are virtually connected to millions of people.

Like the rest of the Web, Internet culture has its growing pains, and ROFLCon is the one time each year we can gather and dissect and discuss the communities, forums, images, GIFs and videos that circumscribe the way we share information, ideas and humor online.

It’s a rare and safe space to explore these themes – although it might be a dying breed itself. The organizers, Tim Hwang and Christina Xu, said this was their last year putting on the event.

“See you guys the next time the Internet gets together,” said Mr. Hwang, as a final farewell.

I was honored to be on the final panel with my fellow Internet advocates, but it's on all of us to make sure the memes (and Internet) are safe forever-ever.