NYC Startup Recruiting Is a Competitive Sport:  Profiles of some of the city’s top tech recruiters reveal just how competitive they are, how competitive the market is for startup talent, and how lavish some of the employment offers can be. In one example, an e-commerce startup tried to hire a CTO away from its rival. The candidate was offered $350,000, 1.5 percent equity and a $500,000 loan to help him exercise stock options at his current company. Recruiters say startup salaries for engineers have risen 20 to 30 percent in the past 18 month to around $140,000 for a developer with three years experience. BetaBeat

Venmo Starts Up in the City: Philadelphia/NYC-based mobile payments startup Venmo will start up in New York just after announcing new iPhone app features including a passcode lock, which locks the Venmo app with a four-digit PIN. The apps also lets you scan a credit card by snapping a picture of it and check in on Foursquare when you split a restaurant bill. The New York Observer

$10 Million for Local Multilanguage Startup: Smartling, a local startup that enables Web sites to go multilingual, has pulled in $10 million to improve its localization tools. Previous investors have all chipped in for a new round. The company, which has Foursquare, Scribd, IMVU and SurveyMonkey as customers, offers a way for sites and apps to add additional language support. Customers can rely on machine language translation tools or use Smartling to hire translators to localize their content. Smartling currently delivers half a billion page views of translated content a month. GigaOM

Need Startup Cash? Here’s $250 Million: Venture capital firm RRE Ventures is setting up a new tech-focused fund, targeting a goal of $250 million. The company makes early-stage investments but tends to stay involved throughout a company’s lifecycle Current portfolio companies include ADstruc, Betaworks, and Business Insider. Dow Jones

Online Radio Beating Real Radio in Local Ratings: Here’s a sign of changing times: Pandora Internet radio says that its streaming music service is winning high ratings, particularly among the 18-to-34 demographic. In fact, in New York, it earned a 0.7 average quarterly hour rating among that demographic, beating out stations Z100 and Hot 97, according to Radio and Internet Newsletter. Among 18 to 49 year olds, Pandora had a 0.5 rating. Crain’s

Apple Will Build a Store in Grand Central: It’s been rumored for months, but now it’s official. Apple will open a large Apple Store on the eastern balcony of Grand Central Terminal, replacing Metrazur restaurant and very likely bringing even more foot traffic into the already vibrant station. The 23,000-square-foot store will also wrap around to a northeastern balcony. Concerns about crowds on product launch days has forced Apple and Grand Central to come up with a crowd control plan. Shoppers will line up in the northeast passage, which extends for five blocks and will then be escorted in groups to elevators to the balcony. Gothamist