Mr. Williams. (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

Power Literary Hire: Twitter cofounder Ev Williams's new publishing tool, Medium, just added an impressive member to its team. Kate Lee, a former literary agent from International Creative Management (ICM), has joined Mr. Williams's startup as the director of content. Ms. Lee was responsible for plucking several bloggers out of obscurity and giving them book deals. The Observer announced her leave from ICM back in April. In a blog post on the site, Mr. Williams described her job as "encouraging, soliciting, commissioning, and contextualizing interesting ideas, authors, and institutions" and noted that she would be building a small team in New York to help her do that.

Branch Finally Lets You Hang Out With Your Friends: Branch, the social conversations site, just launched a groups feature yesterday. In an email to Betabeat, Branch cofounder Josh Miller described it as "Branch's equivalent of a Follow button." The idea was inspired by the conversations that people have at dinner parties, in which smaller groups form to discuss topics that they care about. On Branch, these groups can be added into a conversation. Branch's example site includes a group featuring Mr. Miller, Medium's Ev Williams, John Borthwick from Betaworks, Michael Sippey from Twitter and Facebook's Sam Lessin. These groups have a possibility to create Bloods and Crips-like warfare in tech. Choose sides wisely.

Christmas Swag on a Million: BaubleBar, the discounted jewelry online megastore, is going all out for the holidays. In addition to its Soho pop-up shop The Bar, the company is partnering with nail polish giant Essie and teaming up with Elle magazine for a guided shopping experience. On Cyber Monday, BaubleBar will be giving customers a free product for every $40 they spend in what it calls its Cyber Monday Gifting Suite. And the "20 Days of Buried Baubles," in which 20 style influencers will offer a daily BaubleBar deal to their fans,will begin on the 30th. You're going to need a new jewelry rack.

Like the Song From Legally Blonde: Peek, the Eric Schmidt- and Jack Dorsey-backed travel site, is launching a new feature called Perfect Days. It allows users to share their ideal 24-hour game plan for a city. Users looking for places to recommend can pull from their Foursquare and Google Places accounts. The site already has some celebrities that have made their own Perfect Days, including designer Tory Burch and prolific tweeter Piers Morgan.

Designers Should Apply to This:  The investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) has announced that it's starting a design fellowship program to help young designers get acclimated to working with startups. The three-month program will pair up designers with some of KPCB's funded startups like Coursera, Flipboard, Klout, Square and Path. Applications are being accepted now and will be taken until January 31.

Makeup Ladies Go to the Net: Chloe + Isabel, the e-commerce jewelry brand, just announced the launch of its new online platform. Instead of just a regular store, the company is now employing an Avon model for direct sales, through which its users can now sell products to their friends and profit. These users can pull photos from their Instagram accounts to better display their products. Prepare to be spammed by your friend's hip mom.

Let's Pretend We're Rich: Zaarly, the online marketplace for goods and services, has just launched a virtual pop-up shop for Thanksgiving. If you burn the turkey, just hire a local chef to cook the meal for you. Or perhaps you're not a very good cleaner: just pay someone to do it for you. Hire a fleet of professional help to impress your out-of-town guests and say, "Oh them? They're here year-round!"

Don't Forget to Rate, Comment and Subscribe: Rightster, a service that helps content providers maximize revenue from online video, just announced that it has broken into the top 10 of the U.S. comScore YouTube rankings. It now owns around 300 YouTube channels. John Dillon, a former software ad exec at Alcatel Lucent, just joined Rightster as its new vice president of marketing.

A Really Pretty Junk Drawer: If your inbox is maxed out with daily deals and coupons from your favorite stores, then Sift is the new iPad app for you. It sorts your junk emails into a scrollable shopping experience. The YouTube demo is an EDM shopping party. Go nuts.

Companies Love Paying for Mobile: Usablenet, the company that makes mobile sites for big businesses, has just been named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, a power list that rates the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America. Started in 2000, Usablenet claims that its revenues have grown 861 percent in the past four years.

One of Bonobos' displaced Ninjas. (Photo: Tumblr)

Many startups are able to work remotely with just a laptop and a working Internet connection--though good luck finding one right now. But for ecommerce companies focused on pushing products out into the real world, "just ship it" is taking on a whole new meaning. Between extensive power outages and three days without a functional subway, the disruption is likely to last through the week.

"Eccommerce companies are lucky since we don't have physical stores--we can handle a break pretty easily," said Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan. "We are a little bit like an airplane," he added: "you can turn off the engine for a little bit and there is no problem--if you turn off the engine for a while it is a disaster, but a few days is not a big problem."

That doesn't mean recovering from Sandy has been painless, though.

Many of the companies we talked to didn't have power, and they were preparing their customers for delivery delays.

JackThreads CEO Jason Ross reported that the company's Soho HQ is closed, as they've got no power. Many employees don't either, but they're doing their best to work. Problems also stemmed from JackThreads’ facilities across the East River: "Our warehouse and photo studio in Brooklyn have been shut down the last two days which has delayed our sales calendar as we can't receive merchandise, photograph merchandise or ship anything," he told Betabeat via email.

Mr. Ross expects the warehouse and studio will be back up and running sometime today, offering any employees who can get there a place to work. He's hoping the Soho office will be back online by Monday.

Bonobos' offices at West 25th and 6th Avenue are also closed, as they don't have power. "While Bonobos' 'free & fast' shipping generally arrives in two-days, delivery delays are expected," spokesperson  Kaitlyn Axelrod told Betabeat via email. Packages are getting out of their Massachusetts warehouse, they might take a few extra days to reach customers.

Meanwhile, Bonobos' customer service staffers in New York City are working where they can, and the Palo Alto team has stepped up to support them. "Ninjas are available via phone, email and social media to help customers track packages and answer questions," said Ms. Axelrod. The company's stylish employees have even created their own Tumblr, chronicling work-from-home post-Sandy.

Birchbox, Rent the Runway, and AHALife are all dealing with delivery delays, as well. "There have been a lot of elements out of our control," Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman told Betabeat.

Even for companies with working offices, it's all hands on deck. BaubleBar's Flatiron HQ didn't even lose power or Internet--"not sure how we narrowly escaped that," cofounder Daniella Yacobovsky told Betabeat via email. Yesterday, almost all of BaubleBar's staffers made it into the office, trekking from four of the five boroughs.

"People who lived near one another carpooled in (most with 2 hour + commutes), lots of folks brought food for the team and everyone has collectively put down their work and come into operations to help QC and fulfill orders," said Ms. Yacobovsky.

For the most part, companies seemed grateful the damage wasn't worse. “We’ve gotten in touch with every member of the team and they’re all safe," JackThreads' Mr. Ross said, sounding upbeat. "Everyone has found a safe place where they are able to work diligently and stay positive and productive.”

While Gilt Groupe doesn't have power in its main offices, the company's Brooklyn outpost (typically used for photo shoots) should be up and running again today. Because their customer support and distribution centers are located outside New York City, Mr. Ryan expects delivery delays of no more than a few days, and since they shoot product photos almost a week in advance, they haven't missed anything yet. "But one or two more days and it would have had an impact," said Ryan.

As it is, the hurricane has "hardly impacted business." They maybe lost 10 percent of sales for Monday and Tuesday, but overall they came out about even: "The bottom line is that some people had no electricity or phones so they obviously did not shop, some had mobile only and were bored so they shopped a little and some had both and were locked in their apartment and bored and they shopped a lot," said Mr. Ryan.

"In general, we got off very lucky," he said.

UPDATED: Gilt Groupe also tells us that, to help the affected areas get back on their feet, Gilt City NYC  will be donating 30 percent of profits from now through Sunday to the Red Cross's hurricane relief efforts. AHALife will also donate 15 percent of sales from October 31 to November 4 to the disaster response organization Team Rubicon.

Additional reporting by Nitasha Tiku.

(Photo: twitter.com)

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’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.

(Photo: The Yard)

No Sleep 'Til Back in July, Betabeat revealed that Williamsburg-dwelling coworking space The Yard would be launching a General Assembly-like roster of classes--and at "Brooklyn prices," no less. Well, the curriculum site is now live, with a full list of offerings. Examples include iOS app development for beginnings and Intro to Makerbot. A course on Kickstarter makes the joke about would-be creators of mason jar cocktail shakers almost too easy.

Your Digital Newsstand Now live: DuJour, an ultra-luxe magazine targeted to the rich and fabulous. Glossy photo shoots are all well and good, but DuJour hopes to distinguish itself by thoroughly integrating print and digital--meaning readers can finally click through to featured items that strike their fancy. Giving the pub a long leg up: A partnership with Gilt Group, which'll allow the magazine to launch with a subscriber base of three million.

Learning with Friends Ed tech platform Lore is now open to students, taking yet another stride toward being a social network, rather than simply a platform for classes. Rather than awaiting an invite from an instructor, anyone can now create a profile and start poking around. “We created Lore to make education better by connecting people.” said CEO Joseph Cohen in a statement, adding, “This is the next step. And we’re excited to see the new relationships and communities students form on Lore.”

Don't Miss the Bus Earlier this month we introduced you to Readyforce's Hacker Tour 2012 and its mission to recruit talent for startups, rather than Google or Goldman. Since then, the campaign has racked up even more sponsors, doubling the amount of support from VC-backed companies. Organizers are also offering two "pro-bono" spots for non-profit tech companies, plus three for early-stage companies. The tour kicks off September 12 at Cornell.

Summon the Stylistas Mark your calendars, people of fashion tech: On October 11, StyleCaster and the 92nd Street Y are holding their second State of Style event, on the heels of a sold-out February event. The idea is to "unlock the potential of new media in the style space." Speakers include designer Rebecca Minkoff and Buzzfeed president Jon Steinberg.

New Hires Jewelry startup BaubleBar has secured itself a VP of digital marketing, poaching from the tastefully appointed halls of the established fashion world. Previously, Shilpa Shenoy headed up digital marketing at Barneys New York, where she oversaw a site redesign and the launch of barneyswarehouse.com. Prior to that, she did stints at Helmut Lang and Theory.

Acquisitions Private equity firm Catterton Partners has acquired thirteen-year-old online promotions company ePrize. Terms weren't disclosed, but the company did rake in $53 million in revenue in 2011 and it has almost 500 employees. Because ePrize is profitable, CEO Matt Wise told Betabeat, the acquisition wasn't about operating capital, but rather having deeper pockets for strategic acquisitions.

3-D Printing We hear that Makerbot, New York's one-company manufacturing revival, recently signed a lease on its very own storefront. The Wall Street Journal reports the company will set up shop at 298 Mulberry, between Houston and Bleecker. Go ahead and update your Christmas shopping to-do list; we'll wait.

The eyes have it.

Master merchandiser Rachel Shechtman is treating the launch of her new store not unlike the launch of a startup. To that end, the stealth shop, which was hidden behind an installation by the artist JR, launches today at 144 Tenth Avenue at 19th Street, "in beta" with the e-commerce component to follow in February.

"I kind of geek out around new business models and I think the future of the physical retail environment are gonna become less about consumption and more about content and community, so that’s what we’re doing." said Ms. Shechtman, who founded her own retail consulting group Cube Ventures in 2003, and has offered an amalgam of marketing, merchandizing, and business development to clients like Gilt Groupe, Tom's Shoes, Bliss Spa, and AOL.

"The concept," she explained, "Is a space that has a point of view like a magazine, but it changes like a gallery and it sells things like a store."

"In the same way you go to MoMA and there’s an exhibition by Andy Warhol made possible by Proctor & Gamble, the idea is in February, you might walk into the store and it's our 'Love Issue' and it’s a made possible by Match.com," said Ms. Shechtman. "You would not only be able to buy wonderful, cool curated merchandise, but maybe we’ll have a whiskey tasting with Doctor Ruth or we’ll show Love Story on a movie screen."

For her first "shopping exhibition" in the 2,000 sq. ft. space, Ms. Shechtman, who sits on the board of startups like Birchbox, Fashism, and Smartypants, went with a world she knew well. "A Startup Store," as the six week exhibition ending January 12th is called, will feature beauty items from Birchbox, jewelry from BaubleBar, gadgets and gifts from Quirky, accessories from Joor, and art from Artspace. "It was very deliberate choosing a startup store as our version of beta so I can get practice and comfortable in the space before our launch in February," she said. "I consider us as much of a startup as Bonobos when Andy [Dunn] launched it. We’re just launching with our physical space and our e-commerce is coming second."

Rendering of the space.

In the case of the "A Startup Store" the Doctor Ruth equivalent would be classes from SkillShare, Ms. Shechtman said she was working with co-founder Mike Karnjanaprakorn on hosting classes that match the startup theme.

As for the name of the actual store, Mr. Shechtman declined to share that at the moment. "I am not talking about that just yet," she demurred. "We’re just waiting on some final legal stuff from the Patent and Trademark office." See? Talking like a startup already!