(Photo: Automotive.com)

Google may want to lower the bar from "don't be evil" to "don't be thoughtless" after it dispatched Street View cars to a Staten Island neighborhood devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

The New York Post reports that it witnessed a Street View car, used to collect Street View images to overlay on top of Google Maps data, driving through the New Dorp Beach neighborhood in Staten Island. Many of the homes there were destroyed by Sandy in October, and residents are working to rebuild them.

Many neighborhood residents were angered by Google's decision to dispatch the car. "They are putting us wiped out on the map!" one told the Post. Another wondered if the images would affect the value of their properties.

A Google spokesperson explained to the Post that the updated imagery will help the world understand the extent of the damage, which is probably of little comfort to the actual homeowners affected by the storm.

"The Street View team is currently redriving affected areas of New York City,” a Google spokesperson told the Post. "We hope this accurate, updated imagery that will soon be available in Google Maps will help people around the world better understand the extent of the damage and the importance of coming together as a community to aid in the recovery efforts.”

(Photo: Instagram, @pinkla16)

Thanksgiving beat out Hurricane Sandy as the most-Instagrammed event ever, solidifying the photo platform as more of a Path-type social network than the future of citizen journalism. [PandoDaily]

The Wiki Weapon Project could be testing its 3D printed guns by end of year. [The Guardian]

Courts continue to wrangle over the legality of collecting texts and data from cell phones to use as evidence. [The New York Times]

Facebook has finally admitted it will soon share the data it collects from your profile with external websites and ad networks. [GigaOm]

Can the Wii U save Nintendo? [The New York Times]

(Photo: Twitter/swissmiss)

Anyone in the New York/New Jersey region knows how hard it was to make a call or send a text message in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy's devastation. Simply dialing up your parents to let them know you were okay resulted in many a frustrating dropped call, "mobile network not available" message or weird busy signal. Not to mention that those who lost power were left without a way to charge their typically omnipresent communication devices.

Many of the big networks like AT&T and Verizon were severely impacted by the storm--this reporter still hasn't been able to get reliable 3G service in Brooklyn since Sandy (don't even ask about 4G). Now, Verizon wants to give back to Sandy's victims by waiving all domestic voice and text charges for those impacted by the hurricane from Oct. 29 to Nov. 16.

According to a FAQ page on Verizon Wireless's website, customers in counties across New York and New Jersey will be automatically eligible for the program, and they can expect to see no Verizon charges on their bill for voice and text during these dates (monthly rates still apply).

You can check if your county is eligible here.

(Screencap)

Hurricane Sandy drove many New Yorkers out of their homes and, given the impending Nor'easter, at the worst possible time. Something like 20,000 to 40,000 people need somewhere to stay. Hoping to help alleviate the situation: Airbnb. Thanks to a partnership with the mayor's office, the displaced can now turn to the site for places to stay, free of charge.

The hub for the effort is this page, which greets visitors with the guilt-trip-inducing message, "It's time to help each other." Anyone with a place to stay, be it spare bedroom or humble couch, can list it for free.

In a statement, the company told Betabeat: 

This morning, we announced that Airbnb hosts in Hurricane Sandy–affected areas can now offer their space for free. People who require a temporary place to stay can quickly find a free space via our list of free, available housing for Sandy-affected areas. If you live close to an affected area and have an extra house, an extra room, or even a spare couch, we encourage you to sign up to help.

The page says 100-plus people have already opened their homes. That won't put much of a dent in the housing crisis, but we suppose it's a start.

Can we trust that the illegal-hotel hatchet is well and truly buried?

One of the Fog Creek volunteers, buckets in hand. (Photo: Squarespace)

When Hurricane Sandy smashed into lower Manhattan last week, customers of the data center Peer1 faced the prospect of major downtime. Just a blackout would've been no problem. But when the basement flooded, it took out the pumps that transport fuel from the reserve tanks to the generators on top of the building. That's where Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena came in.

“I wake up Tuesday, I live in Soho," said Mr. Casalena. "There’s no reception. There’s no power, so all the cell towers are dead." Somehow a couple of messages snuck through to his cell phone: "Anthony there’s a major problem at Peer1, the basement’s flooded, they can’t access any reserve fuel, we have 12 hours." He hurriedly packed a bag and started walking downtown.

Squarespace was already preparing  its "hundreds of thousands" customers using the platform for the possibility of downtime. But when he got to Peer1, Mr. Casalena realized it might be possible to keep the data center going. All they needed was a steady supply of fuel to the generators on the roof. So he told the team back at the office not to shut down the service just yet--"I emailed all the people and said, don't shut down. I don't see them turning off, and I think we’re just going to try and push it."

There was fuel in the area. The only problem was getting it upstairs. "So we find, like, oil drums--one of our employees finds oil drums somewhere on Craigslist," Mr. Casalena explained. "We’re just filling them up and trying to take them upstairs, and on day one it was pretty haphazard. It wasn’t like, a nice thing with everyone on the stairwell carrying things one flight--it was like half an oil drum of diesel with people pushing it upstairs taking an hour and a half."

Employees from Squarespace, Fog Creek and Peer1 all pitched in, first with drums and then buckets, working through the night. Their efforts were chronicled moment to moment on a bare-bones status blog. 

On day two, they hired a crew of day laborers and assigned one man to each flight of stairs, managing to truck hundreds of gallons to the roof. On day three, the building went into lockdown, as crews attempted to put in place proper fixes rather than quick-and-dirty workarounds. Luckily, by that point, a Peer1 engineer had finally gotten an impromptu pump working.

As we spoke, Mr. Casalena toggled back and forth between modesty and amazement they'd actually pulled it off. First he said, "I walked down and tried to help, and once it became evident something was possible, I just asked anyone if they wanted to help, and they did, and this is the result." Moments later, he added, "This thing could have fallen apart from like ten angles. Even if it does right now, we still bought three days of uptime. That’s just crazy."

The can-do startup mentality rarely invovles so much manual labor. And, after all, Datagram--another major data center just down the street--went down for days, taking Gawker Media, Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post with it. But to Mr. Casalena, it seemed less like a business decision and more like he had no other option.

"I am really, really proud of Squarespace’s uptime and everything we’ve accomplished," he said. "So, sitting there in an apartment where there’s no electricity or anything else--I mean, I would have to be, like, so lame not to walk down to the data center and just try and help. What am I going to do, sit at home in my apartment? That’s just absurd."

"It’s okay to care about things, you know?" concluded Mr. Casalena. "Even things as silly as websites."

We're pretty sure Peer1, which came out of this looking like heroic to Datagram's hapless, would agree.

(Screencap: Thrillist)

Last week, startups across New York City galvanized to help support the victims of Hurricane Sandy, establishing coworking spaces, volunteer groups and easy ways for users to donate to recovery efforts. But it's a new week, one where the subways are mostly running normally and many across the city have their electricity back. As the sense of helplessness brought by Sandy fades, the internet's penchant for irony and offensive jokes has come roaring back. The first (and undoubtedly not the last) company to fall into this tasteless trap? New York-based daily email service Thrillist.

In a recommendation for Fletcher's Brooklyn Barbeque sent out via email to its New York subscribers today, Thrillist included this delightful description:

Homeless thanks to the hurricane? Want to get away from the unshowered people staying at your apartment, because they're homeless thanks to the hurricane? Been without St. Louis ribs for four long days, thanks to the hurricane? Then get yourself over to Fletcher's, the brisket-y baby of a guy who goes by BBQ Billy, and is currently smoking meats in a 2,600lb pit.

Considering that Mayor Bloomberg announced yesterday that 40,000 New Yorkers were rendered homeless by Sandy, the joke falls a little flat.

Some Twitter users were upset with Thrillist's choice of language:

The offending copy appears to have been replaced on Thrillist's website with something a little more PC.

"Yeah, we're a little embarrassed by that actually -- we're always trying to toe the line of edgy humor and we pretty quickly realized we'd actually gone over the cliff with those jokes," Thrillist cofounder and editor in chief Adam Rich told Betabeat. "Contrary to what our tone might have suggested, we are taking this storm very seriously (most of our own employees have been impacted in one way or another) and we're actually in the process of planning a clothing drive through JackThreads to do our part in helping out the relief effort."

Mr. Politis

This is a guest post from David Politis, the founder and CEO of BetterCloud, the makers of FlashPanel, an admin tool for Google Apps that has acquired 10,000 customers and 3 million users since launching this July. You can follow him on Twitter @DavePolitis.

New York City has long been the promised land for investment bankers, hedge funders, media moguls and advertising agencies. More recently, it has become a center of innovation for technology startups. There is no shortage of launches and funding announcements for consumer-facing tech startups and service providers for digital advertisers.

However, exceptions side, one thing is certain: New York City is not known as a home for startups developing for enterprise.

Conventional wisdom has it that enterprise innovation takes place in the Bay Area, Seattle and other cities that have traditionally attracted enterprise venture capital investment and engineering talent. But faced with a number of options for where to build BetterCloud, the enterprise startup that I launched last year, I chose New York City. Here’s why:

Easier to Standout

For starters, the local venture capital climate is ripe for evaluating truly disruptive technologies that can demonstrate a path to monetization.  To date, most observers would agree that a majority of seed, angel or Series A-funded NYC-based startups fit into two camps: consumer web or digital media. This has created a cluttered, hyper-competitive ecosystem of NYC startups, many making very similar claims about what their products can do (respective to their product categories). While one might argue that this gives both investors and target audiences greater choice, I would argue this homogeneity makes it far easier for startups operating in the enterprise sector to standout.

Making a sector bet in NYC isn’t a new strategy. Mike Lazerow has called his 2007 founding of NYC-based Buddy Media a ‘sector bet’ rooted in Facebook’s then emerging ecosystem of third-party services providers. Buddy Media was one of the earliest providers of B2B social media services in NYC, paving the way for the massive influx of social media startups operating in the city today.  Earlier this year, of course, Buddy Media sold for $745M to enterprise company Salesforce.com, one of many early signals that the enterprise sector is regaining much of the ground it ceded to consumer and digital media over the last decade.

Talent Pool from the Finance Industry

We’ve received several job inquiries from investment bankers, all of whom have been searching for business development jobs. For these candidates, making the switch from banking to enterprise technology is far easier to grasp than a move to consumer tech, where products are seldom monetized and the buyer is hard to categorize.

Staying Grounded

In San Francisco there are so many startups it’s easy to forget that not all Americans actually work in the technology sector. The last time I was in the Valley, a city bus passed with an ad for a company I had never heard of. After expressing confusion, my friend, who had moved to San Francisco a year earlier to start his own tech company, informed me that this was the coolest new startup--how could I have possibly not heard of it?

In New York, you’re surrounded by more Fortune 500 companies than in any other city and brush by celebrities and Wall Street’s wealthiest on a daily basis. It’s pretty easy to stay humble here (though the rest of the world would tell you otherwise). And although the “techlebrities” featured in Bravo’s Startups: Silicon Valley have received significant backlash from Valley insiders, the very premise of the show would be hard to pull off in New York. (I don’t see the real housewives of New York facing any competition soon).

Unmatched Loyalty

In Silicon Alley, choices are limited if you want to work in tech, as opposed to larger industries like finance and media, which breeds a sense of loyalty. If you’ve ever spent a summer morning commute on a jam-packed subway car without air conditioning, you understand the “we’re all in this together” mindset. New Yorkers can reach a point of defensiveness when it comes to their city, and I’ve found the same to be true in New York’s burgeoning startup scene.

People here seem to work with a greater sense of urgency because of this loyalty and because of the pace of life attributed to the city. I’ll often hear of people leaving New York because of the city’s breakneck speed, so those remaining here have self-selected themselves as the kind of people who thrive in this fast-paced environment.

Resilience 

It’s only been a year since I moved back to New York to launch BetterCloud, but as expected, the city hasn’t let me down yet. We’re excited to be a part of this nascent community and are confident more enterprise focused startups will make their way to the Big Apple. And I’ve never been more proud to be a New York startup founder than over the last week week. Hurricane Sandy, as horrible as the effects have been, has validated every reason why founding a startup in New York is the right move. Since the power went out on Monday night, we’ve seen the incredible kindness and resilience of this city. Whether it was the VC who offered us workspace, our employee who trekked on foot from West 99th Street downtown to our office on Tuesday when the rest of us were unable to get in touch, or the willingness of our employees to get to our temporary workspace on the Upper West Side by any means possible--bus, taxi and by foot. Our makeshift office has enabled us to work normal hours and the team has welcomed visits from employees’ loved ones (dogs included).

New York is a resilient city and this week has proven it. As the city is slowly restored and power is returned to our office, I’m certain that BetterCloud and the thousands of other companies impacted by Sandy, will come out stronger on the other side.

Foursquare's temporary HQ. (Photo: Twitter)

Given recent events, Betabeat decided to forego our Rumor Roundup this week for a roundup of all the things startups are doing to help get New York back to normal following Hurricane Sandy.

It didn't take long for New York startups and techies to spring into action after Hurricane Sandy left parts of our fine city without power, water, shelter, or Wifi.

On Tuesday, we pointed you to New York Tech Meetup and New Work City's attempts to mobilize tech-savvy volunteers to help local businesses and organizations get networks and websites up and running. Today, NYTM put out an official call to its 28,000 members, asking for more volunteers and taking requests (online or by phone/text 646-392-7353) from government agencies, small businesses, non-profits, and schools that need help anything from data recovery to Internet connectivity to getting servers back online.

Noel Hidalgo, one of the lead volunteers of that effort, has been manning an uber-useful Sandy Coworking map of offices space for displaced techies. And New Work City founder Tony Bacigalupo, has pretty much morphed into Silicon Alley's Cory Booker. 

I was thinking it'd be bad ass to get teams of people in cars loaded with supplies just rolling around helping whoever was in need.

— Tony Bacigalupo (@tonybgoode) November 2, 2012

In fact, companies like Uber, which temporarily dropped surge pricing amid cries of price gouging but then quickly reinstated it--and Hotels.com have been the aberration. Most startups have lept at the chance to lend a hand and show off the tech scene's self-professed collaborative spirit.

Here's a roundup of yet more Sandy relief efforts spearheaded by the tech community:

No fee Airbnb From Oct. 31 to Nov. 7, Airbnb is waiving its fees for both renters and hosts on all properties located in areas hit by Hurricane Sandy, including NYC and Long Island. Travelers must stay for seven nights or fewer. We found a bunch of local hosts who dropped their rates to $10 a night, as a Sandy special.

Red Cross Tonight Hotel booking service Hotel Tonight is donating all money spent on hotels in NYC Thursday Nov. 1 and Friday Nov. 2 to the Red Cross.

Zaarly's pops up with a helping hand Peer-to-peer marketplace Zaarly launched an online pop-up shop that allows users to purchase local services for NYC residents in need. Examples include homemade meals from a local chef, pet sitting and renovations. All of the proceeds from the pop up shop will be donated to the Red Cross in New York City. "Based in San Francisco, folks at Zaarly wanted to help their friends in New York, but felt powerless," a rep told Betabeat. "After batting ideas around late into Monday night, they realized they were no longer small and powerless. They could help their friends and enable others to do so too."

What a Mitzvah! Yenta, the "Grindr for Jews," has coordinated a bunch of relief efforts. The company has temporarily halted advertising and paid outreach in order to donate those proceeds to the Red Cross. Yenta is also inviting displaced New Yorkers to stop by their offices, where they're collecting food and clothing donations for Sandy victims.

Later, late fees AT&T, Verzion and T-Mobile are both waiving late fees for customers impacted by Hurricane Sandy, and will continue to provide service to prepaid and contract customers, even if they haven't been able to pay their bill. AT&T and T-Mobile have also been providing charging stations for New Yorkers affected by the blackout.

Tying the Knot Wedding startup The Knot created a Facebook page to help brides whose weddings were ruined or canceled by Hurricane Sandy. Affected couples are using the page to "share tips, find available venues and talk to local experts." The page is also collecting the information of wedding venues and vendors in the area who did not suffer damage and are still able to host November weddings.

Time Warner does something good Much-maligned New York cable provider TimeWarner, known for pissing off every actor from Star Trek, has temporarily shrugged off its evil image with a hefty $1 million donation to Sandy relief efforts. According to a press release, "The company will donate $500,000 to the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City with another $500,000 to be dispersed to other organizations that are serving victims in the greater Tri-State area." They also deployed ten trucks downtown to act as charging stations with free Wifi.

Gilt City helps the city From Wednesday Oct. 31 to Sunday Nov. 4th, Gilt City NYC is donating 30 percent of all profits from sales on its NYC page to the Red Cross Hurricane Relief. The company has alerted all Gilt members of this opportunity in an email with the hopes of encouraging some philanthropic shopping.

Rubicon to the rescue Ecommerce platform AHAlife is also donating 15 percent of profits made from Oct. 31 to Nov. 4th to Team Rubicon, which links up military veterans with communities in need of rebuilding.

Squee! Stuffed animal startup Squishable released a limited edition Sandy Corgi, with $5 from every purchase from now until Sunday Nov. 4 going to the Red Cross. The corgi was so cute (see for yourself below) that it quickly sold out, so they extended the offer to the platypus squishable. So far, they've raised $1,460.

The adorable squishable corgi, which is sadly sold out. (Photo: Squishable)

Lucky us Community crowdfunding platform Lucky Ant is providing free crowdfunding for local businesses impacted by Sandy. The company has waived all fees for any local businesses wishing to use the platform to get themselves back up and running. Lucky Ant is also raising a fund with a goal of $50,000 or more that they will distribute to small businesses in need.

Buried bauble relief Online jewelry retailer Bauble Bar is hosting its weekly "Buried Bauble" special, where users use a clue to find a discounted piece of jewelry. This week, for every $10 buried bauble users purchase today, Bauble Bar will donate $10 to the Red Cross.

Fresh charity My Fresh Shirt, an online drycleaning service, has donated a year's worth of free drycleaning for auction at Charitybuzz, a platform that allows users to host auctions for charity. So far, the current bid is up to $600, and all proceeds will go to the Red Cross.

The photo on the left was taken this afternoon in Chinatown and you can see how many people really need a charge from the trucks by the mess of wires around the outlets.

The truck has also made it to 7th Ave South and Greenwich Ave in the Village. Here's what that looks like:

CEO Jonathan Zabusky. (Photo: Seamless)

This week, just when you most wished for the familiar comfort of Seamless order delivered to your door, loss of power and Internet, lack of availability or guilt over subjecting delivery guys to the elements kept you away.

In the midst of the storm, one wit started a Tumblr chronicling the most egregious egregious wait times on the food delivery platform Seamless (try ninety minutes for a smoothie or 37 days for some soup). Asked for comment, a company spokesperson  pointed out that most of the times highlighted were for catering companies, which "are meant for larger parties and therefore need more time to prepare."

But, understandably, delivery times had doubled Monday, just after the storm. (Even if your favorite Mexican place was open during the storm, did you really feel like it was okay to ask them to send a delivery guy out into the hurricane to bring you some fish tacos? If you did, we hope you tipped 200 percent.)

However, over the past few days, restaurants have been slowly coming back online. On Sunday, 28 percent of restaurants in Manhattan were closed. Monday the number jumped to 53 percent, and on Tuesday it ticked up to 64 percent. On Wednesday, however, the rate of restaurants closed slid back to 61 percent, and delivery times are creeping back toward normal--–at least in parts of the city that still have power.