The #SandyCam awaits the action. (Photo: Screenshot)

The wind is already whipping and New Yorkers, having bought up all the bottled water and discount Halloween candy they could find, are ready to hole up in their apartment for the next two days. It's not like you can hop on the ACE and go check out the scene at the waterfront, since the subway is shut down and all.

Luckily for anyone seeking a little vicarious storm-chasing, there's Livestream. The startup has installed a camera on the roof of its Chelsea HQ and will be broadcasting the storm's transit across downtown on what they've dubbed #SandyCam.

"We just decided to scramble everybody, and they'll be working and locking in with food and maybe even sleeping in the office Monday and Tuesday," Livestream CEO Max Haot told Betabeat. Now that's dedication.

By "everybody," he means a skeleton production crew of about five people, who'll be responsible for the feed. The rest of the company's New York employees will be working from home. For his part, Mr. Haot is coordinating the efforts from afar, as he is currently stuck in Las Vegas. "I'll be safe, but without my wife," he said.

The motivation behind this last-minute effort, which wasn't even conceived until Sunday morning? "Basically, we didn't see any good coverage of [Sandy] in the media that's really, like, very interactive, simple, and 24/7," Mr. Haot explained.

Going on infrastructure alone, Livestream was well positioned to provide just that: "Our office happens to be in one of the most connected buildings, both for video fiber and also in terms of power," he said, explaining they've got backup generators on the roof in case of a total blackout. (Hurricane party at 111 Eighth Avenue?)

At the moment, the stream is merely a placid view of downtown, with a NOAA warning on endless loop and a stream of chats. But once the storm really gets going sometime later this afternoon, the excitement will ramp up accordingly. In addition to audio ("so people can really hear the noise and the sounds of the wind"), Livestream will be aggregating the best user-generated footage shot on their remote streaming mobile apps. The company is also dispatching citizen journalist Tim Poole with a specially equipped Jeep and team to shoot photos and live footage across the city, "as long as it's safe."

"That could get quite interesting, to weave that in, instead of just the static camera," added Mr. Haot.

There's a good chance the page will attract quite a few eyeballs as the weather plays out. Even with a very basic setup for last year's Hurricane Irene, said Mr. Haot, "we reached about 100,000 uniques and 30,000 concurrents during the evening, and obviously that was editorially not very compelling and not as big as this." The stream and the entire page are also embeddable, for maximum distribution.

"It could get very interesting in terms of crowd-sourced live news coverage," he said.

Well, it's not the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore being buffeted about in a blue anorak, but it'll certainly do in a pinch.

A sample.

Monday night, Betabeat headed downtown for a new twist on presidential debate punditry. Rather than merely wisecracking, drinking or even live-blogging, Internet types assembled for something new this election cycle: a “live GIF off” of the proceedings, arranged by Tumblr and Livestream.

Our destination was 111 8th Avenue, most famously Google’s New York HQ but also the home to Livestream, our hosts for the evening. Normally an office, the space had been transformed into a multimedia hub, with screens scattered throughout, streaming feeds from both the debate and (so meta) the event itself.

Footage from Florida showed politicians pressing the flesh even as nearby techies milled about, clustering in small knots and yelling to be heard over the music. Moving through the crowd we spotted big-time tech journalist Ben Parr, as well as the city’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot. Getting the setup ready required moving the desks of Livestream’s 75 or so employees.

“We have a lot of staff who are not very happy about it,” joked Livestream CEO (and newlywed husband to Rachel) Max Haot.

Tumblr’s Liba Rubenstein, who’s responsible for building the site’s community of politicos, explained that the concept came about as her team brainstormed ideas for something different they could do around the debates. Given the popularity of GIFs on the social microblogging site, the idea stuck. The intention is to “help bring this content to a really wide audience and help people engage with something that’s more interesting and multifaceted than just watching a news network.”

Gif maestro. (Photo: via Livestream)

To prepare for the proceedings, Tumblr built GIFwich, a new blog specially designed to serve as a hub for this kind of live event coverage. Now that it's there, the company can conveniently host similar events in the future.

Ms. Rubenstein explained that the six bloggers picked to headline the event—including Bobby Finger and Mark Portilla, one half of a duo that goes by Mr. GIF—were power users, with significant followings and a flair for the visual. “None of them are real unknowns,” she explained over the sound of the LCD Soundsystem song “North American Scum.” “We know their work, we trust them.”

While attendees lined up for the all-American buffet, the GIF makers gathered at a table in the center of the room, prepping for the main event. Once underway, the livestream cut from laptop to laptop, an animation taking shape on each screen. Now moderator Bob Schieffer surrounded by flashing BOCA RATONs, now Barack Obama engulfed in a curtain of images of the first lady.

As the party the debate ended, Betabeat snagged Tumblr editorial director Christopher Price (better known to the Internet at large as topherchris), who’d been GIFing away all night.

He introduced us to his fellow correspondent, blogger Lacey Micallef. Asked what brought her to the event, she explained she has a popular Tumblr and “all I do is make GIFs and animate, pixel art, that kind of shit.” (She then apologized for swearing.) “It’s like a big event,” she explained, before turning to Mr. Price. “Nobody else was doing it, right?”

“We’re not saying in-depth political reporting doesn’t have a place,” Mr. Price added. “This is just  this little bonus to follow along with as you’re watching it on TV.”

Mr. Lodwick, Mr. Watts, and Ms. Cantrell (Photo: Instagram/Mike Bodge)

Love must be in the sticky, humid, sweltering air this season. After three Facebook mafia nuptials in a succession, New York techies are taking their turn at the altar.

The New York Times covered Rachel Sterne's East Hamptons wedding to LiveStream founder and CEO Maxime Haot twice in the past two months, once in a trend story about live-streaming your special day. (Yes, they live-streamed it. No, you couldn't watch without a password.)

However, Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick, perhaps burned by the public's response to previous displays of affection, avoided the paper of record's carefully combed-over Wedding section.

(Photo: Facebook)

Besides, isn't that what Instagram is for?

Earlier this week, Mr. Lodwick used the app to document the wedding ring tattoo he got at Three Kings in Greenpoint, noting that "It felt like they were sawing my finger off with a steak knife." On Saturday, guests tweeted photos of Mr. Lodwick's wedding to dancer and choreographer Robin Cantrell, director of the Indelible Dance Company. Mr. Lodwick directed a number of videos of comedian Reggie Watts, who officiated the ceremony by asking the bride, "Do you promise to accept his eccentricities and reject his bullshit?"

Last December, we broke the news that Mr. Lodwick had raised around $1.5 million from prominent New York investors like Chris Dixon, Lerer Ventures, David Karp, Bre Pettis and David Tisch without an idea for a product. Earlier this month, Mr. Lodwick offered some details about the company's two projects: Debris, which he describes as an IRC with images, and Elevision, a platform that lets users discover and watch films and boasts a rather stunning logo.

Skeptics of Mr. Lodwick's funding-before-idea concept take note. Elepath has already used its "Darwinian framework" model to axe development on an iPhone app called Cult that was supposed to help users make social plans. "It sort of worked, but while we were building it, we saw 30 other apps come out that did the same thing, and not get much traction. And even though Cult was different, it wasn’t different enough to stand out (or even to make US happy)." AMEN.

Ms. Sterne's ceremony concluded with fireworks on the water. Mr. Lodwick offered guests a parting gift of Mast Brothers chocolates wrapped in what appears to be an illustration of the couple naked. Artisanal Brooklyn's version of a tiger-monkey photo booth?

via Vogue and a scanner.

Exactly a year after Anna Wintour sprinkled her glossy fashion dust on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Vogue has decided to switch its gaze from women in New York politics to women in New York tech.

After taking a gander at Silicon Alley's female founders, investors, and stalwarts, the magazine opted to profile New York City's social media-savvy chief digital officer (or "head nerd" in 4 Times Square parlance) Rachel Sterne for being "the face of a new era of digital governance."

The feature, which isn't available online (Bad, Conde! Stop that!) says, "Sterne is part of a new generation of bright, attractive women who are turning Silicon Alley into less of a boys' club." We'd quibble with Vogue's  notion that women judged on their relative attractiveness makes it less of a boy's club. But hey, it's Vogue, which means we get references to Ms. Sterne's "willowy, six-foot frame" and "striking figure."

In what we're pretty sure is NYTM's first Vogue reference, the magazine quotes former CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, now stationed at Googleplex East, talking about meeting Ms. Sterne for the first time at the meetup in 2007.

"There I was in jeans and a hoodie, probably with greasy hair, like everybody else,"  McCarthy recalls [Ed note: Yup, sounds about right!]. "And when I saw Rachel I thought, What is this incredibly articulate, impeccably dressed gorgeous young woman doing at a start-up pitch event?"

Also name-checked in the profile are Tumblr's David Karp (Ms. Sterne attended his rooftop "new-media scene" party), Ms. Sterne's fiancé Max Haot, co-founder and CEO of Livestream--as well as Ms. Sterne's good friend Soraya Darabi, Fashism co-founders Brooke Moreland and Ashley Granata, Charitini's Rachel Sklar, and event planner Emily Gannett, all of whom are involved in Change the Ratio.

Vogue's feature follows Vanity Fair's Sean Parker profile and Glamour's recent women in tech piece penned by none other than AllThingsD's own Kara Swisher.

In Vogue, Ms. Sklar remarked on both Ms. Sterne's intelligence and poise:

"She's an intellectual heavyweight who's as smart as--or smarter than--any guy in the room," Sklar says. "And she's ambitious, but she's also really nice and gracious and poised. She's a lady." Half jokingly, she adds, "She's kind of our Kate Middleton."

Vogue culls that last British royal bit for the feature's pull quote, minus the "half-jokingly," part, naturally.

The company is now more than 20 employees and growing, hiring for a web designer in New York as well as some positions in Bangalore and L.A. CLARIFICATION: Livestream is 120 employee in four offices (New York, Los Angeles, Bangalore India, Ukraine), including 50 full-time staff in its New York headquarters.

All photos and captions by James Nani.