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.

(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: YouTube)

Viral Spiral, a company that connects viral video creators with brands and agencies, announced today that it has teamed up with video distribution platform Rightster to produce an original series featuring the kids from the YouTube sensation "Charlie Bit Me!" The partnership marks the launch of Viral Studios, which will seek to create and promote new digital content tailored for an Internet audience.

Harry and Charlie Davies-Carr unwittingly became the subjects of the most-viewed YouTube video (that isn't a professional music video) of all time when they were just 3 years old and 1 year old, respectively. Charlie's impressive finger-biting powers and Harry's pitch-perfect whine have catapulted the duo into well-deserved international stardom, proving once and for all that kids with British accents are just that much cuter than American children.

The Davies-Carr parents wasted no time turning this 56-second clip into a fantastic opportunity for family stardom. Their YouTube channel is branded with a creepy Photoshop logo of Charlie biting Harry, and they even have an iPhone app.

“The intention is to create new formats including one called Kings Of YouTube, which will see the boys watching and reviewing new viral videos as they break," Viral Spiral CEO Damien Collier told PaidContent.

That sounds quite similar to "Kids React to Viral Videos" series, albeit with a star-studded cast.

"There are 3 series. Mix of comedy and reviews," Rightster CEO Charlie Muirhead clarified to Betabeat.

Jeez, everyone's a critic these days.

(Photo: wikipedia.org)

Among the Natives David Karp put on his salesman hat this week and preached the Tumblr gospel in front of execs at an Advertising Week event. Karp pushed his company’s new approach to “native” non-intrusive marketing. He went as far as to call Tumblr the "brave new world." The site now nets 27 million visitors a month and is expected to release some sort of earnings report this week, six months after ads started running on the site.

Pass The Popcorn MoviePass, a subscription service for unlimited movie-going, launched today, but is still invite-only. The app lets you check into a movie theatre, which then unlocks your MoviePass card. You pay at the credit card ticket kiosk using your MoviePass card, like you would with an ordinary card. The service is starting out at $29.99, which makes it a steal for New Yorkers because that's a little under the price of two movies with popcorn in Manhattan.

The Most Eligible Bachelor Wendr, an app for planning a night out with your friends, won Samsung and Thrillist's "Speed Dating For Startups" competition. After submitting a 30-second video advertising their app, the team had to demo with other finalists in front of a panel of judges. The winner was picked by Thrillist founder Ben Lerer, Samsung Senior Manager Jason Redmond, and and David Tisch, former managing director of TechStars NYC. The prizes for winning the competition include a write-up on Thrillist (bro outreach!), launch services from MRPR, KinPixel and LiftFive, and a collection of Samsung Series 9 laptops. Does this mean Wendr has to plan its own startup date?

Get Checked Y'all! In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month, Hologic, Inc, rang the opening bell of the NASDAQ this Monday. They also parked a mobile facility in Times Square that was filled with 3D mammogram technology called The “Tomo Coach.” Their 3D technology is locating cancer faster and better, so go get felt up for a good cause.

1 Billion Amateur Editors Can't Be Wrong Aviary, the photo editing app, announced this week that one billion photos have now been edited on their app within the first 12 months of launching. For a comparison, it took Instagram 18 months to accomplish the same feat. The company estimates that they will double that number by the end of 2012. That's a whole lot of sepia tones and stickers slapped on people's faces.

Streets Now YouTube'able StreetEasy, New York’s best way to avoid getting scammed on Craigslist, has partnered with internet travel show Sonia's Travels, to make video content that spotlights individual neighborhoods throughout the city. "Partnering with her on this type of video series was a no-brainer, especially as we build up our original content," said Michael Smith, CEO of StreetEasy.

Witness the iResurrection Digg, still making its climb out of the Internet grave, introduced a universal app for the iPhone and iPad. It's stark white, just like the new site, which looks really great on the iPad. It also has a cool feature called Reading Sync that uses iCloud to sync up articles between devices.

A British Boost Earlier this week, Rightster, a service that helps content providers maximize revenue from online video, announced a digital revenue services company, announced the hire of Robin Pembrooke as VP of Product & Solutions. He's a former Yahoo! guy, but more recently he led the online operations of Britain's biggest advertising funded TV and radio broadcasters--ITV and Global Radio. He should be able to help them out in a big way in the U.K. market.

The End of the Valley, But Not Advisory Boards Twist, the app that gives your friends your ETA, announced this morning that Yammer founder David Sacks would join Twist's advisory board. Sacks started a small firestorm after he claimed that "Silicon Valley as we know it may be coming to an end" shortly after selling his company to Microsoft. Sacks was quoted in the company's announcement as saying he uses Twist everyday and that "apps that help people manage or save time possess huge market value."

A Better Second Round Betterment, a low cost personal investing website, announced today that they've acquired $10 million in second round financing led by Menlo Ventures. The company says that since its start in 2010, they've increased customer assets under management at 500 percent per year. The company also just launched Betterment Gift, a service that allows you to gift money that you make from investments. Feel free to gift Betabeat as much as your better angels allow.