The scene at Secret Clubhouse. (Photo: Tumblr)

Late last week, Betabeat took a two-hour trip via interborough bus to Secret Clubhouse, a newly launched Williamsburg coworking spot. The shared office (decorated with vintage Apples and a motley assortment of posters) was packed with techies typing away on the laptops, but the vibe was no more panicked than that of an undergraduate library in the earliest days of reading period.

Nearby, permanent residents Small Girls PR were hashing out wardrobing details for the upcoming “Tech Homecoming” fundraiser and upending their desks in search of a missing checkbook. The occasional burst of laughter filtered from the back, and every so often someone would look up with a piece of news gleaned from Twitter. But quiet largely reigned.

The only obvious sign of extraordinary circumstances was a sign on the wall, handwritten grade-school-binder style: “Sandy Shelter,” it said, with a Wifi login and the message of support, “we <3 u.”

Off to one side we found Jessica Lawrence, managing director of New York Tech Meetup, whose jaunty scarf and turquoise cardigan weren’t quite enough to mask an uncharacteristic wanness. Crouched over her laptop, she was crafting an update for volunteers, letting them know what would be the most helpful in the next 24 to 48 hours. Across the desk, her partner in community organizing, Noel Hidalgo, was working away while encased in a gigantic parka. It was quite clear neither had had a moment of downtime since the storm hit.

The wrath of Sandy inspired an outpouring of civic feeling and desire to lend a hand. The trick was directing that energy toward productive results. Can Ruby on Rails really help the wreckage in the Far Rockways? That's what Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Hidalgo were attempting to do from their desk, the battlefield headquarters of New York Tech Responds. In concert with Tony Bacigalupo, cofounder of Soho-based New Work City, the triumvirate had spent the week coordinating the closest thing to an official New York tech relief effort.

In the last week, they've dispatched their army of volunteers for a variety of tasks, such as helping a flooded Chelsea gallery with data recovery, lending the aid platform Recovers.org in handling a deluge of traffic and assisting with relocated polling places. This week, they stand ready to help businesses affected by the storm, whether it's extracting data from soaked servers, setting up public Wifi or restoring point of sale systems.

Spend time around the city’s entrepreneurs when they’re in hustle mode, and it’s common to hear the term “disruption." Every other startup seems ready to shake the foundations of education, medicine, government or something similarly pie in the sky. It sometimes seems the original negative connotation has worn completely away. But there are few things quite like a hurricane to knock a sense of perspective into even the most wildly optimistic.

And so as the hurricane approached, tech scenesters sprang into action. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley touted the Bowery Mission and offered to haul East Villagers’ donations in his car. Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson took his blog and encouraged everyone to support Occupy Sandy. Zynga GM Dan Porter trekked out to the Rockaways, then returned to write a Business Insider op-ed encouraging coders to develop disaster recovery tools. “We are thrilled with how many tech companies, large and small, have reached out to ask how they can help those in need,” Rachel Haot, the city's Chief Digital Officer, told Betabeat.

But Ms. Lawence, Mr. Bacigalupo and Mr. Hidalgo have been the most visible in their attempts to help, emerging as a three-person clearinghouse for techie efforts.

“We’ve been in contact, I think, with pretty much every major government entity and recovery organization"--the Red Cross, FEMA, the Board of Elections--“just trying to make sure that everybody knows that we have this group of people that are willing to help,” said Ms. Lawrence. Their small army numbers somewhere north of seven hundred, a representative cross section of the meetup’s 28,000 members.

Typically, the New York Tech Meetup has a different set of priorities, which revolve around advocating for and serving the interests of its members. Most famous for hosting packed demo nights at NYU’s Skirball Center, the group’s last big public push was in January, when Ms. Lawrence and her compatriots helped scramble the jets to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, objectionable primarily for the onerous enforcement burdens it would have placed on Internet startups. But as Hurricane Sandy bore down on the city, suddenly their horizons expanded.

It began with a note to the meetup’s members, announcing they’d be happy to help anyone trying to get the word out about cancelled or postponed events. But when she and chairman Andrew Rasiej remembered they had in their hands a powerful megaphone, Ms. Lawrence recruited Mr. Bacigalupo (initially for his help designing signup sheet, but he’s been at it ever since) and Mr. Hildalgo, whose previous projects include serving as a public-private liaison include launching NYSenate.gov while serving as Director of Technology Innovation. They’ve been at it ever since, a flurry of conference calls and Skype chats and Google Docs.

If that makes it sound like their results are a little tough to pinpoint, Mr. Bacigalupo says they've ended up spending more time helping those coordinating relief efforts, rather than the victims themselves. “While it’s hard to quantify, I would say I have good reason to believe that our efforts have helped make other efforts more efficient and more effective than they would have if we had done nothing,” he told Betabeat.

Perhaps the most visible manifestation of the post-hurricane outpouring of good feeling has been Sandy Coworking, an effort to make desks and Wifi available for anyone who need a place to be productive. Almost as soon as the clouds parted, anyone with a working office was offering to host the displaced. Staffers from Buzzfeed took up residence in Heart’s cafeteria. Kickstarter moved in with Boxee. Venture capitalist Charlie O’Donnell suggested the hashtag #sandycoworking for those seeking and offering space; as the offers began flying fast and furious on Twitter, Mr. Hidalgo hacked out a platform for anyone to list what they had.

But if the crowd at Secret Clubhouse was any indication, the coworking effort was mostly lifesaver for tech companies--and that includes Gawker. Founder Rick Webb opened his doors almost as soon as the power went out south of Flatiron. Employees from Tumblr (where he’s helping build out a sales and marketing operation) and Foursquare (a company in which he invested). Gawker had filled in empty desks, while Gizmodo had annexed the conference room. By the time Mr. Hidalgo had arrived, Nick Denton was already holding court in the back.

Ms. Lawrence admitted that coworking isn't exactly a familiar concept outside of the confines of Silicon Alley. "But the cool thing is that after this experience they’re probably all going to know what coworking is a little bit more," she said. "Whether they’ve meant to or not, a lot of them have probably ended up coworking.” Even Bloomberg-terminal-addicted Wall Streeters learned to work from home.

But as reports of restored power in downtown Manhattan rippled through the room in Williamsburg, we couldn't help but wonder how sustainable this sudden flowering of civic feeling really was. Mr. Bacigalupo thinks the last week was a turning point: "This was the time, in my mind, when the tech community stepped out of its own bubble and stepped up in a huge way to help this city as a whole,” he said. “This was the tech community doing something that wasn’t about advocating for the technology community.”

Ms. Lawrence said they're looking into whether volunteers would make a long-term commitment to serving as a kind of tech corps--a crew of first responders with very specific skills. And after initially proposing a hackathon to address the issues raised by the storm, New York Tech Responds decided it made more sense to partner with events already planned, providing them suggestions.

Of course, the rapid-fire pace of a hackathon doesn't allow for the time to produce finely-honed tools for FEMA or develop a smarter electrical grid that’s less vulnerable to natural disasters.

It may be that the best possible outcome is simply a reminder that the world has bigger problems than shilling virtual goods. Back on the grind, Anil Dash tweeted he was finding it “very jarring to be back at work at a desk with power & internet, looking at a bunch of tech crap that seems totally meaningless.” What better way to motivate a free market capitalist to spend her spare time construct a donation management solution for Goodwill–especially as images from Staten Island and the Rockaways fade from the front pages? After all, peer pressure worked for voting.

The email press release factory. (flickr.com/mcaven)

Internet startups are rapidly earning—nay, fortifying—their reputations as engines of the economy, veritable job-growing trees, the answer to the nation's loss of its manufacturing sector and attendant morale. And while it's not exactly true that web startups make jobs rain down from the sky, it is true that startups create jobs with even the most modest success. Raise a seed round, and suddenly you, your cofounder and a lawyer have work. Raise more money and the effect is amplified.

In aggregate, startups have spawned a startup-centric economy that spawns special startup lawyers, startup banks, startup recruiters and startup accountants in addition to throwing work to swag-makers and rappers and filling up coworking spaces. Have you seen General Assembly and WeWork? They're growing like weeds!

And ahem, of course, there are the proliferating tech blogs, and we'd be remiss not to mention our counterparts in the thriving tech public relations sector. Edelman, The Morris + King Company, Small Girls PR, Brooke Hammerling and Brew Media Relations, LaunchSquad, Atomic PR and Sunshine Sachs are just a few firms handling startups here in New York.

Chris Dixon may have implied that you don't really need PR as a startup; we suggest all founders with budgets read his relevant blog post saying as much. But many startups feel a publicist is necessary to help their hyperlocal mobile social app stand out from the crowd, and we and the tips@betabeat email can testify as to how hard startup publicists work. Also, a recent ranking by fees says tech PR's star is on the rise.

"PR firms either specializing in tech or with big tech practices showed major growth in 2011 as tech companies grappled with selling and explaining complicated products to a blizzard of audiences," says the study, performed by PR industry publication O'Dwyers. Edelman saw its fees go up 24.3 percent in 2011, compared to an overall growth of 15.9 percent. Atomic PR and LaunchSquad, both Internet startup-heavy firms, were up 35 percent and 30 percent respectively. Yeah, we learned that from a press release.

And Mom I'm going to ride on a airplane and eat peanuts on the airplane!

We're getting in trouble for our un-SEO optimized rumor roundup headlines, but perhaps we can get away with just one more. It's important because reality TV is truly descending upon start-up land! Behold:

MINI-SERIES. We heard the Makery-based start-up PR shoppe Small Girls are getting a reality show! They're at least going to have camera people following them around! We pinged to ask. "It's still pretty hush-hush," petite publicist Bianca Caampued told Betabeat by email. "We're still in the very early stages of filming our sizzle reel and our producer shopping it to networks, so we can't talk about it on internet land yet." Happily, Ms. Caampued and petite pal Mallory Blair were pretty cool about our rumormongering. "We're also actually shooting a segment for another show on Bravo next week, in my closet," Ms. Caampued said. Wee! What should they should call the show? The Mini-est Marketers? The Littlest Flacks? Prometheus?

SERIES BRAVO! A source passed this email along to Betabeat: "One of our partners just sold a TV show to Bravo, and is currently casting for a group of five women investors who are looking for cool stuff to support while running hard through NYC culture. If you're 30-40+ , in the financial industry, and interested, email [redacted]." We scrounged and scrounged and didn't turn up any clues; at the least, the show does not appear to be a product of powerhouse Ish Entertainment.

INSULT, MEET INJURY--ALSO, IT'LL COST YOU. TechCrunch Disrupt has started to send out rejection letters to start-ups that applied to pitch. "They offered us the privilege of paying them $2,000 to have a booth," one frustrated founder told Betabeat. "We are going to blow up in everyone's face and they keep dissing us. It's retarded they are capitalizing on startup fever."

YEAH! WHAT! OKAY! Betabeat got a sneak peak at the Hype Machine iPhone app, due out soon. It is not fancy--basically a bunch of variously-curated music streams. Uh, it's green. The start-up has been planning this since October 2009.

STEALTHY. There is a secret, funded start-up building a "specialized industry-specific web application" in two to three months, but oh--they need a contractor who might transition to CTO. "We are venture-funded and advised by successful and well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and angels," the anonymous company writes in a job ad. The founder has non-profit and business experience. Good luck with that!

ACTUAL STEALTHY. The new DreamIt Ventures incubator quietly announced it had chose 15 start-ups out of more than 500 applications for its summer program which starts May 15. We hear the list of companies will be out next week, as candidates are still scrambling to get their websites ready for semi-prime time. Try as we might, Betabeat could not sniff out a single one--most sources had no idea what we were talking about. "I have no idea. I've barely heard anything about DreamIt. Did they make final selections?" one well-connected investor/founder said when Betabeat asked. "I didn't hear of anyone applying. No one told me at least. I know of SeedStart applicants, ER applicants, TechStars applicants. But no DreamIt." It's a mystery!

UNINTELLIGIBLE PRESS RELEASES. You can use this pitch from BitTorrent, which wanted us to take a conference call under embargo, as a template for your next webby product launch: "Due to your coverage of technology news for BETABEAT, we wanted to give you a heads-up on key digital media Internet technology news coming down the pike from BitTorrent, Inc. that will be of great advantage to consumer tech users! It will be the Beta launch of an amazing new tool from this leading peer to peer Internet file sharing company, BitTorrent, Inc. and their more than 100mm users," is literally what this actual email said. We asked for more information and got nothing back, so whatever. The embargo lifts May 12 when we assume we'll read all about it on Twttr along with everybody else.

RUMORS OF THE DIRECTORY'S DEATH HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED. That $5 paid directory Tumblr rolled out and then abruptly pulled? They're revamping it. The directory sold out too quickly, for one thing, said CEO David Karp, so the next iteration will have a bidding component and more niche categories. "It was incredibly rudimentary the first time around," he said. He predicts the new directory will be out within a month. [Tumbeast joke here.]

SOME CEOS IN NEW YORK DID THESE THINGS WRONG ACCORDING TO THIS ANONYMOUS SURVEY. Recognize anyone?

TRUE LOVE: We're getting another dating site! Miral Sattar is seeking a developer with dating site experience.

RECRUITING: An amusing review of the 2nd Annual NYC Startup Job Fair comes to us from the New York Tech Meetup email list: "So they started off not very organized, by the time I got there they had devised some kind of system for letting people on in groups, kind of like an amusement park ride, but I heard that in the beginning it was just a madhouse free for all and they were just letting people up.  Oh, and, it was in a HALLWAY of AOL. A hallway," attendee Amanda Prinzo wrote. Also, all the start-ups were really only looking for engineers, she complained, even during the hours of the fair that were designated for non-engineer recruiting!

Disclosure.