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.

A pretty Mujjo case (Photo: Mujjo.com)

Checking In to the New Yelp Foursquare already set its sights on overtaking Yelp with the launch of its super useful local search engine. But its newest iOS update really goes for the jugular: Foursquare now gives locations a 1-10 rating to show you how much people actually like it, instead of the app’s old star rating system. Per the Foursquare blog, the rating is calculated by an amalgamation of “tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, loyalty, local expertise, and nearly 3 billion check-ins from over 25 million people worldwide.” Yelp is going to have to do better than Ernest Hemingway to keep up.

Do-Gooders Keep On Doing Good The New York tech community has banded together over the last week to help victims of Sandy. And now Rain NYC and TelAPI are co-sponsoring a hackathon in conjunction with the Node.js Knockout to build applications that will help future disaster relief efforts. It's a 12 hour competition and teams will be responsible for building telephony applications that hopefully will improve communication or information dissemination when there's limited electricity and power.

No App To Wash The Dishes Yet Though There's a ton of recipe based apps and magazines for the iPad, but Panna, released this week, stands out because they feature recipes that you haven't actually thought of before, plus their above average food porn really doesn't hurt either. The bi-monthly magazine features a slew of celebrity chefs like Jonathan Waxman and Rick Bayless. These chefs host video segments that are broken up step-by-step and downloadable for offline streaming, which is good if your wifi doesn't reach your kitchen. Individual issues will cost $5.99 each, and a full year’s subscription is $24.95. But there's a launch special right now and a year's subscription is only, $14.99.

More Brooklyn Please Downtown Brooklyn, DUMBO and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, are of course known as The Brooklyn Tech Triangle. They're already getting a bus line of their very own, but now WXY Architecture + Urban Design are planning to help grow tech infiltrate the three neighborhoods to a greater degree. Andrew Kimball, president & CEO of The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, says that he wants the Navy Yard to become a hub for "maker" companies like Makerbot. Brooklyn is the place to be right now and it's about to get even busier.

Love Thy Favors NeighborFavor, a free app that was launched in August, helps you find people that live near you willing to help out with tasks. Although the app wasn't designed for emergency purposes, the company says NeighborFavor can definitely be used for the Sandy relief efforts: like picking up emergency supplies for those in need, offering alternate transportation, and coordinating times to help with the cleanup.

Buy Pretty Things If you've ever flipped through a catalog and thought "I wish there was more things to buy for me," then be glad that Pickie now exists. They're a Techstars company and they raised one million dollars in their first seed round from DFJ Gotham, Betaworks, Liberty City Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, MESA+ and several angel investors including Jon Steinberg, David Tisch, and Lars Albright. The app shows you a catalog of products to buy based on what you like and what you've bought in the past. Sounds economically stimulating.

Buy More Pretty Things Mujjo, the tech accessories company that uses finest Dutch craftsmanship to make their products, just released a new line of sleeves for the new iPad Mini. They're mad out of Mujjo's signature wool and "vegetable tan leather." A Mujjo case (with a mini inside) just shot to the top of our Hannukah list.

People Use Phones When They Don't Have Computers Usablenet, the company that makes mobile sites for big businesses, experienced huge traffic jumps on their sites during Hurricane Sandy. They reported a 98 percent increase in mobile traffic to airline sites and an over 16,000 percent increase in traffic to utilities sites. Usablenet says that this suggests that while consumers may not visit utility websites from their mobile devices on a regular basis, they do so in great numbers during an emergency.

Villain No More Time Warner Cable, the scourge of New York cord-keepers, was surprisingly helpful during last week’s storm. Workers at Time Warner’s Red Hook store helped a woman restore power to her electric wheelchair in order to vote. Robert Levy, a Time Warner employee, took the store’s generator to Kacania Taylor’s apartment, which has been out since Hurricane Sandy. Levy and other employees ran an extension cord through the window, and charged her chair so that she could get to the polling place. Can we send our $150 cable bill to Mr. Levy instead of TWC?

Scary sky

With mass transit closed and dangerous storm surges set to wallop the city, New York startups aren't messing around when it comes to hurricane prep. Most, like Usablenet, Kickstarter, HowAboutWe and SideTour, are urging employees to work from home due to the closure of the MTA system.

"We have a simple rule of thumb that if the subways are shut down, the office is closed and people can work from home," Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told Betabeat over email. "A few of us are actually crashing here over the weekend - myself and a few engineers. We built the place to be like a home, so it's a great place to be stuck for a few days :)."

"For those that are staying here, we have ample food, beverage, and entertainment. More iPads than flashlights," he added.

Hey, we're sure there's a flashlight app.

"The offices are closed; we're working from home," a developer at Etsy told Betabeat. "We put the Brits on point for Ops, though, in case the power goes out."

Many startups are also thanking their lucky stars that their data centers are out of the line of the storm. "Usablenet's platform is cloud-based and none of its U.S. data-centers are likely to be affected," a rep for the company told Betabeat.

"We're on Amazon Web Services, but we're in different data centers for redundancy," Mr. Baptiste said. "We're not worried about downtime."

Of course, startups with businesses that revolve around reliable delivery services are rolling out massive contingency plans to combat the bad weather and get the goods to their customers on time. H. BLOOM, a subscription flower service that delivers luxurious bouquets monthly to homes and corporations, is well-versed in the weather troubles heaped upon delivery startups.

"Unlike a lot of other technology businesses in New York, a pretty big component of our business is dependent on touching tangible products, receiving it, making something beautiful out of it and then actually delivering it, so there’s no question that a situation like this has an impact on the business," said Sonu Panda, COO of H. BLOOM. "The thing that is comforting to us is having external things impacting our operations is a regular occurrence. We have a bit of a scale--like if President Obama visits the U.N. and eastern Manhattan is turned into a traffic mess, that has an impact. This is a much more significant event and requires a lot more preparation, but in general we’re sort of used to these fire drills."

Mr. Panda

"We got through hurricane Irene just fine," he added.

By beefing up operations workers and having them start their shifts earlier, H. BLOOM intends to fulfill all delivery requests tomorrow. "We’ve got teams that will be getting in as early as 3:30 a.m. tomorrow morning to be able to facilitate deliveries before the storm hits New York," Mr. Panda said. "So the expectation is that everyone will be as delighted as they normally would be. In the instances in which deliveries can’t be done, we’ll be communicating early and often about what our alternative plans are."

Seamless, the popular food delivery service that keeps many New Yorkers from starving on a daily basis, is also working hard to ensure that users not only receive their orders in a timely fashion, but that they also know what to expect when ordering delivery in inclement weather. Likewise, the company is working with those restaurants who request it to close down their ordering service on Seamless during the storm.

"We have the ability to customize neighborhood delivery times so that our customers are able to see most of the times with relatively accurate estimates," Seamless' VP of marketing, Ryan Scott, told Betabeat. "It’s not always perfect just because of the thousands of restaurants we have across the country, but we do our best to look at the neighborhoods that are going to be mostly impacted and use those data points to come up with a plan of attack."

Mr. Scott said that users ordering in areas affected by the storm will also soon see a message crop up when they navigate to Seamless, letting them know about possible delivery delays.

We wondered if the site had seen any spikes in service over the past few days as New Yorkers brace for the storm, but Mr. Scott said that data wasn't available yet. "Without seeing the data until tomorrow I wouldn’t know if tonight produced some sort of a record number, but I'm sure it will be a good day," he added.

Of course, Seamless also urges you delivery lovers to tip your deliveryman well--it's probably not very fun to brave a superstorm just to bring you some pizza.

Mr. Taylor (Usablenet)

New York-based Usablenet is the largest provider of mobile and multiplatform services for brands, powering the mobile presences of 75 of the top 300 retailers--so why have we never heard of them?

Usablenet was founded way back in the dark ages, after the 90's dotcom boom but far before the current one, in 2000. Its original business was focused on making websites more accessible for the visually impaired, which typically boiled down to translating complicated website designs into sleeker, simpler formats that were easier to read. But when smartphones began their prodigious rise, Usablenet wised up quick and used what they'd learned from making websites for the visually impaired to begin building simple mobile sites for clients. They began doing so as early as 2006--way before 'mobile' became a buzzword--with just a three person team situated in a 6th-floor walkup on the Lower East Side.

In the past five years, Usablenet has seen tremendous growth. The company has grown from that tiny downtown walkup to one of the largest providers of mobile and tablet device sites in the country.

"We’re now at around 350 employees and in the region of 300 mobile and multichannel clients, but our goal is to be at 1,000 clients and 1,000 employees in the next three years," Jason Taylor, Usablenet's head of innovation and platform strategy, told Betabeat by phone. "In the last couple of years we’ve been doing not just mobile, but things like Facebook apps, kiosk apps, tablet apps; the explosion of the devices that the consumer has in their hands beyond just a mobile smartphone is also driving our growth."

Any time a new device comes out--like a new tablet or smartphone--brands want to support the consumer on that device, said Mr. Taylor. The Usablenet platform helps translate the sites of brands like Victoria's Secret, Expedia and Dell into beautiful sites or apps that fit the device requirements of smartphones and tablets.

"That’s really what our platform is about," said Mr. Taylor. "Providing it to our clients so we can power the different versions of their mobile sites or apps for all the different devices that come out for market."

The company is now far from having to work out of a small downtown office space. They moved up and uptown, to an office in the trendy Flatiron district, where they handle mobile development for 25 percent of all Fortune 1,000 brands.

So why haven't we heard of them?

"We’re very much a client-led company, which means that we’re focused on communicating and gaining a client base," said Mr. Taylor. "We focused a lot on going directly after clients, talking directly with clients to secure them. We don’t do a lot of partnership stuff, we have a direct sales channel so we don’t work through third parties to reach clients."

The other reason is that though Usablenet powers some of the most visible mobile sites in the country, they're a technology business behind what the consumer is using, so they're rarely recognized. "If you took a day in the life of an average business traveler or consumer, they’d probably be using a number of our sites on a daily basis," said Mr. Taylor. "In New York, we power the NYC metro mobile sites; if you want to take a flight on Delta, we power Delta; same with Amtrak."

Mr. Taylor also stresses that Usablenet doesn't just want to be a one-off company that can be gobbled up by a bigger brand. Usablenet is privately owned and has never taken funding, he said. They took their time building the business from the ground up, "one happy client at a time."

"We’re not this sort of nichey, piped-up environment," he said. "We’re not looking to be purchased. We’re looking to become a company like IBM and Oracle, not just a flash-in-the-pan company that gets purchased. We want a company that has healthy business, so we can say to our clients, 'We will be here not just next week, but we’ll be here in five years' time.'"

Mr. Taylor said that Usablenet currently has offices in New York, Los Angeles, London and Italy, and intends to expand to Asia and Brazil by year's end.