Google just released its 2012 Zeitgeist, its annual collection of trending search topics across the globe. Topping overall search trends for the year were: Whitney Houston, the pop diva who died earlier this year;  Gangnam Style, the hilarious dance (and YouTube’s most-watched video) by Korean singer Psy; and Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged New York and New Jersey in October.

Google says it powered 1.2 trillion searches across 146 languages during 2012. An Android Google Zeitgeist app is coming later today, while an iOS app is coming soon.

Apple’s iPad 3 topped the consumer technology category, followed by Samsung’s Galaxy S3 and the iPad Mini. Samsung’s Galaxy Note and Google’s Nexus 7 rounded out the top consumer tech — clearly this year we were all hot for tablets.

Topping other categories were the British boy band One Direction, the film version of The Hunger Games, and basketball sensation Jeremy Lin of the Houston Rockets (and earlier, the New York Knicks).

As always, Google’s video wrap-up of the year’s searches is all about bold imagery from throughout the year, especially skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s space jump.

Or, more precisely, a way of geoforming the ocean floor to almost eliminate surface waves.

Sessions at the 65th annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s division of fluid dynamics  include presumably fascinating talks on “Bubbles,” “Vortex,” “General Fluids,” and “Drops.” Not to mention “Bubbles II.”

One paper being presented, however, has a less pedestrian title: “A Cloak of Invisibility Against Ocean Waves.” Reza Alam, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will be speaking about a way he has discovered of neutralizing ocean waves in near-shore or off-shore areas.

How?

The magic — or the science — lies in the fact that, as Alam explained to Phys.org, the ocean is stratified into layers: warmer, less dense water at the top, and colder, heavier water at the bottom. Each layer has waves: surface waves at the top, and internal waves in the lower levels. And, crucially, all waves — even surface waves — interact with the ocean floor.

By “properly architecting the bottom corrugations” of the ocean floor, Alam has discovered that “floating objects in stratified fluids can be cloaked against broadband incident waves.” Translation: by making the right hills and valleys in the ocean floor, waves can be transformed from surface waves to internal waves.

Meaning that, from the perspective of an observer floating on the surface of the ocean, the waves have simply disappeared. Of course, they actually have not — they have simply become internal waves deeper within the ocean layers.

And a reverse effect is possible as well. As Alam told Phys.org, “In reverse, it can cause the … reappearance of surface waves in areas where sandbars or any other appreciable bottom variations exist.”

Which means that the same technology that might help shelter marinas or offshore installations might also be used to create a surfer’s paradise.

photo credit: nathangibbs via photopin cc, play4smee via photopin cc

New York-based blogging powerhouse Tumblr is using its influence for good and partnering with Brandon Stanton, the storytelling sensation behind the photography blog Humans of New York (HoNY), to not only raise money for the victims of Superstorm Sandy but to also document the stories behind the storm.

Today, the startup and the famous photography project kicked off a 10-day fundraising campaign on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. The goal is to bring in at least $100,000 for the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, a charity providing support to people in the areas hit hardest by Sandy. HoNY also promised to capture the many sides of Sandy by chronicling the stories of first-responders and capturing the devastating affects of the natural disaster. Both are using Tumblr to promote the fundraising initiative.

The Tumblr/HoNY-powered campaign pooled together more than $86,000 in its first 12 hours, with do-gooders donating roughly $63 a piece, an Indiegogo spokesperson told VentureBeat. Backers have so far contributed more than $94,000 to the not-for-profit project, which means the campaign should surpass its goal before the end of the day. Tumblr and HoNY have promised to give 100 percent of proceeds to charity, and they are also giving away perks such as tote bags, prints, and portraits to donors.

“For the next 10 days, I’m going to be dedicating HoNY to raising money for Hurricane Sandy,” Stanton wrote in a Tumblr post. “We’re going to try to do this in a HoNY-like way. All of the blog’s content will be dedicated to telling the stories of people affected by the storm. Sandy left behind a lot of sad stories, but also some happy ones. We’re going to try to tell them all. The good people at Tumblr have stepped in to cosponsor the fundraiser, and they are going to be promoting these stories through their channels.”

The campaign joins several others started by folks in the technology community. Sandy’s disastrous impact on the North Atlantic region has driven companies such as Apple, Airbnb, HotelTonight, and Indiegogo to help the victims by either using their own products for support with relief efforts or by making generous donations to the American Red Cross.

Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo has brought in more than $200,000 in donations to help victims of superstorm Sandy.

Indiegogo, which competes with Kickstarter, typically caters to inventors and entrepreneurs trying to pool funds to finance their big ideas. In recent days, the site has become a home base for Sandy recovery, with community members turning to peers to fund not-for-profit relief efforts.

Currently, 107 Sandy disaster relief campaigns are taking donations. The Help Long Beach project, for instance, was started by teachers in Long Beach, New York to feed and clothe the people in that area devastated by the storm. The NYC Food Truck Sandy Outreach initiative raised more than $24,000 to deliver hot meals to people in the most affected parts of New York and New Jersey. Altogether, these types of campaigns have pooled together more than $205,000 in Sandy relief donations.

“There’s a huge and growing number of people who want to do more than just click a ‘donate now’ button,” Indiegogo co-founder and COO Danae Ringelman told VentureBeat. “They want to mobilize their friends, families, and social networks to join with them in making a difference at a deeper level.”

For its part, Indiegogo is offering its platform free of charge to all verified nonprofits. The startup has also partnered with the American Red Cross in an effort to funnel even more money to the organization and provide shelter, food, and assistance to Sandy victims. Indiegogo and PayPal have waived their fees so that members who start campaigns to raise money for the Red Cross can do so with 100 percent of funds going directly to the Red Cross.

“Our objective is to harness the passion and energy of these motivated folks and ignite a flurry of crowdfunding campaigns for Sandy Disaster relief,” Ringelman said. “We want people and organizations to know that there’s more they can do via crowdfunding and it’s easy, impactful, and lets them target causes they specifically care about.”

Indiegogo joins a host of other technology companies rallying to support the victims of superstorm Sandy. Community-powered hotel alternative Airbnb is helping victims find free temporary housing, last-minute booking app HotelTonight partnered with 25 New York City hotels to donate $60,000 to the American Red Cross, and Apple ponied up $2.5 million in a generous donation to the Red Cross.

Photo credit: NYC Food Truck Sandy Outreach/Indiegogo

In another sign that we are in the era of Tim Cook’s Apple, the company has donated $2.5 million to the American Red Cross to help victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Under Cook, Apple has become a more publicly charitable company. One of the first things Cook did as CEO, for example, was to start matching employee contributions to nonpofit organizations up to $10,000 per year.

A letter sent from Cook to Apple employees, which was obtained by 9to5Mac, shows how Cook is different from Jobs when it comes to a devastating event like Sandy.

“For the past week, our thoughts have been with those affected by Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath,” Cook wrote. “And Apple employees and customers the world over have raised millions of dollars toward the relief effort so far. But we can always do more.”

The sum donated by Apple will join the “millions” donated by iTunes customers and various Apple employees. (If you’d like to donate to the American Red Cross, click here.)

Check out Tim Cook’s letter in full below:

Top photo: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat
Letter: 9to5Mac

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hurricane Sandy was tough for just about everyone on the East Coast, but Verizon is easing the burden a tiny bit.

The company says that it will waive voice and texting charges for its New York and New Jersey customers until November 16th.

But that doesn’t mean your Verizon service is on the house.

Instead, the deal applies only to so-called “usage charges”, which is Verizon’s way of saying “overages.” That means that you still have to pay your “monthly access charges”, i.e, your bill.

The other limitation shouldn’t surprise you: While the deal applies to voice and text, the same doesn’t go for data access. This is a significant omission because, for many of those affected by Sandy, the Internet was the primary way for them to get information about what was going on in the outside world.

Verizon spokesperson Andrea Kimmet told me that the company didn’t extend its program to data because it found that, for customers, voice and data were used far more often during disasters. That said, Verizon isn’t against the idea of waiving data-related overages in certain situations.

“We will handle data-related concerns on a case-by-case basis,” the spokesperson said.

Photo: Flickr/Shane_curcure

Living up to its potential as a community-powered hotel, Airbnb today changed its policies to allow do-gooders to offer up their spare spaces free of charge to displaced victims of superstorm Sandy.

Four-year-old Airbnb makes a popular web and mobile service for listing and booking couches, rooms, houses, and so forth. Wednesday, the company kicked off a special Sandy initiative in partnership with the City of New York that aims to help people without housing find temporary lodging at no cost.

“There are thousands more people in need of shelter. And there are still thousands of people with extra space. It’s time to come together,” Airbnb’s senior manager of content and social media Vivek Wagle wrote in a blog post.

To help its members come together, Airbnb launched a microsite that gives listers located near Sandy-affected areas the option to donate their spaces. The site also helps Sandy victims locate places to stay free of charge. Airbnb is automatically featuring all donated spaces in a special wish-list called “Donated Sandy Relief Housing.”

Hosts who offer up their spaces are still covered by the startup’s insurance policy, and the company said it won’t collect fees for the listings. So far, more than 200 Airbnb members in the New York area have responded to the call to action and have donated their spare lodging to the Sandy relief effort.

Though officially based in San Francisco, Airbnb’s attitude of community-based aide exemplifies the spirt of New York’s tech scene, which has rallied together to support victims in the storm’s aftermath.

When disaster strikes, fewer things are more important than your smartphone.

So says mobile website platform Usablenet, which reported that mobile traffic to websites of utility companies like Con Edison increased by 16,000 percent both during and after hurricane Sandy.

Other sites saw major traffic boosts as well. Visits to transportation pages spiked by 495 percent, and telecoms saw their own traffic climb by 126 percent.

While these numbers are unsurprising on their own, they do show just how important the mobile web has become for finding information about natural disasters both before and as they are happening. The trick, then, is to ensure that people can access that information quickly and easily.

“The ability to access the mobile web becomes even more essential during times of crisis,”  Usablenet marketing chief Carin Van Vuuren said via email.

While Usablenet’s numbers don’t extend to weather sites, we already know that traffic to The Weather Channel increased a thousandfold during the storm. And much of that, certainly, came from smartphones.

All of this underscores one main conclusion: Investing in mobile infrastructure is the most important thing the government and utility companies can do to prepare for future disasters.

Photo: Flickr/David Shankbone 

Hurricane Sandy has had an astonishing impact on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Dozens are dead. New York officials estimate that up to 40,000 people were left homeless by the storm. The FEMA trailers made famous in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could be on their way back in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

In the face of this disaster, crowdfunding portals such as Fundly and HelpersUnite are making an effort to rush aid to those in need.

One Fundly offering in particular speaks to the way crowdfunding could change disaster relief for the better. Sean and Shana Carroll did not have flood insurance and lost their home in the storm, which created a very desperate situation for them and their two young boys. Today they have successfully raised more than $15,000 from individuals using Fundly’s platform. That total could increase drastically with 56 days left in the campaign. The only cost to the family will be Fundly’s typical charge of 4.9% of total donations.

HelpersUnite, another charity-focused crowdfunding portal, has waived its typical offering fee for Hurricane Sandy victims. These victims can now crowdfund their own Sandy relief and only be responsible for credit card processing fees. These fees are deducted from the funding total only when a campaign is successful.

Christina Hermida of HelpersUnite has high hopes for the impact of crowdfunding on disaster relief.

“After the chaos subsides, emergency efforts and the mobilization of all the donations passes, those who lost their homes and need to rebuild their life find themselves at a loss,” she said. “Whether they have insurance or get help from family/friends, natural disasters are unexpected and nobody is fully prepared to lose it all. This is where crowdfunding comes in.”

HelpersUnite has also launched a parallel web site, SandyStatus.org, that acts as a crowdsourced information repository. The site draws from sources like Instagram, Twitter, and RSS Feeds and aggregates all of this data in one place.

Other crowdfunding campaigns want to gather funds to transfer directly to the Red Cross. Restore the Shore has leveraged the Selfstarter.us platform developed and open-sourced by the makers of Lockitron. To date, they have raised just short of $100,000, which isn’t bad for a campaign that declared a $25,000 goal. Donations undoubtedly will climb higher with 24 days left in the campaign. Those who donate are rewarded with apparel commemorating Hurricane Sandy, as well as a mention on the campaign’s site.

Additionally, there are concerns about people fraudulently trying to collect funds for disaster relief, and crowdfunding is certainly subject to this. However, portals are doing everything they can to ensure the sanctity of their offerings. Many of those seeking donations make their contact information available on offering pages, and portals have their own criteria for receiving donations as well. For example, HelpersUnite requires victims to post a video outlining the damage and needs of the individual or family.

Crowdfunding is establishing a niche in disaster relief while organizations like the Red Cross are coming under scrutiny. Some of those affected by Sandy have been less than satisfied with the response, including Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro, who called the Red Cross’ response an “absolute disgrace.”

The Red Cross has been scrutinized before for everything from the misallocation of funds to a lack of efficiency and oversight. However, there are also numerous stories of the good they’re doing in the wake of Sandy. The question is whether we lean too hard on legacy organizations during crisis situations.

Crowdfunding is providing a valuable alternative and could create a healthy separation of powers for future relief efforts. Organizations like the Red Cross are often first on the scene of major disasters and can provide essential services in the short term, but crowdfunding can serve as a more direct way for victims to seek the monetary relief necessary for long-term stability.

Charles Luzar is the Director of Crowded Media Group and Crowdfund Insider, a blog dedicated to crowdfunding in the United States and around the world. Crowdfund Insider is helping to bring a global perspective to crowdfunding in advance of the JOBS Act becoming law in 2013.

Hurricane Sandy photo via keikolynn/Instagram

In the wake of the worst storm New York City has ever seen, the tech community here has come together to help those in need.

New York’s techies are coordinating donation efforts, co-working spaces, and their technical skills to simply do good wherever possible. They’re certainly not alone — volunteer efforts throughout the city sprang up almost immediately after Sandy, and there are so many looking to help out that they’re being turned away from shelters and other relief efforts.

But the tech community has shown that, with its particular set of skills, it can organize and deploy assistance for major disasters just as well as it does for hackathons and meetups.

The New York Tech Meetup, the city’s largest group of techies, reached out to its 28,000-plus base to build a database of volunteers willing to contribute their technical skills. NYTM is also asking local organizations to get in touch if they need any technical assistance. Now more than 30 Sandy-related hacking projects have been proposed, including NeedMapper, which aims to connect Sandy victims in need people with people who can help, and Disaster Recovery Site, a platform for dealing with future disasters.

SandyBaggers, a grassroots group formed by NYC entrepreneurs, kicked off a donation drive (photo above) this morning to bring supplies to areas still struggling after Sandy. More than 40 volunteers showed up to send off several carloads of supplies to Staten Island and Far Rockaway, Queens in the first two hours of the drive. So far, it has sent five teams to Staten Island and four to the Rockaways. (If you’d like to drop off supplies, they’ll be at the corner of Union Square West and East 17th in Manhattan until 3 p.m. this afternoon.)

“We are truly grassroots and do not claim to be experts, but we have successfully created a community of smart, hip and talented people looking to make positive change,” SandyBagger’s co-founder Divya Kapasi, a consultant at DDK, said in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “We are starting with Sandy Relief, but the possibilities are endless as we start to organically grow.”

In an interview earlier today, Kapasi said that she and the other SandyBaggers co-founders, M.E.S.S. Express founder and CEO Matthew Kochman, Prance Wear co-founder Antonia Dunbar, and Fdbk co-founder Jonathan Swerdlin, were all frustrated by the current methods for offering aid. So they pulled their entrepreneurial experience together to build SandyBaggers. The group received more than 500 followers on their Facebook page in the first 48 hours and spent Saturday canvasing communities to learn what they needed. Today’s donation drive is just the first of many relief efforts the group plans to push, Kapasi said.

Noel Hidalgo, who previously served as director of technology innovation for the New York Senate, and is involved in countless projects in NYC, also created a co-working CrowdMap, allowing anyone to find a or list available office space within the city.

“I witnessed and received several communications from people with displaced teams who were desperate to find a way to get back to work,” wrote Tony Bacigalupo, founder of the co-working space New Work City, in a blog entry where he argued that such spaces could be essential to disaster recovery. “By having a place to point them to, I could easily get them hooked up with a location within biking distance that could help them get online in a timely fashion,” he added.

These are just a few of the many relief efforts being tackled by NYC’s tech community, we’ll be highlighting more throughout the day. Check back for updates!

When Hurricane Sandy took out the data center that hosts Gawker, Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and many other sites, those sites went dark. But they weren’t offline for long: Buzzfeed and Gawker both turned to popular blogging service Tumblr (also based in New York) to continue bringing news of the storm and everything else to the public.

While Buzzfeed was able to get back up on its own servers in a few days, Gawker’s network of sites — including Gizmodo, Deadspin, io9, and Jezebel — is still living primarily on Tumblr. What you’ll find among these makeshift sites is the same content you’d normally find there, only with a more liberal approach to posting content.

Some stories don’t have headlines and others are “reblogs” from other Gawker Tumblr sites. The makeshift Tumblrs also feature a cleaner design that brings back memories of what Gawker used to look like before its 2011 redesign.

“All things considered, we’ve done a great job,” Gizmodo writer Leslie Horn told me from a temporary office. “It’s been stressful and disheartening, but I think there’s a silver lining in all of it. We proved to others that even a hurricane can’t stop Gawker.”

The company has done surprisingly well with Tumblr, taking advantage of the flexible platform and letting writers go wild. Some of my favorite posts this week include “Manhattan’s Impending Uptown-Downtown Civil War: Who Will Win?” and the “8 Tips For Tending to a Glamorous Drug Addict After Hurricane Sandy“. Gizmodo even continued to post full product reviews, and Horn set up a Tumblr called Gizmodo: The Movie.

“Tumblr is a largely amateur world,” Gizmodo Editor-in-Chief Joe Brown said. “These guys are professional bloggers. You give them these tools, they are going to blow the average out of the water.”

While the new design carries almost no ads, each site has a prominent State Farm sponsorship message at the top of the homepage, showing that the business side of Gawker is just as resilient as its technical and editorial components.

“Everyone has stepped up really well,” Brown said. “Within five minutes, it was apparent how we were going to handle it.”

Brown said Gawker’s network of sites should be back to normal on Monday, granted everything goes to plan. He noted that Gizmodo has no plans to continue using Tumblr, even for promotional use, as it does with Facebook and Twitter. However, he said it’s always an option.

“We reserve the right to influence and invade every dark corner of the Internet,” Brown said. “We have no plans to use Tumblr going forward, but we always could go that direction.”

While I’ll miss the fun, sometimes crazy content the Gawker team has put together using Tumblr, I can appreciate a company getting back to normal after a damaging and disastrous event.

Sandy’s timing couldn’t have been worse, as the Weather Company is in the early stages of a massive transformation, transitioning from 13 global data centers to managed hosting in Amazon’s cloud.

Perhaps it was lucky number 13, however, because in spite of a Boston data center being caught in the storm, the company’s 100-strong technical team maintained the site, apps, and services at a 99% uptime rating throughout the storm.

I talked to the Weather Company’s chief information officer, Bryson Koehler, about how they did it.

“We saw double the traffic that we’ve ever seen before on our digital platforms,” Koehler told me. “We had to handle 10X the traffic we’ve ever had before.”

The Weather Company delivers news on basically any medium you can imagine: the original TV show, smartphone apps, tablet apps, live streaming video online, print, radio, and APIs for partners all over the globe. On a typical day, the company serves the equivalent of about 40 million pageviews on its digital platforms, and it has previously seen service interruptions when the number approached only 120-140 million.

But on Monday, the company was serving 110 gigabytes of data per second, almost without a hiccup, not counting the livestreams — 170 thousand simultaneous streams of live video, pushed out over the Internet.

The question is: how?

While the Amazon Web Services integration is still mainly in the future, The Weather Company did have several hundred instances running at 100% capacity, Koehler said, telling me that the scalability was “exactly what you would expect,” as was the cost efficiency.

But the company had significant help from three additional critical partners.

“We relied very heavily on three partners that helped us deal with the sudden surge: Verizon, Akamai, Google were great throughout the storm.”

Akamai, of course, accelerates and distributes site load. Verizon manages some of the company’s data centers and much of its networking infrastructure, adding gigabytes of capacity literally in real time during the course of the hurricane. Google manages the livestreams, as The Weather Company delivers live video via a partnership with YouTube.

But the 13 data centers were key to the service’s resilience. Like any large organization that has been built over time and acquired other companies, Koehler said, there’s a mix of technologies.

“You end up with a good bunch of technologies that come together, but for the most part, we run Linux servers, Apache for web serving, Tomcat for our app server, and VMware for virtualization. MySQL is our core weather database.”

More than the technology, though, Koehler said it’s about the team. The Weather Company put together a 100-person hurricane team: technicians, system administrators, and networking specialists. “We were very prepared,” he said.

photo credit: cab234 via photopin cc

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The sweetly named but oh-so-devastating storm that hit the mid-Atlantic with deadly force also shook up Twitter as people turned to the information network’s airways to share and search about Sandy.

People sent more than 20 million tweets about the storm between October 27 and November 1, Twitter said in a tweet today.

On Monday, October 29, search queries about Sandy peaked at 20 percent of all Twitter searches, the company added. In addition, Twitter mobile usage from people in New York hit max levels around 9 p.m. Eastern on Monday, around the same time as the ConEd explosion. The mobile usage represented more than double that of the previous two days.

Twitter wasn’t the only social network with Sandy-related spikes in activity. On October 29, Instagram said members were sharing photos from the storm, using hashtags #hurricanesandy, #sandy, and #frankenstorm, at a rate of nearly 10 per second.

The storm also dominated conversations on Facebook. On October 29, Sandy registered an 8.34 on Facebook’s Talk Meter, a tool that measures event-related chatter on a 10-point scale. For comparison, only the Super Bowl had a higher Talk Meter score (8.62) than Sandy in terms of major of events for the year. By Tuesday, the top shared terms by people in the U.S. on Facebook were “we are ok,” “power,” and “damage.”

Photo credit: id-iom/Flickr

While imagery of a powerless Manhattan is common in disaster movies, it’s something that New Yorkers have been seeing firsthand since Sandy struck on Monday. But it won’t last much longer: New York power company Consolidated Edison confirmed this morning that it expects to restore power to Manhattan on Saturday.

Con Ed spokesperson Mike Clendenin made the announcement this morning, correcting another spokesperson who had claimed Manhattan’s power would be restored later today, Bloomberg reports.

Update: Con Ed has clarified the above comments further. 6,500 lower Manhattan customers will get power today, while the rest of the island will be restored tomorrow.

Around 900,000 New Yorkers lost power when Sandy hit, and today 570,000 still don’t have any service. Con Ed says the majority of its affected customers should have power again by November 11. Altogether, Sandy knocked out power from around 8.5 million on the East Coast. The storm has so far claimed 39 lives in New York and 14 in New Jersey.

Manhattan lost power below 34th Street, which made for some eery imagery where the lower part of the island was in the dark (see picture above), while everything seemed fine in Midtown and above.

“As of 5 a.m. today, Con Edison had 226,000 customers without power in Manhattan, 84,000 in Queens, 35,000 in Brooklyn, 54,000 in Staten Island and 31,000 in the Bronx,” according to an earlier Bloomberg report from this morning. “In Westchester County, the company reported 140,000 customers out of service.”

Economic losses from Sandy could reach $30 billion to $50 billion, the New York Times reports, based on figures from analysis firm Eqecat.

Restoring power to Manhattan is just one step in a prolonged process to make things normal again in New York City. The subway system is only partially restored, thanks to continued flooding and equipment issues, and there’s still plenty of cleanup left. Commuters are making their way into Manhattan via partially restored commuter rails, bus service bringing people over from Brooklyn (bridging disabled subway lines), and carpooling to meet the city’s three-person requirement for passenger vehicles.

Business were also brought to a standstill after Sandy’s onslaught. The New York Stock Exchange opened yesterday after being shut down for two days, while others in the city are scavenging for coworking space. But many won’t be able to do anything until the lights are back on.

Photo: David Shankbone/Flickr

It’s a good day for giving donations. Apple rolled out its Red Cross donation page on iTunes, and now Facebook is testing “charitable contributions” on its new Gifts feature.

Gifts was first introduced in September and is the social network’s first jump into the exchange of physical goods. It’s Gifts predecessor was an icon exchange system, where people would buy or earn a $1 teddy bear, flowers, heart-shaped icon and send it to a friend. After awhile, people became bored with the digital goods and stopped using it, but the model still works. Now, users can buy a real teddy bear, send it to a friend, who will confirm the gift and enter shipping information.

But in situations like Hurricane Sandy, which ripped through Northeastern states in the U.S. this week, Gifts could prove to be another avenue for donating. If a friend’s basement was flooded, or car was destroyed by a fallen tree, you could “gift” them a donation to the Red Cross or another organization.

Facebook partnered with a number of these organizations right off the bat. These include the American Red Cross, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and Water.org.

Not everyone has the Gifts feature yet, however, so you might have to be patient before you can start using the service. There are a number of other ways you can help with Hurricane Sandy relief, however, including donations through eBay, iTunes (as mentioned before), and good old text messages. Text 90999 to give $10 to the Red Cross.

Gift image via Shutterstock

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, car ride service Uber is instituting surge pricing in New York City — higher prices during a time of higher demand for rides.

Yesterday, the company set up an emergency pricing scheme that allowed drivers to take a double fee while riders paid a single fee and Uber collected no fees for those rides. All told, Uber paid out around $100,000 in a single day to NYC drivers, according to an email sent from the company.

However, Uber reps noted that the scheme was “something we can’t continue indefinitely without breaking the bank.” So for today, surge pricing will be in effect.

Surge pricing means that, due to high demand, prices for Uber rides will temporarily be higher. According to the email,

Without raising the price, there will be less than ½ the number of drivers on the system with several times more demand on far fewer drivers. Without Surge Pricing, Uber would become essentially unusable this week. For those needing a ride this week, it’s going to be expensive; there will be a clear pricing notification in the app at the time of request. During this emergency price increase, Uber will waive all of its own fees with 100 percent of the fare going directly to the drivers helping New Yorkers move around the city.

Here’s what the price updates will look like within the app:

Previously, Uber has instituted surge pricing during high-demand times such as party-heavy holidays like New Year’s Eve and Halloween.

But while the ploy is a commercial success (higher fees mean more drivers are willing to work, thus creating more supply to match the increased demand), it’s been a PR flop in the recent past.

As VentureBeat guest columnist Rocky Agrawal wrote in the days after New Year’s Eve surge pricing, “When people feel ripped off, they don’t want to hear about economic theory or the team of Ph.Ds you have developing optimal supply and demand mechanisms.

“Most people have a sense of what is ‘fair.’ Study after study has shown that people will make suboptimal economic decisions in the name of fairness. Product and pricing decisions have to take that into account.”

And we’re pretty sure New Yorkers won’t see today’s price increases — whether it’s a 1.5x bump or a 6.75x hike, which we’ve seen before in Manhattan — as fair.

The Red Cross is accepting donations to those affected by Sandy through Apple’s iTunes today. Apple has used its entertainment marketplace as a way to solicit donations since 2010.

Hurricane Sandy hit the North East as a downgraded storm on Monday, flooding homes, tunnels, parking lots, subways, and much more. Many lost power, and wind and falling trees further damaged property. The New York Times says the death toll is as high as 70 people.

The Red Cross needs both money and blood donations to help keep up with the damage. A marketplace such as iTunes helps the Red Cross get a lot more eyeballs on the cause, not to mention you have to give Apple kudos for its easy checkout process. Donating is as simple as downloading a song.

As Apple Insider notes, Apple previously used iTunes to solicit donations when an earthquake destroyed parts of Haiti in 2010, killing thousands. The service also took donations when Japan experienced its deadly earthquake in 2011.

But Apple isn’t the only marketplace helping out. eBay has also set up its own landing page for donating to the storm-relief efforts. There are three ways you can donate here. You can buy a product that has a blue ribbon on it, indicating that a percentage of the proceeds go to Sandy. Those products also show which organization the money is going to. Organizations such as the American Red Cross and Team Rubicon are represented.

Alternatively, you can simply donate through PayPal, or you can sell a product and donate a percentage of your own proceeds to an organization helping those affected by Sandy.

Of course, you can also donate $10 to the Red Cross by texting 90999 or by going directly to its website. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) gives tips on how to donate safely. It notes that “cash is the most efficient method of donating,” since it’s liquid. It also warns that you should always donate through an organization or charity you trust. This is especially true online. You never know who will set up an opportunistic fake account to grab some extra cash.

But importantly, FEMA also reminds donors to be patient. While there’s a lot of media attention now, recovery will likely last for awhile, and your help will be much appreciated in the months ahead as well.

NYPD van image via david_shankbone/Flickr

An incredible new video shot from Brooklyn’s 2 Northside Piers shows superstorm Sandy hitting New York City over the course of a few days.

At about the half-way point of the video (1:02), you can actually see lower Manhattan lose power. It’s a spooky moment and one that will resonate with all New Yorkers who are currently trying to cope with the loss of lives and damage to their homes. The VentureBeat team in New York was fortunate; we didn’t have any serious issues. But our hearts go out to all of those affected by the storm.

Since this video has no music, I’ve added another video below that you can play simultaneously to give the time-lapse an even more dramatic edge.

h/t Gawker

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Following Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught on the New York City area, those affected are coming together to help rebuild their communities. In that same spirit, AT&T and T-Mobile just announced that they will temporarily share their networks in New York and New Jersey, which means there will be more cellular capacity for available to subscribers.

The companies say you’ll be able to make calls as normal, but your call will actually routed through the best network available in your area. Subscribers don’t have to worry about making any changes to their plans. This simple roaming is possible because both AT&T and T-Mobile rely on the same standards for their networks.

Hurricane Sandy hit the New York tri-state area on Monday night, knocking out power to millions and putting much of lower Manhattan underwater. Today more than 760,000 people in New York alone are still without power.

The arrangement between AT&T and T-Mobile may seem like a simple deal, but it has the potential to save lives.

Photo: David Shankbone/Flickr

Yesterday the Weather Company, which is the country’s biggest weather service, had a record traffic day with almost a half a billion pageviews as Americans flocked to its website, mobile apps, and video live streams to watch, wonder, and be warned at the devastation Sandy is bringing to the eastern United States.

That devastation includes perhaps 8 million out of power, at least six nuclear power plants shut down, and at least 16 dead in seven states.

On Monday Weather.com alone had a record 298 million pageviews, Melissa Medori, the Weather Channel’s public relations manager told me. That’s double the previous record, and triple what the site did during Hurricane Irene.

Wondering how The Weather Company’s servers survived? We asked them.

Part of Hurricane Sandy’s handiwork

The site’s mobile apps saw another 125 million page views (including a record number of video views), so totaling up all the digital audience with a few smaller sites, The Weather Company’s properties had 450 million pageviews in a single day.

That’s 200 million more than the previous record, set on February 1, 2011, during the historic snowstorm that saw 2o” of snow in some places in central and eastern U.S.

In addition, including all video streams across Weather.com and the site’s YouTube channel, the company delivered more than 9.6 million total live video streams, peaking at 167,000 concurrent viewers.

All of which means, Medori told me, that Weather.com had just as much video viewership as the Weather Channel itself — which at times yesterday had more viewership by itself than all the cable news networks combined.

Apparently, the site administrators are planning for an even bigger day. For the sake of those caught in the path of the storm, one can only hope that there is less to see.

photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via photopin cc, MTAPhotos via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Twitter has turned into an intense, indispensable hub of information about Hurricane Sandy and the damage it’s doing to the East Coast of the U.S.

The hashtag #sandy collects many of the latest updates about the current hurricane, links to photos and video, and information about where the power is out and where the flooding is happening.

But how do you use Twitter if the power is out — or if you no longer have internet access?

Fortunately, the makers of Twitter have you covered. If you have a phone capable of sending and receiving SMS text messages, you can use Twitter — as long as the cellular network is online, that is.

The key is the Twitter shortcode: 40404.

Fast follow: When you need to start getting updates right away

In fact, you don’t even need a Twitter account to use it. You can simply type “follow [username]” in a text message and send it to 40404, and Twitter will start sending all of that username’s updates to your phone.

Text the word OFF or STOP to 40404 to stop the updates from coming. Want to turn them back on? Text ON to 40404. Learn more about Twitter Fast Follow.

You might want to follow FEMA (@fema), CNN’s breaking news feed (@cnnbrk), NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg (@mikebloomberg), or  the National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic). You don’t need to include the @ sign in usernames when texting commands to Twitter.)

Connect your existing Twitter account to your phone

If you’ve already got a Twitter account, text the word START to 40404. Twitter will reply and ask you to confirm by texting YES back to it, then texting your Twitter username, then your password. That will link your phone number with your Twitter account.

Getting all of your Twitter feed’s updates as text messages would be insane — your phone would be pinging all day long. But you can start the flow of messages from just one or a handful of accounts pretty easily: just text “ON [username]” to 40404 to start the flow for that user, and “OFF [username]” to turn it off. You’ll still be following the user on Twitter whether or not you’ve turned text notifications on or offer.

You can also follow a new user via SMS with the command “FOLLOW [username]“. That will subscribe you to the user on Twitter and also turn on phone notifications. Instead of tapping out FOLLOW you can also just type “F [username]“.

To stop text notifications and unsubscribe from someone on Twitter, send the command “UNFOLLOW [username].”

To turn all phone notifications from Twitter on or off, just text ON or OFF to 40404.

Learn more about Twitter’s SMS commands.

Use Twitter with caution

Twitter is great for getting rapid-fire updates from the front lines of the storm. But remember that there’s a lot of misinformation on Twitter too. Don’t rely on it as a source of emergency information unless you can confirm the source. The Atlantic Wire is doing a good job of funneling information about the hurricane and dispelling some of the rumors. Of course, that’s only going to be useful to you if you’ve still got internet access.

Remember that Twitter is only as reliable as the phone networks that carry its text messages and the servers that it runs on. Often, text messages can get through even when voice and data networks are over capacity. But if the whole cellular network is completely down, your phone won’t be send or receive anything at all, including SMS.

And don’t try to use Twitter to call for help in a true emergency. Dialing 911 is what you need if you’re really in trouble.

What are the Twitter accounts you find most useful for getting hurricane info? Post their usernames here in the comments.

With Hurricane Sandy blowing across the East Coast of the United States, you might be looking for online resources to keep real-time tabs on the storm. If so, take a look below at five great ways to track Sandy’s impact online.

1. The Weather Channel Livestream

In an unusual move, The Weather Channel is livestreaming coverage of Sandy on YouTube. If you still have power, this is one of the best ways to keep on top of what’s happening right now. The Weather Channel’s website also does a great job of condensing relevant info, and its pageviews have soared during Sandy.

2. Twitter

Twitter is always a great resource for real-time news and updates. Using the hashtag #Sandy, news organizations and individuals are posting the latest news about the damaging storm.

3. New York Times

The New York Times has dropped its online paywall for the storm to help keep people in the know. The organization is compiling live updates about Sandy’s progress in one place, and the coverage isn’t just focused on New York. It also has a map that is tracking Sandy’s whereabouts.

4. Google Crisis Map

Google is doing its part to help people keep people updated on Sandy as well with its Crisis Map. The map shows Sandy’s current location, the forecasted track of the storm, active emergency shelters, current weather radar, and more.

5. Instacane

While it’s not exactly providing up-to-the-minute data, Instacane does show the impact of Hurricane Sandy through the filters of Instagram. It’s a fascinating collection of first-hand photos from the storm.

Top photo: Nick Cope/Twitter
Instagram photo: Nigel Barker/Instagram

That’s what Hurricane Sandy is doing for Weather.com. As panicked coastal residents up and down the Eastern seaboard are wondering what mother nature is going to bring them, they’re going online. And Weather.com is a big beneficiary.

AdClarity, the advertising analytics tool, studied Weather.com for the past three days. It’s clear that big storms mean big traffic … and big ad numbers.

Weather.com is already the biggest and heaviest trafficked weather site in the U.S., an AdClarity spokesperson told me. But in the last week, its already-high traffic has jumped 20 percent.

Wondering how The Weather Company survived? We asked them.

And just yesterday? Almost 30 percent:

Source: Alexa

Weather.com traffic, as guesstimated by Alexa

That’s big news for the advertisers on the site, says AdClarity, who are now accessing even larger swaths of the population. Top advertisers include NationWide, with the insurance giant taking 11.5 percent of the available adspace, Travelers, and Advil.

Source: AdClarity

Travelers’ ad on Weather.com

AdClarity’s snapshot shows how marketers are reacting almost instantly to changing circumstances.

Travelers’ ads, for instance, highlight Hurricane Sandy by delivering almost a public service message: what your emergency kit should contain, how to prepare your home for a disaster, and so on.

Instant tailoring of ads and quick buying to jump on an opportunity shows the possibilities in real-time advertising, in which marketers adjust campaigns on the fly to fit news, trends, and even, in this case, weather.

The challenge in jumping all over advertising opportunities when a disaster is looming, of course, is avoiding the inevitable ambulance chaser comparisons.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google is just as freaked out about Hurricane Sandy as the rest of the East Coast. Today, the company canceled its New York Android event scheduled to take place on Monday.

It looked like Google didn’t want to be left out of the party when it announced its event to take place less than a week after Apple and Microsoft held their own. The company was expected to announce a new 10-inch Nexus tablet that is said to have 2,560  by 1,600 pixels. The tablet hardware is rumored to be built by Samsung and will have a higher resolution than Apple’s iPad.

Apple recently announced its fourth generation iPad during its event this week, along with an iPad mini that competes directly with Google’s Nexus 7.

The Nexus 7 was also rumored to be getting some love at the event in the form of an update to its 32GB model. Google was also remored to be releasing a cellular version of the tablet. To top it all off, many believe Google is ready to release its next version of its Android operating system.

As The Next Web notes, Google planned on having its event in what is now an evacuation zone in New York City. Looks like we’ll have to wait for the new products until after Sandy blows over.

Hurricane image via Shutterstock