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

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.

With a combination of old and new technology, NeedMapper is launching today to help coordinate requests for need from Sandy victims in New York City.

You can submit help requests to NeedMapper via text messages or an online submission form, and view unfulfilled requests through an online map. The service was built by the team from OrderMapper, a startup that lets businesses offer mobile delivery services, with sponsorship from Twilio.

You can create a help request by texting “NEED” to 607-269-HELP and remove it by texting “DONE” to the same number. Those looking to volunteer can contact people seeking help directly.

Jennifer Turliuk, a NYC technology evangelist who helped create NeedMapper along with the OrderMapper folks, tells us the project still needs quite a bit of help. In particular, they’re looking for testers, people to plug in help requests into their system, as well as Ruby on Rails advisers (and anyone else who can help them scale).

NeedMapper is just one of many projects that kicked off after the New York Tech Meetup put out a call for help last week. One thing’s for sure, we’ll certainly be better prepared with new high tech tools come the next big storm in NYC — as well as anywhere else in the world facing a major disaster.

Photo: David Shankbone/Flickr

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!

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

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