By Brian Kovalesky, StartUp Beat Editor,

It’s official—the holiday season has started, and with it the stream of new funding announcements has begun to slow. This week included seed and Series A announcements from a small, but interesting, group. They included $800K in Angel funding for New Orleans-based group decision-making startup VoteIt and medication search engine Diagnosia’s undisclosed seed round.

StartUp Beat this week featured Q&As with online shopping reviews site Trustpilot and data interoperability platform Flow, a Featured Startup Pitch from Proformative—a social networking tool specifically for corporate executives, and a Thanksgiving Day guest column from Charlie Born of Plimus about how startups are using the cloud and best practices for getting the most out of cloud-based tools.