July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The ongoing saga of approving taxi hailing apps in New York City is beginning to resemble a wild ride in one of the city’s taxis.

After getting the green light last week from a New York Supreme Court judge, NYC’s smartphone taxi hailing program has once again been blocked, Bloomberg reports. The program, announced in December by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, would make it possible for you to hail and pay for a taxi using a smartphone app.

This latest setback is bad news for taxi apps Uber and Hailo, which both just recently announced that they would be participating in the program. We’ve tried to get a comment from Hailo about the news, but their press representative hasn’t yet responded to us.

Several NYC taxi groups, including the Livery Roundtable and Black Car Assistance Corp., initially sued to block the hailing program in February, but their suit was dismissed last week by New York Supreme Court Judge Carole Huff. That decision was nullified today by an Associate Justice, Helen E. Freedman, who issued an emergency injunction of the hailing program, as well as a full review.

“This faux ‘pilot program’ is so fundamentally flawed and illegal in so many respects that it had to be stopped,” said Mastro, an attorney representing the livery cab companies, in an e-mail to Bloomberg. “And now it once again has been.”

We’re seeing a major struggle here between entrenched labor organizations and startups chomping at the bit to disrupt inefficient markets. The hailing program will likely get approved eventually, but expect to see a similar back-and-forth in other cities when it comes to taxi apps and other apps that significantly impact the real world.

New York City’s Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) is graduating 10 startups from its Winter 2013 class this morning, and we’re live at IAC’s Manhattan headquarters for their demo day presentations.

Today marks the end of a four-month program for the startups, which included a $40,000 investment from ERA (plus potential for follow-on funding), coworking space, legal advice, and an extensive network of more than 200 NYC startup mentors.

The companies each tackle a range of different topics — one aims to evolve affiliate marketing, while another simply wants to make it easier for restaurants to hire employees — but they’re all eager to contribute something significant to NYC’s startup scene.

Acquaintable

The Pitch: Makes it easier to meet new people, especially friends of friends.

Funding: Raising $500,000 with $200,000 already committed.

“I started Acquaintable because I gave up on online dating,” said co-founder Joel Rodriguez.

He pointed out that only 20 percent of single adults actively use online dating. When he investigated why, he discovered that it was because many people found it difficult to meet quality dates. On the other hand, 70 percent of people end up finding their significant others through friends. The need for an online dating site focused on friends of friends seemed clear.

In a beta test with thousands of users, Rodriguez said 15 percent of users returned daily (on par with top dating sites). Acquaintable also saw 20 percent more women using the site when compared to other top dating sites.

Cognical

The Pitch: Improves the accuracy of financial underwriting.

Funding: Raising $800,000 with $200,000 committed already.

“We help lenders identify the borrowers who will pay them back,” said Cognical co-founder Brandon Wright. The company’s “AI” engine can increase profit for lenders by 25 to 75 percent, he noted.

One of Cognical’s current users has managed to reduce loan defaults from 15.7 percent to just 2.9 percent after just one month. In particular, the company’s technology could make lenders make better decisions for payday loans, which account for 21 percent of loan defaults, even though they make up only 3 percent of all loans.

Consigned

The Pitch: Improves the affiliate marketing model by making anyone an online retailer.

[Check out our full coverage on Consignd.]

Instead of dealing with an online retailer’s affiliate program, Consignd lets you create your own storefront to show off cool products. You can also easily pin items from your storefront to your Pinterest account (no surprise there as Pinterest is incredbly popular for e-commerce).

By cutting out the online retailer middleman, Consignd lets both brands and their influences earn more money. The company now has more than 500 stores open by its users, who have a reach of more than 10 million people.

Co-founder Neil Parikh noted that Consignd now sees more pins on Pinterest than well-known brands like Warby Prker and Bonobos.

Easy Pairings

The Pitch: Streamlines the hiring process for restaurants and similar businesses.

Funding: Raising $500,000, with $190,000 committed so far.

With annual turnover rates for restaurants at more than 50 percent, and 13 million people employed by the food service industry, the time has come for a better solution for restaurant hiring than Craigslist, according to co-founder Darren Wan. The company’s service can lower hiring times from 18 days to just three days.

As Wan describes it, Easy Pairings’ technology can also apply to any industry with high turnover for entry positions.

Monaeo

The Pitch: Uses data analytics to make tax compliance easier.

Monaeo has developed a SaaS platform targeting the $10 billion market for location-based taxes, according to co-founder Anupam Singhal. The company’s software keeps track of where employees have been, which is crucial for tax compliance.
110 CPAs helped shape Monaeo’s software, and they’re also helping to beta test it.

The company also announced that it has formed a partnership with Expaticore, a company that helps businesses manage employees all over the world, giving it access to several Fortune 1,000 companies

TheSquareFoot

The Pitch: Simplifies commercial real estate leasing by bringing landlords, brokers, and tenants together.

Funding: Raised $400,000 so far, looking for additional strategic investments.

After launching its platform seven months ago, TheSquareFoot has helped more than 50 companies sign leases worth millions, according to co-founder Jonathan Wasserstrum.  The company doesn’t just help businesses find new offices, it also hooks them up with moving services, furniture setup, and telecom setup.

TheSquareFoot now has 75 percent of Houston’s commercial real estate in its system, Wasserstrum announced today. By the end of the year, the company expects to have all of the markets in Texas listed, and it will begin rolling out its service in New York City.

Startist

The Pitch: A platform for creative people to get together to collaborate on projects. Think of it like a Kickstarter for projects, instead of products.

“What if Mick Jagger never met Keith Richards?,” asked Startist’s co-founder and CEO Danny Oh. While Craigslist has been helpful, he pointed out that simple text-based listings aren’t very useful to creative types.

Startist lets creative people create rich media resumes, which lets you vet creative talent similar to how LinkedIn works for resumes.

“Creative people need to express themselves, and that expression often is an interchangeable medium,”  he said. “Writing about how good a dancer you are is like dancing to prove you’re a good fuckin’ accountant.”

Suitey

The Pitch: A tech-focused real estate brokerage to simplify buying, selling, and renting homes.

Funding: Raised $400,000 so far.

David Walker, Suitey’s co-founder, announced that it has completed transactions in every Manhattan neighborhood. Brokerage fees alone reached $60 billion last year, making it a ripe market for a startup to take advantage of.

“We are bringing transparency to online listing search,” Walker said.

The company has developed an elegant interactive map to browse its listings, and it also lets you start the home-buying process right on its site. Walker also noted that Suitey’s agents can complete three transactions in the time it takes a traditional broker to finish one.

Trendalytics

The Pitch: Support software for brands and retailers to keep track of merchandise trends.

Funding: Raising $800,000.

Big data meets fashion: Trendalytics software lets retail buyers know if they’re too early, too late, or right on time for choosing specific fashion trends.

Typically, apparel retailers end up marking down 50 percent of their merchandise, leading to $128 billion in lost value annually, according to co-founder Karen Moon.

VocalizeLocal

The Pitch: Offers marketing tools for companies to manage their online customer reviews, local directory information, and mobile presence.

Funding: Raising $700,000, currently has $350,000 committed.

83 percent of all purchases are now influenced by online and mobile revenues, VocalizeLocal’s founder Philip Krimz pointed out. So local businesses need a service that helps them manage the new digital world. VocalizeLocal is offering a solution that’s simple, affordable, and

Krims notes that businesses can increase their revenue 5 percent to 9 percent a year simply by adding one star to their online ratings. One local moving business that’s been using the service has seen 450 new customers and a 3X increase in local directory inquiries.

VocalizeLocal is already profitable and is seeing an annual revenue run-rate of  $400,000, Krims said.

How do you remake payphones for the modern age? That was the challenge New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a few months ago with the Reinvent Payphones initiative, which was meant to crowdsource ways to upgrade the city’s 11,000 payphones.

Now the entries are in, and the city has announced the five final prototypes, ranging from a beautiful reinvention of the traditional phone booth, to a sensor-equipped unit that can record environmental conditions.

While none of these designs will actually be used to replace the city’s payphones, they will serve to inspire what NYC actually adopts. “We thought the best way to get the most energy and best solutions is to approach the folks who are going to use it,” Rahul Merchant, head of NYC’s IT department, said at the prototype unveiling last night (via WNYC).

The prototypes were judged and given awards based on the following criteria:

• Connectivity: Ability to connect New Yorkers and enable communication, including for safety and emergency purposes.
• Creativity: Originality, innovation, and quality of idea.
• Visual Design: Including visual appeal and user experience
• Functionality: Flexibility, versatility, scalability, accessibility, and sustainability.
• Community Impact: Support of local residents, businesses, and cultural institutions.

The city will also announce a sixth prize, “Popular Choice,” based on votes from the Reinvent Payphones Facebook page. Voting ends at 5:00 p.m. Eastern on March 14, and the winner will be announced on March 15.

Best Creativity: Loop by FXFOWLE

My personal favorite design, Loop, morphs the traditional stand-up phone booth into something that’s multifunctional and unique, making it perfectly suited for city life.

The existing condition of the city-wide payphone system has created a latent opportunity to rethink the relationship between a more technologically-relevant, new payphone design and the city’s vibrant public space. The NYC Loop will serve as an access point to the latest technology while simultaneously supporting the public spaces that make NYC a unique place in which to live, visit and do business.

Best Visual Design: Beacon by Frog Design

Frog is a powerhouse design firm, so it’s no surprise that it ended up with the best-looking design.

Gently rising out of the sidewalk and topping out at nearly 12 feet, BEACON is a slender concrete and stainless steel structure enclosing a stack of indestructible LED matrix screens, similar to those found on Times Square billboards.

Best Connectivity: NYFi by Sage and Coombe Architects

More of a public information kiosk than a payphone, NYFi shows us how it may be more useful to consolidate services everyone uses today — buying metro cards, accessing information about local businesses, Wi-Fi — than replicating archaic technology.

Reinventing the Payphone is not only about a sleeker design or a digital display, it is about radically re-imagining a public amenity: how it will be used, and what it will provide.  Unlike today’s payphone, the NYFi is an interactive portal to public information, goods, and services, a hub for free wireless internet access, and an open infrastructure for future applications.

Best Community Impact (Tie):

NYC I/O by Control Group and Titan

This design aims to create a data network using the city’s cellphones while also adding new functionality like paying for parking tickets and metro cards.

By updating the payphone with a modern array of sensors and displays to create a foundational input/output system for an open, urban-scale computing platform, we can allow New York City to respond to and serve the people. Through open access to real time data and a distribution platform for community, civic, arts and commercial apps and messaging, we can create a safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable city.

Windchimes by NYU ITP, Cooper Union, Parsons

Another design that isn’t too constrained by the idea of a payphone, Windchimes is an interesting attempt to add more sensors throughout NYC.

Windchimes are environmental sensor stations that talk through payphones.  They can plug directly into existing technologies and communication infrastructure, making them low cost and immediately deployable. We imagined New York City’s existing 11,000 payphones as a distributed sensor network providing real-time and hyper-local records of the city’s rain levels, pollution, and other environmental conditions.

Best Functionality: Smart Sidewalks

by Syracuse University, UC Davis, Parsons, Rama Chorpash Design LLC, Cheng+Snyder

Why stop at the phone booth? Smart Sidewalks’ design is incredibly thin and extends right into the city’s sidewalks.

This proposal is driven by two competing aims: the desire to pack as much function into a single device as possible and the opposite urge: to reduce the literal and figurative footprint of the phone.

NEW YORK CITY — In his ongoing effort to make New York City a technological powerhouse, Mayor Michael Bloomberg today revealed the 20 middle schools and high schools picked for the city’s new Software Engineering Pilot (SEP) program.

As part of the program, the schools will get “comprehensive computer science and software engineering curriculum” for around 1,000 students. The program will launch this September and is expected to grow to 3,5000 students by 2016.

For its first year, the SEP’s core topics include computer programming, embedded electronics, web design and programming, e-textiles, robotics, and mobile computing. Elective classes include 3D printing, digital fabrication, and animation. The program also includes training for teachers.

“We know it’s vital to prepare our children to succeed in an increasingly technology-centered economy, and the Software Engineering Pilot will help us do just that,” Bloomberg said in a statement today. “This groundbreaking program will ensure that more students receive computer science and software engineering instruction so that they can compete for the tech jobs that are increasingly becoming a part of our city’s economy. We’re creating the home-grown workforce our city needs and teaching our students skills that will open up new doors for them and their future.”

The announcement follows the “Made in NYC” campaign that Bloomberg announced last week, which supports the city’s startup community. Students participating in the SEP program will likely be strong applicants for Cornell NYC Tech’s campus, which is scheduled to open in 2017 (classes have already begun in temporary Manhattan locations). If all goes according to plan, NYC’s engineer shortage will be less of a problem in several years.

The 20 NYC schools selected for the program are:

• High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology
• Brooklyn Technical High School
• The Bronx Compass High School
• The Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation
• Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology
• Queens Vocational & Technical High School
• Cambria Heights Academy
• Ralph McKee High School
• New Dorp High School
• Ditmas Intermediate School 62
• I.S. 30 Mary White Ovington
• Mark Twain I.S. 239 for the Gifted and Talented
• Bronx Park Middle School
• M.S. 223 The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology
• Tompkins Square Middle School
• Nathaniel Hawthorne Middle School 74
• J.H.S. 185 Edward Bleeker
• Pathways College Preparatory School
• J.H.S. 157 Stephen A. Halsey
• Eagle Academy for Young Men

Watch Bloomberg’s announcement from the High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn below:

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

New York City Mayor Bloomberg describes himself as an “entrepreneur” first and foremost on Twitter, so it’s no surprise that he’s launching a new initiative to support local tech startups.

Dubbed “We are made in NY,” the program includes a new website to highlight the city’s resources for entrepreneurs, including subsidized office space and grants as well as job listings at 900 local startups. New Yorkers should expect to see a series of digital ads on subways and buses to highlight the campaign.

“Growing our local tech industry is an important part of our economic development strategy to bring new businesses to our city and more jobs opportunities to New Yorkers,” said Bloomberg in a statement. The mayor’s office recruited the city’s chief digital officer Rachel Haot and media and entertainment commissioner Katherine Olivia to lead the initiative.

Considering a career change? The site includes an extensive list of tech companies in New York — and many of them are hiring. Kickstarter, Etsy, ZocDoc and many other high-profile startups are based in the Big Apple.

The new website features an interactive map of New York City’s tech startups.

Local entrepreneur Matthew Hogan said the initiative evokes a “strong sense of pride in the NYC startup community.” Hogan is the founder of an early-stage startup called DataCoup; he said resources like these are a life-saver for entrepreneurs living in a fast-paced and expensive city like New York. “The sense of camaraderie is heightened when we recognize others that are fighting as hard as ourselves.”

According to Bloomberg Ventures’ Matt Turck, the initiative demonstrates that the administration “truly gets it” and is “driven by a mayor who’s himself an an extraordinarily successful tech entrepreneur.” He added that the city is now well on its way to “reinventing itself as major tech hub.”

Turck, who recently spoke with VentureBeat about the shortage of data scientists, said he hopes the ad campaign will build the public’s confidence in tech startups — a career path that is “at least as desirable as a job on Wall Street.”

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian is one of many well-known tech entrepreneurs that have lent their support to the campaign. He said in a statement that he’s “thrilled be part of a vibrant industry that has not only been hiring New Yorkers, but hiring them to help change the world.”

For more info, check out the promo video below.

Hadley Harris is a general partner at ENIAC Ventures and Chief Business Development Officer at Thumb.

As a NYC based investor, it’s been pretty incredible to watch New York’s startup scene grow into a dynamic tech playground over the past few years. Even though Silicon Valley will continue to be the start up mecca for years to come, VCs, large tech companies and the technology press have recognized New York’s blossoming tech scene and quickly scrambled to get feet on the street. In fact, there has been so much action lately that the New York City Mayor’s Office created the Made in NY Map to showcase the growing tech community.

Based on investments alone, New York has seen a growth of 32 percent in VC deals from 2007 to 2011. New York’s tech scene has skyrocketed in the past 5 years, with tech related jobs increasing 28.7 percent since 2007. Tech publications have followed startups and investors in suit; VentureBeat opened its New York office in October and TechCrunch opened up NYC office hours last May as the startup scene continued to flourish.

As New York continues to carve out its place in the startup world, it’s interesting to take a look at how it has distinguished itself from Silicon Valley — its challenges and advantages, and how its companies differ from those of West Coast origin.

Funding is one area with significant differences. The ratio of investors to startups in New York’s ecosystem is relatively skewed, which brings about some limitations. While seed stage investment has grown over the last few years, there are still not enough mid-stage venture investors to fund NYC’s tech startups. From Q2 2011 to Q2 2012, the percentage of NY seed stage investments increased from 25 percent to 31 percent. In contrast, Series B investments shrunk from 25% to a mere 14%. New York startups grabbed $2.8 billion in funding last year, but this pales in comparison to the over 1,200 SV companies that raked in $12 billion.

As an active investor on both coasts, I’ve seen this imbalance play out in the valuations that startups garner from investors.  I’d estimate that the same company would get about a 25 percent higher valuation if it is based in the Bay Area as opposed to NYC. As the next wave of successful seed stage companies progress to raising series A and B rounds, look for more mid stage investment activity in NYC.  We’ve already seen investors such as Accel, First Round, NEA, Matrix and Bain Capital Ventures open offices here to address the city’s growing venture market.  As New York’s startup battlefield continues to grow, I expect to see even more investors and companies gravitate towards NYC.

Silicon Alley’s expansion is also rooted in certain characteristics particular to New York. As a long-established center of industries such as finance, fashion, advertising and media, New York has amassed a large pool of extremely talented people from those industries. While the Bay Area also has a high concentration of talent, New York’s broader talent mix has given those companies a particular edge and core philosophies. This is one of the main reasons why large West Coast tech companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook have opened significant offices here — to take advantage of this talent pool.

It’s also the melding of these industries with technology that makes the NYC tech scene special.  Take fashion and commerce startups such as Gilt, Etsy, Warby Parker and Birchbox, or adtech companies such as TapAd, LocalResponse, OnSwipe andAppNexus. Fashion and advertising have long been booming in New York, but in the past few years they have branched into the tech space, creating several successful companies at those industry intersections. As startups arise in New York, many of those brilliant people are joining emerging companies and strengthening them with influence from these creative industries.

A third difference between companies sprouting out of New York and those from the Valley is in the focus on growth over engagement, especially in social startups. Silicon Valley-based companies are often more concerned with quickly scaling huge user bases rather than staying true to the company’s core values and building a real business. For example, in 2012, Bay Area social companies such as Socialcam, Zynga and Google with Google+ have touted huge user bases, but haven’t been able to back metrics like users or views up with anything that resembles strong engagement.

There is a trend amongst Silicon Valley companies of stopping at nothing to grow user numbers, which isn’t always best for the company. In New York however, we’ve watched companies such as Thumb and Tumblr rock the engagement charts. Thumb has amassed a loyal and engaged following, with users spending over 5 hours per month sharing and requesting opinions, while Tumblr users spend an average of 89 minutes on the service’s website each month. This number might be lower than Thumbs, but it is still significant considering that Thumb is second only to Facebook in terms of monthly user engagement per monthly average user.

Much of this success can be attributed to these companies staying laser-focused on their missions – focusing on engagement with an eye towards monetization. Even Silicon Valley-based investors are starting to take notice — recently, Andreessen Horowitz came out against so-called “bullshit metrics” such as page views, and emphasized the importance of user engagement instead. With companies in NYC leading this movement, it will be interesting to watch as Silicon Alley continues to rise in the ranks in 2013. As we move into the new year, I think it’s a safe bet that startups in Silicon Valley will take a cue from NYC and start to focus more on engagement and building a brand that resonates with its users, over strictly honing in on user numbers.

Hadley Harris, a Founding General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, has been actively working at the intersection of business and technology for more than 13 years. He is a noted expert in user acquisition, monetization and seed stage investing. In addition to serving as General Partner at ENIAC, Hadley is the Chief Business Development Officer at Thumb.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

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When it came time for VC firm Lightbank to open its first office outside of Chicago, its partners — including Groupon founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky — looked east to New York City, instead of Silicon Valley.

Today the venture capital firm is officially announcing the opening of its second office, in NYC’s Flatiron District, which will be headed up by Lightbank principal Vicki Levine. The NYC office will help Lightbank score more early-stage deals in the city and along the East Coast and better serve the NYC startups it’s already invested in, like Centzy and OnSwipe. It will also help Lightbank become a bigger part of the city’s tech ecosystem.

So why NYC instead of the Valley? In an interview with VentureBeat last week, Levine listed plenty of reasons: “The type of companies and the type of entrepreneurs we find in New York resonates well with what we’ve seen in Chicago. … We looked at where the portfolio was going, as well as larger investments, and NYC sat very well.”

Levine also saw plenty of potential with the close proximity of several industries in NYC, like fashion, advertising, and media. “The industries, partnerships, and users are all in New York,” she said. Levine has a mechanical engineering and physics background, and she also spent several years as an engineer at Motorola. She seemed excited to bring some of that rare technical background to the city.

Mostly though, it looks like Lightbank is trying to make its way into NYC’s young technology scene before things get too crowded. All of the firm’s partners and principals will play a role in the NYC office, and some of them have already been involved with deals in the city.

“Philosophically, we’ve been outspoken champions of Chicago, and also champions of the reality that tech businesses can be built in lots of places,” Lightbank general partner Brad Keywell told VentureBeat in an interview. “We’ve proven that by virtue of the companies we’ve built, like Echo and Groupon. … Philosophically, NYC has had the same battle cry, you can build great world class businesses in New York.”

Keywell pointed out that Lightbank is also interested in extending its reach as operationally oriented partners with entrepreneurs. The firm has developed in-house resources like talent scouts, customer acquisition specialists, mobile developers, and a marketing group. “A number of companies are choosing to use what we’ve built so they can focus on their core business models,” Keywell said.

“New York won’t be the Valley, it’ll be something different,” Levine said as our conversation ended. “When you think about the comparisons, New York doesn’t want to be the Valley. All the ingredients are there to make it a crazy tech epicenter on its own.”

Lightbank has invested in more than 50 startups since its founding in 2010. Lightbank has raised more than $1.5 billion and generated over $7 billion in equity value in that time. Together with its founders, it has also launched nine companies.

After successfully rallying New York City’s tech community around policy issues like SOPA and PIPA, as well as the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, the New York Tech Meetup (NYTM) aims to play a more steady role when it comes to the city’s technology policy.

NYTM is taking advantage of its more than 29,000 members by starting discussions around significant policy issues like making high-speed broadband readily available at low-cost and making tech-skills a component of the education system. The results of the discussions will be brought to the attention of candidates running for public office later this year.

With elections taking place for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough presidents, and city council seats, this year is a good opportunity for the tech community to make its voice heard. NYTM has been the heart of NYC’s burgeoning tech community for years, so it’s an ideal outfit to actually make a difference with city politicians.

The meetup is encouraging its members to add to its policy goals, share the initiative over social media, and host public policy meetups of their own.

“It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the opportunity ahead of us,” said the NYTM board in a blog post today. “The policies implemented by public officials going forward will have a profound effect on the city’s future, so by doing our part to ensure the candidates are well-informed and are committed to implementing sound policies, we’ll have played a significant role in helping make a better NYC for everyone for a long time to come.”

Here are the initial policy goals NYTM is pursuing:

1. Make New York City the most wired city on earth by providing every New Yorker and every New York business regardless of location access to the fastest broadband networks at the lowest cost.
2. Reinvent the education system to allow every child, young adult, and all New Yorkers to develop the skills necessary to thrive in a 21st century economy.
3. Make New York City the clear choice for entrepreneurs, software engineers, and other technically skilled professionals to start a business and build a career by making it easy to find partners, financing, office space and housing, employees, and access to markets.
4. Support the appointment of a deputy mayor for technology innovation with an appropriate budget charged with the responsibility of reinventing New York City government with a 21st century framework.
5. Make New York City’s system for civic participation the most open, transparent, accountable, participatory, and innovative in the world.
6. Make New York City the most citizen-connected community on earth, where its people connect with each other to unleash a powerful 21st century economy: Selling to each other, renting to each other, funding each other, sharing with each other, coworking with each other, meeting up with each other, and hiring each other.
7. Support public policies that would ensure that technology and the opportunities available to the tech community can reach all New York’s citizens, and help solve issues related to healthcare, human rights and justice, gender equality, transportation, the environment, and other issues of fundamental importance to all New Yorkers.

Photo via Chris Isherwood/Flickr

The memory of Aaron Swartz remains strong more than a week after his tragic death, judging from the turnout at his memorial service in New York City tonight.

Around 900 people attended the service at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, which featured a selection of speakers close to Swartz. In addition to remembering his life and accomplishments, there was also a constant push towards political action — something that makes it clear Swartz’s legacy will live on for some time.

You can watch the entire service online at the Remember Aaron Swartz memorial site.

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the founder of corporate responsibility site SumofUs.org and Swartz’s partner, noted that the best tribute would be for “all of us to go out today and fight to make the world a better place.”

She pushed for five main goals for the audience: Making sure the Massachusetts U.S. attorneys office was held accountable for its tactics prosecuting Swartz; opening up all academic research to anyone in the world for free; making sure MIT vowed never to be part of a similar event; strengthen the criminal reform system; and help pass Aaron’s Law, which would limit the number of charges that can be brought against someone who violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

“Aaron believed there was no shame in failure,” Stinebricker-Kauffman said. “There is deep, deep shame in caring more about believing you’re changing the world than actually changing the world.”

Quinn Norton, an activist, technology writer, and former partner of Swartz’s, stressed that we should also remember him as “another human being with all the flaws and glories that we all have.” She noted that he could be petty and greedy, while also being loving and hopeful. “But in a culture that is ruled by fear, he taught and showed me that trying is more important than being afraid,” she said.

Other speakers included Roy Singham, chair of IT consulting group Thoughtworks (where Swartz was working before his death); executive director of Demand Progress David Segal; and renowned information design writer Edward Tufte.

Earlier today, Wikileaks claimed that Swartz was also a possible source. While the group says it can’t verify if Swartz indeed contributed leaked information, its mission certainly falls in line with Swartz’s drive for making information free and public.

Photo: Flickr/Daniel Sieradski

With the cost of college education on the rise and unemployment still high, many students might be questioning the value of a traditional college education. Enstitute, a New York City-based non-profit, is attempting a new spin on higher-ed with two-year apprenticeship programs in some of the city’s most prominent companies.

The goal: instead of just reading about or being lectured on specific industries, students can actually get their hands dirty with some real-world experience, while also being mentored by notable thinkers and entrepreneurs.

Today, Enstitute is announcing that it’s partnering with The Huffington Post, General Assembly, and Buzzfeed as it expands the focus of its apprenticeships beyond tech startups. Now Enstitute is also offering apprenticeships in digital media and advertising as well as non-profit and social good organizations. You can check out a full list of participating NYC companies here.

I had dinner with Enstitute’s current class of fellows a few months ago (above), and I was struck by how excited they all were to be involved with the program. If they were terrified about straying from the traditional college route, they certainly didn’t show it. The program’s fellows can still go off to attend college once they graduate, but at least then they’ll have far more real work experience than typical college students.

More partners will be announced leading up to the February 3 application deadline for Enstitute’s 2013 program. Anyone over 18 with a high school diploma can apply to Enstitute’s program.

Jasmine Gao, an Enstitute fellow working at Bit.ly under its data scientist rockstar Hilary Mason, had no regrets about leaving college to pursue the program. In a statement today, Gao said, “The current state of higher education has you waiting 4 years to apply the abstract concepts you learn in class with no guarantee of any measurable impact on your career or the world you’re trying to change — in Enstitute, there is no buffer time, and you learn very quickly whether or not something works or brings any value to what you’re trying to do.”

Other Enstitute entrepreneur mentors include LocalResponse CEO Nihal Mehta, Tracks CEO Vic Singh (both of whom are partners at Eniac Ventures), and Ben Lerer, CEO of Thrillist.

Launch.it, a New York City-based startup that has built a platform for managing and distributing news, has been tapped to power the onslaught of news coming from startups at the Consumer Electronics Show next month.

The company will serve as a news platform for exhibitors at Eureka Park, the startup innovation portion of CES, as part of its partnership with the Consumer Electronics Association. Launch.it will provide a central spot for startups to publish their news and contact information at CES, as well as provide detailed analytics about visitors.

In short, it’s a far better alternative to throwing flash drives and PDFs at journalists and prospective investors. For startups, Launch.it gives them one place to send anyone interested in their company. And for journalists and everyone else, they’ll know exactly where to go to learn more about an intriguing startup.

“Our big vision is a free self-publishing platform to unlock the news,” said Trace Cohen, president and co-founder of Launch.it. “We want to be the biggest searchable database [of news] … almost to disintermediate Google.”

For its customers, Launch.it offers a bunch of useful features, including: a Wiki-like environment to allow customers to easily update their news, Facebook comments, the ability to buy and test out services, and the ability to let media and investors “follow” companies for instant news updates.

While Launch.it is starting with Eureka Park for now, its goal is to eventually offer a centralized spot for the thousands of companies exhibiting at CES, Cohen tells me. The father and son company (chief executive Brian Cohen is Trace’s father) has also partnered with Ultralight Startups and ShowStoppers, which runs product showcase events at popular conferences. So far, Launch.it powers news sites for around 300 to 400 companies.

You’d think by now that someone would have come up with a solution to modernizing the news distribution process, but Cohen tells me he was just as surprised at the lack of innovation in the market when he kicked off Launch.it at the New York Tech Meetup in May. One potential competitor is Virtual Press Office, which was acquired by PRNewswire in 2009, but Cohen notes that’s less appealing than his company since it resells wire services and isn’t consumer-facing. (Also, Virtual Press Office looks like it was made a decade ago.)

Launch.it is completely bootstrapped and only has three employees (along with an “off-shore” tech team in Long Island), but Cohen says the company is looking for strategic partnerships.

Photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

With more than 11,000 payphones that need to be replaced by October 2014, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is tapping into the local tech community to come up with radical new payphone ideas.

Today at the New York Tech Meetup, NYC’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot announced Reinvent Payphones, an initiative to collect virtual and physical prototypes for new payphones from the public.

“We want to invite your prototypes and help build something that could potentially impact the future of payphone infrastructure in NYC,” Haot said.

“We need to replace them, reinvent them, bring these things into the 21st century,” Bloomberg said in a cheeky pre-recorded video conversation with Haot.

In a world increasingly dominated by smartphones and tablets, it’s certainly easy to ignore the lowly payphone. But with such massive infrastructure already in place for NYC’s payphones, they’re also ripe for a complete revamp.

We’ve already seen the city experiment with touchscreens and Wi-Fi hotspots in payphones, but it seems the Mayor’s office is looking for even crazier ideas. “It doesn’t even have to look like a payphone,” Haot noted.

The city will choose up to 15 prototypes to be shown off at a Demo Day on March 5, 2013. The winner will be selected by a panel of judges, including Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, DoSomething CEO Nancy Lublin, Startup Box CEO Majora Carter, 3rd Ward CEO Jason Goodman, and Beth Novek, founder of the White House Open Government Initiative.

“[Payphones are] technologically the most valuable asset we have in the city, and it’d be wrong of us to replace one payphone with just another payphone,” said NYC’s chief information and innovation officer Rahul Merchant at the tech meetup.

We love our gadgets. Unfortunately, so do thieves.

That’s why Gazelle, a leading gadget trade-in site that has already bought more than a million phones, laptops, and tablets from consumers, is implementing CheckMEND, a service that compiles 150 billion digital records on stolen devices from carriers, police, the FBI, and more.

“Essentially, we’ll check whether a smartphone or tablet has been reported lost or stolen,” Gazelle’s Sarah Welch told me yesterday. “When we receive an item we’re checking it against the database, and if it’s been reported stolel we won’t pay the sender.”

Thieves’ problem, of course, is turning plastic, glass, metal, and electrons into cash. That’s where, too often reseller sites come along — sites where anyone can send electronics in exchange for cash. Now, however, that’s going to be harder, if not impossible.

Gazelle is the first consumer electronics trade-in site to implement CheckMEND. The system isn’t perfect — potentially stolen devices will be returned to senders, not sent to police — but it’s a good start at making crime pay less.

I asked Welch why Gazelle is doing this, and whether this wouldn’t actually hurt business.

“There will be some transactions that we’re saying no to, and it may be a small revenue hit in the short term,” she answered. “But we think this is the right thing to do. We pioneered this space and we think this should be standard … and from a longer-term brand effect it will be a positive.”

I wondered aloud what Gazelle actually does with all the phones it buys from people.

Apparently the company, which provides a free data wipe service so customers’ data isn’t compromised, sells a few of its phones via eBay, but most to wholesalers who refurb them and re-sell them domestically and abroad. In fact, chances are if you’ve ever been compensated by an insurance agency with a replacement for a lost device,  it may have come from Gazelle or another trade-in site.

The new CheckMEND service is provided by a UK-based company, Recipero, which has recently expanded to the U.S. Despite its relatively recent introduction to the market, Recipero says its already “the largest U.S. consumer electronics background report service.”

In the future, CheckMEND review may actually take place on the front end of the transaction, online or via an app, which would address the stolen-or-not issue before the device shows up at Gazelle’s offices. For now, that’s a little too complex a solution.

photo credit: West Midlands Police via photopin cc

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!

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

With a new office and growing staff, VentureBeat is ready to take on New York City’s vibrant technology scene.

We officially planted our flag in NYC this week with a private launch party, where we invited key members from the tech community to drink, chat, and reflect on where the city is headed.

VentureBeat has actually had a footprint in New York City for some time — I joined in 2010 (after freelancing for several months), and we hired Sean Ludwig as a staff writer in 2011. This year, VentureBeat hired our first NYC sales person, Angie Waters. We’ve also brought on Ricardo Bilton (formerly of ZDNet) as a contributor, and have had great contributions from NYC-based writers such as Ben Popper and Erica Berger.  But things really took off once our founder and editor-in-chief Matt Marshall moved from San Francisco to New York City in July.

Now we have a new office (a lovely coworking space with the Internet Media Labs folks), and we’ve hired Ken Beach as our chief revenue officer.

After announcing the finalists for NYC’s top tech influencers last week, we named Nate Westheimer (right, together with Marshall), who’s been executive director of the New York Tech Meetup for the past few years, as our choice for the City’s #1 tech influencer. With more than 28,000 members, NYTM has remained one of the central events for the tech community to rally around.

Every monthly NYTM meeting (which are always sold out) is a chance for startups to pitch their ideas and meet new members of the community. For me, and many members of the tech community that I know, NYTM is the heart of tech in NYC.

LocalResponse CEO Nihal Mehta won the popular vote in our influencer contest (he also made sure to rib Westheimer about his win), and he was followed up in votes by TechStar’s Dave Tisch.

It also wouldn’t be a New York City party without a random celebrity sighting. We spotted reality star Lo Bosworth, of MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills fame, with her entourage chatting about some of her new projects.

VentureBeat would like to thank Flurry for sponsoring the event (Flurry’s VP of direct media Long Ellis braved the crowd to discuss what he’s doing in New York), and DJ Dojah for carving out time from his own NYC trip to play our party. (Additional thanks to Dojah for playing the 8-bit Punch-Out!! theme.)

Just one day before Windows 8 hits retail and online stores, Microsoft has corralled journalists, analysts, and its partners to officially kick off the new operating system.

After a bombastic opening video, Microsoft’s Windows head Steven Sinofsky bounded on stage to announce that Microsoft has sold more than 670 million Windows 7 licenses, including to more than half of the major enterprise companies. But with Windows 8, he said that Microsoft is aiming to bring computing to “the next billion people.”

Windows 8 is also available for download today for existing Windows users who wish to upgrade.

Across all of Microsoft’s early Windows 8 releases available to the public, Sinofsky said that the OS has had more than 1.24 billion hours of prerelease testing. He also noted that more than 1,000 new PCs have been certified for Windows 8 — including traditional laptops, tablets, and laptop/tablet hybrids.

With Windows 8 also comes the Windows Store, Microsoft’s new app marketplace. According to Sinofsky, it’s launching with more apps than any competing app store had at their launch.

Sinofsky proceed to introduce Windows RT, Microsoft’s Windows 8 variant for ultrathin ARM-powered devices. Windows RT is also powering Microsoft’s Surface tablet, which is launching tomorrow as well.

Microsoft’s Julie Larson-Green, Windows VP of program management, and Mike Angiulo, Windows VP for planning and hardware partners, showed off some of the new Windows 8-powered PCs. Angiulo noted that by upgrading his Thinkpad Carbon X1 to Windows 8, he managed to get 33 percent faster boot times (versus Windows 7).

“What you’ve seen and heard should leave no doubt that Windows 8 shatters perceptions as to what a PC really is,” Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said when he stepped on stage, with the enthusiasm of a quarterback gearing up for the Super Bowl. “Windows 8 will do everything, and will frankly make it a lot easier to do nothing,” he added.

Proudly, Ballmer proclaimed that more than 400 million PCs will be sold within the next year, according to figures from analysts.

With complete confidence, Ballmer encouraged the crowd to head out to stores and try out new Windows 8 machines. “In the case of Windows 8, seeing touching, clicking, and swiping is really believing,” he said.

VentureBeat’s been taking a close look at the New York City startup scene. You’ve seen our top New York City technology influencers, but we also want to spotlight the top 10 most interesting startups the city has to offer.

We wanted to look beyond well-established names like Foursquare and Tumblr to find some lesser known startups that VentureBeat’s New York City crew — national editor Devindra Hardawar, cloud lead Sean Ludwig, and contributor Ricardo Bilton —  find especially exciting.

In particular, we wanted to choose startups pursuing radically different things than Silicon Valley and other tech hubs. These picks are uniquely New York in many ways.

VentureBeat has had a New York City office for a while already, but now that our editor-in-chief Matt Marshall is settled in the city, we’re officially launching our East Coast headquarters this week with a private party. If you want to snag an invite, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, then send a tweet to the @VentureBeat Twitter account with the hashtag #vblaunch telling us why you should be there. We’ll choose five winners on the morning of October 24.

Without further ado, here are our top 10:

33Across

It’s hard to make sense of everything happening across the social web — especially for brands and publishers. 33Across’s Brand Graph offers a suite of tools and technology to help major brands, including Fox, Time, and MTV, better push their products and content across social media. The company also bought Tynt earlier this year to offer publishers a better way to track how their content is shared.

“Social is transforming the world. Publishers need to understand the data, actions, and graph around their readers … to understand how all of the data is being shared,” 33Across chief executive Eric Wheeler told us in January.

33Across recently raised $13.1 million in a third round of funding, bringing its total to more than $26 million. Investors include First Round Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Pelion Venture Partners.

By approaching the social web as a “big data” problem, 33Across is tapping into what’s truly meaningful about social media.

Chartbeat

Chartbeat provides publishers and websites with real-time analytics that tell them how popular content is right now. Sites can use this wealth of info to take action like rearrange front-page content, push popular stories to other networks, and more. Sites owned by The New York Times, Starbucks, and the United States Government use the service. (VentureBeat does as well!)

“The big goal is to make everyone feel like a data scientist,” Lauryn Bennett, Chartbeat’s head of brand, told us in April when Chartbeat redesigned. “We want to make sure the people on the front lines of these sites feel like they can understand, react, and predict how to capitalize on their traffic.”

Chartbeat was incubated at Betaworks, which also has its hands in startups like Digg, Bitly, Rap Genius, and Livestar. The company has raised around $13.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Index Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and others. With that backing, we expect big things.

Codecademy

With coders in great demand nowadays, lots of people are scrambling to learn the esoteric art of programming. And that’s where New York-based Codecademy steps in. Launched in 2011, Codecademy helps users learn programming languages like Python, Javascript, and Ruby while motivating them with badges and rewards. It’s the sort of learning only the Internet can enable.

And for co-founder Zach Sims, Codecademy represents the first time programming has been completely democratized.

“It’s available to anyone with a computer and it’s easy to follow. We think creating a new generation of programmers will help to raise employment and the standard of living for those individuals. It’s preparing the world for the future,” Sims told VentureBeat last year.

That’s a compelling argument not only for those who have used Codecademy, but also for those who have opted to invest in it. So far, the company has raised $12.5 million, which is reason enough to suspect that there’s something to its business model.

Kickstarter

If you’ve heard the term crowdfunding, you have Kickstarter to thank for it. Founded in 2009, the site started off as a funding platform for creative projects. But in the past year, we’ve seen several Kickstarter projects raise millions on the service — like the Pebble E-Ink smart watch and the Ouya Android game console — all without giving up any equity to investors. The crowdfunding model is great for tinkerers, but it’s also a fundamental shift for consumers, who can now have a closer relationship with the products they buy. (For some people, funding Kickstarter projects is practically an addiction.)

Kickstarter raised $10 million in funding last year from Union Square Ventures, Zach Klein, Caterina Fake, and others.

Learnvest

For too long, financial planning has been something reserved for the rich. Learnvest is aiming to change all of that with an online service that helps you manage money, as well as subscription plans that give you access to real life Certified Financial Planners. It’s not just another Mint.com — Learnvest connects to your financial accounts to help you keep track of spending, but it also offers helpful visualizations and an easy way to track cash purchases as well. And if you sign up for a premium account, you’ll have a real person holding you accountable.

“I just want to make financial planning really consumable — right now it’s not a consumer product,” Alexa Von Tobel, LearnVest’s founder and CEO, told VentureBeat in an interview in September.

LearnVest has raised around $25 million from Accel Partners, Rose Tech Ventures, Richmond Management, and others.

MakerBot

Born and bred in Brooklyn, MakerBot has established itself as one of the coolest, most interesting companies in 3D printing today.

3D printing is poised to completely shift the way we both consume and create. Instead of buying their kids toys, for example, parents can design and print them in their own homes. 3D printing may also change the way hardware stores like Home Depot do business. After all, what’s the point of maintaining inventory when stores can just print out parts when customers come in and request them?

Fresh off the launch of its latest 3D printer, the Replicator 2, Makerbot’s biggest challenge nowadays is not only making its devices more powerful, but cutting their prices as well. So far, however, the company is focused on the former.

“Before we make 3D printing cheap, we have to make it excellent,” Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis said in September. So far, the company has raised $10 million from Foundry Group, Bezos Expeditions, and others.

An affable visionary, Pettis rose to mainstream stardom last month when he and the Replicator were featured on the cover of Wired. The magazine’s take: The Replicator 2 will change the world.

NumberFire

Love fantasy sports? Meet NumberFire, the startup that uses “big data” to help its users dominate their fantasy sports leagues. The service, led by CEO Nik Bonaddio, provides statistics and recommendations about which players they should have on their teams. At the beginning of this year’s football season, Bonaddio said NumberFire’s revenue was up 800 percent and users up 300 percent year-over-year.

“We generate new recommendations on a daily basis and send them to your inbox,” Bonaddio told us in September. “Whether it’s adding players, dropping players, or initiating trades, you’re covered.”

Bonaddio, a winner of $100,000 on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, used earnings from that show to start NumberFire, and he likes to joke that Regis Philbin was his angel investor. On top of Bonaddio’s money, the company has also raised $650,000 from RRE Ventures, TechStars’ David Tisch, and Pennyblack’s Eliot Durbin.

Thrillist

Few startups nowadays are as tied to New York  as Thrillist.

Founded in 2004, Thrillist began as a small email newsletter tailored to urban males. Today, it generates over $40 million a year and reaches five million people each day.

Business development vice president Shane Rahmani told VentureBeat earlier this year that at the core of this growth is Thrillist’s no-compromise editorial strategy.

“We’ve always had a focus on building a really strong voice and connecting commerce and editorial content. The guys we speak to are an elusive, affluent demographic, and their BS detector is finely tuned,” he said in February.

Thrillist’s biggest news of the year came that same month, when CEO Ben Lerer announced the creation of Thrillist Media Group, a new parent company that combines Thrillist, Thrillist Rewards, and JackThreads. The company has raised $10 million so far from Oak Investment Partners, Lerer Ventures, and Pilot Group.

As with many of Thrillist’s moves, that one was done in an effort to further expand the company’s scope. This means more cash from brands, who are always eager to tap into the sort of cleanly defined male demographics that Thrillist resonates so strongly with.

Yext

Here’s a company doing some truly interesting things around a seemingly mundane topic: online listings for local businesses. Yext started out as a phone transcription service but quickly realized it could help out local businesses more by giving them one place to manage their online identity. Yext lets businesses make sure their information is accurate on 50 online publishers, including Yelp, MapQuest, and Bing.

“Starting a business is a scary proposition, but it’s even scarier to bet a company that’s doing $30 million in revenue this year — and growing — on a totally unproven business model,” Yext CEO and co-founder Howard Lerman told VentureBeat in an interview back in June. “To the credit of my team, they didn’t blink when I said we were doing something else. … I’m not even sure we recognized how crazy it was [at the time].”

Yext recently raised $27 million in a fifth round of funding, bringing its total to more than $65 million from Marker, CrunchFund, Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), WGI Group, and others.

ZocDoc

ZocDoc, a startup that helps people schedule doctor appointments online, first caught our eye back in 2008 when it attracted funding from power players including Khosla Ventures, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Since then, the company has been expanding quickly, attracting lots of capital to reach $95 million in funding, and adding killer new features like ZocDoc Check-In. The startup’s service is available in 31 U.S. metropolitan areas and will soon open a second office in Phoenix to help with customer service and sales.

“Of all the things you have to book in your life, health care services are arguably the most frustrating,” ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi told VentureBeat last year. “Our belief is that for all those people who book services like travel, hotels, or restaurants online, health care is the most important service and should have easy access.”

While ZocDoc’s mission is simple, Massoumi’s words echo loudly. Americans want health care to be easier to manage. ZocDoc can help you find doctors and rate your visits. This increases pressure on doctors to be good with patients and makes it simpler to find the right medical professionals.

While these are the ten companies intriguing us the most in NYC, we’re always on the lookout for new innovations. Let us know in the comments if there are any NYC startups that you find particularly exciting. And stay tuned to VentureBeat, as we bring you the best NYC has to offer.

Top Photo: Devindra Hardawar

A while back we asked for your nominations for New York City’s most influential techie. Now we’re, ready to announce a list of finalists — one of whom we’ll name our top Silicon Alley tech influencer later this month.

The group of finalists all embody the energy and passion that we’re finding so remarkable about New York City’s tech community. We’re highlighting the VCs, entrepreneurs, and community leaders (many are an impressive combination of these categories) that have all made a significant impact in the city.

These individuals are especially important now as New York City is cementing itself as a technology hub. We’ve seen major companies rise up over the past few years, and a concerted effort from Mayor Bloomberg’s office to push digital initiatives. And in a few years, we’ll see additional technology schools from Cornell and NYU, which should generate a healthy supply of engineers to the startups that desperately need them (not to mention sparking another wave of entrepreneurs).

But it all starts with amazing people, like these.

Rachel Haot

Chief Digital Officer, City of New York

Formerly Rachel Sterne (before she married Livestream CEO Max Haot), Haot landed the newly created role of NYC’s Chief Digital Officer after proving her tech savvy as founder of the social news site GroundReport. She also ran her own independent digital strategy firm for several years, and has served as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School (where she taught a course on social media entrepreneurship).

Haot has been a prominent voice in the New York City tech scene for several years now, and these days she’s a constant presence with Mayor Bloomberg whenever he makes a tech-related announcement (most recently at Boxee’s headquarters).  As chief digital officer, she put together a digital road map for NYC and is always working to promote digital initiatives that can help New Yorkers.

Hilary Mason

Chief Scientist, Bitly; Co-founder, HackNY
Bitly is more than just a link shortening service — mostly thanks to the work of one Hilary Mason. As chief data scientist, she dives into the company’s massive trove of data to come up with new products and features. It also wouldn’t be a stretch to call her New York City’s hacker queen. Mason co-founded HackNY, a non-profit that brings together student hackers with startups. And she’s also a member of the hacker collective NYCResistor.

Cyrus Massoumi

Co-founder & CEO, ZocDoc

On paper, ZocDoc sounds like a fairly simple idea: It offers an easy way for you to find and make doctor appointments online. But from that kernel of an idea, Massoumi has built a fast-growing service with more than 1.8 million monthly patients and around $95 million in funding. Now the company is also aiming to rid patients from the chore of filling out paper medical forms. ZocDoc proves that NYC isn’t just a home for media and social startups — even health technology can succeed here.

Nihal Mehta

Co-founder & CEO, LocalResponse
Now on his fifth startup, Mehta may just be the model CEO that every budding NYC entrepreneur aspires to be — and it’s not just because he spends an insane amount of time at work. Mehta’s also dedicated to helping out the community whenever possible: He made a New Year’s resolution to meet a new entrepreneur every day, and failing that he aims to teach classes at NYU, he told the Next Web. Together with some friends, he also co-founded ENIAC Ventures, a seed stage investment firm focusing on mobile.

David Tisch

Co-founder & Former Managing Director, TechStars NYC

When Bloomberg decided to air a reality TV series based on one of TechStars NYC’, it’s not hard to imagine that the energetic (and often foul-mouthed) Tisch was one of the main attractions for the network. Tisch spent two years leading TechStars NYC accelerator program, where helped 36 companies build their businesses. Of those, 34 are still active and have raised more than $50 million.

Tisch is also a managing partner at BoxGroup, an angel investment firm for early stage companies. He’s made investments in more than 40 NYC companies, including Fab, Boxee, and GrouMe. Even though he stepped down from his managing director role at TechStars NYC in August, Tisch remains involved with the group as an investor, mentor, and co-founder.

Nate Westheimer

Entrepreneur, Executive Director, New York Tech Meetup

If there’s one defining gathering for this city’s tech crowd, it’s the more than 28,000 member strong New York Tech Meetup. Since he took over organizing the event in 2008, Westheimer has helped grow its member base from 7,500 members. He’s helped to promote and rally NYC’s techies, while at the same time pursuing his own startups, including AnyClip and PictureLife. He also serves as an advisor to Flybridge Capital Partners.

Fred Wilson

Co-founder/Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures

A longtime venture capitalist and insightful blogger, Wilson has been the most vocal proponents of New York City as a hot spot for building technology companies. At Union Square Ventures he helped to land some notable investments in NYC startups like Tumblr, Foursquare, and Kickstarter (not to mention big West Coast investments in Twitter and Zynga).

He’s also been offering up free advice to entrepreneurs at his personal blog, A VC, since 2003. Though Wilson rarely takes the media spotlight himself, his enduring efforts to help and promote the NYC tech community have made him a legend. (Personal aside: his blog was one of the many forces that drove me to move to New York to cover tech.)

VentureBeat will be hosting a private launch party this week in New York City. Want to snag an invite? If so, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, then send a tweet to the @VentureBeat Twitter account with the hashtag #vblaunch telling us why you should be there. We’ll choose five winners on the morning of October 24.

Who deserves to be the top Silicon Alley influencer? Cast your vote in the poll below, and tell us more in the comments. (VentureBeat will pick the winner, but your votes will be taken into consideration.)

Top photo via Chris Isherwood/Flickr

It was only a matter of time before MESA, a NYC-based investment bank focusing on middle-market media deals, launched a fund of its own. Today the bank is announcing MESA+, a new $10 million seed and Series A venture fund aimed at media-focused startups.

The launch is yet another sign that investors are paying attention to NYC’s fast-growing technology community. MESA was founded in 2008 based on boutique banking initiatives — basically, working on smaller, more specialized deals than traditional investment firms.

“We would never go out and raise a traditional fund that competes with sponsors of our core clients,” said Mark Patricof, managing partner at MESA in an interview with VentureBeat. MESA+ is a fund concept that will “connect the dots, but not compete with” top 25 funds, he added.

Staying true to MESA’s boutique focus, the firm chose to stick with a $10 million fund size, even though it could have easily bumped it to $20 to $30 million, Patricof said. The smaller size forces the firm to think more carefully about the startups it’s investing in and allows MESA to spend more individual time helping its portfolio companies.

Other partners in MESA+ include Jacob Brody, MESA’s man on the ground seeking out startup talent, and MESA vice president Andrew Montgomery. (Full disclosure: Brody was also a contributor to VentureBeat prior to joining MESA.)

MESA+ will also serve to connect startups with large media partners, something the firm has been doing for a while now. “Sometimes the startup people don’t understand what media companies are looking for … who will be their internal champion, we can help put those two together,” said Montgomery. Conversely, MESA+ will also serve big corporations by trendspotting startups.

The partners expect MESA+ to invest in 50 to 70 companies with a focus on New York (though they say they’re still considering global investments). The fund’s portfolio currently includes the ad company Bread and image analytics firm TripleLift. MESA+ has invested in seven companies in New York and California together with Google Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and other big firms.

Photo via Shutterstock

Slowly, but surely, Cornell’s New York City technology school is becoming more of a reality. Today Cornell revealed four new renderings of the Roosevelt Island-based technology campus to coincide with the beginning of its land use review process.

“Just as Cornell Tech will be pioneering new approaches to graduate research and education, our campus won’t look like any other university campus that exists today,” Daniel Huttenlocher, Dean of Cornell Tech, said in a statement today. “We are determined to innovate in every aspect of the development, from the way that students, faculty, researchers, industry and the local community are intermingled, to the sustainability of our buildings and their iconic architecture.”

Renderings are often an idealistic look at how large construction projects will turn out, but Cornell’s NYC Tech campus should still be memorable even if it only approaches a fraction of the design vision we’re seeing today. The new renderings feature the school’s first academic building, which Cornell plans to make a net-zero energy development thanks to an array of rooftop solar panels.

It should take Cornell around seven months to complete the land use review process, and it plans to begin construction in 2014. Cornell plans to open the campus in 2017 and finish construction by 2037 (it’s certainly a good thing the design looks so futuristic). The school is also  accepting applications for a “beta” class of computer science masters students, who will take classes in Google’s Chelsea headquarters.

Cornell NYC Tech recently announced that it will be working together with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to help students and researchers quickly patent products and inventions.

NEW YORK — In a city that’s no stranger to startup incubators and accelerators, how do you do something different? The cofounders of IncubateNYC, Brian Shields and Marcus Mayo, are taking up that challenge with an early-stage business program that offers a community support structure, workshops, and a mentor network for budding entrepreneurs.

Participants have to apply for the IncubateNYC program and pay a $50 monthly fee, but unlike accelerators, you don’t have to give up any equity in your company. (On the flip side, you don’t get any seed funding from IncubateNYC.) In exchange, you get access to a group of like-minded entrepreneurs and advisers to help you develop your business idea.

“The moment you stop thinking about your idea is when your business dies,” Shields said at the IncubateNYC launch party last night, held at Google’s headquarters in the city. “We’re trying to save ideas and businesses out here.”

Ultimately, the goal of IncubateNYC is to make entrepreneurship more accessible, Shields said. The program consists of a five-week intensive workshop, followed up with weekly meetings to keep participants on track. IncubateNYC also continues to help out participants after they launch their businesses (this is where the mentor network becomes really helpful). It has partnered with Google and Columbia University, and it currently operates out of Harlem and Manhattan.

In more than one way, IncubateNYC resembles a startup version of a book club — other members in your class hold you accountable for work you promised to do, and they also collaborate with you on the viability of your business direction.

Shields acknowledges that they may not be able to attract the same level of startup that NYC’s many incubators do, like Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and TechStars. But from what I gathered at the launch event last night, IncubateNYC is far more interested in helping entrepreneurs develop their ideas, instead of being focused on building the next Facebook.

After all, not every startup can be massively successful — but plenty of them can still be viable businesses.

IncubateNYC’s generally inclusive attitude on entrepreneurs also makes it the most diverse startup group I’ve seen in the city. Instead of being overrun by white men, the program’s participants so far have included plenty of minority and women entrepreneurs.

“Usually you invest in a business, sometimes you invest in a plan, but it has to be pretty good and well baked. But in this case a bunch of people came together and invested in a vision, and second in Brian and Marcus,” said IncubateNYC investor and adviser Jurgen Leijdekker, who also serves as a senior operating executive at Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe. “Our big bet is that this is a generation of entrepreneurs … that wants to strike their own path, is disenchanted with the corporate world, and is willing to take that risk.”

One of the first entrepreneurs to go through IncubateNYC’s pilot program was Eric Ho (above, together with Brian Shields), creator of Husky Chat, a Chrome app that lets you chat with other people on any website. Even though he had a working version of the chat service before he joined IncubateNYC, Ho says he received plenty of helpful advice from others in the program. In particular, he appreciated the structure and diverse community from Incubate NYC.

“A lot of the accelerators are industry focused, you’re kind of talking to yourself,” Ho said. “I look at incubateNYC as my Alcoholics Anonymous.”

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If you’re like most startups, you’re likely in a perpetual search for more and more funding. But shouldn’t you make sure you have a sustainable business first?

Thor Ernstsson thinks so. Ernstsson is the mind behind New York-based Casual Corp, a so-called social project studio that takes the funding-before-product start up model and turns it on its head.

Casual Corp allows its partner developers to rapidly develop prototypes and decide early on whether a project has any traction. It’s an interesting, if slightly unconventional approach that flies in the face of how most startups do business today.

“We’re not just supporting an idea. We’re supporting an actual product,” Ernstsson said from Casual Corps’ office in the lobby of a New York City hotel.

But Casual Corp does a bit more than enable rapid prototyping. There’s a format here that all its products follow, one that boils down to three words – casual, personal, and social.

• Engagement has to be casual, which means that users shouldn’t have to jump through any hoops to sign up. That’s where services like Facebook and Twitter are so important: They lower the barrier to entry.
• Casual Corp projects are also personal. Every user has to have their own experience, Ernstsson says, which makes things more relevant to them.
• Equally key is social pressure. “Users have to have a social reason to return,” Ernstsson said.

These traits are pivotal components of Casual Corp-backed projects like Send Your Best, Mogo, and Momental, all of which are built with them in mind.

But the Casual Corp founder tears things down a bit further: You may have a good product, but that doesn’t mean you have a sustainable venture.

“We focus on building products that also make for viable businesses,” he said.

To illustrate this, Ernstsson points to services like Twitter and Instagram (and, heck, even Facebook) that grew to a massive scale without concrete and proven business plans. That’s not a model that Casual Corp aims to follow.

Because the company is still in its infancy, the biggest question mark for the Casual Corp approach is just how effective it is. While the data is currently slim, Ernstsson says Casual Corp will have more to report as it continues to monitor Giftorious, its first spin off company.

And what happens when a Casual Crop-backed project does turn into something sustainable? It becomes its own company and enters into the start up funding frenzy that every other start up has to deal with. So while money is key, it isn’t everything. “It’s just one piece of the puzzle,” Ernstsson says.

Photo: Casual Corp

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Just like the city’s favorite progenies Andy Warhol and Madonna, the key to New York’s success is all about its “ability to continuously reinvent itself,” according to the NYC Economic Development Center.

Throughout Fashion Week and through the end of the month, the city is running its Project Pop-Up Store at the retail curation complex STORY on 10th Avenue in Chelsea. Here, the city awarded 11 new tech enterprises — including Perch Interactive, FashionGPS, and Acustom – with business mentoring support and demonstration space to help them connect with the small businesses of fashion. The city wants to give smaller fashion businesses the new ideas that will help them keep generating employment and add to the flow of shopping dollars into the city’s economy. A particular focus has been on propping up new retail models, as this part of the industry is still set for growth of 13% over the next 12 years, while manufacturing continues to decline, and wholesale/design stagnates.

“Our retail display technology is helping fashion, footwear, and accessories retailers to connect with a highly distracted audience”, said Perch Interactive creator, Jared Schiffman, referring to the impact showrooming is having on brick-and-mortar business. “Shoppers are using retail stores as giant, physical catalogues to get ideas for their ongoing mobile and web research. We help shoppers remember why they came to the store in the first place by creating interactive displays that encourage shoppers to touch and handle the products, forging a connection that bonds them to the product and store brand. Unlike traditional displays, Perch can be updated instantly, with fresh ideas and designs, and can pull data from Twitter, online reviews, and star ratings. That’s the sort of information people are looking for on their phones, while standing in the store.”

Bootstrapped by its founders, Perch is profitable and in the process of raising outside capital to accelerate its growth. The Perch Interactive premise is that 67% of shoppers who touch sample goods go on to purchase in-store, helping revitalize retail businesses and creating a multi-sensory shopper experience that can’t be replicated online.

Fellow winner FashionGPS uses barcode scanning technology to track and manage product samples sent to media outlets in order to improve the PR workflow chain which, historically, results in lost merchandise and missed opportunities as samples lay idle on editors’ desks instead of being featured in fashion magazines.

“Fashion GPS possesses an intrinsic value for emerging designers with limited resources. By streamlining the day to day operations associated with promoting their wares, brands both big and small are free to focus on their bottom lines,” says FashionGPS CEO, Eddie Mullon. They have calculated that when a brand misses out on the opportunity to promote their new season in the leading glossies, it is the equivalent of losing $54,742 in potential revenue. By better coordinating who has what samples for promotion and how the fashion media are using them, boutique and independent designer labels can scoop up more of this revenue, FashionGPS believes.

Another tech winner of Fashion Week’s Project Pop-Up Store was Acustom. Customers can book online for a personalized fitting in their New York showroom in order to have clothing tailor made to each shopper’s personal body measurements. Scanning technologies gives small businesses a competitive advantage over online retailers: the assurance that items purchased will fit well and look good. Internationally, this technology is already trickling in to fashion retail. Botisto, for example, has showrooms in Barcelona and South Korea that use a foot scanner to take measurements for Italian custom-made leather shoes. New York City’s promotion of Acustom is aimed at encouraging more of the 300,000 visitors who come to the city for its fashions to buy locally while they are here.

Too often, technology and social media innovation are expected to solve the problems of an industry coping with massive change from globalization, the digitizing economy, and the greater power of consumers to choose. By selecting tech entrepreneurs who are helping reshape how small local retailers sell to shoppers, New York City is hoping those businesses will have a longer lasting effect than some of the trends seen on this year’s Fashion Week catwalks.

Mark Boyd is a freelance writer based in Barcelona, specializing in software-as-a-service startups, city data systems, and sensor technologies.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Motorola and Verizon Wireless just sent out “save the date” notices for an event at starting at 2 p.m. on Sept. 5 in New York City. (We guess that they don’t care that Nokia and Microsoft are unveiling their Windows Phone 8 Lumias earlier that morning.)

The companies will likely show off the long-rumored Droid Razr HD, which is said to boast a 720p HD resolution. Since the invite points to a singular main event, we’re not expecting any other new products alongside the Razr HD (Motorola hasn’t released a new tablet since the disappointing Droid Xyboard earlier this year).

Motorola Mobility announced last week that it would soon cut 4,000 workers and focus on fewer device as part of Google’s reinvention of the company. In Google’s recent Q2 earnings, Motorola Mobility reported an operating loss of $233 million on $1.25 billion in revenues (10 percent of Google’s total revenues).

After struggling for so long, I can’t imagine that Motorola has had time to develop a truly groundbreaking smartphone or tablet, but we’re excited to see if “Droid does” again. VentureBeat will be on the ground at the event, so stay tuned for more.

If you’ve ever had a dystopian nightmare starring Microsoft, it likely began with something like this: The software giant is teaming up with the NYPD for a high-tech crime prevention and counterterrorism platform called the Domain Awareness System. (Heck, even the name has shades of Big Brother.)

Well, that’s now reality. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced the partnership today at a small press gathering at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative headquarters. The Domain Awareness System is the logical evolution of the extensive surveillance technology that the NYPD has deployed throughout Lower and Midtown over the past decade. Now that the city has a steady stream of data on the public from cameras, sensors, and other surveillance tools, the NYPD needs a way to make sense of all of it.

With the Domain Awareness System, law enforcement officers will take advantage of surveillance data and do things like instantly grab information via live video feeds, reveal crime patterns by mapping location and chronological data, and immediately track the owner of a suspicious package. If a radiation detector is set off, the system can alert the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative HQ and determine if the radioactive material is harmless, naturally occurring, or a weapon.

“The system is a transformative tool because it was created by police officers for police officers,” Commissioner Kelly said in a statement today.

Since the NYPD helped Microsoft develop the software, the city will also receive a 30 percent cut of future sales of the Domain Awareness System. Judging from the announcement today, it sounds like the system can be easily deployed to other locations.

New York City’s a great spot for e-commerce innovation, and payments startup Dwolla and online marketplace Etsy are taking advantage of that fact by organizing NYC’s first-ever Ecommerce Hack Day.

The event won’t be your typical hackathon, Dwolla’s business development head Alex Taub told VentureBeat in an interview this morning. First off, there’s a “bullshit filter” for developer registration in the form of a puzzle in the Hack Day’s website source code. The first 200 developers to figure that puzzle out will get a free ticket to the event. Additionally, the event is geared towards creating something that you can make money from.

“For every hackathon, maybe one hack lives on,” Taub said. “We’re not guaranteeing that anyone will build something that will last… Just we think there is a much higher chance.”

Also participating in the event are Zappos, Twilio, Stripe, and several other companies. The Hack Day will be held on August 4 and 5 at The Hatchery in New York City.

Taub described the puzzle as a good filtering process for finding legit developers: “If you can solve this puzzle, you can basically make an API call… It proves you know the difference between binary, base64, and JSON, and can make AJAX calls.”

Photo via Chris Isherwood/Flickr

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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There’s something special going on in New York City’s vibrant technology scene: startup ideas (and money) are flowing freely, big tech companies are beginning to claim a bigger presence, and the tech community has never been stronger and more supportive.

To help celebrate technology in NYC, we’re looking for the most interesting and influential people helping to shape this scene. We’re taking nominations now and will name the Top Silicon Alley Techie at an event in the city next month.

After living in Brooklyn for the past three years, and seeing the dramatic changes the tech community in NYC has gone through in that short time, it feels like we’re on the cusp of something great. (So much so that we convinced VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall to move out here for several months to drink it all in.) That wouldn’t have been possible without intelligent and disruptive people shaking things up.

How to Nominate

Fill out this form for the person that you’d like to nominate as the “Top Silicon Alley Techie” in 2012.

We’re looking for people — not companies — who’ve helped shape tech scene in the New York City metro area into what it is today. Nominees can be entrepreneurs, executives, venture capitalists, and just about anyone alive who has made an impact.

Nominate yourself, if you’re brazen enough, but make sure you give us a good reason to consider your nomination. Whoever you nominate, please include contact information so we can reach you (and the nominee, if you represent that person).

The deadline to submit nominations is Thursday, June 7, at 5pm Pacific time.

We’ll then invite you to vote on the short list of nominees, but since it’s so easy to game online polls, they won’t be binding. We’ll be factoring your results into our judges’ decision, which will announced at an event in New York City in late June (details are still being worked out).

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Cornell University’s NYC tech school is taking shape. The school announced today that it has named Greg Pass, former chief technology officer at Twitter and and VP of engineering, as its founding entrepreneurial officer.

Pass, who also graduated with a Computer Science degree from Cornell University in 1997, will be in charge of uniting the new tech school with New York City’s burgeoning tech community, as well as making sure CornellNYC’s academics are actually relevant to the real-world industry needs.

“In the tech industry I’ve experienced first-hand how talented and entrepreneurial engineers are at the heart of productive change,” Pass said in a statement today. “Now, I am honored to be joining the Cornell Tech team as we build a new kind of applied science education—one that will better cultivate young engineers for technological innovation and entrepreneurship, and create new value in collaboration with the start-ups and creative companies that are making New York City a world tech leader.”

Pass was also the co-founder and CTO of the real-time search company Summize, which was acquired by Twitter in 2008 for $15 million in cash and stock (boy that sure seems like chump change now). Before that, he created an image search engine called ToFish that was purchased by AOL, where he spent time as a software engineer and later a system architect.

Given his experience both in launching small companies, and working within large corporations, Pass seems like a versatile choice for advising CornellNYC’s students. The first phase of the school’s campus on Roosevelt Island (mock-up above) won’t be ready until 2017, until then Google has donated space to CornellNYC in its massive NYC offices. Classes are scheduled to begin this Fall.