(cornellbasketball.blogspot.com)

The mayor's campaign for a New York tech campus has stretched on for almost a year, but final proposals are due Oct. 28 and the choice will be made by the end of the year for who will host the New York City applied sciences campus.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg has batted his eyes at Stanford for the new campus, but the local contenders are putting up a fight. Both NYU and Cornell want their names on the new campus real bad. Earlier this summer, Betabeat heard Stanford, Cornell, and Israel's Technion are the favorites.

It seems Cornell is ready to put on the full-court press before the decision is made.

"Many Cornellians are at the center of this new generation of tech companies," writes Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of Computing and Information Science, in an editorial in the latest issue of Ezra Magazine, a campus quarterly (not available online). "The companies they have founded or have funded have created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of market value during what has been the deepest recession in most of our lives. I have had the privilege of working with some of these people, who are passionate about helping encourage Cornell students and alumni to get their ideas out into the world (such as the hosts of some recent, truly insightful events about tech entrepreneurship: Paul Graham ’86 at Y Combinator, Steve Conine ’95 and Niraj Shah ’95 at CSN Stores, and John Zimmer ’06 at Zimride)."

Cornell has the strongest commitment to the city's tech scene, he writes. "During these next few months, many Cornell faculty, staff, students and alumni will be doing everything they can to ensure that the city understands what we already know--that Cornell not only brings unsurpassed academic quality in the technology arena, but also has the strongest technology business network in New York and the strongest commitment of any institution to the city’s technology sector."