Betabeat » chief digital officer

Watch Rachel Sterne on ‘Morning Joe’ as Joe Scarborough Tries to Explain Foursquare to His Co-host

Nitasha Tiku — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:20:55 -0400

via Morning Joe

New York City's chief digital officer Rachel Sterne has already graced the pages of Vogue magazine. But this morning, fresh off of waving the Made in NYC™ pom-poms at SXSW, she stopped by MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to announce NYCgov's new Facebook photo contest to get your pic on the big screen in Times Square.

Joe Scarborough and his guests took the opportunity to shout out their personal digital requests, such as Wifi in the subway and shower.

"You know, I'm a small government conservative," said Mr. Scarborough. "But you know just—

"—Free wifi for all," interrupted one of his guests.

"Everybody!" Mr. Scarborough continued, gesticulating enthusiastically. "User name: USA. Password: Number1."

Our favorite part, however, had to be at 2:14 when Mr. Scarborough tried to explain Foursquare to his cohost Mika Brzezinski. "Foursquare is where you tell people where you are at any given time." Ms. Brzezinski response? "Why would you do that? What's wrong with you?"

We hope Denveen isn't too offended. After all, the hosts had a similar aversion to Facebook. "I don't do it. I tried once, did you try? It takes a lot of time out of the day," noted Ms. Brzezinski, inspiring Mr. Scarborough to offer this novel recommendation: "Can you block it in New York City?"

Rachel Sterne Gets the Vogue Treatment as the ‘Kate Middleton’ of New York Tech

Nitasha Tiku — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:23:37 -0400

via Vogue and a scanner.

Exactly a year after Anna Wintour sprinkled her glossy fashion dust on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Vogue has decided to switch its gaze from women in New York politics to women in New York tech.

After taking a gander at Silicon Alley's female founders, investors, and stalwarts, the magazine opted to profile New York City's social media-savvy chief digital officer (or "head nerd" in 4 Times Square parlance) Rachel Sterne for being "the face of a new era of digital governance."

The feature, which isn't available online (Bad, Conde! Stop that!) says, "Sterne is part of a new generation of bright, attractive women who are turning Silicon Alley into less of a boys' club." We'd quibble with Vogue's notion that women judged on their relative attractiveness makes it less of a boy's club. But hey, it's Vogue, which means we get references to Ms. Sterne's "willowy, six-foot frame" and "striking figure."

In what we're pretty sure is NYTM's first Vogue reference, the magazine quotes former CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, now stationed at Googleplex East, talking about meeting Ms. Sterne for the first time at the meetup in 2007.

"There I was in jeans and a hoodie, probably with greasy hair, like everybody else," McCarthy recalls [Ed note: Yup, sounds about right!]. "And when I saw Rachel I thought, What is this incredibly articulate, impeccably dressed gorgeous young woman doing at a start-up pitch event?"

Also name-checked in the profile are Tumblr's David Karp (Ms. Sterne attended his rooftop "new-media scene" party), Ms. Sterne's fiancé Max Haot, co-founder and CEO of Livestream--as well as Ms. Sterne's good friend Soraya Darabi, Fashism co-founders Brooke Moreland and Ashley Granata, Charitini's Rachel Sklar, and event planner Emily Gannett, all of whom are involved in Change the Ratio.

Vogue's feature follows Vanity Fair's Sean Parker profile and Glamour's recent women in tech piece penned by none other than AllThingsD's own Kara Swisher.

In Vogue, Ms. Sklar remarked on both Ms. Sterne's intelligence and poise:

"She's an intellectual heavyweight who's as smart as--or smarter than--any guy in the room," Sklar says. "And she's ambitious, but she's also really nice and gracious and poised. She's a lady." Half jokingly, she adds, "She's kind of our Kate Middleton."

Vogue culls that last British royal bit for the feature's pull quote, minus the "half-jokingly," part, naturally.

The City Plans to Give Local Companies Access to the .NYC Domain Name

Nitasha Tiku — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:14:18 -0400

Sorry to blow up your spot, back-of-head guy.

In a chilly, temperature-controlled auditorium at Time Warner headquarters, insulated from steam gathering outside, the top representatives of the New York City's efforts to make good on that Road Map to a Digital City gathered to discuss the recently-released plans. How often do Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne, NYC EDC President Seth Pinsky, and DoITT Commissioner Carole Post really get together—when not on stage to demonstrate city's newly-streamlined approach to tech? Actually, all the time, assured Ms. Post.

In a nod to Sterne's emphasis on social media as the first steps in digitizing New York, Twitter's Adam Sharp, who was just celebrating his "halfaversary" as manager of government and political partnerships, was also on stage. The conversation naturally dovetailed into other Internet Week memes, like the suddenly-ubiquitous "Made in NYC" label.

It first came up with questions from the audience about ICANN's expected approval of the top-level .nyc domain name. Ms. Post said although the approval was delayed, the city had done considerable preparation and "we feel like we’re very uniquely positioned to capitalize on the NYC cache." Mr. Pinsky clarified how this could benefit local startups:

We think that there’s a huge opportunity to allow locally-based companies to brand themselves and associate themselves with New York, which I think helps the companies but also helps New York as a center of creativity and innovation, which is really what our long term goal is. Not just to make New York a center of innovation, but to make sure the world understands that New York is a center of innovation.

The Made in NYC nomenclature came up again in a press release Betabeat was handed before the talk, announcing the NYC App Hub on NYC.gov. (How your average citizen could possibly keep track of or even know these efforts exist was a recurring theme of the panel. And the answer circled back to both social media and the city's 300,000 employees wide reach.)

The mini, local app store collects all the "city-created" smartphone apps in one place, including Big Apps competition winners like this year's Roadify. The panel's moderator, Fortune's Jessi Hempel, had never heard of Roadify, or Big Apps, before the panel. But she seemed eager to snatch it up, before telling Mr. Sharp, "Then again, that's what I use Twitter for every morning," to find out if she should take the F or B train.

Betabeat jumped at the chance to get in the last question of the morning, and of course we wanted to confirm our tip that a big carrier is bringing free wifi to major city parks this week. Ms. Sterne, looking modelesque in a silk minidress, toned down by a demure gray blazer and nude kitten heels, didn't want to comment beyond the report, but acknowledged:

We support [private-public partnerships for wifi] because it’s a really a great example of when interests are aligned. And of course when something’s at no or very little cost to taxpayers, that’s the ideal scenario. We have examples in Bryant Park and Madison Square Park and we look forward to expanding on that.

Ms. Post cited last year's announcement that Cablevision and Time Warner will be funding and providing wifi in about 35 city parks, selected by elected officials and community boards.

The notion is to be a companion to where wifi is already provided in commercially viable areas, but to use these avenues to bring this service to areas that might not otherwise attract a commercially-viable partnerships. None of these agreements are exclusive to anything else, so we’re really excited to be able to have a sort of a toolkit of options to choose from.

Without the definitive confirmation we were hoping for, Betabeat picked up a silver stressball from the table (now absent the breakfast buffet) on our way out. Emblazoned on one side of the silver ball was the NYC Digital logo, on the other, the word amaze. "It's an amazeball!" said Betabeat's resident webutante when we gifted her the swag. We still up in the air whether it's a mark against us that we didn't get the joke ourselves.