(Photo: Imgur)

Looks like the tech industry is still poaching from Wall Street, and the WSJ is ON IT! [Wall Street Journal]

Facebook's first quarter results are in, and it looks like the company's mobile ad revenue is finally increasing. [New York Times]

The father-son duo of NYC-based VC firm Lerer Ventures is launching a website in conjunction with Mayors Against Illegal Guns called StoptheNRA.com. [TechCrunch]

Now that the neckbeard lobby is growing in influence, can Hollywood A-listers master the Reddit AMA without having another Rampart situation on their hands? [LA Times]

Now New York Senator Chuck Schumer is going after patent trolls. Perhaps he's jealous of all Mayor Bloomberg's startup cred? [TechCrunch]

"Hey guys, we can make TV too!" - AOL [Adweek]

(Photo: CornellNYC Tech)

The patent wars rage on in the tech world, but today a couple of big names extended olive branches in hopes of brokering a peace--or at least one between the industry and the notion of patents. This morning, leaders from the Commerce Department and Cornell University announced that there'll be a U.S. Patent Office staffer permanently planted right on campus.

That individual will serve as a kind of liaison between the worlds of tech and intellectual property, working to connect university students and affiliates to whatever resources the Commerce Department has to offer. (Before you private sector devotees scoff, that ranges from IP strategizing to government grants.) It's all in the service of speeding innovations from academic notion to marketable product.

This is the first time the bureau has ever devoted such attention to a particular university campus. How you like dem apples, Stanford?

To make the announcement, acting U.S. Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank appeared at Google's New York digs with Cornell president David Skorton and a host of local politicos, including both Seth Pinsky and a very tan Charles Schumer.

Secretary Blank quickly clarified there won't be an actual office--wouldn't want the already overworked patent officers besieged by PhD candidates!--but rather just the staffer.

“The resources we’ll provide at Cornell University’s New York City tech campus are a natural extension of the Administration’s commitment to removing the barriers that get in the way of more jobs and more innovation," she said.

It's all part of exploring a new model of university-led innovation, she added, "so we can push even more great American products into the global market."

President Skorton stepped up to say that the program would allow broadening the curriculum to incorporate both academia and industry. Nor will this staffer be kept closeted in the ivory tower--everyone who spoke was very clear the initiative would be available to other schools.

Of course, one wonders how having a patent officer on the grounds of a high-profile tech campus is going to play out, given the rampant problems with patent trolls and the popularity of open source. President Skorton made pointed mention of the discussion, but also said that having a patent point person on campus will help with the process of "figuring out together the sweet spot for IP protection in the software area from trade secrets to patent protection."

It's also probably an indication that CornellNYC won't limit itself to consumer Internet startups, as one doesn't typically wade into biotech without filing some serious paperwork.

Receiving a shout out from Patent and Trademark Office director David Kappos was Stack Exchange. The two have a partnership to get third-party feedback on pending applications and share prior art, with the aim of making patents stronger and more specific. He gave props to the site for having stepped up to the plate. "We're getting discussions going on in Stack Exchange in real time," he said, surely blowing the minds of everyone who's ever attempted to get a straight answer regarding a governmental application process.

Senator Schumer took the floor and first gave props to Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney for wearing the appropriate shade of red. "Almost like rapunzel it takes research and transforms it into jobs and companies," he said of the tech transfer process.

He proceeded to hold up a copper pipe in one hand an iPhone in the other, to illustrate the rapid rate of innovation. Senator Schumer made the point that university founding father Ezra Cornell had held the patent on a pipe-laying machine, making it only appropriate that his should be a leader in the current technological revolution.

The Roosevelt Island Tram sure will be crowded circa 2017.

Senator Schumer, with David Tisch and Jessica Lawrence at his side.

Today, Senator Charles Schumer popped up to New York City for a visit to General Assembly and an announcement: Tomorrow he plans to introduce new legislation to the Senate--the snappily-named BRAINS Act--in an attempt to help alleviate the tech talent crunch by making it easier for startups to hire foreign-born workers.

"The bill will fix America's broken high-skilled immigration problem," he promised, by providing 55,000 new green cards available annually for foreign students graduating from US universities with advanced STEM degrees.

Everywhere he goes, said Senator Schumer, business leaders cite the lack of technical talent as their number one challenge. "With the introduction and hopefully the passage of the BRAINS Act, we're going to move closer to ensuring a more vibrant future for Americans not even born yet," he promised.

Silicon Alley's desperate need for workers made General Assembly a logical venue for the bill's debut. "We in New York have a big dog in this fight," said Senator Schumer. "Silicon Valley may have given us the semiconductor, but New York City is the birthplace of the next generation of Internet giants--but they won't become giants unless they can get the talent." And, while CornellNYC is already taking applicants, those candidates aren't going to be hitting the workforce any time soon.

"All of us here care so much about the tech community--it really is our future in New York City, New York State, U.S.A., and the world."

Of course, those common desires can make for some moments of cognitive dissonance. As the cameras were setting up for today's press conference at General Assembly, a lovely metaphor for the tech world's relationship with politics unfolded before Betabeat's eyes: A tattooed man wearing a t-shirt saying "Your Mom Makes Great Sandwiches" wandered through a cluster of suit-clad politicos and notebook-clutching reporters.

The problem with the status quo is this: Foreign students who graduate from American universities with STEM degrees have to compete for an extremely limited number of H1B visas. That means many are forced to go home empty handed, and even if a startup wanted to hire them, it's impossible.

"If the Yankees needed a new center fielder, and the best person available was from Japan or the Dominican Republic or Cuba, it's inconceivable they wouldn't get a visa," pointed out Senator Schumer. "But when one of the startup companies here has a brilliant engineer who they're almost certain could create a company that might create hundreds or even thousands of jobs, we won't let them come."

"We should run our economy the way we run our sports immigration," he added.

But the Senator was merely warming up to his topic. "All these talented people from overseas, they want to come here, and they want to stay here. And we kick them out! It's unbelievable," he said. "It's the dumbest, stupidest policy that one could devise."

"If someone wanted to devise a policy on how to prevent American from growing good-paying jobs in the future, they'd probably design our present immigration policy. It just doesn't make much sense."

As for the bill's prospects, well, it's far from a sure thing. The hope is that a window for political compromise might open up after the elections, during the lame duck session of Congress. And Senator Schumer was upbeat, emphasizing that his counterpart in the House, Lamar Smith, is introducing a similar bill with several potential points of compromise. "I believe we're closer to this compromise than we have ever been in the past," promised Senator Schumer.

Then again, he shared another anecdote that makes the odds look a little iffier: "I had one senator say to me, a conservative Republican, even if Albert Einstein wanted to immigrate I wouldn't want to let him into this country."

But Senator Schumer has a colorful, locally sourced rebuttal to that: "When I was a kid, we had this thing at Coney Island. It was a barrel you'd walk through as it turned," he explained. "New York is sort of like that barrel--it takes people from all over the globe, we turn into Americans, and their kids sally forth around America and do great things."

"I just wish the rest of the country would understand our experience on how positive immigration is."

The Times tells us that the pair were wedded yesterday, at their home--excuse us, their "estate"-- in Garrison, New York. The announcement recounts their meeting:

The couple met in November 2005 through a college acquaintance of Mr. Eldridge’s at a brunch in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. Mr. Eldridge was working as a customer service manager for a moving company in Somerville, Mass., and Mr. Hughes was a senior at Harvard, and already a founder of Facebook.

“He was very intelligent and charismatic,” Mr. Hughes said of Mr. Eldridge. “He was very kind and politically engaged, and he cared about the world around us. All of that was very attractive to me.”

Aw, it's almost enough to make us forget we find the Vows section even more agonizing than the Modern Love column!

A source tells Betabeat that while the wedding itself was intimate, at around 75 people, the party was a blowout, with something like 400 guests. Mark Zuckerberg attended, as did fellow Facebook cofounder Andrew McCollum and his wife Gretchen Sisson. Misters Hughes and Eldridge are quite connected in the city's Democratic circles, which probably explains what Nancy Pelosi was doing at the party, getting down to "All The Single Ladies."

Arianna Huffington put in an appearance at the couple's wedding dinner at Cipriani--and couldn't resist tweeting out a photo of herself with fellow guest Senator Charles Schumer. Senator Chris Coons likewise attended, betraying an endearing sentimental streak (or maybe just a sweet tooth) by tweeting out a picture of the wedding cake.

Mr. Hughes may be busy recruiting for The New Republic in his new role as media mogul. But there were plenty of friends from the tech world in attendance as well. LocalResponse founder Nihal Mehta and his wife Reshma Saujani were both there and tweeting their congratulations--no great surprise given Mr. Hughes' support for Ms. Saujani's 2010 Congressional campaign. Ms. Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code; the program's executive director Kristen Titus was also among the guests. We heard that Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley of Upworthy (which aims to "make important content shareable") were in attendance as well, and that Olivia Ma of YouTube did a reading.

Alberto Ibarguen, head of the Knight Foundation, and Ivanka Trump also attended. (Ms. Trump is married to Jared Kushner, head of the Observer Media Group, which owns Betabeat.)

Of course, Mr. Hughes' nuptials follow hard on the heels of those of both Mark Zuckerberg's surprise wedding and Andrew McCollum's seaside affair. Starting to reconsider that bachelor lifestyle, Eduardo? Inquiring minds want to know.

With contributing reporting from Nitasha Tiku.

"The only method of payment for these illegal purchases is an untraceable peer-to-peer currency known as Bitcoins. After purchasing Bitcoins through an exchange, a user can create an account on Silk Road and start purchasing illegal drugs from individuals around the world and have them delivered to their homes within days," the senator said in a letter co-written by Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

But now it's January, and Sen. Schumer seems to have forgotten about the cryptocurrency and the virtual drug bazaar that is the Silk Road. In fact, the senator's less-than-serious effort to get Bitcoin shut down actually boosted Bitcoin, argues one Bitcoin developer, by elevating its profile.

For those of us who had been with bitcoin since early on, we would become excited at the smallest appearance of bitcoin in the press. We all knew the amazing ramifications of this cryptocurrency (or commodity), and were awaiting that inevitable breakthrough that came a few years early with Schumer’s announcement. It was not the right kind of press we were hoping for, but press is press. And while dealing with the moral panic, it gave you a platform for expounding on the social benefits of bitcoin.

The publicity for Silk Road didn't hurt either. The site is still the largest single marketplace for Bitcoins outside of the Bitcoin exchanges. You can buy Adderall there!

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is a co-sponsor of PIPA, the sibling legislation for SOPA, the awful one that still contains the provision that would allow our government to shut down websites accused—not convicted of—but accused of copyright infringement. Today, there was quite a large protest outside of her office! 1,000 people and a bunch of Internet luminaries were there.

As it turns out, Sen. Gillibrand has heard the voice of the people! And as such, she has taken to her page on (the SOPA-opposed) Facebook to say...

...'whatever,' or the political speak for it:

Thank you for all your messages regarding Protect IP. I agree there are real concerns with the current legislation & I'm working to make important changes to the bill. We must work to strike a balance between ending online piracy to protect New York jobs & ensuring Internet freedom so our tech community can continue to flourish.

Those "important changes" have yet to include the omission of its most disturbing provision, the aforementioned one, let alone be specified. Remember, it's a big political goose-egg to have the bill you co-sponsored fail, which no politician wants.

And before you ask, no: No official press release on her response to the widespread outcry against her legislation. Sen. Chuck Schumer has yet to use (the SOPA-opposed) Facebook to inform his constituents that he doesn't really care about them, either.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Sen. Schumer. (wikipedia.org)

Earlier today, Amanda Peyton (Y Combinator alum, Makery/Bnter resident and local Woman About Tech) posted a transcript of a conversation she had with a rep for Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who used "the c-word" in reference to the Protect IP Act, the Senate version of the Stop Online Piracy Act. "Censorship," that is.

Both Ms. Peyton and Betabeat (we picked up the story) received calls from energetic staffers, eager to run, not just walk, the quote back. "It is absurd to suggest that Sen. Schumer, who led the charge against the assault on net neutrality, would support censoring the Internet; he unequivocally does not," said Mike Morey, a spokesman for Sen. Schumer's office.

Staffers from Sen. Schumer's office got on the phone with Betabeat late Friday to go into more detail on the senator's position on the bill, which they said had first been presented by a coalition of representatives from different industries more than a year ago. The industries represented including pharmaceutical companies, apparel manufacturers and more, in addition to the purveyors of movies and music who have emerged as the evil villains in the internet's backlash against the legislation.

The bill is also targeting counterfeiters and fake drug makers, the senator's office said, and will allow companies whose intellectual property is being infringed to sue websites and have courts take action—essentially making something that is already illegal, also enforceable. The senator believes that legal activity on the internet should be "inviolate," staffers said, but illegal activity should not.

During the markup of PIPA, staffers said, there was no outcry from the tech industry beyond tempered concern. It was only after the House version, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was farther reaching, that opponents' voices began rising. UPDATE: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures disputed this in the comments. "Our firm and others were very vocal with the Senator and his staff as early as the middle of last year," he wrote, "that this was bad legislation and that the tech industry was going to fight it and fight it hard."

Part of SOPA and PIPA's problem is the perception that the bills are being written by older, out of touch Congressmen and women who don't spend much time with the internet and don't really understand how it works, a la the late Senator Ted Stevens and his famous "series of tubes" remark.

For the record, at least one staffer we spoke to in Sen. Schumer's office had a firm handle on the technicalities of the bill, including the provisions that would allow IP owners to ask a court to order Internet Service Providers and search engines to block certain sites, arguably the two most controversial aspects of the bill.

Now that more people in the tech industry are speaking out against the bill, the senator is carefully considering his position, his office said. He does not 100 percent support the bill as written, his office said, and is taking more time to research its effects and talk to interested parties in order to ensure the bill does not have unintended consequences.

According to staffers, the senator wants to be sure that sites like Twitter and Facebook (and hi, Tumblr, hey, Reddit) which may have infringing content, but are not primarily in the business of selling illegal stuff, are not harmed. The bill is supposed to target websites that exist mainly to traffic in counterfeited or pirated goods or content, allowing IP owners to sue a website and potentially earn a temporary or permanent shutdown, depending on standards they must meet before the court, with the ability to target enablers like ad networks, payment providers, and as it now stands, search engines and ISPs.

(Homepage image credit: dpape)

Discussing plans to ruin el Internet, probably.

Message Party founder Amanda Peyton was in for a rude awakening this morning when she tried to do the right thing. Rather than taking the Internet's word for it that the proposed Protect IP Act (PIPA) is inherently evil—"I know how myopic the tech world can be sometimes," she notes—Ms. Peyton decided to go to the source:  Senator Chuck Schumer, co-sponsor of the bill.

After protest from tech industry leaders and human rights groups, PIPA, in essence the Senate's version of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), is already being reconsidered by its author, Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT-D). Sen. Leahy is calling for more research. But as it stands, the legislation would subject a website that contains copyright infringing content to being de-indexed from search engines, blocked from ISPs, and stopped from doing accessing business services like PayPal.

Enough backstory. On her blog, Ms. Peyton, narrated what happened when she called up good ole Chuck.

The first question I asked was “why does the Senator support this legislation?”

The guy on the other end of the phone said: well, he’s a co-sponsor so he’s not changing his position.

He must have known why I was calling.

Asked the same question again. This time the reply I got this time was different: Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the internet.

....

No one has been brazen enough to drop the C-word without hesitation. But this dude apparently had no problem with it. I said again: “So you’re saying Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the internet?”

Yes.

He then backpedaled a bit, and mentioned that Schumer is in favor of censoring illegal activities on the internet. But still, the C-word.

I could hear the phone-answerer smacking his lips in the background, grinning and thinking: ALL YOUR CAT PHOTOS ARE BELONG TO US. on a centrally controlled website owned by Viacom.

If that rubs you the wrong way, not to fear: there's an (emergency) Meetup for that.

But there's another upside to this disappointing tale. When Ms. Peyton called, an actual human being answered the phone! "There’s no annoying menus, no transfers, no answering machines. Washington, please don’t ever change this." Everything else about Washington, however... big room for improvement.

CLARIFICATION: Ms. Peyton received a call from Sen. Schumer's office clarifying the senator's position:

1. It’s not just Hollywood – another big issue that they are trying to combat here is piracy related to physical products that are sold by overseas websites: counterfeit chips, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, etc.
2. DMCA is incredibly effective, but only for the companies that actually comply with it.
3. There have been some changes made to the bill already that take into account the concerns of the tech community. For example, yesterday one of the Senate sponsors said “he will recommend that the the Senate gives DNS blacklisting “more study” before moving ahead”.
4. The tech community is very important to New York State, and so are all the other industries here who support the bill (entertainment, manufacturing), and while the outcry from the opposition has been heard, it is also pretty recent. Back when they were researching the bill, they felt there was a balance of interest between those who were for and against it.

Mr. Bloomberg, flanked by Facebook's Serkan Piantino and Sheryl Sandberg

When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told a crowd of reporters last week that Facebook would be opening its first engineering office outside Palo Alto right here in New York, it sounded like the Bloomberg administration’s dream come true. Could the West Coast tech giants finally be taking New York seriously as an innovation center, rather than just a convenient base to sidle up to advertisers?

Indeed, earlier this year, the Economic Development Corporation said its goal in accepting bids to build an applied sciences campus in New York was to "increase the probability that the next high growth company—a Google, Amazon, or Facebook—will emerge in New York City and not in Shanghai, Mumbai, or Sao Paolo." An engineering office from a company on the verge of what might be the biggest IPO in history sounds like the next best thing. What’s more, Facebook seemed so confident about luring technical talent (typically a sore spot with New York techies) that they weren't waiting for the campus to break ground.

Facebook's decision was so glaringly aligned with the city's goal of diversifying into an innovation capital that it was hard not to wonder if New York had tried to sweeten the deal.

According to Julie Wood, Mayor Bloomberg's deputy press secretary, however, Facebook was not offered any tax or real estate incentives, "as of right" or discretionary, to start an engineering outpost here. Both EDC President Seth Pinsky and Facebook confirmed the same to Betabeat.

Ms. Wood said a number of administration officials work with Facebook regularly and that the Mayor himself "visited Facebook last year and there’s an open line of communication between our administration and their senior leaders." Rather, both the EDC and the Mayor's office credited the move to the city's strategic approach to economic development.

"In a lot of cities, the role of an economic development agency is very tactical: Let’s get this company to move their office here! It’s great, but it’s a very inefficient way to build an economy," Mr. Pinsky told Betabeat. "To have an economy that consists of 3.5 million jobs, to build it 100 jobs at a time or 50 jobs at a time is not really going to move the needle."

"In just the last five years the number of people in the technology sector has grown by nearly 30 percent, though in certain cases that may be attributable to certain tax programs, for the vast majority of cases the reason companies have grown is because this Mayor and this city have put into place the conditions that make it in the interest of these businesses to expand here," he added, pointing to the applied sciences in particular.

"Remember the whole fuss about Goldman?" asked a source familiar with City Hall's tech initiatives, referring to the deal Goldman Sachs got to stay in the Financial District back in 2005. "I don’t think they got anything special, they just qualified for things because they were building in Lower Manhattan and the threat of them leaving Lower Manhattan may have kicked some other things in." In terms of an outsider coming to New York, the city would be even less likely to roll out a red carpet.

"There was no, 'Hey, come here, we’ll give you $100 million.' Or ‘Please, please, please Facebook please come here," said the source. "There’s no courting because we don’t see the need because we know New York is a premium brand. That comes up a lot, New York is a premium brand. We don’t need to sell down. We don’t need to go down market the way other states and cities do. This is like a really, really firm policy. That’s why the applied sciences campus is such a big deal because it’s such a diversion from the standard policy."

From a Valley perspective, of course, New York still has a lot to prove. But another reason the city was unlikely to offer incentives might have been because they lack the funds to do so, said the source. "There isn’t money to do stuff like this." That is partly the reason why the EDC offered up sites like the Brooklyn Navy Yard as potential locations for the campus because they represent areas for growth that the city hasn't yet found a way to develop.

Of course, Mayor Bloomberg and legislators like Chuck Schumer were more than happy to join Ms. Sandberg and company for a victory lap at the press conference. "If this was some specific City Hall thing, you wouldn’t have seen that massive outpour of random legislators all showing up," said the source. "I think it’s just everybody trying to take credit for something good happening. If Chuck Schumer had been responsible for getting Facebook to come here, doing something, he would have tried to take that event for himself."

In a statement Facebook sent to Betabeat, the company said its New York engineering team would be located at its current offices at 333 Madison Avenue where they are looking to expand to another floor in the building. "Facebook’s New York office has been open since 2007, so being in New York is not new for us," the company wrote via email. "Recruiting great engineers is one of our highest priorities and some of the most brilliant, ambitious, and talented people in the world are in the Northeast. We want those people to help us continue to grow and innovate on an experience that more than 800 million people in the world rely on. This is why we selected to open an engineering office in NYC."

Rather than incentives, Mr. Pinsky said the EDC is more likely to offer tech companies moving to New York help with finding talent or vendors. The EDC is also open to help with locating office space. Betabeat heard they offered to help foursquare with its recent relocation effort. But for the most part, Mr. Pinsky said, the startups are better equipped to do the office search themselves.

Does that mean the EDC will help Facebook staff up, we asked. After all, since Friday the number of open positions for the office has increased from 15 to 17. "[Facebook has] proven themselves to be very effective at hiring talent and expanding their business," responded Mr. Pinksy, in the understatement of the year. "If they need assistance then the city certainly is here to help as we are for any business in New york City, but they haven’t specifically asked us."

"Literally, it allows buyers and users to sell illegal drugs online, including heroin, cocaine, and meth, and users do sell by hiding their identities through a program that makes them virtually untraceable," New York Senator Chuck Schumer said at a news conference Sunday.  He wants Silk Road, a website where users can purchase drugs using bitcoin, shut down immediately.

The simple truth is that bitcoin does lend itself to this kind of transaction, but was certainly not designed to facilitate money laundering or online drug abuse. Sadly, most of the public was introduced to bitcoin through Adrian Chen, the Gawker scribe who spotlighted Silk Road. "Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road."

"It's a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen. It's more brazen than anything else by lightyears."

Bitcoin is a digital peer-to-peer currency currently trading at about $9 to one bitcoin. Schumer described the process of converting dollars to bitcoins as, "An online form of money laundering used to disguise the source of money, and to disguise who's both selling and buying the drug."

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