Photo: Macro Sea

"New Lab" For Brooklyn Navy Yard Real estate developer Macro Sea opened the first "beta" portion of its New Lab project at the Brooklyn Navy Yard yesterday, a year ahead of schedule. The opening, which was attended by City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Christine Quinn and Borough President Marty Markowitz, will welcome a "first-of-its-kind advanced manufacturing hub" which will be the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Navy Yard's 220,000 square foot Green Manufacturing Center. The New Lab will give entrepreneurs a place to create and test their businesses alongside other engineers and designers. Maybe the first thing they can figure out is an easy way to actually get to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

More Bitcoins With Gift Cards Mobile gift card company Gyft is the most recent business to jump on the Bitcoin bandwagon, agreeing to let users who purchase gift cards on its Android platform use Bitcoins as a purchasing method. Gyft is partnering with Bitcoin payment system BitPay for the transactions, which will now open 50,000 physical locations including GAP, Lowes, Sephora, GameStop, American Eagle, Sports Authority, Nike, Marriott, Burger King, Fandango, Brookstone, and more to customers wishing to use Bitcoins.

City Council Approve Tech Campus The New York City Council voted Wednesday to approve the building of Cornell's Roosevelt Island Tech campus. The vote is the final step in the city’s land use review process for Cornell NYC Tech, the two million-square-foot applied sciences and engineering campus that will be located at the Goldwater Hospital site on the island. The vote also included a number of programs associated with the campus that will be instituted, including a one-year summer ferry pilot program to the island.

Meetup For Women In Tech Google is teaming up with Personal Democracy Forum to offer 15 free registration/fellowships to their 10th annual Tech/Politics/Advocacy Conference, which will be held June 6-7 in New York. PDF is apparently looking for women who are "deploying new applications of technology in the political or civic arenas." While coding & dev skills are a plus, they aren’t required, so ladies with any level of tech skills should consider applying. The lineup already includes Becky Bond, Catherine Bracy, Kimberly Bryant, Sara Critchfield, Jaclyn Friedman, Dan Gillmor, Joi Ito, Nancy Lublin, Liz Mair, Nate Silver, Ben Rattray, Harper Reed and Douglas Rushkoff along with top execs from Github, Google, Uber, Union Square Ventures, with more to be announced later. Personal Democracy Forum is aiming for 50/50 representation of women onstage,which is probably some sort of record.

Film Startup Gains Investors Digital distribution service Yekra, known for its “AffiliateConnect” feature which allows studios, networks, and filmmakers to build movie for specific audiences by genre or topic, announced it raised $3 million in a recent round of seed funding from Angel Maurice Gallagher and Bray Capital. Next Thursday, the site will premier the digital release of the new art culture documentary Tattoo Nation, which features Danny Trejo, Travis Barker, Ed Hardy and other icons of the tattoo world.

Art Meets Tech Marina Abramović and Siena Oristaglio will be speaking about the cross section of tech and art next Wednesday at 7 p.m., at an event hosted by General Assembly. The Serbian performance artist will be speaking alongside her social media developer Oristaglio about the development of the MAI Institue as well, which will open in Hudson, New York, in the near future, and will pursue "a role in culture by seeking productive unions between the arts, science, technology, spirituality and education."

Photo: Cornell University

Cornell's NYC Tech Campus Scores Big Along with his wife, Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs, founding chairman and CEO emeritus of Qualcomm, announced a $133-million gift to Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Monday to build and establish the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute (JTCII). The JTCII will be a part of Cornell Tech, the new technology campus of the Ivy League school located on Roosevelt Island that was heavily supported by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City of New York. The funds will go primarily to two-year graduate programs. Now if only they can find a more efficient way to get to the island that doesn’t involve a 40-year-old gondola.

Women's Lifestyle Site Earns Funding Women's lifestyle and finance website DailyWorth announced Tuesday that it added $1 million in additional Series A financing on top of the previous $2 million earned last year. DJF Gotham led the funding, which the company will use mainly to hire bring in new key new hires. Additional investors included Gabriel Investments, 500 Startups, Robinhood Ventures, Investors' Circle, Bullet Time Ventures, Patient Capital Collaborative, Joanne Wilson, Rebecca Saeger, Carol Chow, Diego Canoso, and Mark Censits.

Amazon Originals Actually Being Watched As we covered last Friday, Amazon is entering the original television business with the company's production arm Amazon Studios releasing 14 original TV pilots. AAnd it appears the shows are doing pretty well, even if some of them weren’t particularly entertaining:  8 out of 10 of the most streamed episodes across the Amazon Instant Video platform were original Amazon programs. The new TV shows are also averaging a 4 out of 5 rating on Amazon--though if life has taught us anything, it's that Amazon reviews aren’t always the most trustworthy.

Quantifying The Best Of The Web The Webby Awards announced a partnership today with Quantcast to bring Quantcast's web tracking technologies to the Webby award process. Quantcast will also specifically help the Mobile & Apps categories with deeper insights into mobile app usage by employing Quantcast’s new Measure for Apps program. Some of this year’s Webby Award nominees for Mobile & Apps are HBO Go, Google Maps, Mailbox, Netflix App, Waze, Lady Gaga’s Workshop and NIKEiD Mobile. If only Betabeat had a mobile app, we'd be in there for sure.

Investors Earn DoD Award Three New York employers, including investment firms Drexel Hamilton and Goldman Sachs, along with the New York City Fire Department, are semifinalists for the 2013 Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award, given to companies that provide extraordinary support to their Guard and Reserve employees. Benefits that these companies have excelled at include setting veteran hiring goals, establishing military employee liaisons, providing childcare for deployed employees, arranging care package drives, and granting additional leave for military employees and family members before and after deployments. Now let's see if the tech startups start opening their doors like their investors are doing.

Someday! (Photo: CornellNYC Tech)

Cornell Tech's coffers are a little fatter this morning. Yesterday, Qualcomm cofounder Irwin Mark Jacobs and his wife Joan announced they're donating $133 million to the project. And so the joint program designed by Cornell and the Technion (a project within the Roosevelt Island campus, it'll allow students to earn dual masters degrees) will now be known as the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute.

That's a useful data point if you're trying to get your name on a major NYC landmark.

According to the announcement, "The funds will help support curriculum initiatives, faculty and graduate students, and industry interactions in a two-year graduate program." 

“We are delighted to partner with Cornell and the Technion on this unique educational initiative,” the couple said in a statement. “We believe strongly in the mission of this international collaboration to drive innovation and to foster economic development.

This isn't the couple's first higher-ed donation, either. Both Cornell alums, they've established a scholarship program and an endowed professorship at their alma mater, and their names are slapped on both a Graduate School and a "Center for Communications and Information Technologies" at the Technion. Dr. Jacobs has also already been involved with Cornell Tech, as an advisor.

Wonder how much the Jacobs spent on their wedding.

Bon voyage and happy trails. (Photo: Screencap)

Today Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered his final State of the City address. Amid wisecracks about the Knowles-Carter family (you might know Barclays Center part owner Shawn Carter "by what he's been called since the Super Bowl: Beyoncé's husband"), Hizzoner had plenty to say about the city's tech sector. Hey, he can't let President Obama totally blow up his spot.

Below, a few of the big shout-outs:

King of Numbers, Defender of the Data

It's finally happened: New York City has merged wholly with Startupland. The evidence? In his speech, Mayor Bloomberg announced that our fair metropolis (which already has a Chief Digital Officer, Ms. Rachel Haot) will now have a Chief Analytics Officer, as well:

Using data to tackle problems has helped us to improve services across city government. This year, the data analytics team we created at City Hall will launch a new platform that will improve the way all agencies share information. To lead this effort, I'll appoint the city's first ever Chief Analytics Officer, Michael Flowers. And he'll make as much of this data as possible public, so that the tech community can hold us accountable.

Please, please tell us we're all getting real-time, MTA-wide countdown clocks on our phones sometime before the 2nd Avenue Subway opens.

E-National Guard 

All that community spirit that flowered in the wake of Hurricane Sandy finally has an outlet:

We'll also ask the tech community to join us in tackling data projects that can improve public services, by creating something we call Code Corps.

More details here; founding partners include familiar names like 10Gen, Etsy, General Assembly, New York Tech Meetup, Seamless and...Rent the Runway?

FREE WI-FI! 

There's no date you can put on your calendar just yet, but there's at least some signs of life:

"And to further expand New York's role as a global tech hub, we'll launch a competition to install Wi-Fi in more of our Business Improvement Districts.

Until then, we'll always have Chelsea.

School Days, Fool Days

It won't solve anyone's immediate tech talent supply problems, but it ought to make parents worrying about high schools feel a little better: The city will be opening a second Academy for Software Engineering, and "with private support" 20 more schools will be getting comp sci classes, as well.

Mayor Bloomberg also highlighted the idea of private-public partnerships in education that got love in the President's SOTU earlier this week:

To prepare our students for success, we'll also create new schools that connect students directly to college and work. In his State of the Union address, President Obama highlighted our partnership with IBM and CUNY to create a high school that includes two years of college which we call grades 13 and 14. When students graduate, they receive an associate's degree — and an interview at IBM.

Don't give up hope if your senior prom is long behind you, either:

Today, I've directed Deputy Mayor Bob Steel and Small Business Services Commissioner Rob Walsh to work with the tech industry, universities, and the nonprofit sector to develop an intensive computer science training program for our adults who want to learn IT skills. And why not do it right here in Downtown Brooklyn? There are now 500 tech companies just between here and the NAVY Yard. We'll work to connect more New Yorkers to the jobs they're creating.

More Converted Industrial Space

Tired of searching in vain for new office space? We hear Brooklyn's nice:

We'll move forward with a plan to turn the old Domino Sugar Plant into new housing and we'll create the commercial space that Brooklyn's growing tech community needs.

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we'll work with the State to help Steiner Studios begin creating a 50-acre new media campus. The campus will eventually provide 2,500 good jobs in film, television and tech — two of the fastest-growing industries in our city.

Here Come the Electric Cars

Hey, technology isn’t just consumer Internet and 3-D printing:

We'll make New York City a national leader in another new technology: electric vehicles. This year we'll pilot curbside vehicle chargers that will allow drivers to fill up their battery in as little as 30 minutes as opposed to the normal 8 hours.

"We'll work with the City Council to amend the Building Code so that up to 20 percent of all new public parking spaces in private developments will be wired and ready for electric vehicles, creating up to 10,000 parking spots for electric vehicles over the next seven years.

Good news for New York's ailing media industry. Think of all the pageviews when the fights break out over mileage and how long it takes to really charge these cars!

Congress Fail Whale (Photo: blogspot.com)

API Rate Limit Exceeded Back in April of 2010, the Library of Congress promised to add every tweet up to that date to its famous archives. But like anyone following too many people at once, it's just caused one big mess. The library now has an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets totaling to a compressed 133.2 terabytes. Now the librarians of Congress are planning to work with Gnip, the company currently organizing all of the data, to develop a plan for archiving all of the tweets.

Apparently there have already been more than 400 access requests to the Twitter archives from researches doing work on citizen journalism and political communications. Someone needs to teach the librarians how to make lists as soon as humanly possible.

Schools Get Cash The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has just pumped a bunch of cash into New York's tech universities. It has awarded a total of $15 million to Columbia University, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and High Tech Rochester to create three Proof-of-Concept Centers dedicated to helping inventors and scientists turn their high-tech, clean-energy ideas into successful businesses. Columbia will form a new accelerator, several upstate schools will work together on a new development center, and NYU-Poly will work with CUNY to create PowerBridge, an applied science research institute that focuses on challenges specific to an urban environment.

Drop The Ball, Up The Traffic The customized mobile site publisher Onswipe had lots of reasons to pop champagne on New Year's Eve. The company says that it has reached 44 million unique visitors in total for 2012 and now is reaching more than 10 million monthly active uniques on iOS devices. The publisher also saw a huge bump in traffic after people opened their gifts on Christmas morning. Most notably, in the two days after the holiday, total unique visits on its sites jumped 22 percent and Kindle Fire unique visitors increased 75 percent.

Get Glasses, Give Glasses Diane von Furstenberg is teaming up with the insurance company VSP Vision Care to run a contest on Pinterest to help benefit the NYC Mission Society. Every time an image gets repinned from the VSP Pinterest Board, a gift certificate for an eye exam and glasses will be donated to the New York City Mission Society. These repinners are in luck too--when a user repins that image, they are automatically qualified to win a pair of DVF sunglasses and a $500 DVF.com gift certificate.

Move, Drop, Shake Unpakt, the site that lets you compare movers, continued its “Innovators on the Move” series. It features tech entrepreneurs reflecting on recent moves in their lives. This week's video features VHX founders Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson talking about the move to its first offices in Brooklyn.

Innovators on the Move: Casey & Jamie from Unpakt on Vimeo.

Baby You're A Firework (Filter) The favorite photo sharing app of the Williams sisters, Mobli, just celebrated 2013 in the best way they know how--by adding two new filters to its app. Both of them are New Year's Eve themed. One has a fireworks overlay, while the other has "2013" glittering in gold. Siiiick.

Live Like 'Countdown' Just last month, Gojee was the site to go to for recipes based on what's in your pantry. But it's recently launched a slew of fashion verticals which include landing pages for lingerie, heels, dresses, jewelry and handbags. The recipe sites are still up, so there's no need to panic about your dinner just yet. This makes living your best Beyonce life ("All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time") all that much more possible.

More Style Buying Speaking of buying clothes based off the pretty images you find on Tumblr and Pinterest, there's now StyleSays -- a new fashion image sharing community that connects users’ favorite style images to purchasable content. It tags pictures of pretty outfits with links to purchasable items. Some might be the exact product and it could give you an affordable alternative.

AT&T Sucks If one of your New Year's resolutions is to ditch your phone provider once and for all, consider making a switch to T-Mobile. The company is now touting the results of its $4 billion commitment to improving service and says its reception in New York is better than ever. Neville Ray, the CTO for T-Mobile, said in a blog post that NYC customers "can also bring their unlocked AT&T smartphones to T-Mobile and experience a significant speed boost on our network with most devices, while also saving up to $50/month compared to AT&T."

Old dog learning new tricks, etc. Bluefin Labs, the social TV analytics company for advertisers, just added an important employee to its team. Scott Grunther, a former Nielsen executive, is joining the Bluefin team in 2013 as a senior vice president. He will also be the general manager of media products out of the company’s New York office. He's been in the industry for 20 years.

Screencap, via HyperVocal

While the bigwigs of Cornell's NYC Tech program gathered at their temporary digs in the Google HQ to pat each other's backs, word was spreading about one enterprising cam girl who decided to use Cornell's Carpenter Engineering Library as a backdrop for a self-made porno.

A tipster sent the video to IvyGate, which was uploaded to Xhamster and posted to Cornell's forums, EzraHub. The video shows a young blonde woman masturbating; at one point, she angles the computer to show that someone is studying behind her, providing a pretty comprehensive view of the library which IvyGate confirmed is "Carp."

Naturally, Cornell students immediately donned their Internet sleuthing caps and went to work trying to determine the woman's identity. One student linked to a profile of a professional cam girl named Cameron Knight, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl in the video. Her profile also states that she lives in Syracuse, which is just an hour drive to Cornell's campus in Ithaca.

Another EzraHub poster wondered if she was a student over the summer. "The video was posted over the summer and that's the only time I could see Carp being empty enough for a hot (ok, she's not hot at all, but hot for the Engineering Quad) girl to get away with touching herself without a slew of neckbeards drooling all over her," he wrote.

One Cornell alum told Betabeat, "Oh man. That's number one on the Cornell 161 things to do list: fuck in the stacks."

Whoever the mystery girl may be, this is certainly the most interesting thing to ever happen in an engineering library.

(h/t HyperVocal)

Update: IvyGate has confirmed that the same cam girl has filmed at least three other videos at the Cornell Law Library. Does Cornell have any campus security?

screengrab

Team GhostShell returned late Monday with Project WestWind: a leak of 120,000 records from 100 major universities around the world.

Team GhostShell is the hacking group behind Project Hellfire, which launched in August this year. Project Hellfire lifted 1 million accounts from 100 websites around the world, compromising data from the CIA and from Wall Street.

The hacked data leaked in Project WestWind does indeed appear to come from a who's who of major learning institutions. They include Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Tokyo University, Cornell and New York University.

In their Pastebin announcement, Team GhostShell said Project WestWind was a serious effort to jump-start a dialogue on the state of higher education today. Apparently this hack wasn't pranksterism for the lulz, but hacktivism for the greater good:

We wanted to bring to your attention different examples from Europe, how the laws change so often that even the teachers have a hard time adjusting to them, let alone, the students, to the US, where tuition fees have spiked up so much that by the time you finish any sort of degree, you will be in more debt than you can handle and with no certainty that you will get a job, to Asia, where strict & limited teachings still persist and never seem to catch up with the times and most of the time fail to prep you up for a world where foreign affairs are crucial in this day and age.

The hackers ask that others use the information as a conversation starter, team member DeadMellox writing:

You don't have to talk about it with us, what's important is that you bring up the subject 'today's education' in day-to-day conversations with your family, friends, people close to you and try to understand the system better, together. How it works, how a certain type of diploma can or cannot help you in your road to the career you want to pursue.

Though Team GhostShell's data dump contains user screen names and mostly hashed passwords (Betabeat examined one file in which some of the passwords were apparently cracked), they claim they've kept the leaked records to a minimum.

Team GhostShell issued a warning to the targeted institutions regarding the states of their networks: "When we got there, we found out that a lot of them have malware injected. No surprise there since some have credit card information stored."

Betabeat has reached out to a web network administrator at one of the hacked universities for comment and will update this post if we receive a response.

(Photo: CornellNYC Tech)

Cornell NYC Tech, the Ivy League school's Technion assisted expansion onto Roosevelt Island, just got a huge PR boost from three big names. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Qualcomm Founder Irwin Jacobs, and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt have all been tapped to be advisors to the new tech campus.

Now they're like the super-important ultra-rich white guy Avengers of Cornell. 

This is, of course, not the first time that the Mayor and Mr. Schmidt have been involved with Cornell NYC Tech. Mayor Bloomberg has participated in pretty much every major announcement about the campus, including personally revealing the appointment of Cornell NYC's first dean at Tumblr HQ.. Although Mr. Schmidt hasn't publicly been associated with the campus, Google has gifted the campus 22,000 square feet of office space for the next five years.

In addition to being the founder of Qualcomm, Mr. Jacobs was an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT from 1959 to 1966 and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California, San Diego from 1966 to 1972. Besides the fact that he's an incredible entrepreneur, it's clear that the guy knows some stuff about tech education.

In a press release sent to Betabeat, the three titans shared their thoughts on officially becoming a part of this new venture. Some shared more thoughts than others. A little terse there, Mr. Schmidt:

“New York City’s growing tech industry is about to be infused with new talent, thanks to the historic investments made by the City and Cornell for the new campus on Roosevelt Island,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “Ensuring that the new campus is connected in the right way to the thriving entrepreneurial sector is important to delivering on the promise of economic growth that is at the center of this project. I look forward to advising the university leadership on how we can achieve these goals.”

"Throughout my career as an educator and as founder of two companies based on innovation, I have experienced great satisfaction in developing unique products and growing large markets by exploiting rapid advances in applied science and engineering," said Irwin Jacobs.  "I am excited by this opportunity to work with Mayor Bloomberg and Eric Schmidt in guiding Cornell NYC Tech and the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute through a rapid transition from startup to major player in applied science education and the formation of impactful new companies. Both Cornell, where I received an excellent undergraduate engineering education, and Technion, which has trained many of the engineers working at Qualcomm Israel in Haifa, have the energy and experience to surpass our great expectations."

“I am pleased to join the steering committee for Cornell NYC Tech as they build their presence in New York City,” said Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. “This campus is an important step forward for the development of the city’s tech sector and its continued economic growth.”

The press release gives a hazy description of what the three will actually be doing for the new graduate program. It says that they "will provide advice to tech campus leadership on the educational, research, economic development and community engagement functions of the campus, helping to promote new national and international models connecting academia and industry."

We doubt that any of these three guys will be picking up some chalk to teach a class any time soon, but at least their presence gives promise that this campus will be pretty star-studded.

Artist's rendering. (Image: Cornell University)

CornellNYC is starting to come together. Applications are now being accepted; the infant school has a home with Google until the Roosevelt Island campus is complete. Now the Cornell Daily Sun reports that the debut roster is growing, announcing one name who'll be doing splitting his time between Ithaca and New York and a semester-long visitor from San Diego.

That faculty lounge is starting to fill up! Provided the faculty lounge is actually David Karp's sidecar.

Joining UCLA poachee Deborah Estrin (for the first semester, anyway) will be a Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, Rajit Manohar, and a University of California at San Diego professor of computer science engineering, Serge Belongie.

UPDATED: An earlier version of this article suggested that Professors Manohar and Belongie were new, full-time hires. We've updated the relevant portions of the article to make their positions more clear. Betabeat regrets the error. 

Good news for all you Big Apple big data types: Professor Belongie will be teaching "Modern Analytics,"  which sounds like it'll help make the campus fertile ground for hunting new talent. According to the Sun: "His class arose in response to the growing number of high tech companies looking to hire data scientists."

Professor Belongie's comments to the Sun make us wonder--not for the first time--how closely tied the final product will be to the commercial world:

“I felt that had Stanford won, in some sense it would suggest that Stanford would be bringing some of the Silicon Valley-style approach to New York, because that’s where Stanford has excelled traditionally; they’re such an integral part of the culture in Silicon Valley,” Belongie said. “The idea that a different university won, one that’s actually from New York State, presents a really neat opportunity to create something brand new instead of a copy of something that exists somewhere else.”

His point is well taken, but one wonders whether he's ever heard the expression, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Professor Manohar, on the other hand--who's agreed to an intense-sounding half time in New York and half time in Ithaca--will be teaching something a little more hands-on IRL. In "Physical Computing," students will learn to build tech that interacts with the environment. Think smart grids and smart homes. Maybe that manufacturing revival isn't just a product of our fevered imagination, after all.

The future.

The latest challenge for the city's grand applied-sciences plans: Some ticked-off East Harlemites, says the Daily News.

As we've mentioned before, building that snazzy billion-dollar campus on Roosevelt Island requires demolishing the antiquated old Coler-Goldwater long-term care hospital. Hundreds of patients--many of them with complex needs and financial situations--have to be relocated before October 2013.

The good news is the city has a plan: The Daily News reports that, in order to squeak in under the deadline, "city officials are racing to erect several facilities in East Harlem that will house as many as 700 Coler-Goldwater patients." But that's going to cost some $300 million and the locals are, frankly, peeved.

The term "hidden subsidy" is bandied about.

Says the Daily News:

They never bothered to ask locals what they wanted done with that land, according Community Board 11, which voted unanimously in mid June to oppose them.

“We’re not against the Cornell school,” said Matthew Washington, chairman of Community Board 11.

“We just believe there has to be more support from the city for our own residents” and a “recognition of the burden” the neighborhood will bear for these projects.”

Community leaders want more construction jobs for locals and, according to the Daily News, believe that "the mayor should assure that Cornell provides special science programs for all East Harlem schools."

However, the city would like to point out that this closure was announced in 2010, before the tech campus competition even started, much less the winner announced. Coler-Goldwater was antiquated and needed to be replaced, regardless.

Another day, another tussle.