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!

Masters students from Zicklin School of Business could be forgiven for mistaking Fred Wilson for Peter Thiel recently.

After all, Mr. Wilson's advice had shades of an argument we're more used to hearing from Peter "The Real Bubble Is in Education" Thiel.

At the B-school, which is part of Baruch, as a senior college at CUNY, Mr. Wilson told students that if they wanted to be entrepreneurs, they didn't need a formal education to be successful. Considering the students were attending a rather laughably-named class on "E-Business," we can see where Mr. Wilson was coming from.

PBS.com's Media Shift blog interpreted Mr. Wilson's advice as saying that journalism school isn't enough for media entrepreneurs.

According to the blog, he told the students that a better indicator of entrepreneurial success would be learning to code and then advised them to find classes on at Ruby on Rails, Javascript,  PHP, or database programs like MySql or Mongo at General Assembly—or try their hand at CodeCademy, the fast-growing USV-backed teaching platform.

Certainly sounds more practical than "E-Business Principles and Technologies."

"Be technical, get technical, or find people you can be business partners with who are. Even if you are not going to do these things by yourself, it's helpful to learn," he said. "It's better to learn it to talk to technical people, and to evaluate if somebody technical is good or not."

Funny, we'd heard something similar about teaching yourself to talk the talk from TechStars New York managing director David Tisch recently, along with a note of regret about not biting the bullet and learning to code altogether.

Disclosure: Both @benpopper and @nitashatiku attended the same journalism school at NYU. On more than one occasion, they have been heard wishing they could spend their student loan payments taking Ruby classes instead.

Pobrecito, Andy.

With less than three weeks left until proposals are due to build a Stanford-like engineering mecca on the isle of Manhattan, no one is taking any chances. Rumor may have it that Stanford proper is a lock for the contract. But as Betabeat has reported, a source familiar with the decision-making process says it's pretty much about the RFP. (Even Mayor Bloomberg's imprimatur is merely  a "small to medium plus," said the source.)

Cornell's PR firm and power lobbyist, hired to help manage the school's campaign, seem convinced that a little community spirit can't hurt. This Saturday, October 15th, Cornell will be the only academic sponsor for Next Jump's Silicon Alley 500 recruiting event on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, matching engineers and engineering students with hot Made in NYC startups like 10gen, Etsy, Boxee, Meetup, SecondMarket, and Tumblr.

Cornell may need the good will. Over the weekend, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, and Columbia all showed a little RFP leg--with proposals that opt for Brooklyn and Manhattanville over Roosevelt Island. And this morning Stanford just announced that it's partnering with CUNY and City College.

The creation of the Stanford-CUNY Collaboration at City College, or Stanford@CCNY for short, seems like an aggressive response to critics, among them Union Square Ventures's Fred Wilson, who told Betabeat, "It’s downright anti-NYC for the mayor’s office to consider helping an outsider come into NYC and a massive slap in the face of all the great institutions NYC has here already." Well, it looks like Stanford's bid just got some local flavor.

Mr. Wilson, who is on the board of NYU and its engineering school NYU-Poly will likely be backing the joint bid from NYU, which partners with schools like Carnegie Mellon, CUNY, the Indian Institute of Technology and companies like IBM, ConEd, and Cisco. The latest issue of Crain's New York Business reveals previously undisclosed details, like the fact that neither NYU's nor Columbia's proposal will use Roosevelt Island, the parcel of city-owned land thought to be the preferred choice for the new campus.

According to Crain's, "NYU will put forward a 450,000-square-foot campus at 370 Jay St. [in Brooklyn], an underutilized city-owned building—across the street from Polytechnic Institute of NYU—that is leased to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority." Columbia will stick with Manhattan, but further uptown:

"Columbia, which is flying solo, wants to build a 1 million-square-foot data science institute on its emerging Manhattanville campus, north of West 130th Street, between 12th Avenue and Broadway. Two new buildings would be constructed, and an old auto factory would be refurbished. The center would focus on new media, smart cities, cybersecurity, finance and health analytics, and would involve the university's business, journalism, engineering, international and business schools."

While Carnegie Mellon brings the Brooklyn Navy Yard, one of the original four locations proposed by the NYC EDC, back into play:

"Carnegie Mellon's bid, aimed at making the city a production powerhouse, is altogether different. Patterned loosely on partnerships the university has with Disney and Google in its home city of Pittsburgh, the plan calls for collaborating with Steiner Studios to build an entertainment technology center adjacent to Steiner's home at the Brooklyn Navy Yard."

Crains' says that kind of smaller-scale plan, at least compared to the campus on Roosevelt Island, opens up the possibility of the EDC picking two or more winners, something that agency hasn't ruled out. But breaking ground on that many projects before Mayor Bloomberg leaves office may stretch the resources and efforts too thin.

News hackers Juan Muller and Joe Cullen. Photo: Daniel Bachhuber

The winner of this weekend's news games hackathon hosted by journalist/developer group Hacks/Hackers at CUNY's journalism school this weekend was created by a professional newsroom programmer, Associated Press developer Julian Burgess. In Whose Headline, players match headlines to their publications. It has the simple, sticky satisfaction of solitaire, but you gain a top-level sense of what's going on in the world at the same time. Is "DRUGGY DAUGHTER BOOMERANGS WHITNEY" from The National Enquirer, the New Yorker or The Onion? "Attorney generals slam 'binge-in-a-can' drink"--The New York Daily News, Forbes or The Guardian?

Unfortunately, not all the apps were really news games. Context, which also got a prize, allows readers to comment and annotate articles inline. Great, but where's the fun in that? "A newsgame is an application of journalism in videogame form," according to the Newsgames project at Georgia Tech.

The problem is, news games are difficult and rare; there are not many good examples of them. Maybe it's because using game mechanics as a gimmick to attract readers feels un-journalistic in some way. "I’m not comfortable journalistically with badges, rewards, basically tricks, to drive traffic," video game journalist Heather Chaplain said during a panel at the event.

Co-organizer Daniel Bachhuber said he wasn't disappointed in the lack of truly gamesy news games, but he wishes they'd used a word other than "hackathon" to describe the event. "I think it came together pretty well," he said. "Reinventing how news is consumed doesn't happen in a day. I also think that we need a better word... hackathons have a technology focus, and I think non-developers are turned off.