(Photo: Wikimedia)

Today Time Warner Cable announced that the company expects to invest $25 million to expand its fiber optic network in both "established and emerging" business sectors around New York City. Many of the areas highlighted in today's announcement happen to coincide with burgeoning tech hubs.

In a press release to Betabeat, Time Warner said it would extend its broadband capabilities in "the World Trade Center, the Flatiron District, all areas of Midtown and throughout the Financial District," in Manhattan. In addition to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Time Warner is also upgrading fiber in the "Brooklyn Tech Triangle, the Brooklyn Army Terminal and Industry City." Long Island City in Queens, the future home to Shapeways 3D-printing factory, will also benefit from the effort.

The investment is part of a deal with the city that was still being hammered out in June when Mayor Bloomberg announced his big plan to improve broadband. At the time, Time Warner was named in the ConnectNYC facet of the mayor's plan, which focused on wiring previously underserved areas and improving connectivity in commercial and industrial buildings.

Today's announcement, for example, was made at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, home to Carnegie Mellon's tech campus initiative, where Time Warner is finishing up "a multi-million dollar investment to provide fiber-based solutions to tenants of the 300-acre business complex."

But Time Warner isn't the only company the city has partnered with, as the Wall Street Journal reports, especially when it comes to residential initiatives.

The city also has tech agreements with Verizon Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and AT&T Inc. Companies are laying fiber, providing wireless hot spots in parks and opening learning labs that give residents access to computers.

Time Warner itself is opening a "state-of-the-art" Learning Lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, "located inside the massive complex and accessible to the public." Good news for the long-neglected residents of the three neighboring housing projects, we hope.

(Photo: Facebook)

It's the dog days of summer--humid and sticky and icky--so we can't blame you if you're looking for some sweet relief. If you're pining for a pick-me-up that doesn't involve an icy alcoholic beverage or a slab of street meat, perhaps Trojan can interest you in a lil' somethin somethin.

According to the New York Times, the company is handing out free samples of its Tri-Phoria and Pulse "personal massagers." You know what that means. ;)

Trojan has transformed two hot dog carts into "Pleasure Carts" and will be pushing them up and down the streets of Manhattan to designated locations in the Flatiron and Meatpacking district (how appropriate). There, the teams will hand out vibrators--until supplies last, of course.

They're actually going to be in the Flatiron today at 4. Hmm, we think we know a few tech startups in that area.

Nodejitsu now has web developers working with node.js covered from application creation to hosting. CEO Charlie Robbins writes:

At its core flatiron is two things:

An initiative to build a collection of decoupled tools with the same standard of quality and performance that you would expect from anything built by Nodejitsu.

A full-stack web application development framework which packages these tools together to make isomorphic and stream-based application development easier.

The startup is really throwing its fortune in with the future of node.js, a relatively new tool for web development. Considering Microsoft just embraced the technology, doesn't seem like a bad idea. The framework should give Nodejitsu another advantage in competing with Y Combinator superstar Heroku, which released a node.js hosting service. Nodejitsu also competes with Y Combinator alum, NowJS.

This way to the arcade.

Brush up on your ping-pong skills, advertisers, you're about to get to get the Silicon Valley treatment.

With Advertising Week poised to take New York City, the New York Times reports that the sales and marketing teams of internet behemoths like Yahoo, Google, Apple, and yes Facebook are poised to make good on their Manhattan real estate investments. Although Twitter's new Madison Avenue digs somehow don't warrant a mention.

Rather than flying big brands out to the West Coast, they've set up shop in the Flatiron (Apple's new iAd division), Times Square (Yahoo's new digs), Madison Avenue (Facebook and Twitter are new neighbors), and don't forget the Googleplex East on Eighth.

Those companies will be on display at Advertising Week's 200 events with panels on mobile connectivity, online privacy and social networking, but the real ticket are the baller office parties to entertain clients as the digital world goes searching for their one guaranteed revenue stream: ad dollars. Yahoo has purple conference rooms and door pulls in the shape of exclamation points and Google has a heli pad and, Betabeat's persona favorite, a food truck that sells a mean knockoff of the Momofuku compost cookie.

But Facebook is playing up the startup vibe:

The company’s new office evokes a kind of romanticized view of a Silicon Valley start-up, including an open bar, video games and threadbare couches that reflect the dorm-room sensibilities of the roughly 100 employees who work there.

“When you get to that critical point in terms of the number of employees,” said Carolyn Everson, the vice president for global direct sales, “we like to have a look and feel similar to how Facebook looks and feels in Palo Alto and Singapore and London. And with this market — where we’re all on Madison Avenue and entertaining and meeting with clients every day — we wanted to have a proper presence. And we just weren’t able to do that in the limited space that we had across the street.”

We hope the gift bags include hoodies.