As far as technophiles seeking political office go, Jack Dorsey is taking the opposite approach from Sheryl Sandberg.

Ms. Sandberg's new book may read like the source material for a campaign platform, but on a recent 60 Minutes appearance, she evaded questions about leaning in to the White House. Mr. Dorsey, on the other hand, is once again boldly pointing to his desired political office (Mayor of New York City), just not, you know, when he's running or what exactly he'd do when he got here--besides marvel at our transportation system, of course.

Last night, the Twitter and Square cofounder also took the hot seat on 60 Minutes. Actually, the temperature was rather warm and welcoming. The CBS crew seemed smitten with the man "many people" call "the intellectual successor" to Steve Jobs and his shy, contemplative ways. Indeed, it was hard not to read a note of admiration as Lara Logan asked about his inability to communicate, as is befitting the new mode of deference to our nerd-boy-kings, who are somehow still able to snag model girlfriends and charm celebrities.

The segment was also bookended with mentions of Mr. Dorsey's vague mayoral campaign. As Ms. Logan intoned:

"Square is still a startup, but we were surprised to learn that Jack Dorsey already has his eye on the next job he wants, Mayor of New York City--an unlikely role for a man who calls himself a loner and spends a lot of time dreaming and thinking."

The daydream believer revisits that ambition as he and Ms. Logan are filmed riding around the subway. Here's their exchange from the middle of the Times Square station:

Dorsey: What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away. Just look at us in this station, there's just people walking everywhere--

Logan: Chaos.

Dorsey: It's chaos. It's kind of like being in a car in the middle of a thunderstorm. Everything is raging around you but you're safe inside that car. So New York feels very much to me like that.

Yeah, "safe" isn't the first word most New Yorkers would use to describe life in the city?

That segues into a photo of Mr. Dorsey and Mayor Bloomberg. "Jack Dorsey knows it helps to be a billionaire if you run for mayor in New York," according to Ms. Logan's voiceover. In fact, as David Kirkpatrick noted in 2011, Mr. Bloomberg explicitly advised Mr. Dorsey to "make a lot of money first."

At that point, Ms. Logan swings it back his comfort level with face-to-face communication with voters. Mr. Dorsey looks down as he responds:

"I guess my natural state would be through mediation of letters or through text, all those mediums I definitely find ease with. But do I appreciate it as much as face to face communication? No. Do I feel like I'm an expert at having a normal conversation, face to face? Absolutely not. That's just not my natural state. I would rather be walking in Land's End [across from the Golden Gate bridge] and thinking about things."

Sounds more like he's running for successor to Steve Jobs than mayor.

Let's all work from SPACE! (Photo: Chatter-fest)

Just when we all thought the furor about whether Yahoos! can work from home might finally die down, Mayor Michael Bloomberg weighed in on the matter--siding with Ms. Mayer. During his weekly radio show, reports Capital New York, he noted that, "I've always said, telecommuting is one of the dumber ideas I've ever heard."

Well, Sir Richard Branson, for one, could not believe his ears. Absolutely aghast at this latest turn of events, the gallivanting founder of Virgin Group employed his blog once again to preach the gospel of working remotely and/or butt into the business of other major moguls: 

I have enormous respect for Michael Bloomberg and have rarely disagreed with anything he has done or said. However, on this occasion I disagree completely. Many employees who work from home are extremely diligent, get their job done, and get to spend more time with their families. They waste less time commuting and get a better work/life balance.

"To force everybody to work in offices is old school thinking," he added. Never mind that many Yahoo employees weren't even bothering to log in via VPN, which even the worst work-at-home slacker knows is a necessity. Wouldn't want to seem like an old fogey!

"In 30 years time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed," added Sir Richard Branson. "Do you agree that offices will one day be a thing of the past?"

We eagerly await the day the workers of the world can all Skype in from their very own Caribbean islands. Too bad this utopia won't arrive until after everyone's Metrocards get even more expensive.

Photo: Dorm Room Fund

Because Angel Investors Can Live In Dorms Too The New York tech scene can never have too many venture capitalists, but sometimes it can be difficult for student entrepreneurs to bridge the age gap between themselves and their investors. Enter the Dorm Room Fund, an investment team started by firm First Round Capital, which is run and composed entirely of students. With $500,000 provided by First Round, the student members of the Dorm Room Fund can choose which student projects to invest in, as well as who will be accepted to be a board member of the investment team when other members graduate. After last year's debut in Philadelphia, the Dorm Room Fund is expanding to New York, and will be accepting applications to its board from Columbia, NYU, Princeton, and Cornell's tech campus until March 11, and has already begun accepting applications for student startups seeking investment at these schools.

Warby Parker Gets Another Round of Funding With Google Glass on everyone's mind, the news of online eyewear distributor Warby Parker's new funding successes was a little swept under the rug. But Monday's announcement of new investments from American Express and J. Crew chief executive Millard S. Drexler is just another sign that the New York startup, which lets you "try on" glasses online, could be a serious challenger to the physical eyewear market. Wonder who might want to partner with them? (Hint: we already mentioned them.)

Once Again, Please Stop Paying For Cable If you're a twenty something New Yorker, chances are that somewhere along the way to your $12oo-a-month Bushwick apartment you sacrificed paying for cable. Well you can stop pirating all your favorite shows, because Aereo announced on Monday that it's expanding its live video streaming service beyond the five boroughs to more than 19 million people in the surrounding New York metropolitan area. The cloud/DVR's access area will now encompass 29 counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York. The company will also be rolling out a new multi-million dollar ad campaign in the New York area, highlighted by the tagline, “Live TV. Online. No Cable Required.” Although only 30 channels are provided now, the company hopes to rapidly expand in the near future.

This Definitely Isn't Your Childhood Summer QAmp Although its not always the flashiest part of a tech company, the quality assurance (QA) section is necessary for any tech company wishing to release a quality, glitch-free product. And to that end, SummerQAmp, an education initiative started by a number of companies, will return this summer to provide students with internship opportunities at tech companies across the country in the field of quality assurance. The QA department is often viewed as just a place for product testing, but SummerQAmp aims to change that. Of course, no matter how you spin it, an internship consisting of continuously opening and closing an app doesn't exactly sound like a dream vaca.

Aggregation Just Got Even More Ridiculous With Movie App "Clinch" If you've never heard of Clinch, the movie making app, which was released last year, creates films using a users' video and combining it with multiple sources such as other users', media. Well now Clinch will be updating their app this Monday with a new user interface that focuses on integrating videos and photos from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sources, as well as improving upon its proprietary algorithms for creating spliced videos. Because people don't already hate when their writing is aggregated, so why not start doing the same with videos as well?

Bloomberg Wants All Our Children To Be Nerds New York mayor Michael Bloomberg sure has been on a tech tear recently. Last week he announced his Made in NYC campaign to help New York tech startups, and on Monday he revealed that 20 New York high schools and middle schools will receive “comprehensive computer science and software engineering curriculum” as part of the city's new Software Engineering Pilot (SEP) program. The program will begin with 1,000 students and expand to 3,500 students by 2016, though it remains to be seen whether this program will finally unify the jocks and geeks on the high school popularity spectrum.

The Bronx And Staten Island Are Some Of Klutziest Cities In America In another sign that Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens are the only boroughs worth living in New York, consumer electronic trade-in site Gazelle recently announced the ten klutziest cities in America, and the Bronx came in at fourth and Staten Island placed ninth. The numbers, based on the percentage of electronic devices the site received from each city that were either cracked, dented or water-damaged, found that Tallahassee, Florida was the worst offender in the U.S., followed by New Orleans (in fact, the South dominated the list with six of the ten spots.) As it comes to no one's surprise, the site receives plenty of broken phones, and has decided to run a "Broken Phone Stories" contest in order to discover the best broken phone story in the country.

It wasn't so long ago that the Nook was the key to Barnes & Noble's future. Now the bookseller is planning to back off of its efforts to sell its own e-reader, and is working on strengthening partnerships with tablet suppliers. [NYT]

It's not that Julian Assange isn't giving interviews—it's just that he's leading a busy life inside the Ecuadorian government's London embassy, and it's a question of fitting reporters in. [Ars Technica]

Kara Swisher leans into the backlash against Facebook COO's Sheryl Sandberg's new book. [AllThingsD]

In case you can't wait for the competing biopics currently in production, here's what it's like to go on a double-date with John McAfee. [PandoDaily]

During the Q&A period, Dawn Barber, cofounder of the New York Tech Meetup, asked Mr. Schumer what he thought of the role of the technology community would play in the city's future.

The topic has been received with considerable skepticism recently, particularly after Mayor Bloomberg waved his pom-poms at a press conference yesterday trying to lure more startups to New York.

The event--hosted at Buzzfeed's perky Flatiron headquarters--was light on actual news. Mr. Bloomberg officially announced the "Made in NY" label invented for the entertainment industry could now be applied to tech companies. While he was it, he also launched an online hub, We Are Made In NY. The site builds on the pre-existing Made in NY map, which let's tech-happy workers search for which startups are hiring or where to find investors. It also provides links to apply for resources subsidized office space or broadband connectivity.

However, as Kevin Roose noted over at Daily Intel, in order to qualify for that "Made in NY" sticker, companies have to have 75 percent of their technology development based in New York City. That eliminates major employers like Facebook and Google, who can make a bigger impact on the jobs market. Those types of companies are motivated more by "talent arbitrage"--luring engineers from other strong sectors (hi, Wall Street!) who might be open to taking tech jobs if they don't have to leave New York.

Thus Bloomie's brand of PR push doesn't work on them, Mr. Roose argued:

" . . . they're incentivized when they want to reduce their tax burdens, when they want to open a new market, or when they can get something in a satellite location that they can't get at home. Mayor Bloomberg isn't proposing any new tax breaks for start-ups, but he could convince West Coast–based computing giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Genentech to expand their New York presence by pointing out the vast engineering talent that exists here and can't be moved. That alone would create more New York jobs than convincing a hundred small start-ups to set up shop."

What's more, as The Awl's Choire Sicha pointed out today, the nebulous resources highlighted on the We Are Made In NY page won't necessarily move the needle for smaller startups either.

This morning's breakfast offered Mr. Schumer an opportunity to respond to some of those concerns, albeit indirectly. He mentioned his proposed immigration bill, which allows STEM (science technology engineering and math) graduates to "get a green card attached to your diploma," as a way to attract technical talent to New York, "because we’re the most hospitable place for immigrants anywhere in the nation."

"I’m a competitive New Yorker, so I like to see us do better than everybody else," he said. Mr. Schumer predicted the tech sector would be "one of our great futures," noting venture capital reports that show New York as second only to Silicon Valley in venture funding and a bigger percentage of growth in funding here.

This time around, he added, the promise is "not illusory the way it was in 2000." By way of proof, he offered the following anecdote:

"It's much stronger and deeper. I talk to experts in California. Eric Schmidt, the head of Google, told me that he gets more productivity per worker out of the 3,000 Google workers here--per person, per dollar--than out of the 13,000 people in Mountain View in their headquarters."

Huh, wonder what they're putting in the food trucks at Googleplex East?

Mr. Schumer didn't offer any further explanation, so it's impossible to say whether that enhanced productivity-per-dollar is because GOOG found a way to marshall New York neuroses or just because engineers in the Valley are paid a prettier penny. But that certainly sounds like the kind of stat that might interest Facebook and Twitter.

If City Hall does decide to start publicly courting the big boys, it might want to tread lightly. There's such a thing as being too welcoming.

Mr. Stringer. (Photo: Thomas Good / NLN)

Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to exit stage left this year, which means it's time to elect someone to take his place. Since there are no other billionaire tech evangelists waiting in the wings, local techies are being courted for their votes by candidates eager to prove they're the all about Silicon Alley.

Wall Street? Where's that? 

The Wall Street Journal reports that, when April rolls around, Manhattan Borough President (and would-be city comptroller) Scott Stringer is planning to host a conference on the tech business and "how it could offer a gateway to the middle class for New Yorkers." For the tentpole act, he's wrangled the big Democratic names in the race to participate in a mayoral forum, which is an ideal opportunity for wooing.

Mr. Stringer told the Journal:

“Because Mike Bloomberg has really led the way in making us the number two tech hub in the nation, rivaling only Silicon Valley – we’ve already surpassed Boston – we do need to focus the 2013 candidates on this vital part of our economy."

We do hope, however, that this will be more than an opportunity for candidates to spout platitudes and show off their smartphones. Back in December, Mr. Stringer's office released a lengthy report questioning how much access the city's working class currently to the almighty tech boom and outlining ways to turn an exploding industry into a real route to the middle class. And with concerns over the city's affordability becoming the stuff of concerned newspaper stories, it's about time to have the talk.

Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Dorsey. (Photo: nycgov.tumblr.com)

A fair bit of Mike Bloomberg's third and final term has been devoted to improving New York City's educational offerings in the practical hard sciences. Besides the creation of Cornell Tech, he also helped broker city support for beefed-up programs at NYU and Columbia.

But there's one science-focused school that has clearly has the mayor's heart, and it's in Baltimore, of all places: His alma mater, Johns Hopkins, where he got his engineering degree. He's showered the university with cash for years, and the New York Times reports that his latest gift (a cool $350 million, the largest individual gift in the school's history) brings the total to $1.1 billion. 

In a piece about his latest donation, Mayor Bloomberg complained to the Times, “In our society, we are defunding education.” But not the man whose Scrooge McDuck-scale fortune have been shaping the school for years:

“The modern story of Hopkins is inextricably linked to him,” said Ronald J. Daniels, the university’s president, as he walked around the campus recently. “When you look at these great investments that have transformed American higher education, it’s Rockefeller, it’s Carnegie, it’s Mellon, it’s Stanford — and it’s Bloomberg.”

That cash has bought everything from a new physics building to 20 percent of the need-based scholarships the school grants annually. You'd almost think he wanted to disrupt the liberal arts!

Of course, as Quartz points out, former C student Mayor Bloomberg probably wouldn't get into Johns Hopkins today. His odds for admission to Cornell look iffy, too, and forget about the "elite" program here in the city. Maybe he can do a little something for the late bloomers with the billions he plans to give away?

(Photo: Flickr, imaginecup)

Earlier this week, Betabeat reported on New York Tech Meetup's plans to host a series of candidates forums ahead of the upcoming citywide elections, as the local tech community seeks to reshape the city in the image of its own fast-Internet, open-data, science-in-schools algorithmic fantasy.

As we noted, plans for the forums followed news that the board of NYTM was set to approve a slate of proposals to mayoral candidates (and to those running for those public advocate and comptroller), which would then be presented for feedback to NYTM's rank-and-file.

Consider the slate presented. Under the modest heading of "Help Us Make NYC the Best City for Tech in the World!," NYTM laid out its agenda. You can read its seven proposals below, and NYTM members can offer input here.

It appears to be a broad slate, offering political hopefuls a safe way to commit to New York's future as a center of innovation.

At a glance, the firmest proposal seems like NYTM's call for the creation of a deputy mayor for technology innovation, a proposal that gives way to a pet fantasy of our own: that Mayor Michael Bloomberg finds an office in the next administration, and continues to run the city from behind the new titular head, a la Vladimir Putin.

In the unlikelihood of that outcome, we're sure there are plenty of excellent candidates.

1. Make New York City the most wired city on earth by providing every New Yorker and every New York business regardless of location access to the fastest broadband networks at the lowest cost.

2. Reinvent the education system to allow every child, young adult, and all New Yorkers to develop the skills necessary to thrive in a 21st century economy.

3. Make New York City the clear choice for entrepreneurs, software engineers, and other technically skilled professionals to start a business and build a career by making it easy to find partners, financing, office space and housing, employees, and access to markets.

4. Support the appointment of a Deputy Mayor for Technology Innovation with an appropriate budget charged with the responsibility of reinventing New York City government with a 21st century framework.

5. Make New York City’s system for civic participation the most open, transparent, accountable, participatory, and innovative in the world.

6. Make New York City the most citizen-connected community on earth, where its people connect with each other to unleash a powerful 21st century economy: selling to each other, renting to each other, funding each other, sharing with each other, coworking with each other, meeting up with each other, and hiring each other.

7. Support public policies that would ensure that technology and the opportunities available to the tech community can reach all New York’s citizens, and help solve issues related to healthcare, human rights and justice, gender equality, transportation, the environment, and other issues of fundamental importance to all New Yorkers.

(Photo: "Alexander Torrenegra)

For many in the New York City startup community, it's been nice having Mayor Michael Bloomberg around. Not only does the third-term mayor double as the city's most successful tech entrepreneur, Mr. Bloomberg has championed policies aimed at turning New York into a hotbed of innovation.

With Mr. Bloomberg's time in office coming to a close, and no candidate stepping boldly into his loafers, the New York Tech Meetup revealed plans to host a series of candidates forums in the months leading up to this year’s mayoral election.

It's all part of the tech community attempt to claim a larger role in the political sphere as startups lose their best ally in City Hall, NYTM executive director Jessica Lawrence told Betabeat.

News of the forums, which have not been finalized, comes after The Wall Street Journal reported that NYTM is drafting proposals to educate would-be officials on issues that that the tech community considers paramount.

"Our main goal is to make sure our issues are part of the dialogue," Ms. Lawrence told us. "It's something that’s incredibly important if the city is to be a center for innovation, that the people elected to office listen to what those of us in the tech community have to say, and pay attention to that expertise."

According to Ms. Lawrence, NYTM has been gathering input on its proposals for at least six months, but the organization's efforts to play a greater political role date back to its efforts to defeat SOPA and PIPA in 2011, during which NYTM aimed to join the national debate on the anti-piracy laws.

Beyond NYTM's efforts, the New York tech community has been increasingly feeling its political oats. The city's tech community helped raise money for President Barack Obama's reelection campaign. In 2010, congressional candidate Reshma Saujani built her campaign around an innovation and entrepreneurship platform, drawing support from tech luminaries such as Jack Dorsey, of Twitter and Square and Facebook’s Chris Hughes.

“I think we've seen with Bloomberg how important it is to have a mayor who understands the role that tech plays in the local economy," Ms. Lawrence said. "Because of that we've been able to make significant progress in establishing New York as center of innovation.”

To continue the strides that the city's tech sector has made under Mayor Bloomberg, NYTM is expected to emphasize greater access to high-speed Internet and public data, as well a greater emphasis on math and science education in the city's public schools, when it presents its proposals to candidates for the offices of mayor and public advocate.

A preliminary version of the slate will be discussed by the NYTM board at a meeting tonight. Assuming passage, the slate would be presented for comment to the organization's 29,000 members, then finalized in the weeks and months to come.

“It’s going to be a combination of trying to be representative of the community, and what the community needs are without giving the candidates too many issues to deal with,” Ms. Lawrence said.

While it's too early to say precisely what shape the forums might take, Ms. Lawrence anticipated large gatherings that would allow the candidates and the tech community to get to know each other better.

"As we look at the city's economy, its systems for responding to disaster, or the traditional systems of making data available or awarding contracts—they’re all being changed by technology," Ms. Lawrence said. “It's not going backwards anytime soon. It's important that we start having conversations about how tech is impacting the city's economics and infrastructure.”

Mayor Bloomberg and Jack Dorsey during Square's short-lived pilot program.

This morning, on his weekly Friday radio show with John Gambling, Mayor Bloomberg discussed the Taxi and Limousine Commission's vote in favor of a year-long pilot program to test out e-hailing apps, which let riders flag down a cab with their smartphone.

As we noted yesterday, the pilot was a last-minute compromise when it seemed like lobbying from black car and livery car incumbents would prohibit the passage of permanent rules to open up the taxi market to any app with a license. (Black cars and liveries worry that the ability to "pre-arrange" taxi rides with an an app will hurt their business.)  

In his remarks this morning, Mayor Bloomberg mused on some potential pitfalls of incorporating the apps into the taxi hailing experience:

"The mobile phone knows where you are, so in theory you hit a button and any taxi driver that’s on the same app on his mobile phone or her mobile phone can hit a button and say, 'I’m going to come.' What happens if two guys hit a button at the same time? What happens if you hit the button, a guy says he’s coming, and in the meantime some cab pulls up empty--somebody’s getting out? Do you hop in? And what do you do with the first cab guy? Whose obligations are what?"

Overall, however, he advocated for a free market approach, echoing statements made by TLC chairman David Yassky in our interview earlier this week.

"Everyone’s different, I have absolutely no idea which one is better. My sense is always that you should have more than one so the public has a choice and let the marketplace decide."

But things really started to heat up when Mr. Gambling guessed that cab companies and drivers would be into this sort of innovation. Mr. Bloomberg reiterated the example of adding credit card payment options, which came up repeatedly during negotiations as an example of unfounded fears of incorporating new technology.

"Uh. There is a group of cab owners that are opposed to anything, but yeah most cab drivers should like this. They didn’t like credit card use and now they’ll all tell you their tips are up dramatically."

Somehow that segued into a diatribe on corruption in the taxi industry!

"The cab industry is a funny industry. I don’t know if there’s any other place in the world where the city gives a license and the people that have that license can then trade it and resell it and the city doesn’t have any interest and any ability to share in the value going up. And the politics, because they support candidates--a normal market would just say: Well, we’ll just issue more taxi licenses. Wrong! Because they have bought the legislatures and stopped the ability to do that. It is one of the great rip-offs of the public any place I’ve ever seen."

Mr. Bloomberg's agenda for 2013 might be to disrupt medallions, but the rest of us are more concerned about the MTA.