Adam Israfil, 14, presents an app to help readers find books suited to their taste.

“It’s pretty safe to say we’re all geeks here,” said Xavier Suarez, a particularly self-aware 16-year-old from Brooklyn, gesturing to a classroom full of fresh-faced fellow high school students. Betabeat had trekked down to Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus for the first pitch presentation of NYC Generation Tech—a new initiative by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship to provide mentorship for disadvantaged high school students interested in technology.

The program, which is still in pilot phase, consists of a two-week summer bootcamp followed by a series of weeknight meetings in the fall, hosted at the local offices of top tech companies like Facebook, NASDAQ and Warby Parker. The 30 accepted students work in teams to develop a mobile app prototype using MIT App Inventor, targeted at other New York City students.

To be eligible for the program, students must be entering grades 9-11 in the fall, have a minimum 3.0 GPA and 90 percent attendance in school. They also either have to qualify for free or reduced lunch or attend a school where more than 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. In December, the students will demo and pitch their finished apps and business plans to a panel of judges and venture capitalists for a $5,000 cash prize.

Last Friday, the halfway mark of the summer bootcamp, each student pitched their own rudimentary app idea to an audience of their peers. Jordan Runge, the head instructor of NYC Generation Tech, told Betabeat that the first week, students got an introduction to technology and entrepreneurship, brainstorming grievances and inconveniences that they could address in an app. That day, after pitching, the students were instructed to form teams of four or five based on the similarity of their app. Over the next week, each team will decide on the best app idea to pursue for the remainder of the program.

In the LIU classroom, students pitched with idealistic enthusiasm, describing apps clearly designed to solve problems they encounter in their own lives. Topics like homework, grades, after school snacks and “time management” were raised repeatedly, and a large number of pitches involved creating personalized schedules to help students manage various commitments, especially while staying on top of school work.

Ms. Barry, age 16.

Mona Barry, 16, bemoaned the inconvenience of not knowing your grade in a class until report cards, and explained that her app would alert students when their grade was in danger of falling below a certain standard. Other pitches involved instant messaging systems to enhance communication between students and teachers (“Isn’t it awkward to friend your teachers on Facebook?” asked one of the students) as well as support groups for teenagers suffering from bullying and depression.

Harry Trustman, a 15-year-old from Brooklyn, addressed summer reading grievances, marketing his app “Bookmark” as a solution to “a summer reading list filled with books you’ve never heard of.”  His app aims to improve on the customer reviews on sites like Amazon, which, in his experience, can’t be trusted. “I bought Twilight based on positive reviews, but it was terrible!” he exclaimed.

“Bookmark” would enable users to fill out a taste profile, read reviews written by peers with similar taste, and connect with students who have already read the book—a step up from Sparknotes, Mr. Trustman claimed, asserting that the study-site didn’t really answer questions and was ultimately “just another thing to read.”

Mr. Trustman wasn’t the only student to invoke the fallibility of user reviews. Many students noted that many sites require users to be 18 to provide reviews, and designed their apps to allow teenage users to access relevant reviews from written by peers.

Jose R., a sophomore from Queens, gave perhaps the most eccentric pitch, which he described as an “easy-to-use stock simulator.”

“What I need to do is make people rich,” he said, explaining that since, “Most people don’t know how to pick stocks . . . this app is for anyone who wants to learn how to make money and has the Internet—so, pretty much everyone.”

NYC Generation Tech is one of the first tech mentorship programs designed for high school students, with the aim of exposing these concepts to a more diverse group. Ron Summers, an instructor in the program, said that he finds the students's eagerness and inexperience to be a great advantage.  “Instead of thinking, I can’t do it, I don’t have those skills, they’re willing to just try it out,” he said.

Mr. Runge, the head instructor, echoed these sentiments, admitting that he actually finds it easier to work with younger students on tech projects than with adults. “You have a bunch of students who are interested in these topics, but they never really know how it works or they never realized they could be part of the creation process,” Mr. Runge said. “We get to illuminate the fact that ‘No, you can be, you’re just like anyone else and you can do whatever you want and here’s how you do it.’”

“The big difference between working with adults is that [for high schoolers] we really have to fast-track their learning to get them to a place where they can have the language and background knowledge and context so they can even talk about this,” Mr. Runge said, calling the program fairly fast-paced.

After the pitch presentation, Mr. Trustman and his new team members reflected on the first half of their experience. “The week was really awesome,” Mr. Trustman said, recounting the field trip to Makerbot the day before. “I think yesterday was my favorite because we got to make 3D sculptures of ourselves,” he explained. “And we saw 3D printers in action!” Mr. Suarez interjected excitedly. The students were also visited by a number of guest speakers from the tech industry, including Jared Cohen, the director of Operations at Kickstarter.

The boys told Betabeat they were more nervous about time constraints than creating a prototype of the app. "It’s like, I’m going to have fun, but at the same time the deadline is a week around the corner,” Mr. Suarez confided.

NYU's initial proposal for a tech campus at 370 Jay St.

UPDATE: Read our liveblog of the Mayor's press conference about the NYU's new Brooklyn campus here.

Well that was well-timed! Hours after The New Yorker posted a profile of Stanford that tore at old wounds about the innovation engine's decision to drop out of building an engineering campus in NYC--blame sour grapes or Seth Pinsky, depending on who you ask--the city is finally ready to make an announcement about a secondary initiative.

According to Mayor Bloomberg's schedule, it looks like the second-place winner is a bid from NYU and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly). In its initial proposal, NYU wanted to transform the derelict former MTA headquarters at 370 Jay Street into a Center for Urban Science and Progress. At 1pm this afternoon, the Mayor will be joining NYU President John Sexton to announce a partnership to create a new "applied sciences center in Downtown Brooklyn." 

A quick refresher: Back in December, when a joint submission from Cornell-Technion was named the winner of the New York City Economic Development Corporation's competition to build an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island, Mayor Bloomberg also teased the possibility that a secondary winner would be named among the three remaining proposals: NYU (Downtown Brooklyn), Columbia (Manhattanville), and Carnegie Mellon (Brooklyn Navy Yard).

The only hangup? The entire $100 million grant from the city for the campus contest had been allotted to Cornell-Technion, meaning the new project (or projects, the city said they would love to build all three) would likely have to rely on philanthropic donations or some creative financing on the city's part in terms of incentives. That's probably why this announcement took months longer than expected.

It's unclear whether NYU's proposal, which also got hung up on the MTA's buyout price for 370 Jay St., will still be at the same location and cover the same scope as initially proposed. But we'll be live-blogging the presser and let you know as soon as we find out. Brooklyn politicians--and real estate developers!--have been lobbying hard for this to get approved, so expect plenty of self-congratulatory back-patting.

Stanford's proposal for Roosevelt Island

In this week's issue of The New Yorker, the illustrious Ken Auletta, who recently profiled Sheryl Sandberg's attempts to "upend Silicon Valley's male-dominated culture," looks at the Bay Area from a different perspective. This time, he analyzes how Stanford became "the farm system for Silicon Valley," and whether the "gold-rush mentality" among both Stanford's students and faculty is good for the university.

Tucked inside the story are also a number of details about why Stanford, which was widely considered a frontrunner to open a its first-ever second campus on Roosevelt Island, abruptly dropped its bid at the last minute.

In our post-mortem about the botched deal in December, Betabeat previously reported how Stanford balked at costly penalties for failure to meet deadlines, even if the factors were outside the university's control, such as toxicity on the Roosevelt Island site. Stanford wasn't the only institution whose legal teams threw up a red flag. Other universities that applied and those familiar with the city's development process cited an alarming vulnerability to legal action. Stanford appeared to be particularly insulted by last-minute attempts to pit Stanford against Cornell in an attempt to see which institution would make more concessions.

(Aggressive negotiating tactics and contracts with onerous demands in the city's favor have been a hallmark of Seth Pinsky's career as president of New York City Economic Development Corporation.)

Mr. Auletta's investigation offers more details and insights along those lines.

According to Mr. Auletta, Stanford President John Hennessy was pissed that the school was being held to impossible deadlines:

On December 16, 2011, Stanford announced that it was withdrawing its bid. Publicly, the university was vague about the decision, and, in a statement, Hennessy praised “the mayor’s bold vision.” But he was seething. In January, he told me that the city had changed the terms of the proposed deal. After seven universities had submitted their bids, he said, the city suddenly wanted Stanford to agree that the campus would be operational, with a full complement of faculty, sooner than Stanford thought was feasible.

Mr. Auletta cites "city lawyers," and not the Mayor's office as responsible for the millions of dollars in penalties sprung on Stanford during negotiations:

The city, according to Debra Zumwalt, Stanford’s general counsel and lead negotiator, added “many millions of dollars in penalties that were not in the original proposal, including penalizing Stanford for failure to obtain approvals on a certain schedule, even if the delays were the fault of the city and not Stanford. . . . I have been a lawyer for over thirty years, and I have never seen negotiations that were handled so poorly by a reputable party.” One demand that particularly infuriated Stanford was a fine of twenty million dollars if the City Council, not Stanford, delayed approval of the project. These demands came from city lawyers, not from the Mayor or from a deputy mayor, Robert Steel, who did not participate in the final round of negotiations with Stanford officials.

Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, who had "an agreeable conversation" with President Hennessy the same week Stanford dropped out, insists that there were no last-minute changes, but in fact schools were pitted against each other to see who would offer the city a better deal, Mr. Aulleta reports.

All the stipulations that Stanford now complains about, he says, were part of the city’s original package. Actually, they weren’t. In the city’s proposal request, the due dates and penalties were left blank. Seth Pinsky, the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, who was one of the city’s lead negotiators, says that these were to be filled in by each bidder and then discussed in negotiations. “The more aggressive they were on the schedule and the more aggressive they were on the amount, the more favorably” the city looked at the bid, Pinsky told me. In the negotiations, he said, he tried to get each bidder to boost its offer by alerting it of more favorable competing bids.

Along with responsibility for the toxicity of the Roosevelt Island site, Stanford was asked to shoulder penalties as high as $25 million for delays outside of its control:

At one point, Stanford asked about an ambiguous clause in the city’s proposal request: would the university have to indemnify the city if it were sued for, say, polluted water on Roosevelt Island? The city responded that the university would. According to Pinsky, city lawyers said that this was “not likely to produce significant problems,” and that other bidders did not object. To Pinsky and the city, these demands—and the twenty-million-dollar penalty if the City Council’s approval was delayed—were “not uncommon,” since developers often “take liability for public approvals.” To Stanford, the stipulations made it seem as if the goal posts were not fixed.

This may not be the end of Stanford's presence in New York City, however:

Jeff Koseff, who played golf with Hennessy within a few days of Stanford’s withdrawal, recalls, “He was already talking about what we could do next.” One venture that Hennessy was exploring, though there is as yet no concrete plan, is working with the City College of New York to establish a Stanford beachhead in Manhattan. Deputy Mayor Steel says, “I’d be ecstatic.” Still, a Stanford official is dubious: “John’s disillusionment with the city is pretty thorough.”

A partnership with City College was one facet's of Stanford's initial bid for the campus competition.

Make it work!

Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City Economic Development Corporation may at the top of the list for tech-happiest city governments, but a new study out by the Center for an Urban Future wonders if there's one sector they've been missing: the city's wealth of design and architecture schools like Parsons The New School for Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts .

The 38-page report, called "Designing New York's Future," points out that the number of degrees in design and architecture has grown 40 percent in New York City from 2005 to 2010 and the sector already attracts foreign students (*cough* Technion *cough*). Despite all that, however, design schools have been overlooked as part of the city's innovation agenda, argues the report:

"Many of those we interviewed believe that design—and the city’s design schools—will play an even more important role in New York’s eco- nomic future. One reason for this is that design clearly plays to New York’s strength as a creative center. Additionally, major companies in technol- ogy, manufacturing, health care and other leading industries are increasingly looking to designers to help them solve challenges and come up with innovative solutions. As one example, New York- based Internet companies such as Foursquare, Tumblr, Gilt Groupe and Kickstarter have relied on innovative designs to turn already established technologies into entirely new tools and services."

But while the tech sector has its new applied sciences campus and number of incubators, including EDC-backed GA, the design sector only has a new fashion design incubator at the CFDA. What's more, many design school grads aren't being taught the basics of business. Only 12 percent of respondents said NYC design schools provided "significant opportunities to develop business and entrepreneurial skills."

The real oversight, however, seems to be in cultivating interdisciplinary programs like Stanford's Institute of Design, or d.school, a one-year post-graduate certificate that attracts a number of b-schoolers.

Ryan Jacoby, a d.school alum and director of IDEO's New York office, for example, told the Center for an Urban Future that IDEO will often pick Stanford as a recruiting ground over other schools "just so they can participate in the d.school."

One such interdisciplinary field the city might want to focus on? Video game design. NYU's Tisch School of the Arts recently launched an MFA program in game design with resources from NYU Poly and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. But demand is growing, says Ed Schlossberg, founder of the New York-based design firm ESI Design:

“Game design is growing rap- idly here,” Schlossberg says, “and it needs people who know about music design and screen design and story-boarding. There’s a whole new division called physics design, which involves taking what you learn in physics and applying it to the cre- ation of these online, virtual worlds.” Schlossberg says that the technologies that have given rise to this and other fields have revolutionized his own discipline in the last few years and that in order to stay competitive he has had to find people, often recent graduates, who not only know how they work but can apply them creatively in new contexts.

We already know one rapidly growing gaming company that's hiring.

via nycedc.tumblr.com

On its Tumblr, the New York City Economic Development Corporation posted an announcement this afternoon about the 28 individuals named to the city's NYC Venture Fellows Program. The press release was actually issued last Tuesday, the NYCEDC confirmed by phone, but was only just added to Tumblr. C'mon, guys, until they plant that RSS chip in our brains, you gotta get with El Bloombito's new social media agenda: everything updated all a' the time.

This is the second year of the Venture Fellows program, developed with the agency along with Fordham University. "NYC Venture Fellows promotes emerging business leaders and encourages international entrepreneurs to start or expand their operations in New York City. The program connects fellows with mentors who are investors, serial entrepreneurs, CEOS, and operational managers from New York City and abroad."

Combine that description with the word "fellows" and you might picture some accelerator-stage startups in real need of mentorship and connections, not far off the the lean Ramen life. Not so with the 28 rising stars on this year's list, which includes BillGuard founder and CEO Yaron Samid, MakerBot cofounder and CEO Bre Pettis, Warby Parker cofounder and co-CEO Dave Gilboa, and charity: water founder and CEO Scott Harrison.

But if the city's competition for the tech campus wasn't enough of a clue, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYCEDC are thinking global, which means our promising tech companies need to get great. As EDC president Seth Pinsky said of the program:

“Through innovative programs like Venture Fellows and World to NYC, we will ensure that New York City continues to strengthen its position in an era of increasing global competition. By introducing established businesses to the many opportunities that exist within the five boroughs—as well as providing emerging entrepreneurs with the mentorship needed for their businesses to take the critical next steps towards success—we are confident New York City will remain the global hub of business and innovation well into the 21st century.”

Here's the full list:

• DonorsChoose Co-founder and Chief Executive Charles Best
• BaseKit Co-founder and CTO Simon Best
• Medivo, Inc. Co-founder and CEO Sundeep Bhan
• EnNatura Technology Ventures Co-founder and CEO Sidhartha Kumar Bhimania
• Warby Parker Co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal
• H.Bloom Co-founder and CEO Bryan Burkhart
• MBA & Company Founder and MD Daniel Callaghan
• hoopCHINA.com Co-founder and CEO Shawn Cheng
• Catchafire Founder and CEO Rachael Chong
• Rent the Runway Co-founder and President Jennifer Fleiss
• Totsy.com Co-founder and CEO Guillaume Gauthereau
• Warby Parker Co-founder and co-CEO Dave Gilboa
• charity: water Founder and CEO Scott Harrison
• Paperless Post Co-founder Alexa Hirschfeld
• Miniwiz Founder and MD Arthur Huang
• Rent the Runway Co-founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman
• Lot18 Co-founder and President Philip James
• Student Competitions Co-founder, Chairman and CFO Robert Lyngman
• AHAlife.com Founder and CEO Shauna Mei
• The IOU Project Founder and Creative Director Kavita Parmar
• MakerBot Industries Co-founder and CEO Bre Pettis
• BillGuard Founder and CEO Yaron Samid
• Papayamobile Co-founder and CEO Si Shen
• South Pole Carbon Asset Management Ltd. Co-founder and CEO Christoph Sutter
• LanguageMate Founder and CEO Bill Tan
• soleRebels Co-founder and MD Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu
• Yipit Co-founder and CEO Vinicius Vacanti
• LearnVest Founder and CEO Alexa von Tobel

Mr. Rosebaum and patent.

Looks like much-maligned U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is getting into the holiday spirit and trying to make entrepreneurs swoon. After six years, the agency has suddenly decided to give Steve Rosenbaum, founder and CEO of Magnify.net, the gift he's been waiting for—U.S. Patent No. 8,117,545, covering a hosted video discovery and publishing platform—complete with a Valentine's issuance date.

It's a "big thumpy one too :), " Mr. Rosenbaum told Betabeat over Skype. Thumpy? "Makes noise when you put in on the desk... thump," he explained.

Considering Mr. Rosenbaum, author of "Curation Nation," had to suffer through three rejections and two years of straight silence along the way, we say it should've come a bag of Sweethearts®, at least.

While consumers may not be familiar with Magnify, its video platform powers sites like New York magazine, TEDxTALKS, and Mediaite. It allows publishers to populate their sites with video from around the web and create their own video channels.

We talked to Mr. Rosenbaum, who was recently named entrepreneur-in-residence by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and also built the 9/11 Memorial iPad app, about why Fred Wilson calls patents "the Anti-Christ" and the three ways a company can respond once its been granted a patent.

Mr. Rosenbaum founded Magnify back in 2006, the same year Google purchased YouTube. “Web video was a mere trickle,” he said. “We had this idea that it would be a massive river.” In the early days, Magnify was preoccupied with the idea of discovery. “If there's way too much video... and you want to find what you care about... what's the technology to do that?”

“We came up with a word, and code, and a process, and wrote a pattern application while we wrote the code. The word was ‘curation.’ Video curation, to be specific. Then we waited.” Two years later, the PTO responded with an ‘office action.’ Mr. Rosenbaum called it “polite talk for rejection.”

So Magnify re-filed, narrowing its claims and honing the language. In 2008, it was rejected again. In 2009, more of the same. “No fun at all,” he noted. In the meantime, Magnify was growing. “The practice was starting to get traction, and the patent claims were getting more carefully worded.” The PTO’s response? “Two years of silence,” said Mr. Rosenbaum. “Yeah, your government dollars at work.”

According to Mr. Rosenbaum’s “patent guy,” who did much of the IP work for Akamai, Magnify had a particularly arduous road, until “ta da—we get notice of allowance, with an issuance day of Valentines Day (love that!).” To celebrate, Mr. Rosenbaum said he was going drinking for Social Media Week at Bowlmor Lanes.

But now, comes the hard part. “It means that we have to decide how we want to proceed,” explained Mr. Rosenbaum. “There are flavors—Patent Troll (ugh), Licensing (not predatory), Business Partnerships (always). This the conundrum.”

As he framed it, it's almost a conflict of ideologies. “I believe in the freedom of innovation, and clearly the problem with patents is that they are little more than permission to sue. Which means the big pockets can ignore a claim of infringement, or suit up for battle.  While the small startups end up paying the freight. This is why Fred Wilson calls patents the Anti-Christ.”

Magnify has never faced an intellectual property lawsuit, but having a patent means, “Revenue, partnerships, potential suitors—it validates our take on the space and gives us real running room...our investors are pretty darn pleased.”

Had Mr. Rosenbaum heard of fellow New Yorkers facing the same slog with the PTO?  “No, but it's a little like asking someone how much they earn—the whole patent topic is kinda hush-hush, which I think is crap.”

In the patent wars, startups are also expected to behave differently than corporations, he noted. “No one says that Google shouldn’t file a patent, or Apple, or Microsoft, or Amazon, right? But startups are told that patents 'stifle innovation.' So big companies buy patent portfolios from each other,  trade them like baseball cards, and startups are told they should win on 'traction,’ which is fine, but really for B2C tech, not enterprise.”

In enterprise, he explained, “You need to sell your service to big companies (not consumers) and they often can be your competitors... with the resources to compete and reverse engineer your tech.”

For now, he thinks startups have to operate by the those guidelines if they want to compete. “Don't get me wrong," said Mr. Rosenbaum. "If we all agreed to abolish technology patents, including the big players, that would be cool. But until then, I think we should all play by the same rules.”

"CORNELL STUDENTS, WE WANT YOU! ...TO WORK AT NYC START-UPS," the school cheers on its Google+ page. The talk, organized by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, features the founders speaking "candidly" about their entrepreneurial experiences and describing a day in the life of their startups. Making nice with the neighbors before you've even moved in, sounds like someone's angling for extra credit.

Today on the NYC EDC's Tumblr, a blog typically devoted to Hizzoner's policy musings, updates on the tech campus competition, or showing off the Mayor's new Instagram account, went in a different direction with a post called "Ratio of Single Men to Single Women in NYC," which, conventional wisdom holds, does not fall in a hetero lady's favor. 

The post, authored by economists within the NYCEDC's Center of Economic Transformation, aims to debunk that myth. True, overall, New York City's population is 53 percent female and 47 male, however, if you break down the Census data, the numbers look a little more promising. Of the population of singles ages 20 to 34 who have never been married, men actually outnumber women—742,400 to 729,500.

Older than 34? Divorced? Might as well pack it up and head to Toledo, but for the rest of you, here's some additional intel:

"More interestingly, the ratio varies widely by neighborhood (we used Census Public Use Microdata Areas). On the Upper East Side, young single women outnumber young single men nearly 2 to 1. Jackson Heights, Queens is on the other end of the spectrum—where there are 1.7 males for every female. The neighborhoods with ratios of 1 to 1? Jamaica, Queens and Pelham Gardens in the Bronx."

The column then concludes with some related stats: "Spending at the City’s roughly 1,200 bars is approximately $855 million per year. This works out to $140 per resident age 21 and over, which is 58% higher than in the United States as a whole."

We'd like to meet the individuals who can get through a year in New York City with a $140 bar tab. Maybe they can get the next round?

Inspirational viewing!

On stage announcing the creation of a Software Engineering Academy this afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg revealed that the high school had the support of Fred Wilson and the city's tech community. Betabeat has learned a little bit more about how that will work.

According to Department of Education spokesman Frank Thomas, Mr. Wilson has committed to financially supporting the school and to raise money for the school from the tech community at large. We have heard from other sources that Mr. Wilson's financial commitment will be philanthropic and that the goal is to raise around $1.25 million, although that number has not been confirmed.

No other private investors have yet been named, but Silicon Alley insiders have been involved with the initiative from the get-go. A plan for the school has been in the works for the past six to eight months, said Scott Schwaitzberg, a principal policy advisor on the school, who recently left City Hall for the startup world to join Anil Dash as vice president at Activate. Mr. Schwaitzberg said the idea started with a round table discussion with folks like Mr. Wilson, Foursquare's Naveen Selvadurai, Dogpatch Lab's Matt Meeker, as well as Mr. Dash.

Even as discussions to build a graduate school of applied sciences were ongoing, the city was itching to do more to support the tech industry and education in New York. The schedule for tech campus offered more of a long-term impact. The EDC had also make roadway in supporting incubators for existing startups, but "We were missing that critical middle of investing in the two to five year time frame," said Mr. Schwaitzberg.

Mr. Selvadurai, Mr. Meeker, and company urged them to think younger. "They kept saying, you really need to start training these kids earlier, you really need one program that delivers on that."

Independently, Mr. Wilson had heard about the program Mike Zamansky was running out of Stuyvesant High School from some of Mr. Zamasky's graduates and Mr. Wilson reached out the city about it. "We realized it was a great opportunity for a our model of public-private partnerships," said Mr. Schwaitzberg.

With the tech community in full support of the software engineering high school, it would be easier to "fast up" the design, he said. Also on the advisory board were heads of engineering teams at a bunch of startups as well as the hackNY.

Getting the Union Square location was also key, said Mr. Schwaitzberg, because of its proximity to the startups and tech companies in the area. Both in terms of having students of the academy involved at, say, General Assembly, or Google, or Foursquare, as well as having engineers visit the school as instructors.

"We got other computer schools out there, this is about creating software," he said. Not about starting companies, Betabeat wondered? "And potentially companies, we don't expect every single graduate to go and launch the next Foursquare, we do expect them to have the tools to make working code."

The impact, Mr. Schwaitzberg predicted, would go beyond just the students at the academy. School principals, he noted, have a lot of leeway in adding programs that work to their curriculum.

Another big ancillary benefit of the school, he noted, would exposing engineering to a more diverse student body and "getting kids who are representative of New York City" to code.

NYU's proposed campus at 370 Jay St.

For months, Mayor Bloomberg has dangled the possibility of picking two winners for the city's tech campus competition. He even left the possibility open while announcing that the New York City Economic Development Corporation would give the full $100 million grant to Cornell-Technion to build an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island. Now Crain's is reporting that between the remaining contestants, NYU's Downtown Brooklyn proposal may have "taken center stage" over Carnegie Mellon's Navy Yard campus and Columbia's Manhattanville proposal.

Hey, if the Fulton St. Mall can have its own Shake Shack, why shouldn't the M.T.A's derelict former headquarters on nearby 370 Jay St. be transformed into a Center for Urban Science and Progress?

Although Crain's says NYU, the M.T.A., and E.D.C. all want to make a deal to help revitalize Downtown Brooklyn, "but money is the sticking point."

Back in October, NYU was asking for $20 to $25 million from the city and pledged spending $450 million on the 200,000 sq. ft. space. Now that someone actually wants the blighted building that has frustrated officials for year, the M.T.A. is asking for more:

"NYU has asked the city for $20 million to help buy out the MTA, based largely on numbers thrown around during previous attempts to revive the beleaguered building, sources familiar with the proposal said. But the MTA's asking price has now ballooned to $50 million to $60 million."

As Crain's reports:

"The MTA controls the site via a master lease and has the right to stay in the building as long as it is using it. The 459,000-square-foot property contains vital communications equipment, and the negotiations hinge on just how much it would cost to move or replace it."

At the press conference announcing Cornell-Technion's big win, city officials seemed somewhat optimistic about the ability to find the financing for a second project, even without any of the $100 million in play. "Obviously the city budget funds other projects," said the source, "If there’s a way to make it work with other funding, that could be a possibility. If there’s philanthropy we can do, then we might be able to get somewhere."

UPDATE: Another City Hall source offered some clarification on the MTA's position. As we originally mentioned back in October, the $20 to $25 million that NYU pledged to build the center was allocated in part to cover, "infrastructure improvements and moving out old MTA equipment." The latter appears to be the real issue because the 459,000-square-foot property still contains vital communications equipment for the MTA.

“It’s pretty integral signalling equipment, it has to do with running the train lines,” said the source who believed the infrastructure was currently in use by the agency. "The tough piece of 370 Jay has been that that equipment is there." The source also noted that it wasn't so much that the cost "ballooned" as that estimates to relocate that equipment has varied through the years, including when the MTA was contemplating putting out an RFP to redevelop the building. "Clearly neither of those estimates was the city’s estimates," said the source, who also seemed optimistic about the ability to reach a deal with NYU and the MTA.

Even if NYU's Downtown Brooklyn project was selected as a second winner, that might not necessarily leave Columbia and Carnegie Mellon out. "I think we’re still working on creative ways to do all of them," said the source. " Even without the $100 million, we wondered? "There are other ways to create incentives for people to pursue these projects," the source offered obliquely.