Gorgeous Sunrise. (Photo: iTunes)

If there’s one takeaway from last night’s New York Tech Meetup, it's that people’s organizational skills are only as good as the apps they use.

The first app of note to present was TeuxDeux, a “simple, designy to-do app” that wants to disrupt the world of lists. Presented by creator Tina Roth-Eisenberg (a.k.a @swissmiss to her 350,000+ followers), the app is an elegant, responsive and minimalist approach to organizing your day. Just enter the tasks you want to accomplish and mark them off as you complete them. However, if you miss a task, like doing laundry, it’s automatically transferred to the next day and on and on until its completed. (One person near us remarked that it’s “beautiful.”) The subscription-based app is currently only available for iPhones.

Then there was Sunrise, a well-designed calendar app for iOS. It’s created by a few former Foursquare designers, and puts Apple’s default calendar to shame. It syncs up to a server and pulls in data from your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google accounts to create a centralized and powerful calendar so you’ll never miss an event/birthday/happy hour again. During the app’s Q&A session, someone asked how they’re going to stop Apple from directly imitating it, leaving one of the app’s creators to shrug and conclude that “at least we were first.”

Of course, organizational apps are useless without things to do, so enter Ketchup, an iOS-only app that helps you plan your social life using your Facebook account. It organizes all the things you say you’re going to do with your friends, but never end up doing for whatever reason. Unlike its competitors (we immediately thought of now defunct app Forecast), there’s no time element, thus making it the ultimate boredom killer. If for whatever reason seeing Spring Breakers no longer entices you, there’s a “flake out” option that offers an excuse if you can’t show up.

If IRL activities riddle you with boundless  anxiety, then you can bond with your friends using an app called Bout. From the creators of CollegeHumor, presenters Julie Babb and Jim Babb described it as “Instagram meets Apples to Apples.” A player chooses a challenge (“A fancy pose” or “Something that kills the mood”) and the group snaps or uses pictures saved on their phone to answer the prompt. After five entries are submitted, the person who created the challenge chooses a winner and is awarded points.

Of course, NYTM wasn’t all apps. A service called Next Caller presented, or "caller ID on steroids" for customer service hotlines. There was also a peppy presentation from a website called Grand St. that intrigued the audience. The flash-sale outlet reviews and sells new products every other day from independent makers.

(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.”

Paging Mr. Cuomo! (Photo: flickr.com/MTAphotos)

A coalition of techies say it's time to do something about our campaign finance morass, and they're starting with New York State. A veritable who's who of Silicon Alley--including Fred Wilson, Andy Weissman, Dennis Crowley, John Borthwick, Kevin Ryan, and Esther Dyson--have released an open letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo, urging him to take point on an effort to make the political process work a little more like Kickstarter or Github.

The problem, as they see it: "Today, elections in Albany are dominated by a small group of affluent campaign donors, professional influence-peddlers and deep-pocketed vested special interests." Not to mention some of those state capital buildings are downright Politburo-back-deal chic.

So what does this have to do with the technology business? Glad you asked. The undersigned are confident they've got just the model for reform: "We think that the open and diverse culture of the web that can help fix politics in New York." To wit:

All around us, we see the flowering of diverse, distributed networks of large numbers of people who are coming together to identify common concerns and act in concert. On crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter, thousands of New Yorkers are financing each other's creative businesses and projects, pooling small donations to fund big dreams.

The letter concludes that, "It is time to bring this same way of doing things to campaign finance in NY State, and create a national model that will strengthen small-d democracy." They're encouraging their fellow tech leaders to add their names to the petition. (It is interesting to note that Reddit cofounder and Internet politico Alexis Ohanian isn't on the list just yet.)

In a statement announcing the push, New York Tech Meetup chairman and Persona Democracy Media founder Andrew Rasiej got figurative:

"Democracy is an incredible application, but it’s time for an upgrade to work out some of the bugs that have crept in. Tech leaders are encouraged that Governor Cuomo has made public funding of elections a goal for New York."

The whole thing is more a call to action than a specific plan, but we suppose you've got to start somewhere.

Mr. Westheimer

Serial entrepreneur Nate Westheimer is something of a renaissance technologist.

Picturelife, the photo startup he cofounded with OMGPOP founder Charles Forman, recently raised a $4 million round led by Spark Capital. Picturelife's concept is timely: the service focuses on backing up, storing, and accessing all of your photos from the cloud. That got the attention of a number of other notable investors, including Crunchfund, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, Highline Venture Partners, Betaworks, David Karp, SV Angel, and Chris Dixon. Mr. Forman put some of the "way more" than $22 million he earned from OMGPOP's sale to Zynga and former Zynga GM Nabeel Hyatt, a partner at Spark, joined Picturelife's board.

But that venture is hardly enough to keep the prolific Mr. Westheimer, who once penned a sweat lodge manifesto about teaching himself to code, fully occupied. He's also an advisor at Flybridge Capital and has been executive director of  New York Tech Meetup since 2008. (Coincidentally, the last time we made a list of "Insurgents" to watch--all the way back in 2008!--Mr. Westheimer made the cut.)

Today, Mr. Westheimer reached out to announce that he is launching a "small seed fund" called Red Bud Partners that will invest in the New York tech community that he actively helped grow. The fund, which will have an average investment size of $25,000, has already made one as-yet-undisclosed deal, he said.

On his blog, Innonate, Mr. Westheimer explained that the fund, which he launched with his father Dick, will focus on "networked technology."

This idea comes from my observation over the past few years that “information technology” and “web technology” no longer describe everything that’s interesting. “Networked Technology” encompass not only incredible new web and mobile technology, but also the array of new hardware projects which are springing up showing great promise to change the world we live in. We want to invest in all of it.

By email, Mr. Westheimer clarified that the fund "has absolutely no affect on Picturelife being my 24/7 100% job and life," he said. "Now I just have a vehicle to make investments in companies I come in contact with during the course of Picturelife and everything else I do."

Was anyone really worried Mr. Westheimer couldn't multitask? Oh ye of little faith.

The scene at Secret Clubhouse. (Photo: Tumblr)

Late last week, Betabeat took a two-hour trip via interborough bus to Secret Clubhouse, a newly launched Williamsburg coworking spot. The shared office (decorated with vintage Apples and a motley assortment of posters) was packed with techies typing away on the laptops, but the vibe was no more panicked than that of an undergraduate library in the earliest days of reading period.

Nearby, permanent residents Small Girls PR were hashing out wardrobing details for the upcoming “Tech Homecoming” fundraiser and upending their desks in search of a missing checkbook. The occasional burst of laughter filtered from the back, and every so often someone would look up with a piece of news gleaned from Twitter. But quiet largely reigned.

The only obvious sign of extraordinary circumstances was a sign on the wall, handwritten grade-school-binder style: “Sandy Shelter,” it said, with a Wifi login and the message of support, “we <3 u.”

Off to one side we found Jessica Lawrence, managing director of New York Tech Meetup, whose jaunty scarf and turquoise cardigan weren’t quite enough to mask an uncharacteristic wanness. Crouched over her laptop, she was crafting an update for volunteers, letting them know what would be the most helpful in the next 24 to 48 hours. Across the desk, her partner in community organizing, Noel Hidalgo, was working away while encased in a gigantic parka. It was quite clear neither had had a moment of downtime since the storm hit.

The wrath of Sandy inspired an outpouring of civic feeling and desire to lend a hand. The trick was directing that energy toward productive results. Can Ruby on Rails really help the wreckage in the Far Rockways? That's what Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Hidalgo were attempting to do from their desk, the battlefield headquarters of New York Tech Responds. In concert with Tony Bacigalupo, cofounder of Soho-based New Work City, the triumvirate had spent the week coordinating the closest thing to an official New York tech relief effort.

In the last week, they've dispatched their army of volunteers for a variety of tasks, such as helping a flooded Chelsea gallery with data recovery, lending the aid platform Recovers.org in handling a deluge of traffic and assisting with relocated polling places. This week, they stand ready to help businesses affected by the storm, whether it's extracting data from soaked servers, setting up public Wifi or restoring point of sale systems.

Spend time around the city’s entrepreneurs when they’re in hustle mode, and it’s common to hear the term “disruption." Every other startup seems ready to shake the foundations of education, medicine, government or something similarly pie in the sky. It sometimes seems the original negative connotation has worn completely away. But there are few things quite like a hurricane to knock a sense of perspective into even the most wildly optimistic.

And so as the hurricane approached, tech scenesters sprang into action. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley touted the Bowery Mission and offered to haul East Villagers’ donations in his car. Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson took his blog and encouraged everyone to support Occupy Sandy. Zynga GM Dan Porter trekked out to the Rockaways, then returned to write a Business Insider op-ed encouraging coders to develop disaster recovery tools. “We are thrilled with how many tech companies, large and small, have reached out to ask how they can help those in need,” Rachel Haot, the city's Chief Digital Officer, told Betabeat.

But Ms. Lawence, Mr. Bacigalupo and Mr. Hidalgo have been the most visible in their attempts to help, emerging as a three-person clearinghouse for techie efforts.

“We’ve been in contact, I think, with pretty much every major government entity and recovery organization"--the Red Cross, FEMA, the Board of Elections--“just trying to make sure that everybody knows that we have this group of people that are willing to help,” said Ms. Lawrence. Their small army numbers somewhere north of seven hundred, a representative cross section of the meetup’s 28,000 members.

Typically, the New York Tech Meetup has a different set of priorities, which revolve around advocating for and serving the interests of its members. Most famous for hosting packed demo nights at NYU’s Skirball Center, the group’s last big public push was in January, when Ms. Lawrence and her compatriots helped scramble the jets to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, objectionable primarily for the onerous enforcement burdens it would have placed on Internet startups. But as Hurricane Sandy bore down on the city, suddenly their horizons expanded.

It began with a note to the meetup’s members, announcing they’d be happy to help anyone trying to get the word out about cancelled or postponed events. But when she and chairman Andrew Rasiej remembered they had in their hands a powerful megaphone, Ms. Lawrence recruited Mr. Bacigalupo (initially for his help designing signup sheet, but he’s been at it ever since) and Mr. Hildalgo, whose previous projects include serving as a public-private liaison include launching NYSenate.gov while serving as Director of Technology Innovation. They’ve been at it ever since, a flurry of conference calls and Skype chats and Google Docs.

If that makes it sound like their results are a little tough to pinpoint, Mr. Bacigalupo says they've ended up spending more time helping those coordinating relief efforts, rather than the victims themselves. “While it’s hard to quantify, I would say I have good reason to believe that our efforts have helped make other efforts more efficient and more effective than they would have if we had done nothing,” he told Betabeat.

Perhaps the most visible manifestation of the post-hurricane outpouring of good feeling has been Sandy Coworking, an effort to make desks and Wifi available for anyone who need a place to be productive. Almost as soon as the clouds parted, anyone with a working office was offering to host the displaced. Staffers from Buzzfeed took up residence in Heart’s cafeteria. Kickstarter moved in with Boxee. Venture capitalist Charlie O’Donnell suggested the hashtag #sandycoworking for those seeking and offering space; as the offers began flying fast and furious on Twitter, Mr. Hidalgo hacked out a platform for anyone to list what they had.

But if the crowd at Secret Clubhouse was any indication, the coworking effort was mostly lifesaver for tech companies--and that includes Gawker. Founder Rick Webb opened his doors almost as soon as the power went out south of Flatiron. Employees from Tumblr (where he’s helping build out a sales and marketing operation) and Foursquare (a company in which he invested). Gawker had filled in empty desks, while Gizmodo had annexed the conference room. By the time Mr. Hidalgo had arrived, Nick Denton was already holding court in the back.

Ms. Lawrence admitted that coworking isn't exactly a familiar concept outside of the confines of Silicon Alley. "But the cool thing is that after this experience they’re probably all going to know what coworking is a little bit more," she said. "Whether they’ve meant to or not, a lot of them have probably ended up coworking.” Even Bloomberg-terminal-addicted Wall Streeters learned to work from home.

But as reports of restored power in downtown Manhattan rippled through the room in Williamsburg, we couldn't help but wonder how sustainable this sudden flowering of civic feeling really was. Mr. Bacigalupo thinks the last week was a turning point: "This was the time, in my mind, when the tech community stepped out of its own bubble and stepped up in a huge way to help this city as a whole,” he said. “This was the tech community doing something that wasn’t about advocating for the technology community.”

Ms. Lawrence said they're looking into whether volunteers would make a long-term commitment to serving as a kind of tech corps--a crew of first responders with very specific skills. And after initially proposing a hackathon to address the issues raised by the storm, New York Tech Responds decided it made more sense to partner with events already planned, providing them suggestions.

Of course, the rapid-fire pace of a hackathon doesn't allow for the time to produce finely-honed tools for FEMA or develop a smarter electrical grid that’s less vulnerable to natural disasters.

It may be that the best possible outcome is simply a reminder that the world has bigger problems than shilling virtual goods. Back on the grind, Anil Dash tweeted he was finding it “very jarring to be back at work at a desk with power & internet, looking at a bunch of tech crap that seems totally meaningless.” What better way to motivate a free market capitalist to spend her spare time construct a donation management solution for Goodwill–especially as images from Staten Island and the Rockaways fade from the front pages? After all, peer pressure worked for voting.

Foursquare's temporary HQ. (Photo: Twitter)

Given recent events, Betabeat decided to forego our Rumor Roundup this week for a roundup of all the things startups are doing to help get New York back to normal following Hurricane Sandy.

It didn't take long for New York startups and techies to spring into action after Hurricane Sandy left parts of our fine city without power, water, shelter, or Wifi.

On Tuesday, we pointed you to New York Tech Meetup and New Work City's attempts to mobilize tech-savvy volunteers to help local businesses and organizations get networks and websites up and running. Today, NYTM put out an official call to its 28,000 members, asking for more volunteers and taking requests (online or by phone/text 646-392-7353) from government agencies, small businesses, non-profits, and schools that need help anything from data recovery to Internet connectivity to getting servers back online.

Noel Hidalgo, one of the lead volunteers of that effort, has been manning an uber-useful Sandy Coworking map of offices space for displaced techies. And New Work City founder Tony Bacigalupo, has pretty much morphed into Silicon Alley's Cory Booker. 

I was thinking it'd be bad ass to get teams of people in cars loaded with supplies just rolling around helping whoever was in need.

— Tony Bacigalupo (@tonybgoode) November 2, 2012

In fact, companies like Uber, which temporarily dropped surge pricing amid cries of price gouging but then quickly reinstated it--and Hotels.com have been the aberration. Most startups have lept at the chance to lend a hand and show off the tech scene's self-professed collaborative spirit.

Here's a roundup of yet more Sandy relief efforts spearheaded by the tech community:

No fee Airbnb From Oct. 31 to Nov. 7, Airbnb is waiving its fees for both renters and hosts on all properties located in areas hit by Hurricane Sandy, including NYC and Long Island. Travelers must stay for seven nights or fewer. We found a bunch of local hosts who dropped their rates to $10 a night, as a Sandy special.

Red Cross Tonight Hotel booking service Hotel Tonight is donating all money spent on hotels in NYC Thursday Nov. 1 and Friday Nov. 2 to the Red Cross.

Zaarly's pops up with a helping hand Peer-to-peer marketplace Zaarly launched an online pop-up shop that allows users to purchase local services for NYC residents in need. Examples include homemade meals from a local chef, pet sitting and renovations. All of the proceeds from the pop up shop will be donated to the Red Cross in New York City. "Based in San Francisco, folks at Zaarly wanted to help their friends in New York, but felt powerless," a rep told Betabeat. "After batting ideas around late into Monday night, they realized they were no longer small and powerless. They could help their friends and enable others to do so too."

What a Mitzvah! Yenta, the "Grindr for Jews," has coordinated a bunch of relief efforts. The company has temporarily halted advertising and paid outreach in order to donate those proceeds to the Red Cross. Yenta is also inviting displaced New Yorkers to stop by their offices, where they're collecting food and clothing donations for Sandy victims.

Later, late fees AT&T, Verzion and T-Mobile are both waiving late fees for customers impacted by Hurricane Sandy, and will continue to provide service to prepaid and contract customers, even if they haven't been able to pay their bill. AT&T and T-Mobile have also been providing charging stations for New Yorkers affected by the blackout.

Tying the Knot Wedding startup The Knot created a Facebook page to help brides whose weddings were ruined or canceled by Hurricane Sandy. Affected couples are using the page to "share tips, find available venues and talk to local experts." The page is also collecting the information of wedding venues and vendors in the area who did not suffer damage and are still able to host November weddings.

Time Warner does something good Much-maligned New York cable provider TimeWarner, known for pissing off every actor from Star Trek, has temporarily shrugged off its evil image with a hefty $1 million donation to Sandy relief efforts. According to a press release, "The company will donate $500,000 to the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City with another $500,000 to be dispersed to other organizations that are serving victims in the greater Tri-State area." They also deployed ten trucks downtown to act as charging stations with free Wifi.

Gilt City helps the city From Wednesday Oct. 31 to Sunday Nov. 4th, Gilt City NYC is donating 30 percent of all profits from sales on its NYC page to the Red Cross Hurricane Relief. The company has alerted all Gilt members of this opportunity in an email with the hopes of encouraging some philanthropic shopping.

Rubicon to the rescue Ecommerce platform AHAlife is also donating 15 percent of profits made from Oct. 31 to Nov. 4th to Team Rubicon, which links up military veterans with communities in need of rebuilding.

Squee! Stuffed animal startup Squishable released a limited edition Sandy Corgi, with $5 from every purchase from now until Sunday Nov. 4 going to the Red Cross. The corgi was so cute (see for yourself below) that it quickly sold out, so they extended the offer to the platypus squishable. So far, they've raised $1,460.

The adorable squishable corgi, which is sadly sold out. (Photo: Squishable)

Lucky us Community crowdfunding platform Lucky Ant is providing free crowdfunding for local businesses impacted by Sandy. The company has waived all fees for any local businesses wishing to use the platform to get themselves back up and running. Lucky Ant is also raising a fund with a goal of $50,000 or more that they will distribute to small businesses in need.

Buried bauble relief Online jewelry retailer Bauble Bar is hosting its weekly "Buried Bauble" special, where users use a clue to find a discounted piece of jewelry. This week, for every $10 buried bauble users purchase today, Bauble Bar will donate $10 to the Red Cross.

Fresh charity My Fresh Shirt, an online drycleaning service, has donated a year's worth of free drycleaning for auction at Charitybuzz, a platform that allows users to host auctions for charity. So far, the current bid is up to $600, and all proceeds will go to the Red Cross.

(Photo: @Marissa)

Many businesses and organizations in New York are suffering without electricity following yesterday's devastating hit from Hurricane Sandy. With electrical and tech equipment down across the city, there's a need for capable engineers to help get New Yorkers back to being plugged in. Today, the New York Tech Meetup and New Work City published a sign-up form for volunteers hoping to use their tech skills to help out a neighbor.

"NY Tech Meetup and New Work City are organizing volunteers with technology skills to help New York-area businesses and organizations get their technology back up and running after Hurricane Sandy," reads the signup form. The team is currently organizing a database of willing volunteers and then will decide from there how to allocate help.

Skills in need include server maintenance, data recovery, and wifi troubleshooting, among many others. They're also looking for volunteers to donate or lend supplies.

Interested volunteers should sign up here.

Senator Schumer, with David Tisch and Jessica Lawrence at his side.

Today, Senator Charles Schumer popped up to New York City for a visit to General Assembly and an announcement: Tomorrow he plans to introduce new legislation to the Senate--the snappily-named BRAINS Act--in an attempt to help alleviate the tech talent crunch by making it easier for startups to hire foreign-born workers.

"The bill will fix America's broken high-skilled immigration problem," he promised, by providing 55,000 new green cards available annually for foreign students graduating from US universities with advanced STEM degrees.

Everywhere he goes, said Senator Schumer, business leaders cite the lack of technical talent as their number one challenge. "With the introduction and hopefully the passage of the BRAINS Act, we're going to move closer to ensuring a more vibrant future for Americans not even born yet," he promised.

Silicon Alley's desperate need for workers made General Assembly a logical venue for the bill's debut. "We in New York have a big dog in this fight," said Senator Schumer. "Silicon Valley may have given us the semiconductor, but New York City is the birthplace of the next generation of Internet giants--but they won't become giants unless they can get the talent." And, while CornellNYC is already taking applicants, those candidates aren't going to be hitting the workforce any time soon.

"All of us here care so much about the tech community--it really is our future in New York City, New York State, U.S.A., and the world."

Of course, those common desires can make for some moments of cognitive dissonance. As the cameras were setting up for today's press conference at General Assembly, a lovely metaphor for the tech world's relationship with politics unfolded before Betabeat's eyes: A tattooed man wearing a t-shirt saying "Your Mom Makes Great Sandwiches" wandered through a cluster of suit-clad politicos and notebook-clutching reporters.

The problem with the status quo is this: Foreign students who graduate from American universities with STEM degrees have to compete for an extremely limited number of H1B visas. That means many are forced to go home empty handed, and even if a startup wanted to hire them, it's impossible.

"If the Yankees needed a new center fielder, and the best person available was from Japan or the Dominican Republic or Cuba, it's inconceivable they wouldn't get a visa," pointed out Senator Schumer. "But when one of the startup companies here has a brilliant engineer who they're almost certain could create a company that might create hundreds or even thousands of jobs, we won't let them come."

"We should run our economy the way we run our sports immigration," he added.

But the Senator was merely warming up to his topic. "All these talented people from overseas, they want to come here, and they want to stay here. And we kick them out! It's unbelievable," he said. "It's the dumbest, stupidest policy that one could devise."

"If someone wanted to devise a policy on how to prevent American from growing good-paying jobs in the future, they'd probably design our present immigration policy. It just doesn't make much sense."

As for the bill's prospects, well, it's far from a sure thing. The hope is that a window for political compromise might open up after the elections, during the lame duck session of Congress. And Senator Schumer was upbeat, emphasizing that his counterpart in the House, Lamar Smith, is introducing a similar bill with several potential points of compromise. "I believe we're closer to this compromise than we have ever been in the past," promised Senator Schumer.

Then again, he shared another anecdote that makes the odds look a little iffier: "I had one senator say to me, a conservative Republican, even if Albert Einstein wanted to immigrate I wouldn't want to let him into this country."

But Senator Schumer has a colorful, locally sourced rebuttal to that: "When I was a kid, we had this thing at Coney Island. It was a barrel you'd walk through as it turned," he explained. "New York is sort of like that barrel--it takes people from all over the globe, we turn into Americans, and their kids sally forth around America and do great things."

"I just wish the rest of the country would understand our experience on how positive immigration is."

Ms. Pinder at Women's Demo Night. (Photo: Erica Schwiegershausen)

Ever opened a letter from a doctor to discover an unexpectedly, eye-poppingly enormous bill? Well, one New York startup wants to make sure that never happens again, by providing a platform that allows the average medical consumer to compare prices.

It's a concept that ought to appeal to anyone in a position to be cost conscious--whether uninsured, out of network, stuck with a high deductible plan, or just plain offended by overpaying.

Betabeat first encountered Clear Health Costs at the Women's Demo Night organized by New York Tech Meetup last month. In advance of the company's debut on the mainstage at tonight's meetup, Betabeat asked founder and CEO Jeanne Pinder to tell us a little more.

Appropriately, it all began with a dire case of sticker shock. "I got a bill once from a hospital that included a charge for $1,419 for a drug that I found I could buy online for $2.47," she told Betabeat.

While it seems it ought to be fairly straightforward to inquire what costs what and why, Ms. Pinder found that, "the more you ask, the more complicated and incomprehensible it becomes."

"You should be able to know what stuff costs," she said. Easier said than done, it seems.

Ms. Pinder took a buyout from the New York Times in 2009 and, unsure of her next move, took a class on entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY, with Jeff Jarvis. "The class was about finding new ways of doing journalism and finding new ways of telling people stuff." As part of the course, students created and pitched business ideas to a panel of judges, who had $50,000 in foundation cash to dole out. Ms. Pinder took home $20,000 worth of the jackpot and began fleshing out her concept.

Another $20,000 from the International Women's Media Foundation followed,  as well as a third grant from the McCormick Foundation.

But despite the early awards, the reaction wasn't universally enthusiastic. Many people she approached in the healthcare sector apparently reacted with GIF-worthy befuddlement. "Quite often their response was, 'You can't do that. Tell people what stuff costs? Which price?'" Nowadays, however, the response is more like: "It's really exciting, you're where you need to be," she said.

Upon landing on the site, a visitor will see several procedures, with highest and lowest prices. Nor are these merely nickel-and-dime differences. An urgent care visit ranges from $20 to $350; a cardio stress test might cost either $150 or $1790.

There are a couple of sources for that information. "We're doing basic shoe-leather reporting, calling providers and asking them for their prices, their cash or self-paid price for a range of procedures," Ms. Pinder said. She also pointed Betabeat to a feature called the PriceMap Interactive. Typing in "cervical spinal fusion" for New York City brings up a broad range of prices--the varying amounts Medicare paid for the procedure locally over a year.

Then there's the crowdsourcing experiment, which might be the most attention-gathering aspect of this project. As a kind of proof of concept, Clear Health Costs asked women across New York City to divulge what they paid for birth control. A single prescription might cost $17 or $50 just a few blocks away.

"As far as we can tell, people are really interested in telling their stories about what they're paying for things," said Ms. Pinder. The team is working on ways to flag information so it'll be clear what's crowdsourced, as well as making it easier for people to submit their contributions. "That's one of our challenges," she admitted.

At the moment, however, most of the information is still either sourced by freelance journalists or drawn from databases and price lists available online.

In terms of the monetization, Ms. Pinder expects there'll be "sponsorships or essentially advertising from providers who want access to that cash-paying customer," adding that even though the functionality isn't fully integrated into the design yet, "we're getting really good response." She also anticipates business-to-business opportunities that "remain to be seen, depending on how quickly we can get up and running with more robust data."

It sounds like Ms. Pinder is merely enjoying the process, in the meantime. "Being part of the startup culture here in New York is just thrilling," she said.