Mr. Dickerson (Photo: Twitter.com)

Lots Of Tiny Wicker Puppets Sold Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson took to the company's blog to address his craft-obsessed minons and report big new numbers. Etsy recently hit 20 million members across over 200 countries. In the first week of November, they passed the $700 million sales mark and their direct checkout system has now processed over $100 million in transactions. By the end of the year, Etsy projects that it will have sold over 100 million items in the company's history.

The company is also going all out for the holiday season and expects to have its best month yet. It's running a multi-million-dollar online advertising campaign and opening a Etsy Holiday Shop in SoHo from November 29th through December 8th. SoHo though? Isn't Greenpoint or Williamsburg more on target with the Etsy brand?

Chu Bets Against Zynga Betable has already announced partnerships with big game companies and is right on the path to become the Spotify of online gambling and pass its closest rival, Zynga. Ya-Bing Chu, a former VP and GM of Zynga's mobile division, has now joined Betable as the company's new Chief Product Officer. At Zynga, he was responsible for operating Words with Friends and Scramble with Friends. Mr. Chu explains the move in an essay on Betable's blog, where he says, "I realized that Betable was the only frictionless way to enter the real money market, which is revolutionary."

Make It, Don't Break It Mayor Bloomberg and NYCEDC have opened submissions for their New York's Next Top Makers challenge. Competitors will have to create a product with commercial potential which includes consumer products, equipment, furniture and lighting, soft goods, packaging, interaction, transportation, DIY (kits) or something else. There are six $5,950 prizes and an $11,000 grand prize up for grabs. The deadline is in three months, so get to brainstorming right away.

Tumblr Goes Native Tumblr just released an update to its iOS app with a completely redesigned dashboard. The app has gone fully native and now finally runs a lot smoother: it runs faster than before, photos are a lot bigger, and GIFs play automatically when swiped. Better GIF's on your phone people, this is the stuff of the future.

Where's Our Food? There aren't many differences between the major players of the online food ordering game. But GrubHub has just changed the game a little bit with the beta release of its Track Your Grub feature. Similar to Domino's Pizza Tracker, Track Your Grub lets you know what the status of your order is during every step of the way. You'll get texts when your food is expected to arrive and when it leaves the restaurant. In certain areas, you can even watch your food make the trip to your apartment in real time on the maps feature. Seamless just got a little nervous.

Shop Like No One's Watching Sole Society, the West Coast based site that lets you order shoes direct from the manufacturer, has announced its first celebrity collection with two-time Dancing With The Stars champion Julianne Hough. On the site, Hough says, "Every girl needs a sexy leather jacket and a cutout heel." Noted.

Big Data Gets Big Money The social data platform, Datasift, has just secured $15 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners and Northgate Capital and Daher Capital also contributed. Rory O’Driscoll, the managing director of Scale Venture Partners, said in a press release sent to Betabeat, “Great companies make hard problems simple for the end user, and DataSift has done that with its game-changing visual interface."

Sad Turkey Daily deals site are a dime a dozen and so 8Coupons, a site that thinks of itself as "Kayak for deals," lets you see all daily deals across the web at one glance. The site's efficiency was proved this week when David Burke at Bloomingdales tried to pawn off its special turkey dinners on nine different deal sites at the same time. Seems a little desperate to go for nine sites at once.

Poke Your Way To Africa Plyfe, the game that rewards you for using social media with real prizes like Lady Gaga tickets, is about to go mobile. The site, which raised one million dollars in funding last March, has also announced an unexpected new partner--the United Nations. Users can now win opportunities to do development work in Africa. That should lead to some great new submissions for Gurl Goes To Africa.

Bad Guys Still Temporarily Nice Time Warner Cable, the unexpected nice guys of Hurricane Sandy, has announced that it will automatically credit many local residential and business customers whose services were impacted. The company says that it will also waive any fees or penalties for equipment, such as set-top boxes and cable modems, which were lost, damaged or destroyed as a result of the storm. In a press release sent to Betabeat, John Quigley, regional VP of operations for Time Warner Cable’s New York City market, said, “By posting credits automatically to customers’ accounts in the hardest-hit parts of our service area, we hope these affected residents and businesses will have one less call to make as they recover from the storm.”

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.

Our setting. (Photo: Yelp)

Pop-ups are ever popping up about the city like so many mushrooms after a rainstorm, so it was only a matter of time before we saw one just for fashion startups. The New York City Economic Development Corporation has just announced that it'll be collaborating with retailer Story  on a competition dubbed Project Pop-Up NYC. It's targeted to both up-and-coming retailers and (more importantly for our purposes) innovative fashion tech startups.

Up to three winners will get their very own pop-up within STORY's Chelsea outpost during the month of September, which of course coincides nicely with Fashion Week. They'll also win PR support, mentoring and "exposure at key industry events." That last bit sounds a bit fuzzy, but the right mentor is a pearl beyond price. As many as eight other companies will also get display space.

Judges include Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, High Line Venture Partners' Shana Fisher, and Lucky editor-in-chief Brandon Holly.

The criteria:

Being an existing fashion retailer and/or fashion-related technology company; able to support a pop-up store with saleable merchandise (retailers) or a demo/showcase (fashion technology companies) during the month of September; be based in New York City; have been in business for at least one year; and have annual sales or sales projections of over $25,000.

STORY's whole schtick is to operate as kind of a "permanent pop-up," constantly rotating out not just its wares but its look and feel, as well. And as we noted back when it opened, it's always had a very startup-like approach.

As for the NYCEDC's angle, well, there's this little gem from Bonobos' Andy Dunn and included in the NYCEDC's statement: “Having made the decision to call NYC home for Bonobos has been one of the critical factors in our success." No way is fashion tech taking hold in anywhere but the fashion capital of America--not on Mayor Bloomberg's watch, by God.

Applications are due July 30 and available here.

The Made in NY Digital Map

It was sticky and rainy outside, but scores of people showed up to see Mayor Bloomberg shake his tech pom-poms today at Internet Week HQ. The Mayor trudged to 82 Mercer to announce a new initiative alongside chief digital officer Rachel Sterne, NYCEDC president Seth Pinsky and--surprisingly--Josh Miller, the cofounder of Branch.

So what exactly did Mr. Mayor have up his sleeve? Turns out it was a new interactive map that displays the locations of tech companies around New York City. A sidebar also displays which of these companies are currently hiring.

The map "also locates the offices of investors, making it an excellent tool for entrepreneurs in search of capital, and includes over 30 tech incubators," he said. "We expect this map to be another tool that helps propel our tech industry forward."

Ms. Sterne elaborated, "Right now, there are over 600 startups, investors and incubators listed on the map, and we invite others to submit their company because this is an interactive resource."

Ms. Sterne also said that over 320 companies on the map are hiring, equating to "more than 1,000 open jobs in New York. The message is loud and clear: New York City is open for business."

So much rah-rahing was starting to make us nauseous. After Mr. Pinsky spoke, Mr. Miller then took the podium and briefly listed three reasons why he decided to move Branch back to NYC, the last of which was, "I much prefer a slice of New York pizza to a San Francisco burrito."

Finally it was the press's turn to ask questions. We were dying to ask the Mayor if he's keeping to his New Year's resolution to learn how to code.

Unfortunately, we never got called on. Maybe next time, Mr. Mayor.

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.

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?

The man in the middle

Ahhh, the EIR. It's one of those amazingly vague and flexible positions that only exist in the tech industry. Part liaison, part networking hub, part founder, part investor (typically). As Mayor Bloomberg continues his quest to cuddle up to Silicon Alley, the New York City Economic Development Corporation has announced its first ever entrepreneur in residence, or in the EDC's case "entrepreneur at large" Steven Rosenbaum, the founder and CEO of Magnify.net and creator of the recent 9/11 memorial app.

Mr. Rosenbaum is a born communicator. "I was a magician in high school, and I always loved the back and forth with the audience. The feedback. When I started working in the media, I found the whole 'one way' thing kind of hollow. I wanted applause if we did well and I wanted rotten fruit if the audience didn't like a documentary or program we produced."

The NY video meetup, which Mr. Rosenbaum runs, has become a locus for the intersection of tech and media (the upcoming one will feature one of favorite local hardware startups, Kogeto). Magnify also powers video for some large local companies like New York mgazine and TEDx.

The gig involves spending time each week at the various local incubators, giving advice to the young founders working in the trenches. And hopefully he'll be bringing their concerns and questions to the people in the New York City Economic Development Corporation and other parts of government who can get things done. There is an innovation agenda around issues like patent reform, immigration and censorship which needs to be addressed at the local and national level.

Luckily it seems Mr. Rosenbaum understands the challenge. "The DNA of startups and the DNA of government don't naturally fit together," he told Crain's. "But things work better if you understand how the city is wired."

I am a rock, I am an island.

Thus far the anticipation index over Michael Bloomberg's big plan to bring an engineering campus to New York has centered around which university will win the bid. (The mayor's rather sweet on Stanford, but Cornell is doing a full court press.) While those two duke it out, jockeying for position has swung back over to where, exactly, this campus will be located. NYC EDC has offered up three city-owned plots of land: the Navy Hospital Campus at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Governors Island, or the Goldwater Hospital Campus on Roosevelt Island. And the latter has come out swinging.

At a press conference earlier this week, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin (D-Manhattan) told reporters, "We want Roosevelt Island to be Silicon Island.” But as Capital writer Dan Rosenblum points out, the pitch wasn't held on the would-be developer mecca, but rather a Manhattan plaza at the end of the Roosevelt Island Aerial Tramway, "the gondola that for many years was the only public transportation available to the island from Manhattan without going through Queens." (You can now get there via the F train.) A spokeswoman for Ms. Lappin told Capital said they wanted to host the press conference "on the quieter island, but said that they also wanted to make sure reporters would come."

Ultimately, the decision for where to host the campus looks like it will rest with the city, but the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, the strip of land's "own mini-government," will give their two cents as the plan evolves. For island natives and their representatives, the campus looks like their ticket to relevance. Assembly member Micah Kellner said, "This is a way to integrate the island fully and completely” with that other island to their West.

Ms. Lappin and others think the city should raze Goldwater Memorial Hospital, which was built in the 1930s and is due to close in 2014, a year ahead of the campus opening. She also touted Roosevelt Island's selling points:

"It’s an island that is a beautiful and very green place and we think students would enjoy that. We have an excellent school on the island. We just added gifted-and-talented classes to the school, PS 217. We have retail. We have Starbucks. Every student needs a Starbucks.”

Yeah, where else would they find one of those?

Last month, the NYCEDC completed the same survey with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and published the results on Tumblr.

• 66% of entrepreneurs responding that we are not in the midst of a tech bubble
• 36% of the VC community responding that we are not in a tech bubble

  Of those who felt that we are in the midst of a bubble, all except one respondent felt that the bubble was not unique to New York City.

The survey also found that India, the U.K., Europe and China were the areas of strongest interest internationally.

Respondents felt the NYCEDC could be most helpful to entrepreneurs by facilitating access to capital.

The survey is quite detailed, asking for elaboration on several questions, but there's no indication that the results will go anywhere but on Tumblr.

Recall: "A new, state-of-the-art applied sciences research school would be a major asset for New York City as we develop a 21st century innovation economy," our mayor said in December. "The City is committed to finding the right partner ... to establish such a facility."

Stanford president John Hennessy, who grew up in Long Island and got his master's and doctoral degrees in computer science at SUNY-Stony Brook, pitched the idea to his faculty last week. "The opportunity presented by the city of New York is one that Stanford should at least explore. The concept as laid out by New York plays to many of our strengths, particularly the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes this university," he said.

Faculty are supportive, Dr. Hennessy told the Stanford Daily, and the university is working on its formal expression of interest.

The initial concept calls for a center focused on information technology, at first with 25 faculty from the School of Engineering and the Graduate School of Business, serving 125 doctoral students and 250 or more master's degree students. The East and West Coast campuses would share courses and "support cross-country research collaborations."

"The time is coming for universities to be in more than one location," Dr. Hennessy said.

Stanford was one of 20 universities from four continents that attended an information session in New York earlier this month. Other contenders for the city campus include Cornell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Purdue, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay is also in the hunt. Formal expressions of interest are due to the city by March 16. The city hopes to release a more targeted and specific request for proposals by summer, and select a partner by the end of the year.

"A number of very strong institutions both from within and outside of New York have expressed interest, and we're eager to hear from them. Our goal is to create an applied sciences campus that promotes New York City as the 21st century capital of innovation to match its standing as a global capital of other industries, like finance, media and fashion," said Andrew Brent, spokesperson for Mayor Bloomberg.

The city indicated it's committed to the project "despite these difficult fiscal times."

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries