Zach Sims (Photo: Twitter.com)

With UPenn making moves on the title of "Stanford of the East" and Eric Schmidt advising Cornell on the evolution of its new tech campus, NYU doesn't want its students left behind in the college tech revolution. Hence the school's new partnership with Codeacademy. Students in the Steinhardt School’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) can now opt in to a ten-week course where NYU professors and Codecademy instructors will teach them how to code.

This reporter can attest that on NYU's campus, there's a definite attitude that startups are where the jobs are. Students and recent grads are flocking to community manager and marketing positions at startups. Two of our sophomore year roommates made the switch to computer science and both said, "If I know how to code, I'll be fine when I graduate." Tech@NYU, one of the school's fastest growing clubs, now hosts weekly HackDays and DesignDays where members can collaborate on their own products.

The program will cover HTML, Javascript and Python, and students will also be able to attend monthly talks with leading industry insiders. Sessions start next week and run until the end of the semester. Visiting assistant professor Liel Leibovitz will teach the classes with coding instructor David Hu.

“We’re very excited to help NYU teach scores of students to learn to program--it's great to work with a world class institution like NYU that thinks on the cutting edge and wants to teach its students the skills and creativity that the labor market require,” said Zach Sims, CEO and cofounder of Codecademy, in a press release sent to Betabeat.

"It's cool that things like this are around more," said Cody Brown, NYU graduate and founder of Scrollkit. "I imagine it will be as much a learning experience for Codecademy as it will be for the students." He further explained that this would be new for them, because "they are going irl."

In 2011, NYU's journalism department announced a digital journalism concentration designed by Jay Rosen. But the program hasn't really taken off yet, perhaps because it requires journalism students--who already have to have a double major--to take several additional credits.

Besides the Code Academy initiative, the plans for NYU's Applied Sciences Center in downtown Brooklyn are still in motion--which is a good sign for the university. Wouldn't want to get stuck as the plain old "Berkeley of the East," now would we?

Ms. Ray and Mr. Brown

If Wife Swap is one of your guilty pleasures (ahem), then you might get a kick out of Founder Swap, a project created by the makers of Scroll Kit, Kate Ray and Cody Brown, [Editor's note: along with Jonathan Basker of Betaworks] which aims to inject fresh talent into startup teams. On June 1st, New York-based early-stage startup founders will swap places with the hope that the project will help foster new ideas among the participating companies.

According to TechCrunch:

Founder Swap hopes to mix and match founders for one day, basing the swap in part on the strengths and weaknesses of the founding teams. It’s aimed at very early-stage startups, those with just two or three people working together, and is designed to provide a fresh perspective on the things they’re building.

When you're heavily into a certain project, it's easy to put blinders on that can keep you from even the simplest of innovations. Perhaps participating in events like Founder Swap can help break you out of that funk.

Also, if you're of the Michael Lazerow belief system that you should "sleep with your cofounder," June 1st is apparently your lucky day.

Mr. Skiff (ericskiff.com)

Unless your company is driven by big-name investors, it can be difficult to get press coverage for your fledgling startup until you've raised a significant amount of funding or kicked up some controversy. At least that's the theory behind 5in5NYC, a new web series from entrepreneurs Eric Skiff and Kunal Shah that spotlights some of New York's most compelling budding companies.

Mr. Skiff and Mr. Shah originally worked at Drop.io, a New York-based file sharing site that was acquired by Facebook back in 2010. After the acquisition, Mr. Skiff went to work for AOL Ventures' Q Labs, an incubator that rapidly prototypes new technologies every six weeks, and Mr. Shah went to Urtak, a TechStars company. Now, the two have teamed up again for 5in5NYC.

"5in5NYC is a weekly video show where we’re highlighting five New York startups each week and giving them a chance to tell their own story, pitch what they’re working on, and what they're currently going out and selling," Mr. Skiff told Betabeat by phone.

Mr. Skiff said that 5in5NYC grew out of a need for a positive news outlet that focused on young startups.

"I know so many people working through TechStars or Y Combinator, but struggle to find coverage before they’re a big name," he said. "It puts you in a really tough position of always needing something from reporters. We wanted to create an easy channel, something that was very founder friendly."

The first episode debuted yesterday and featured companies like Scrollkit and TimeHop. But perhaps most interesting was the demo made by 3D printing startup Shapeways. Though the company had teased the new material on their blog, Brad Dickason, Shapeways' head of product, demo'd for the first time a flexible, squishy material that the team is working on.

Carine Carmy, Shapeways' marketing and communications director, confirmed to Betabeat that "the squishy material is new, though we haven't made it available for sale just yet as we are finalizing all the details."

Once it goes into production, Shapeways' new squishy material could be a total game changer for the 3D printing market, which has previously only focused on hard materials and flexible plastics.

"We were super excited to have them make an announcement that big on the show," said Mr. Skiff. "It totally changed the tenor of the first episode. I think this was the first time that anyone had really seen the material, seen how amazing it looks, see that it squishes and that it’s not just like a more flexible plastic--it’s actually a whole different class."

5in5NYC plans to release a new episode every Monday. Next week they're hosting Karma, which is San Francisco-based but partners with a lot of East Coast companies, including Birchbox, said Mr. Skiff.

Now that they've got your attention, they decided to have some fun with it, by putting the DIY back in Valentine's Day love notes.

Madeline 4, and her dad Brian Snyder the co-founder of Everything Butt Art demoed their iPad app at last night's NYTM. (Ben Weitzenkorn)

NYU’s Skirball center was at capacity last night as roughly 850 people crowded into the once monthly New York Tech Meetup to celebrate the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, and check out some startup demos.

Last night was also special (and started late) because the meetup was simulcast on Livestream for the first time in many months, so everybody at New Work City and New York General Assembly could join the NYTM remotely.

The big news: NYTM announced two new sponsors: Bloomberg and Nasdaq. Nasdaq has apparently been “shooting awesome video of the tech startups that are being built here.”

Andrew Rasiej, chairman of NYTM hailed the efforts of, by his count, more than 2,000 NYTM members who went down to the offices of senators Schumer and Gillibrand and protested their support of the misguided anti-piracy bill. "We put a human face on a protest that was happening around the world," Mr. Rasiej said. “We proved that people are more important than money.” He said 13,000 people viewed the protest on Livestream and NYTM got 1,500 new members almost immediately. The meetup now has 22,000 members.

Scott Heiferman, co-founder of Meetup.com and NYTM board member gave the “State of the tech union” declaring NYTM as the biggest meetup in the world.” New York still falls behind California's Bay Area in terms of tech meetup membership... but barely.

New York Tech Meetup Blog

Now onto the DEMOS!

To get things going, Madeline, the four year old daughter of Everything Butt Art co-founder and Author (it was a book first) Brian Snyder drew an inguana on an iPad. The socially-integrated app begins a drawing with a butt shape and from there... the possibilities are endless. Everything Butt Art has various characters, a stamp tool and one-step sharing for Facebook, email and Twitter. Despite the cheeky name, Mr. Snyder could report that they've had zero inappropriate content issues.

MyMatchmaker is a new dating site  (this one's different, we swear!) that's could have been the high school love child of Facebook, Paypal and OkCupid if only websites could procreate. The twist on this one is that some users are "matchmakers" who "personally invite you to join their singles group." The idea is a curated pool of eligible hotties that will be more compatible with you than the general site population.

MyMatchmaker has managed to make online dating even safer for the shy, timid and emotionally fragile.  The site's privacy settings allow you to have the messages directed at you sent through your matchmaker first bringing the "I know whose got a crush on yooooou" game into the 21st century. The site is free for now but a "make payment" button makes it easy for you to send your matchmaker cash. For all their trouble.

The co-founders of Scroll Kit showed off their new invention that puts the power of web design into the hands of the masses and allows anyone to "make magazine-style layouts for the web and iPad without knowing how to code."  This method of web layout also prevents designers from getting lost in their divs when they want to do something as simple as move an element from the right to the left. The ability to edit in preview means that something that might have taken five minutes can now be done in five seconds. The company is just now expanding to three people. There is a Scroll Kit Wordpress plugin in beta right now.

Ben Zhuk, the co-founder and head of product at Best Vendor came up and made a bold statement. He wants his new startup to be the "Wikipedia of products" or like the one-stop shopping recommendation engine for work related apps. Each app on Best Vendor has its own page that shows notes, who is using it, and user ratings. The site also lets users to ask each other questions and discuss different apps they like or don't.

PaperLex is not trying to put lawyers out of business as one NYTM member suggested but rather trying to help entrepreneurs, small businesses and freelancers create standard, customizable legal documents such as service agreements. Big league tech and biz magazine "Fast Company" is PaperLex's first media client.

MVF or Most Valuable Follower shows you who to suck up to on Twitter and, as of last night Facebook too. Proprietary code calculates how many followers a user has over how many they follow to determine their worth. Certain users had to be "black listed" including Barack Obama because they skew results.

The guys behind Umami recently launched their new TV Companion iPad app that uses audio fingerprinting technology to pull up complementary information about the show you're watching. Need to know what other movies that one guy has been in? Now there literally IS an app for that.

CartoDB a new geospacial project allows developers and engineers to quickly create custom maps by plugging in data sets that seem to map themselves. Information from the data set can be excluded (among these wifi spots, which ones are free?) and integrated with other data sets (among NYC parks, which ones have wifi? Which ones have free wifi?).

Lenddo is the first crowd-based credit and identity system based on proven micro-finance techniques. Lenddo wants to give more people access to "life improving loans" and rates creditworthiness based on the creditworthiness, practices and reputation of the other people in your Lenddo network. For instance, if you take out a loan and pay it back, it helps your score and the scores of those you are connected to. Although legally Lenddo can't be opened up to the general public in the U.S. just yet, Lenddo Score is being used in Philippines and getting ready to launch in South America.