Someday! (Photo: CornellNYC Tech)

Cornell Tech's coffers are a little fatter this morning. Yesterday, Qualcomm cofounder Irwin Mark Jacobs and his wife Joan announced they're donating $133 million to the project. And so the joint program designed by Cornell and the Technion (a project within the Roosevelt Island campus, it'll allow students to earn dual masters degrees) will now be known as the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute.

That's a useful data point if you're trying to get your name on a major NYC landmark.

According to the announcement, "The funds will help support curriculum initiatives, faculty and graduate students, and industry interactions in a two-year graduate program." 

“We are delighted to partner with Cornell and the Technion on this unique educational initiative,” the couple said in a statement. “We believe strongly in the mission of this international collaboration to drive innovation and to foster economic development.

This isn't the couple's first higher-ed donation, either. Both Cornell alums, they've established a scholarship program and an endowed professorship at their alma mater, and their names are slapped on both a Graduate School and a "Center for Communications and Information Technologies" at the Technion. Dr. Jacobs has also already been involved with Cornell Tech, as an advisor.

Wonder how much the Jacobs spent on their wedding.

(Photo: Asilomarssc.org)

Earlier this week, Betabeat had the privilege of speaking with Deborah Estrin, the first academic faculty member announced for Cornell and Technion's $2 billion tech campus. (Coming soon-ish to an island near you!) For an institution concerned with spinning out an army of startups based on the latest technological developments, it's hard to think of a more fitting hire.

Most recently, Ms. Estrin worked as a professor at UCLA, where she founded the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. She also heads East with a number of accolades, including being named one of the "Brilliant 10" in Popular Science's list of elite researchers. This year, Wired included her on a list of “50 People Who Will Change the World” and CNN called her of the “10 Most Powerful Women in Tech.” That last distinction Ms. Estrin shares with her sister, serial entrepreneur Judy Estrin.

Must be something in the genes: Their mother, Dr. Thelma Estrin, is a pioneer in the field of biomedical engineering. 

Both Ms. Estrin's research in networked sensors as well as Open mHealth--the mobile health nonprofit she cofounded--share a practical bent, tackling issues like traffic patterns, energy usage, and treating soldiers with PTSD. "Her forte is building real systems that solve societal and industrial problems," Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering, said in a press release about Ms. Estrin's appointment. “We are looking for faculty members who have made an impact in the academic, commercial and societal realms, and she’s a superstar in all three," added Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the new campus.

Ms. Estrin won't officially move to New York until January, she told Betabeat by phone, although she did sound right at home on a cacophonous East Village street corner. Ms. Estrin's work in networked sensors is just starting to hit the mainstream, but her emphasis these days is on personalized, mobile health. That being said, she added, "One of the most exciting things about computing technology and the Internet," is its ability to cut across various disciplines. That works with CornellNYC Tech's nimble academic structure, which calls for evolving hubs on health, mobile, and  based on the next big wave in tech.

"It’s not just about one featured hub," Ms. Estrin explained. "Not only are we breaking boundaries between academia and industry, but I think we’ll be paying a lot of attention not to build too many boundaries among ourselves."

The common theme across her academic career, she said, is her inability to resist chasing down the next big technological innovation. "I was in the middle of doing wireless sensors and distributed sensing in the mid-2000s when mobile phones started becoming so much more than talking and texting devices," said Ms. Estrin. "With their data capabilities and programmability, they became really interesting distributed sensors. As someone who came up in a generation in which the Internet emerged, it became far too interesting of an opportunity to leverage. So if these are distributed sensors, then where are they? They’re on people. Moving into applications [that] help people capture data about themselves--the killer app is around personalized medicine and personalized wellness."

"It’s an interesting balance," she added, "where you’re trying to chase, and lead, and herd. All at once!"

In terms of leadership, Ms. Estrin also sounds poised to help change the much-bemoaned ratio of women in the field. "Being a woman technologist is part of the sort of technologist that I am," she said. "I’ve always really benefitted from having other women around--always wished there were more, always looking for opportunities to promote their being more. And so I bring that anywhere I go and I’m looking forward to that on the tech campus as well."

It's an issue that will be increasingly relevant as technology intersects with every facet of our lives. "In these areas that have so much connection to society, there’s lots of opportunities to pull women in from many avenues," she theorized. "Those that are sort of tech-y nerds from the start, as I perhaps was, to folks who want to come in and try to solve problems and get engaged in technology as a great way to do that."

You can also expect Ms. Estrin’s tenure at CornellNYC to emphasize open-source innovation. “Everything we developed [at UCLA] was always open source,” she said. “In our ecosystem, it’s really great when commercial enterprises have open source architecture and open source ecosystems on which to build because companies don’t spend time redeveloping the commodity components, their innovation is sort of pushed up and built on those commodity components and overall the commercial world gets more innovation.”

Mr. Page and co.

Mayor Bloomberg announced today at Google’s New York headquarters in Chelsea that the company has agreed to provide CornellNYC Tech with 22,000 square feet of free office space while the Roosevelt Island campus is built. The mayor joined Google CEO Larry Page, Cornell President David Skorton and Technion's director Craig Gotsman at a press conference this morning to make the announcement. The value of the space is over $10 million, said Mr. Page.

According to the press release:

The space will allow Cornell to build its presence in New York in close proximity to tech companies and entrepreneurs with whom it will collaborate....Google will initially provide Cornell with 22,000 square feet of office space on July 1, 2012, free of charge for 5 years and 6 months or until the completion of Cornell's campus on Roosevelt Island--whichever occurs first.

Oh good, they opened the conference with this embarrassing video.

CEO Larry Page took the stage following an introduction by Google CIO Ben Fried. The Mayor has “a healthy disregard for the impossible," said Mr. Page. "He sets big ambitious goals and he usually hits them. I’ve learned a lot from Mayor Bloomberg about management and especially his bullpen. I also hear he's learning to code, so I’m hoping I can teach him a thing or two to return the favor."

"When we put the best most innovative minds together today we end up with the best most innovative tomorrow," he added.

Mr. Page then introduced Mayor Bloomberg, "a man who needs no introduction."

"When we envisioned creating such a school in our city and created the compeititon for it, we always expected the school to have close ties to the private sector," said Mayor Bloomberg. "Today Google is certainly getting in on the ground floor."

Of Silicon Valley's tech lead, Mayor Bloomberg joked, "We don’t like to be second to anybody. Google and NYC tech are going to help us seriously close that gap."

"We need to create a new academic model for this time, and this place, and this industry and that's exactly what we're going to do," emphasized Cornell President David Skorton.

In answering a question about whether or not Google would have 'dibs' on Cornell's tech grads, Mr. Page beamed: "I wish."

Mr. Skorton said that the campus would officially open in the fall, and Cornell will be bringing a small number of grad students and professors down from Ithaca to kick off the semester.

One reporter asked who is currently occupying the space. "Did you have trouble renting it out?" he asked.

"Do you know anything about the New York real estate market?" joked Mr. Fried.

"We're going to compact [Googlers] a little more to make room for our friends here at the university," clarified Mr. Page.

Over the next six months, he said, Cornell plans to start a search to find "at least one university from Europe and as many as two from Asia" to boost the applied sciences program's prestige abroad.

“It’s a whole new model,” Fuchs said, adding that the campus will make Cornell the first American university to build a school in the United States with international schools. “We think about going elsewhere — there are many [American] universities that have campuses and partnerships overseas — but not about bringing [international universities] here to the U.S.”

The working motto seems to be "a rising tide lifts all boats," something Cornell president David Skorton said at the press conference announcing Cornell-Technion as the winner of the fierce competition to build on city-owned land.

“If we have more partners in this innovation institute, it raises the reputation, the ranking, the visibility, the prestige of Cornell in the home countries of those universities, just as it would raise their own prestige,” Fuchs said. “If we had a university from Asia, they’re going to have visibility — that’s why they’d be eager to do it.”

Although the move may be aimed at ensuring a competitive applicant pool, Mr. Fuchs emphasized it was not designed to help Cornell shoulder than $2 billion price tag for the 30-year project. He did admit, however, that other schools will “certainly bring resources indirectly.” Considering that the city is only chipping in $100 million, every little bit helps.

According to Mr. Fuchs, this cosmopolitan twist has been part of the plan all along, despite the fact that this wasn't discussed during the heated battle between Cornell and Stanford:

“If I remember correctly, in the agreement with the Technion we talk about creating a global innovation institute and inviting other members,” Fuchs said. “When anyone asks us about this, we certainly tell them.”

Ah, we see. It's just that no one bothered to ask the right questions. Makes you wonder, what else should we be asking Cornell . . .

The description of the animation, which was done by the digital production house AJSNY, is as epic as the images: "In 2012, in the year of the Technion's cornestone centenary, a third millennium cornerstone is to be laid."

But before the futuristic beauty inspires you to cryogenically freeze yourself until 2037 (the estimated date of completion for the full 2 million sq. ft. build-out), here's a dash of realism from Mike Caprio at Startup-o-Rama, "I hearby cynically predict it will be very late, very over budget, & less than 1/2 as green as it appears in the video." He was talking about the exterior shots, but the point still stands. As the commenters over at Hacker News pointed out about our campus confidential feature, just because you promise more, doesn't mean it can be delivered, especially not in New York City's thorny development regulations.

For now, however, why not just let the soothing sounds whiiiiiiiiiisk you away.

Those glittering solar arrays kind of make the boroughs to its left and right look dull by comparison, no?

Check out this week's Betabeat feature, a campus confidential on how Cornell beat Stanford to build a 2 million sq. ft. engineering mecca on Roosevelt Island.

Gleaming the cubes.

On Monday, the lobby of the Weill Cornell Medical College, which resides on a particularly gray stretch of the Upper East Side, was crawling with men and women in wooly blazers dotted with “carnelian” buttons—the technical name for the maroon hue that invariably moves Cornell students to chant some version of “Go Big Red!”

Inside the auditorium, as an assembly of press, pols, and local technorati waited for Mayor Bloomberg to appear, a giant projector flashed a mosaic of the Cornell University logo.

The news had been leaked to every major news outlet by midnight on Sunday; there was no point in being coy.

“Today will be remembered as a defining moment,” Mayor Bloomberg told the crowd, officially announcing that a 50-50 joint proposal between Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology had won the $100 million grant to build a new engineering mecca and applied sciences campus. The project is designed to help New York surpass Silicon Valley as a global innovation capital, creating 30,000 jobs and as much as $1.4 billion in tax revenue.

For the next hour, a stream of political operatives, from New York City Economic Development Council president Seth Pinsky to councilmember Jessica Lappin, who represents Roosevelt Island, where the 2 million sq. ft. build-out will stand, took to the podium to express their breathless excitement at the scope of the $2 billion initiative.

Cornell president David Skorton debuted a video of an aerial rendering of the gleaming net-zero energy building. Set to a dramatic score, it looked like a CGI version of a utopian future—you know, the part in the sci-fi flick before the apocalypse sets in. “There are visions of sugarplums dancing in my head right now,” said New York City Public Schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott in response to the bit about Cornell and Technion instructing 200 of his teachers in science education every year.

"Of all the applications we received, Cornell and the Technion’s was far and away the boldest and most ambitious,” Mr. Bloomberg said of the sweeping offer, which included a $150 million venture capital fund, startup accelerator, and ambitious plans to construct 300,000 sq. ft. by just 2017—as close to the end of his third term as the mayor was likely to get.

But what should have been an effortless victory lap for the city’s yearlong plan to remake its economy for the coming century was clouded by a note of confusion. Stanford, after all, was pegged the front-runner at least as far back as March, when Mayor Bloomberg gave a speech in Palo Alto, noting, “We’re particularly pleased that Stanford—which has a top-flight engineering school—is considering the idea.” Stanford batted its eyelashes back by launching a Tumblr—native technology!—featuring a video of Larry Page and Sergey Brin talking up the Mayor’s initiative.

Indeed, as late as Friday morning, the school’s negotiating team was still locked in meetings with EDC officials; a few hours later, news hit the wire that Stanford had withdrawn its bid. And not long after that, Cornell issued a hastily-written press release revealing that it had received a $350 million anonymous donation. The largest gift in the school’s history was announced late on a Friday afternoon.

At the time, it was hard to say what was chicken and what was egg. Was Stanford trying to save face with a preemptive break-up, or did Cornell win by default? Surprisingly bitter recriminations followed from the various players as everyone tried to spin the narrative in their favor.

Part of the difficulty of understanding where negotiations broke down is a silence clause stipulated in the request for proposal (RFP). But numerous sources, who spoke under condition of anonymity, painted a picture of tense discussions and onerous demands that left several schools wary, including Stanford.

Cornell, eager to increase its presence in New York City, was more compliant at the negotiating table and better versed in what it took to get city approval, including fundraising before commitments were made. Sources said the $350 million gift, for example, had been secured for months. "We need to expand beyond Ithaca," President Skorton said plainly from the podium.

“Cornell needed it more. But NYC Tech needs Stanford more,” tweeted New York City–based venture capitalist David Pakman, alluding to the latter's prestige within tech circles and facility with spinning out successful startups. (There's a reason China and Russia are trying to build their own Silicon Valley.)

In the end, it seems the city got a better deal for taxpayers by going with the one that wanted it more, rather than the one it was supposed to want.

A university source familiar with the negotiations said Stanford’s decision to drop out wasn’t based on any one issue, but rather due to “a whole host of things that held them liable for factors outside of [their] control,” such as big-ticket penalties for missed construction deadlines and the city’s desire “to indemnify themselves for any toxicity” at the Roosevelt Island site. Although a Phase II study was commissioned this year, a full scale analysis of the medical dump under the hospital cannot be done until the building is razed. Should serious hazards be uncovered, the school will be on the hook not only for the clean-up but also potentially for resultant delays."You had a lot of institutions that wouldn't even apply because of the terms, and they got even more severe in the negotiation process," said the source.

City officials counter that such stipulations are par for the course. “If we didn’t include these types of commitments, there would be a chorus of people saying: How could the city write a blank check to a university that in five years could just decide it wasn’t into it?!” one official said. “It’s standard in any kind of long-term land lease or land sale that the city would ask the recipient to agree to certain benchmarks.” (Cornell and Technion are leasing the land for the next 99 years, at which point they can pony up $1 to buy.)

However, legal representation for schools besides Stanford also balked at the contract. “The legal document that we got was essentially, if you signed it, it would require you to build even if you didn’t hit the [fundraising] target,” another university source said. “If you state that by this date, you’re going to have this much faculty and this much building completed, and you don’t get it completed, you’re left open to a legal challenge. It was enough for our general counsel to raise a red flag to say they are not comfortable with signing this.”

Even institutions that have negotiated to build in New York City before hadn't encountered this level of vulnerability to legal action. "There wasn't any contract we signed that if our endowment goes to Madoff and then goes to nothing, we're required to build," said another source familiar with land use issues in New York.

The city’s aggressive negotiating stance also created friction. As has been reported, Stanford did not take a shine to Mayor Bloomberg’s assertion during a talk at MIT in late November that “Stanford is desperate to do it,” even if he said the same of Cornell. The bigger stumbling block, according to our sources, seems to have been another remark uttered during that same speech: According to Mr. Bloomberg, the desperation meant that, “We can go back and try to renegotiate with each one." A university source said Stanford “had no idea that everything was back on the table.” The school “responded in good faith, and everything was changing,” said the source, wryly adding, “But apparently Cornell said yes to everything.”

“Seth [Pinsky] famously negotiates every last penny off the table, and that spooked Stanford,” acknowledged a New York City real estate executive. “They thought they had a partner and were shocked with his hard line. They were told not to worry about the particulars and that it would be fixed in the end, but despite assurances, they ultimately felt uncomfortable partnering with the city.”

A city official pointed out that it was that same aggressive stance that helped Mr. Pinsky close "complicated and thorny" deals on Hudson Yards and Willets Points, which the city had been trying to navigate for years.

In fact, a source with knowledge of the negotiation process said familiarity with the way the city does business helped Cornell, which already employs more than 5,000 New York City residents. "There are things the city is going to ask you to do that [Cornell] was very comfortable with, it's not clear that the other side was that comfortable," said the source before dropping a bit of local trivia, "They know what a ULURP is."

ULURP, or Uniform Land Review Procedure is the city's notoriously arduous standardized review process. In October, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger told the school's newspaper, "I’ve been through a ULURP process. Nobody in their right mind should go through a ULURP process more than once in their life.” Of course, Mr. Bollinger was talking about how the ordeal might hold back his competitors for the tech campus RFP, noting that it took Columbia three-and-a-half years from submitting rezoning plans to getting mayoral approval to develop in Manhattanville. It's something candidates no doubt had in mind considering the penalties for delays.

"It's binding," Mr. Bloomberg shot back to a question from the press corps about the contract. "Keep in mind, if we’re gonna invest, commit this land, turn down other people who wanted it, and invest $100 million, you don’t do that unless you have a binding commitment... One of the attractive things about Cornell is that they know how to do business in the city. Just look around," he added, referring to Weill Cornell Medical College.

But both city officials and Cornell say it was the school’s superior offering that clinched the deal. “The catalyst was that Cornell was beating them in every single category,” said source close to Cornell, citing the speed of construction, the size of the campus, and the amount of students and faculty it will serve.

“Cornell was hungrier, Cornell was more humble in the process—I think it helped them win the proposal,” said Charlie Kim, CEO of Next Jump, a loyalty rewards company, who sits on the advisory committee that helped select winners. Mr. Kim said the committee met a thirty to forty-five days ago and then again last week to go into more detail. "I think probably after reviewing everything, and this is kind of my opinion, I felt Cornell-Technion was the number one recommendation."

City officials claim the rush to sign the papers was merely a reflection of the way discussions were being structured. The city was simultaneously negotiating with everyone that applied, trying to move each deal as far along as possible. When Stanford dropped out, the deal with Cornell was already near completion.

And what of the mysterious $350 million donation? Though some speculated that the money had come from Mayor Bloomberg himself, The New York Times revealed Monday evening it had been a gift from Cornell alum Charles Feeney, the Duty Shop Group entrepreneur and subject of the book The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing.

Which isn’t to say Mr. Bloomberg won’t be opening up his wallet to see that his legacy-defining project remains on track. Although Cornell and Technion have been granted the full $100 million, the city left open the possibility of approving a second smaller-scale project, like  plans from NYU and the Polytechnic Institute to transform the derelict former MTA headquarters into a Center for Urban Science and Progress, or Carnegie Mellon’s proposed partnership with Steiner Studios to build a digital media campus at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, both of which will now likely have to rely on philanthropic donations.

“You assume that when they make phone calls, I’d be on the list,” Mr. Bloomberg said at the press conference, while trying not to crack a smile. “But I also have some commitments to some other educational institutions, as you know.”

ntiku@observer.com

Mr. Feeney via the Cornell Chronicle

Looks like Sandy Weill will have to be okay with having only two Cornell institutions named after him. The New York Times just outed the Big Red enthusiast responsible for a $350 million anonymous donation towards Cornell and Technion's proposed applied sciences campus. The individual is 80-year-old Charles F. Feeney who made his billions running the Duty Free Shoppers Group. The donation was made through Atlantic Philanthropies, an organization founded by Mr. Feeney.

Well that explains the duty free joke during today's presser announcing Cornell and Technion as the winner. Early in the presentation, Technion president Peretz Lavie said he was told on Friday afternoon to buy a ticket for New York. When Betabeat asked whether that meant the decision wasn't made until Friday (after Stanford dropped out of the race), Mayor Bloomberg quipped:

"The president of the Technion—I don’t want to brag for him—but he was in Sweden where one of his faculty members just received a Nobel Prize, so if you’re going from Israel to Sweden you might as well keep going, hopefully he’ll spend a little bit of money and buy some things to take back."

Wink-wink. Okay, now we get it!

The donation was announced Friday afternoon, although sources say it had been in the works for awhile. It's not clear whether part of Mr. Feeney's donation went towards the $150 million venture capital fund announced as part of the campus initiative at today's press conference. Mayor Bloomberg also revealed that Cornell received the full $100 million grant allocated for the project.

According to the Times, Mr. Feeney may know a little something about the ramen-eating, lean startup lifestyle espoused by the beneficiaries of his donation:

"He flies coach, owns neither a home nor a car, and wears a $15 watch."

via BerlinRosen

After months of public jockeying and lobbying strategic consulting, this Friday marks the final deadline for applications to build a tech campus that will transform New York into the next Silicon Valley. That means you can expect five days of attempts at showstopping revelations from the universities. Think of it like an Advent Calendar, except with building details instead of candies and a chance to build on city-owned land instead of the birth of baby Jesus.

Cornell is first out of gate with its announcement this morning that its proposed tech campus, which it is building in a 50/50 partnership with Israel's Technion, will feature the "largest net-zero Energy building in eastern United States," at least according to its PR firm, BerlinRosen.

The specs for the 150,000 ft. sq. ft. building include "a solar array more than 3 times larger the biggest current solar array in New York City and "4 acres of geothermal wells, again the largest in NYC, totaling 400 wells, which are used to heat and cool the campus efficiently." After combing through the (super sleek) designs, it's hard not to think about how the RFP process itself, which is rumored to cost at applicants at least $1 million, might favor those willing to spend.

via Belsky Bits

With less than two weeks until the deadline for the RFP, universities are ready to pull out the show-stoppers. Cornell just threw the process (and Betabeat!) for a loop by announcing that it would be partnering with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in its bid.

Early on, Technion was rumored to be a favorite--along with Cornell and Stanford. Although it all depends on what's proposed, the prospect of two frontrunners combining their efforts has to set the playing field off-kilter. Suri Kasirer, Cornell's power lobbyist, and BerlinRosen, its PR firm hired especially for the occasion of the chance to build on city-owned land, certainly know how to make an announcement.

This news comes a week after CUNY's City College let it slip that it would be partnering with Stanford on the Palo Alto mothership's bid--lending some hometown flavor. However, that collaboration is only on joint programming, as Standford's Lisa Lapin made clear to Betabeat over the phone last week. “Our applied science campus proposal is just a Stanford proposal. We’re partnering with them on programs, but they’re not a partner in the proposal itself,” she said. “We’re not financing the project with anyone else. We’re not building it with anyone else.”

Cornell's partnership with Technion on the other, which also calls for building on Roosevelt Island, seems to be more 50/50, at least according to the press release:

"The key attributes of the partnership between Cornell and the Technion underscore the distinctive and practical dimensions of the proposed NYC Tech Campus and its specific focus on strategies to spur innovation and commercialization. An integral part of the campus will be the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute (TCII), a 50-50 collaboration between the two universities to form a graduate program that will focus on commercialization of immediate relevance to the city’s economic growth.  Second, the campus’ academic hubs will provide an interdisciplinary environment to better prepare students for careers in tech companies, large and small, where the problems to be solved involve using technical knowhow and also expertise in other domains at the heart of the city’s key industries.  Finally, for their degrees, students will be required to take courses that prepare them to be entrepreneurs and early stage investors, fueling the rapid expansion of the tech ecosystem in New York."

Yesterday, Cornell's PR firm also sent around a link from Scott Belsky, a Cornell alum and CEO of Behance, who tries to make the case that a win for Stanford would be a win for the West Coast:

"It’s widely known that Stanford’s all-powerful alumni network has 'first dibs' on tech talent, and this often means a quick migration of recent graduates to Silicon Valley (not Alley). Anecdotally, nearly all of my smart friends from Stanford leveraged their alumni network for jobs and, as a result, most of them stayed on the west coast. Even if Stanford students took a year or two studying in NYC, they would still tap their alumni network for jobs. And when they do, they’ll head back west to their home turf.

In contrast, Cornell is New York, through and through. Cornell’s alumni base is heavily skewed to the East Coast, and especially New York City."

Your move, Bradley Tusk.