New York University’s premier tech club, Tech@NYU, is in the midst of its annual Startup Week. This year’s series of panels featuring familiar faces from Silicon Alley are all organized under the theme ”Hacking as a mentality.”
Hence last night’s event starring Charlie O’Donnell, partner of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, and David Tisch, the former Read More
The patent wars rage on in the tech world, but today a couple of big names extended olive branches in hopes of brokering a peace–or at least one between the industry and the notion of patents. This morning, leaders from the Commerce Department and Cornell University announced that there’ll be a U.S. Patent Office staffer permanently planted right on campus.
That individual will serve as a kind of liaison between the worlds of tech and intellectual property, working to connect university students and affiliates to whatever resources the Commerce Department has to offer. (Before you private sector devotees scoff, that ranges from IP strategizing to government grants.) It’s all in the service of speeding innovations from academic notion to marketable product.
This is the first time the bureau has ever devoted such attention to a particular university campus. How you like dem apples, Stanford? Read More
Sometime around hearing the umpteenth pitch for a location-aware, mobile, social events recommendation tool, one starts to wonder if the founders ever really questioned their basic assumption: that anyone would download yet another one of those apps when none of their friends are on it.
Lean Startup Machine CEO Trevor Owens wants to help with that. Today, he’s launching a free product development tool called the Validation Board that help startups crystallize things like their “Riskiest Assumption,” which ideas have been “Invalidated,” and what constitutes a “Minimum Success Criterion.” Read More
On a windy evening back in April, Betabeat took a Skillshare class with Designer Pages founder Avi Flombaum called, “Be One of the Cool Kids: An Introduction to Ruby on Rails.” We emerged a modicum cooler, with a much better understanding of Ruby, but nowhere near ready to touch an SDK.
“Does that make sense?” Mr. Flombaum asked repeatedly, thoughtfully checking in on whether his pupils understood why “hash is like a vending machine.” Once he got into the weeds, the best we could do without a programming background was nod politely and pretend.
That helps explain the need for his newest venture, the Flatiron School, which attempts to the close the gap between a dilettante and a skilled app developer. Read More
CornellNYC is starting to come together. Applications are now being accepted; the infant school has a home with Google until the Roosevelt Island campus is complete. Now the Cornell Daily Sun reports that the debut roster is growing, announcing one name who’ll be doing splitting his time between Ithaca and New York and a semester-long visitor from San Diego.
That faculty lounge is starting to fill up! Provided the faculty lounge is actually David Karp’s sidecar.
Joining UCLA poachee Deborah Estrin (for the first semester, anyway) will be a Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, Rajit Manohar, and a University of California at San Diego professor of computer science engineering, Serge Belongie. Read More
Bright and early this morning, we hopped aboard an F train and ventured not into Midtown, home of Betabeat, but rather deeper into Queens. Our destination: The Queens Business Solutions Center, an unassuming government building located on Jamaica Avenue and surrounded by bargain stores. Waiting, freshly printed, on every single seat: An updated copy of the city’s digital roadmap, dated August 2012.
Mayor Bloomberg had shlepped out to discuss his plan to bring small businesses into the Internet Age. The means: the Small Business Toolkit, a program incorporating both in-person classes at business solutions centers across the five boroughs, and a new online library of how-to guides developed in cooperation with local tech companies Mashable, Tumblr, Google and Weebly to help neighborhood entrepreneurs figure out this whole Internet thing.
While startups in the Union Square vicinity focus on disruption, few have been addressing the many neighborhood business that aren’t even online, and don’t know how to get there. Perhaps the administration got the memo about that bodega tech gap? Read More
The starchitect-designed Roosevelt Island campus won’t be ready ’til sometime in 2017, but that doesn’t mean the embryonic staff of Cornell NYC Tech plans to sit around for the next half decade, twiddling their thumbs. A rolling stone gathers no moss! Time and tide wait for no man! Haven’t you heard there’s a tech talent crisis on?
Today Cornell University (with Mayor Bloomberg, naturally) announced that applications are now being accepted for the “beta class” of the school’s one-year Master of Engineering in computer science program. Classes commence in January 2013, in space borrowed from Google. So if you’ve been kicking the tires on a graduate degree, today could very well be your moment of glory. Read More
We thought manufacturing had departed New York for the foreseeable future, and yet suddenly there’s a building boom right here in the five boroughs. Shapeways is building a factory out in Long Island City; now City College’s Grove School of Engineering is getting its very own incubator, focused on “devices and manufacturing,” the Daily News reports.
What’s next? We start eating local oysters again? (Yes, please.) Read More
Last week, Skillshare, the disruptive teaching platform backed by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, announced a big expansion: incorporating an online element into its classes. Rather than relying on its popular in-person workshops, which Betabeat has personally employed to brush up on our coding and financial modeling skills, the startup opened its doors around the globe with “Hybrid” classes that combine those in-person workshops with “project-based online learning.”
Skillshare cofounder Michael Karnjanaprakorn came up with the idea for this hybrid approach when he was teaching his own class, “Launch Your Startup Idea for Less than $5000.″ Instead of just lecturing at students, he began asking them to present their ideas at the end of class and the results dramatically improved, leading to the creation of actual startups like RentHackr and Hashpix. Read More
Less than a day since it switched out of private beta, Branch is already proving that its civilized discussion platform can house more than dry tech speculation or a chorus of bubble cant. Today, fellow Betaworker Lauren Leto used to platform to ask the question burning up literary hearts across New York City: Fuck, Marry, Kill the Jonathans (i.e. authors Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jonathan Lethem). Read More
