Last month, as rumors swirled of a possible run for New York City mayor, former congressman Anthony Weiner rejoined Twitter – the service the led to his downfallback in 2011. He began tweeting out links to a 20-page roadmap for NYC called “Keys to the city,” and it sure looked like the actions of a man gearing up for a comeback.
“…The classic New York story: you work hard, you make it into the middle class, and you make life a little bit better for your kids. That’s how this city was built,” says Weiner.
“But it’s getting harder and harder every day – some of the highest rents in the country…goog jobs with benefits disappearing, our schools aren’t what they should be, and we need to keep this city safe.”
Weiner doesn’t shy away from his past indiscretions:
“Look, I made some big mistakes, and I know I let a lot of people down. But I’ve also learned some tough lessons. I’m running for mayor because I’ve been fighting for the middle class and those struggling to make it my entire life. And I hope I get a second chance to work for you.”
According to recent polling, Weiner trails Democratic frontrunner Christine Quinn by a margin of 15% to 25%. That same poll indicated that 49% of people felt the Weiner shouldn’t run for mayor.
Google, along with a handful of other high-profile companies, has announced that they will join New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is participating in the “Carbon Challenge,” an initiative to “cut greenhouse gases, improve air quality, and fight climate change.”
Google has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from its NYC offices by at least 30%, and up to 40% over the next 10 years.
As a whole, the “Carbon Challenge” hopes to cut emissions in municipal buildings by 30% by 2017.
“When it comes to greening Google’s office buildings, we apply the same focus that we use for any of our products: put the user first,” said Ben Fried, Chief Information Officer for Google. “Creating facilities with leading environmental performance improves the health and productivity of our employees around the world. It also helps us reduce waste, save energy and water, and improve indoor air quality. Through our participation in the NYC Mayor’s Carbon Challenge, we hope to inspire companies of all shapes and sizes to take innovative approaches to reduce their own environmental footprint.”
Bloomberg announced that the citywide emissions are down 16%, which is over half of their stated goal.
“The Carbon Challenge is an essential partnership between the City and our businesses, universities and organizations who share our commitment to a greener, greater New York,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “I want to applaud the commitment of the 10 companies making the Carbon Challenge pledge, as well as the universities and hospitals that have already taken steps to become more efficient. Their leadership on this issue is not only going to move our city toward a more sustainable future; we also hope it will inspire others to follow suit.”
The other companies joining Google in signing on to this initiative are American International Group, BlackRock, Bloomberg LP, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JetBlue Airways, JPMorgan Chase, and PVH. The initiative already has 17 universities and 11 major hospitals on board.
New York City’s famous landmark, the Empire State Building, is used to being lit up for events – Christmas, Election Day, St. Patrick’s Day, etc. But it’s never seen anything quite like this. The tower now has a new LED lighting system.
“The state-of-the-art dynamic lighting system from PCK is unique to ESB and allows customized light capabilities from a palette of over 16 million colors in limitless combinations along with effects previously not possible such as ripples, cross-fades, sparkles, chasers, sweeps, strobes and bursts. In addition to greater control and management of the lighting, the new computerized system will deliver superior light and vibrancy levels in real-time, unlike the previous floodlights,” says a release.
Last night, the debut light show featured two songs by NYC native Alicia Keys.
People were able to follow along with the light show by tuning their radio dials to one of four different stations, all broadcasting the Alicia Keys’ songs: “Girl on Fire” and “Empire State of Mind.”
“The Empire State Building’s lights are the international icon of the New York City skyline. We use our tower lights to partner with select charities, organizations, and events around the world,” said Anthony E. Malkin, President of Malkin Holdings which supervises the Empire State Building. “‘Philips Color Kinetics’ new LED lights were installed over the summer and have been set at the color and intensity of the incandescent lights they replaced. As of tonight, our lights’ full range and intensity will be brought to life, forever changing the New York skyline. We wanted to celebrate with and thank New York City and our global audience with a specially choreographed, custom light show.”
I swear this is how it started in “Dawn of the Dead” didn’t it? A couple of stories here and there. Like a man eating another mans face in Miami, and a man eating another man’s brain and heart in Baltimore?
Well, now we get the story of a pizza shop owner in Saten Island New York City who bit another mans ear. Apparently it all started because of a change to the TV station on the TV that hangs in a local diner. A former waitress who was hanging out there became angry and her and the man got into an argument.
It was then that the owner of the pizza shop, Thomas Tomasello, got in his face and started screaming at him. Then the victim, Nicholas Cacace, did the stupid thing and started to taunt Tomasello. This is the part of the story that I neither understand or believe but it is what was reported so here we go. Cacace then went outside to smoke and was follwed out by shop owner Tomasello who proceeded to bite the mans ear.
Tomasello was arrested and charged with second- and third-degree assault charges and was released on $1,000 bail. He will have to appear in court in August. Maybe homeland security knew something we didn’t when they bought 450 million bullets. The zombie apocalypse 2012 is underway!
Google not only provides decent internet search, reliable email, wacky self-driving cars, and augmented reality specs, but now it’s in the real estate business. Mashable reported today that Google is loaning out 22,000 feet of its New York City office building to CornellNYC Tech while the school’s campus on Roosevelt Island is constructed.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Google CEO Larry Page spoke today at a press conference to announce the deal. So not only do CornellNYC Tech students basically get to go to school at Google, but Google’s not even going to charge the school rent to use the offices for the entire five and a half years that it will take to build the school’s actual campus. Page said that the value of the office space that the school will be using is about $10 million, which is a little surprising it’s not higher given New York’s famously exorbitant real estate market.
Towards the end of 2010, Google purchased the office building at 111 Eighth Avenue for $1.9 billion, a sale that was deemed the most expensive purchase of a single building in the United States for that entire year. The full area of the building is 2.9 million square feet, so Google will probably not even notice that the CornellNYC Tech students are there.
The Google office space should be properly renovated in order to accommodate classes for the upcoming fall semester.
Long is the troubled history of teachers and students communicating via social networking sites. The thing is, you never hear about teacher-student communication on Facebook or Twitter until it causes some kind of trouble and then we’re all left to assume that, because it’s rare to hear something innocuous like how a student Liked a teacher’s post about what they had for lunch, all teacher-student communication on social media is only bad teacher-student communication.
The latest city to put the brakes on such activities is New York City. The city’s Education Department has released a list of guidelines for teachers to follow when it comes to social media and students, strictly prohibiting communication between teachers and students via personal pages. However, instructors are permitted to set up pages on Facebook and Twitter that are dedicated to classroom use.
The opportunity for teachers and students to communicate personally on social media still seems so near enough with that one permission that the consideration will undoubtedly still cross somebody’s mind, eventually. However, at least there’s a policy set up that dictates whether you, as an employee of NYC’s education system, are doing something wrong. The New York Times points out, though, that the new policy does nothing to discourage personal texting or even phone calls between students and teachers, which has been a more widespread problem.
So as to clarify what’s appropriate and what isn’t, in case it isn’t obvious, the city will be providing training sessions for teachers in order to demarcate ways that they can still apply social media in the classroom – something the Education Department says is a good thing – but to do it in a professional manner.
New York officials said that they chose not to prohibit all forms of direct electronic contact, and that they could still discipline teachers who used cellphones inappropriately. “The last thing we want to do is prohibit communication and prevent a teacher from helping a student in distress, even if that means making a phone call,” a spokesman, Matthew Mittenthal, said.
The new policy also recommends is that teachers utilize privacy settings on their social media pages so as to reduce the incidence of personal communication from students. Conversely, parents will have to sign consent forms for their children that grant permission for students to use the classroom-dedicated social media webpages.
The thing about all of this is, though, is that teachers and students already know it’s a bad idea to carry on a personal relationship via social media. Well, students might be in disbelief about it but teachers definitely should know. If you have to covertly communicate in personal messages, posts, tweets, texts, whatevers, that’s likely a good indicator of Things Not To Do. A fine litmus test for this problem, I propose: if the message you’re about to send to your student isn’t something you’d post publicly on their wall or tweet publicly to them, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it at all.
So how about it? Do you think this goes far enough to curb any temptation teachers and students might have to exchange personal messages on social media sites? Think the Education Department is over-reaching on this policy? Let’s have some discussion about it below.
Since the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began taking applications for new generic top-level domains, unique opportunities galore have opened up for several possible new website domains. One place that’s hoping to acquire its own domain, and thus establish its own internet brand, is New York City. If all goes well, the citizens of the greatest city in the world could be registering sites with a .nyc domain in the near future.
The city is seeking a contract with a Virginia-based company, which would apply for the domain and operate and market it on the city’s behalf. The company would pay the upfront costs, and the city would get a share of revenue; under the five-year contract, it is guaranteed at least $3.6 million. London, Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona have said that they will also seek domains, but Rachel Sterne, the city’s chief digital officer, said she believed New York City was the only major city in the United States to be pursuing one.
Various groups have campaigned for a .nyc domain as far back as 2000. One website, thenycdomain.com, has gone so far as to organize a Twitter campaign around the hashtag #thenycdomain in order to raise the $50,000 needed to file an application with ICANN.
And why shouldn’t New York have its own domain, or any other city or state for that matter? However, upon hearing this news, somewhere in Wilmington a cadre of hazy-eyed hipsters are waking up to begin poo-pooing about how they saw .nyc open up for .net in 1999, and then pour a PBR over their bowl of cornflakes.
The hardest thing about the tragedy on September 11th was the giant hole in the ground at the World Trade Center. After years of ridiculous political bureaucracy and scandals, the new Freedom Tower is almost ready. Construction is currently on the 92nd floor, but the 104 floor tower is expecting construction to be finished by this summer.
The new building at the site of 6 World Trade center will tower over the rest of the city, and according to the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, anything else in the Western Hemisphere. It is being topped by a 408 ft broadcast tower to bring the grand total height to 1,776 feet. The broadcast tower is projected to generate more than $10 million annually by broadcasting TV and FM radio signals.
“Broadcasting from the top of One World Trade Center is both an economic and symbolic achievement,” said Jody Durst, president of The Durst Organization. “It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate setting for an ultra-modern broadcast facility than the pinnacle of the world’s most iconic building. At the same time, the facility would serve as a source of ongoing revenue for the property.”
“This expanded use of One World Trade Center makes perfect sense,” said authority Executive Director Patrick Foye. “The Durst company brings great experience and expertise in managing broadcast facilities, and their team understands the emerging dynamics in the broadcast marketplace over recent years. With an ideal operator in place, the center would help Lower Manhattan reclaim its status as one of the city’s elite broadcast venues.”
One World Trade Center will be managed, operated and leased by The Durst Organization, with Cushman & Wakefield is serving as leasing and marketing agents for the building’s office space. The Durst Organization will oversee construction and operation of the broadcast facility.
We’re approaching the last leg of today’s SOPA/PIPA protest that delivered shocks throughout the Internet to Senators and lazy college students alike. Wikipedia suspended itself and Google made a pretty pointed statement.
Still, while all of this heavy activity was happening on the Internet, there was a bicoastal movement that put some anti-SOPA/PIPA foot soldiers in the public space of New York City and San Francisco. In NYC, New York Tech Meetup organized an impromtu rally this afternoon outside the offices of U.S. Senators Schumer and Gilliband while, on the other side of the continent, protesters in San Francisco rallied in Civic Center Plaza outside of the mayor’s office.
Using the tags #NoPIPASF and #nytmSOS, supporters who attended the events shared many photos and thoughts via Twitter this afternoon.
From San Francisco (and, uh, yeah, that really is MC Hammer):
Politico, a fast growing political news organization is celebrating their successes by expanding their market into New York City. CEO, Fred Ryan is excited to expand into the market after a climb to success in the Washington, D.C. area. Currently the publication (magazine) is available in a handful of D.C. area Starbucks and has several prominent subscribers including the White House and Congress.
Politico will be strategically placing distribution boxes around the the City of New York, but will also be handing out free copies of their publication to business leaders and financial institution to spark interest. So if your in the New York City area or you’re in D.C., check them out.
Starting on January 1, 2012 a new agreement will take effect, which will allow ABC to begin selling ads and providing clips of entertainment to Creative Mobile Technologies (CMT) infused New York City cabs. At the moment, that’s about 6,600 cabs that will receive ABC’s content.
Cabs will be able to offer weather, news, and news-you-can-use features, which will run in a loop.
Dave Davis, President and General Manager of WABC-TV in New York stated that this, “significantly expands the growth opportunities ahead for our taxi TV programming and advertising business,” according to Deadline.
The deal also encompasses cabs located in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Anaheim, Kansas City, Denver, Columbus, and Charlotte. With those additional cabs, that brings the total to around 10,000 cabs where ABC content will be shown.
According to the companies, this deal will “lay the groundwork for additional expansion into new markets… in the coming months“.
What do you think of advertising in cabs? Tell us what you think in the comment area below.
Twitter said hello to New York City today as they opened their new East Coast headquarters at 340 Madison Avenue.
The brand new office will house 40 full-time employees, including engineers, designers and of course, advertising execs (it’s Madison Ave, right?)
New York is a big city for Twitter, with over 65 accounts being operated by the city government. Those accounts have over 300K followers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is also active on Twitter, hosting Q&A sessions on the service using the #askmike hashtag. Recently, Twitter was the tool that the NYC government used to get out updates involving the situation with Hurricane Irene.
“We are proud to welcome Twitter to New York City’s growing technology sector,” Mike Bloomberg said. “New York City has always been a place where big ideas are born, and we are working to ensure it’s the place where the next great tech success story is written – from incubating dozens of start-up ventures to bringing a new Applied Sciences school here. Companies like Twitter provide us with an important way to engage with citizens, informing and serving them in real-time.”
Did you know that NYC has more Twitter users than anywhere else? Jack Dorsey lets us know –
“Twitter and New York share the same constant pulse of energy,” he said. “We’re looking forward to growing our presence in a city that has more Twitter users than any other city in the world and is led by innovators like Mayor Bloomberg who engage, inform and serve residents in realtime.”
So…Twitter and advertising? We’re guessing that the new Madison Avenue office location is not just a charming coincidence.
Here’s the press event featuring Jack Dorsey and Mayor Bloomberg –
Did you know that the New York Police Department has their own YouTube channel? Well, they do, and they recently used it to post a video that has caused quite the interweb controversy.
The 80-second video shows the destruction of over 5,000 pounds of fireworks, confiscated by the NYPD. How do you dispose of fireworks? Apparently you pile them up at a firing range and…boom (goes the dynamite).
So yes, the following video is pretty awesome – A $25,000 firework show in less than a minute? Sounds good to me. Check it out –
But the fascination with high explosives seems to be tempered by some people’s feelings about New York’s fireworks laws.
The reason that the NYPD found themselves in possession of so many fireworks in the first place stems from NYC’s all inclusive ban on fireworks. The buying, selling, transporting and using of fireworks is strictly prohibited and can lead to jail time. Here’s the explanation from the NYPD –
This year, the Police Department has confiscated more than 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks, ranging in size from sparklers to professional pyrotechnics. Police have also arrested 70 individuals and seized six vehicles in connection with the transport of illegal fireworks. FDNY Fire Marshals in the Firework Enforcement Unit have made 20 arrests for the sale, use, storage and/or transportation of illegal fireworks, and have seized more than 300 cases of fireworks valued at more than $25,000.
July Fourth is a day for celebration, but not at the expense of safety,” said Fire Commissioner Cassano. “Our Fire Marshals have done a tremendous job removing illegal fireworks from the streets, and our members in Fire Safety Education have worked tirelessly educating the public about the dangers of illegal fireworks. Their efforts show in the dramatic reduction of fireworks related injuries and fires we have seen in recent years.
The destruction of all of those fireworks has incensed YouTubers, for various reasons. Some see the ban as an assault on the very freedom they wish to celebrate. Others find the display a waste of a perfectly good firework show.
“Totally sill stupid waste of time and money- from the ‘busts’ all the way to the time spent on the range making this asinine spectacle. Last I heard there was real crime in NY that needed attending to,” says user eigenstates.
“This is just rediculus even in the so called nanny state of sweden consumer firewoks are legal!!!” says user ollonborresverige.
“‘Items such as sparklers are mistakenly thought to be safe, when in fact they can be very dangerous’ – I don’t know what sparklers NY uses, but other states citizens are doing just fine with them,” adds user bastian74.
“What’s the message of this? We’ll do the same thing you’d do with the illegal fireworks (setting it on fire)” asks sigiSLO.
“Could they not saved it for a special occasion and just do some fireworks charity event? kill 2 birds with 1 stone :S,” says SeriousBusiness100.
As you can see, people are questioning the message the video sends, and that is legitimate on one hand.
On the other hand, however, it’s just an awesome video of things blowing-up.
