New Yorkers soon will start seeing strange kiosks popping up in parks and other public places. They should be welcome sights, though, since anyone can plug their phones into them for a quick battery refresh. Read more »
Apart from Los Angeles, this week’s expansion mainly targets smaller cities and towns, but Sprint is going urban once again this summer with a big 120-city push. Read more »
RootMetrics recent New York City tests reveal that the Bronx game out on top among the five boroughs in mobile data performance. Of the four major carriers, AT&T’s networks were the fastest. Read more »
New York is getting on board with e-hailing services for taxi cabs though it’s doing so slowly. The Taxi and Limousine Commission approved a one-year pilot program that will allow companies like Uber, Hailo and others to offer taxi hailing from a smartphone. Read more »
42Floors, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Friday announced an expansion to New York and a $5 million Series A round of funding. The company, which launched in San Francisco in May, provides businesses with a search engine for finding office space to lease and sublease. Read more »
Start spreading the news — New York’s buzziest new media start-ups draw from a richer cultural tapestry that can lure engineering talent from Palo Alto, Gotham founders say. Now they just need a massive exit. Read more at paidContent »
Joshua Kushner, the well known founder of New York-based Thrive Capital, an investor in hot startups such as Instagram, Fab, CodeAcademy and Warby Parker is working on his second startup, that is said to be focused on the healthcare industry. It is all very hush-hush. Read more »
New York co-working spaces and startups are opening their doors to workers who are either displaced from their offices or can’t get to work because of the crippled transit system. Read more »
New York startups can apply to be part of a new Fiber Challenge, which will award 240 business with a fiber hook up to their building. The competition is being done in partnership with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision, which will be wiring up the winners. Read more »
Following a successful first two years for the original FinTech Innovation Lab in New York, Accenture and its banking pals are trying to replicate the scheme in the world’s top financial center. Read more »
Thrive Capital, the New York VC firm that has invested in Instagram, Fab, Warby Parker and GroupMe, has raised a third fund totalling $150 million. Thrive, led by 27-year-old Joshua Kushner, will continue to look at Internet and media companies at any stage. Read more »
Two of the biggest taxi service startups are preparing to go head-to-head as San Francisco’s Uber and London’s Hailo gear up for launch in New York. Who will win? Evidence so far suggests it’s a tough game, but the British company may just have the edge. Read more »
European technology companies looking to go public usually desert their home turf and head to the U.S. — creating an echo chamber that has made some local investors angry. Now reports suggest that the British government may be trying to reverse that trend. Can it work? Read more »
David Tisch, the managing director of TechStars New York, is stepping away from his duties to pursue new projects. He will remain active with the accelerator program. His replacement has not been announced yet. Read more »
New York-based SecondMarket Thursday announced that the company was adding former U.S. Congressman Scott Murphy to its board of directors. Murphy, an entrepreneur, was previously managing director at Advantage Capital, a venture capital and small business financing firm. Read more »
Payphones, those relics of the pre-cellphone era, may just get a new lease on life in New York. The city is testing a new pilot program in which it installs free Wi-Fi on select payphone kiosks. It is starting with ten kiosks in three boroughs. Read more »
Paris is following London by starting to provide free wireless access to subway travelers, thanks to a new initiative from WiFi service company GOWEX. With similar moves in New York as well, is this boost in transport connectivity a trend? Read more »
Education startup Codecademy — which promises to help anyone learn to program with its game-like online courses — is stepping up to the international market with a $10 million round of funding from new backers including Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Read more »
Consumer startups angling for a spot in TechStars NYC better have a plan for earning users. And it better not involve the buzz words “social” and “viral.” Read more »
It looks like we were right about AT&T sunsetting its 2G networks to make way for more mobile broadband capacity. On Wednesday, Ma Bell announced it would ‘refarm’ PCS spectrum in New York City currently used by its GSM voice networks for “3G and 4G” services. Read more »
Google is offering 22,000 square feet of free space in its New York headquarters to help CornellNYC Tech university get underway. The space will allow CornellNYC Tech to begin offering courses this fall as opposed to waiting for the completion of its school on Roosevelt Island. Read more »
It’s fun pitching cities like Berlin against the Valley, but it’s an artifical contest that makes little sense these days. Two investors believe it’s time to ditch the territorial debate and start building European startups that cross borders. Read more »
EBay is putting down roots in New York and has bought up a 35,000 square foot space. The retailer is announcing that it has purchased an entire floor in the Flat Iron district where it will house 200 people in a new technology center of excellence. Read more »
New York’s start-up community relived its fondest science fair memories Thursday with the inaugural NY Tech Day, a showcase for 180 start-ups that demonstrated some of the breadth and depth of the local tech scene. The event packed in more than 4,500 attendees. Read more »
Thanks to $340 million in no or low-cost loans authorized by the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), the Freelancers Union is expanding its health insurance offerings for independent workers, offering a new low-cost option to those in New York, New Jersey and Oregon. Read more »
Everyone wants to chime in on Google’s privacy polices including, it seems, graffiti artists. In recent weeks, an unflattering version of th… Read more at paidContent »
New York’s got an abundance of most everything but engineers are increasingly a precious commodity. But the NYC Turing Fellows Program is revving up in its second year to really take on the problem and start feeding more tech talent to the exploding start-up scene. Read more »
This weekend in New York City, dozens of developers gathered for the second Cleanweb Hackathon, where programmers spent the weekend building mobile and web apps around new ways to manage energy. The event is the latest sign the ecosystem around clean technology is changing. Read more »
Members of New York’s tech community, a couple thousand strong, braved the winter chill and gathered outside the offices of New York senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand to protest the PIPA and SOPA legislation Wednesday, calling it a potentially crippling set of bills. Read more »
Charlie O’Donnell, a principal at First Round Capital in New York, thinks Brooklyn is increasingly where the action is, and he’s launching the first Brooklyn-based venture capital fund to help kick-start companies on the other side of the East River. Read more »
The 2012 CES show hasn’t even officially kicked off and already the smart energy home has emerged as a key target for a variety of sectors, including telcos, big box retailers, startups, chip companies and now cable operators like Time Warner Cable. Read more »
Its 2011 LTE build goal already complete, AT&T is expanding the new super-high-speed network into more markets in the remaining days of the year, starting with New York City. AT&T’s CFO says the expansion is being driven by ever-increasing mobile broadband demand. Read more »
Facebook announced Friday it will establish engineering operations in New York City in 2012. This will be the social networking company’s first engineering office outside of the west coast. “We want the next Facebook to start here in New York City,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. Read more »
The authorities in New York are discovering what Egypt also learned — that it’s not as easy to regulate or arrest journalists when everyone is a journalist. But while that may make our lives a little more complicated, it is fundamentally a good thing for society. Read more »
Remember Justin Kan, the Justin.tv founder who broadcasted much of his life online to kickstart his company? Hans Eriksson from Swedish Justin.tv competitor Bambuser tries to bring back some of that early live streaming spirit with a 24-hour live tour of New York this week. Read more »
Charlie Kim, CEO of NextJump, who just organized the largest engineering job fair in New York said the challenge for local companies is to win the talent recruiting wars, which comes down competing at home, playing for the long term and getting top executives involved. Read more »
TechStars New York, now a TV brand thanks to a new Bloomberg series, graduated its second class today of would-be break out stars. The class shows that the program is still churning out a lot of quality, with a pretty polished group of graduates debuting. Read more »
AT&T announced on Tuesday it’s extending free Wi-Fi to five more New York parks, part of the plan to bring Wi-Fi to 20 parks spread throughout the five boroughs of New York. Free Wi-Fi isn’t just good will; it’s a helpful tool in relieving cellular networks. Read more »
NYC SeedStart, a New York incubator program founded by NYC Seed along with a handful of VC partners, just graduated its summer class focused on media. The seven startups cover a range of topics, but a few themes emerged like crowdsourcing, commerce and content management. Read more »
The impact of digital technology has shattered long-established monopolies and ways of making money in the newspaper publishing industry. Today, publishers must find ways to subsidize content-creation costs directly, and this report examines a few different approaches, from more flexible paywalls to charging users directly for access and mimicking the business models of other industries, such as online gaming. Companies mentioned in this report include Ford, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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