Here are the new markets receiving LTE services: Albemarle, N.C.; Bloomington, Ind.; Charlotte, N.C.; Contra Costa County, Calif.; Denison, Texas; Greeneville, Tenn.; Joplin, Mo.; Kerrville, Texas; Lafayette, Ind.; Lincolnton, N.C.; Los Angeles; Mankato/North Mankato, Minn.; Memphis, Tenn.; Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Newport News, Va.; Palm Bay, Fla.; Port St. Lucie, Fla.; Rochelle, Ill.; Salisbury, N.C.; Shelby, N.C.; Tullahoma, Tenn.; West Palm Beach, Fla.

Sprint now has LTE service in 88 markets (you can see the complete list here), and while many of them are on the small side, the operator is readying some major cities for launch. The operator called out New York City, San Francisco and Washington in Thursday’s announcement, saying customers are already starting to get LTE signals in those cities. In the coming months, Sprint said, it will officially unveil networks in additional 120 cities and towns in coming months.

Sprint is trying to catch up to Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both of which got more than a year’s head start on the No. 3 U.S. operator. Verizon is pretty much finished with its primary LTE network — in its earnings call today that it revealed it has built 4G in 95 percent of its 3G footprint — and it is set to break ground on its second network this year.

Recently AT&T has been turning on new LTE markets in small increments. For instance, on Thursday it said the 4G service has expanded to Cheyenne, Wyo.; Cushing, Okla.; and Florence, S.C. But it plans to make a big push this summer as well, launching in 77 new markets. By the end of the year it plans to have 250 million people under its LTE umbrella, which would put it about 50 million shy of Verizon’s footprint.

Meanwhile T-Mobile’s LTE build is just starting. Its first seven 4G cities went live in March.

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A recent round of speed and performance tests in New York from RootMetrics revealed that data speeds from mobile broadband networks averaged 13.5 Mbps, nearly 2 Mbps faster than any in any of the other four boroughs. The home of the Yankees also clocked the best upload speeds in the city, averaging 5.8 Mbps.

Manhattan actually had the lowest download speeds of the five, though it sat right in the middle in terms of upload. It’s doubtful that the big four operators are neglecting Manhattan. Rather, its lower performance is probably a reflection of its much greater density of people and smartphones along with the difficulty of finding tower space in the overbuilt borough.

When broken down by carrier, things get interesting. In all five boroughs, Root recorded the fastest average speeds on AT&T’s LTE networks. Verizon’s LTE came in second in all five cases, while T-Mobile and Sprint were a distant third and fourth respectively (neither carrier has LTE in NYC yet). But in Root’s overall testing of the NYC metro region – which by Root’s definition spans northern New Jersey, bits of southern New York and most of Long Island — Verizon came away with the speed prize, averaging 13.4 Mbps to AT&T’s 10.3 Mbps. While AT&T has built LTE over ever inch of NYC, that coverage seems to fall off when you leave the city.

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But it means that taxi users will now get to legally hail a cab from their smartphone, though the rules will be different depending on where a user is located. User will be able to hail a taxi that’s within a half-mile radius in Manhattan below 59th street. The radius grows to 1.5 miles for the rest of New York. Users will pay using the existing credit-card payment systems from VeriFone and CMT. And companies wanting to offer e-hailing will need to get a license from the city.

Uber tried unsuccessfully to start an e-hailing service back in September but quit within six weeks after encountering difficulties in building up its fleet of available taxis because of obstacles put up by the city. Now, it’s poised to get back on the road, the second big win in two weeks for Uber after the Washington D.C. City Council approved digital dispatch services last week. The company wrote excitedly in a blog post what this means:

“We already know how this pilot will turn out. As you may remember, New York City’s first experiment in e-hailing yellow cabs was only a couple months ago. Along with quite a bit of controversy there was enormous, unprecedented demand from New Yorkers who used it to get a yellow cab dispatched to them for the first time in decades. Drivers who found themselves in neighborhoods far from midtown Manhattan were finding riders they never had before – and were earning hundreds of dollars a week more than before – helping them make a far better living. But obstacles and roadblocks, and politics got in the way and six weeks ago we ended our ambitious e-hail experiment.

Now, UberTAXI’s return is imminent.”

But it’s not just Uber that wins. Services like Hailo, GetTaxi and Taxi Magic will also get a shot at offering services under the pilot program. The new approvals in New York and D.C. suggest that cities are acknowledging consumer interest in these services and the need to look at more technology options for moving people around. A TLC survey found that 70 percent of passengers said they had a smartphone and 55 percent wanted the ability to hail a cab and pay with their smartphone.

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The office space search engine on Friday announced an expansion to New York and a $5 million Series A round of funding from 35 big-name investors, including Thrive Capital’s Jared Kushner, Founder Collective’s Chris Dixon, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and Digital Sky Technologies’ Yuri Milner. The company said the majority of its investors are New York-based because that’s where it plan to focus.

42Floors, which launched in San Francisco in March, provides users with a free, comprehensive database of available office space listings, along with photos and relevant information. The goal of the site is to make the usually painful and frustrating search for office space hassle-free. The search engine serves businesses of all sizes, but 42Floors’ “growth hacker” Darren Nix told me 80 percent of its queries are for spaces between 1,000 and 6,000 square feet, making its “sweet spot” companies with 5 to 50 people.

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Yet Big Apple founders are taking pride not just in rivalling but in pitching a quite different kind of online upstart, four told a Monaco Media Forum panel event on Wednesday.

Like the east-west rap feud of the 1990s, their alternative approach exposes a cultural schism that enriches the ecosystem as a whole.

Tumblr founder David Karp said:

“The industry in New York right now would like to be known for having different sensibilities.

“The west is about making things scale but not making people’s lives better. It is about indexing, but not about creating.”

Speaking on the same panel, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti agreed:

“If you’re building a pure technology company, Silicon Valley is still the best place to do it. People there are still nerds; pure technology. But sometimes that hurts them when they need knowledge of a specific field.”

The reality is becoming clear to these folks that a different and more diverse, alternative startup to Silicon Valley’s all-engineering lifestyle is what differentiates east from west.

Thrillist’s Ben Lerer. Photo: Monaco Mediax ©

It draws not just from mathematics but from publishing, music, film, design and more. And it’s not just culture, Katie Beauchamp, founder of fashion-content-commerce cross-over Birchbox, told the Monaco Media Forum panel: ”Companies in New York are being founded with business models at the outset.”

All of which is all very well. New York is developing just fine with this relatively touchy-feely bent. But Tumblr’s Karp said New York can compete effectively, even for straight-up Valley engineering talent:

“We thought it would be an up-hill climb to convince these guys to pick up their families and move to the east coast. But we’ve found it easy to leverage.

“You’ve got all these big networks on equal footing — Twitter, Facebook and Google pulling people with very similar offerings — Palo Alto is a very similar community.

“When we show up at the end of that process and say ‘Before you make up your mind on Facebook or Google, spend a weekend with us in New York’, it puts us on a totally different footing. We show them an opportunity that’s as intriguing to them as in Silicon Valley – but in a much better city.”

Thrillist founder Ben Lerer told the same panel: “From a recruiting standpoint – people want to live in New York City.”

That is also rubbing off on investors who, traditionally, had eyes only for California, Karp said:

“West Coast VCs are starting to spend a lot more time out in New York. We’re now getting people from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock and Sequoia come over. They come to New York and they make a week of it… they hang out with us over the weekend doing something cool.”

This buzz is being amplified with Cornell’s Chelsea Technion facility, but was already fully in bloom despite such initiatives. These programmes concentrate interests, but a city so rich and relatively diverse can provide welcome distractions from the Valley’s tech bubble, Tumblr’s Karp told Monaco Media Forum:

“One really great characteristic of New York is that, after work, you’re not going out and hanging out with people in your industry.

“Walking down the street, seeing everyone with the Dropbox or Facebook T-shirt… they’re building something for themselves rather than, as in New York, for communities of tens of millions of people.

“The west coast feels like a race, whereas, in New York, you’re surrounded by passionate people rather than this hypercompetitive air on the west coast.”

BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti. Photo: Monaco Mediax ©

Karp said 50 percent of Tumblr staff were relocators. Of around 60 engineers, a dozen were candidates to join the Valley’s Facebook, Google and Twitter during recruitment. “We’re able to show them a similar opportunity in a better city,” he said.

BuzzFeed’s Peretti suggested that the east coast’s particular flavor of tech boom is now happening because non-technology folk are harnessing increasingly accessible technologies atop their specialist fields to enact niche disruptions:

“As technology becomes cheaper and easier to deploy, you’re seeing people already passionate about these fields in New York building new technology companies in these technology verticals.”

New York may be shooting for a different goal than Palo Alto but, within its own game, hasn’t yet achieved equivalent success, Thrillist’s Lerer noted:

“I think it would be nice if we had some big exits like the Valley.

“The goal is to build really big, important tech companies – the west coast has consistently done that. New York is starting to do that. Tumblr will have some nice eventuality where people will be able to say ‘New York is great’.”

Karp said:

“There are things we’d love to put us on the map to validate us further — but we don’t want to cross over as ‘Valley Jr.’ but as a whole different genre where products and technologies get made.”

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Kushner, who eschews attention, is keeping everything hush-hush, so much so that even the name of the company is under wraps. In fact, I am still waiting to hear back from him. What I have learned is that it is focused on the healthcare business and is trying to take advantage of the changes in the healthcare industry due to universal healthcare. It has been funded by Kushner’s fund and has hired about fifteen people, mostly in engineering and design.

One of the reasons why Kushner’s new effort is interesting is because he has proved to be a stunningly successful venture capitalist, with a keen eye for consumer internet trends. Kushner started his first startup, Vostu (a social-gaming company based in Brazil) when still a junior in college about five years ago.

He left to work full-time on Thrive Capital, which has three funds and has about $200 million under management. As a venture capitalist, Kushner has been on a tear. His investments include Instagram, CodeAcademy, Dwolla, Fab, Warby Parker, and GroupMe. Of the lot, Instagram was acquired by Facebook and GroupMe was gulped by Skype before it was acquired by Microsoft.

Charlie O’Donnell, founder of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, kicked off the effort Tuesday, calling on local work spaces and startups to share info about open desks under the #sandycoworking hashtag.

If anyone in Bklyn, Queens, Manhattan has offices w/ power, empty desks/tables, please use #sandycoworking to announce. Open! Share! Plz RT—
Charlie O'Donnell (@ceonyc) October 30, 2012

Since then, a number of offices have announced availability, some with discounts and assistance for workers and companies. Headhunter Labs opened up its office to needy workers while Bitmap Creative Labs reduced its daily rate from $35 to $20. Bat Haus, Dumbo Startup Labs and Secret Clubhouse, all Brooklyn co-working spaces, have also taken on tech refugees. Jar Group, a marketing agency announced a lot of open desks and startup TurboVote also pitched in with a dozen desks. You can take a look at a map of open spaces here.

O’Donnell said a majority of the startups in Manhattan are below 39th Street, where most of the impacts from Sandy have been felt. Additionally, many of the tech workers live in Brooklyn, which makes co-working spaces there very convenient. But he said he’s hearing from spaces, startups and property owners all over the city, who are interested in pitching in.

“The New York community has always joined together and felt a sense of togetherness,” O’Donnell told me. “Because we don’t have the resources of Silicon Valley, New Yorkers have realized we can only succeed by working together so it’s not surprising that people have jumped on board.”

Now, some of these co-working places already had excess capacity, so opening their doors can mean good karma and marketing. But some traditional companies are also opening their doors, which could mean making space for a worker from a competing company.

It’s a sign of how the New York tech community comes together in a crisis. But it also demonstrates the growth of the local ecosystem, which encompasses a lot more co-working spaces and startups than it did several years ago.

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The ConnectNYC Fiber Challenge, which is taking applications until Nov. 27, will offer $12 million worth of wiring work by Time Warner and Cablevision to wire winning businesses. The city’s Economic Development Corporation, which is leading the competition, expects to provide a fiber connection to 100 businesses in the first year and up to 240 by the second year.

Fiber with strings attached

That’s right. The city is helping sponsor a contest where the winner will get free fiber wiring to a premise and a one-year contract at a negotiated rate with either Time Warner Cable or Cablevision. In exchange Time Warner and Cablevison get a new customer (that they get to approve ahead of time) who is locked into a negotiated contract for a year, and who will also sign away publicity rights for the following three years.

In some ways this is a smaller version of Google’s competition to choose a city where it would deploy a fiber-to-the-home network. The search giant eventually got applications from more than 1,000 municipalities, but at least in that case Google was building out an entirely new network with miles and miles of new infrastructure. Plus Google would cover a larger area and the winning city didn’t have to agree to contract to buy service for a whole year.

If this is what it takes to get high speed broadband deployed in this country, we are screwed. Letting ISPs pick and choose where and who they elect to cover puts even more power into the hands of uncompetitive ISPs. Plus they are making the end consumer do the work of getting their landlord on board with the build out –something ISPs have employees to take care of when they plan their expansions. And while ISPs do sometimes add the cost of deploying fiber-to-the-premise for business customers who ask for fiber, that’s not always a given.

That NYC gets a sweepstakes instead of an all-in fiber-to-the-premise deployment is frustrating. New York’s slow broadband has been a common complaint among startups in the city. Fred Wilson blogged last year that New York’s startup community needed more bandwidth and more fiber connections to thrive. So while this contest is nice in that it could offset the cost of wiring for fiber, it’s also not the answer to the city’s overall broadband problem.

Here’s what you need to know

Fiber Challenge applicants will be judged on how much impact a fiber connection will provide for workers and productivity; how close the applicant is to other businesses or industry clusters; and whether they are in an underserved area for broadband. Winners will be selected early next year according to four categories corresponding to where they are located: in a Cablevision or Cablevision Industrial Business Zone; or in a Time Warner or Time Warner Industrial Business Zone.

The final winners will be selected by the ISP “based upon the feasibility of wiring a finalist’s location and the potential revenue to the ISP.” So if wiring a business is too difficult or is not expected to bring back enough revenue, you may be out of luck. It costs an average of $50,000 to build out fiber to a business.

It’s not clear how big an impact the fiber build out will have on the startup community. If the ISPs seek out clusters of businesses in one building, it will be a help but could leave out many others who don’t happen to work alongside other applicants. But at least a quarter of the money will be spent on small companies in Industrial Business Zones, which are usually not as wired for high-speed broadband connections as other parts of the city.

The challenge is the latest step in New York’s efforts to build a local technology hub. The city has been trying to position New York as the competitor to Silicon Valley but it still struggles with some basic issues like broadband and talent, something the city’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been tackling with more Wi-Fi and a new technology campus.

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The setup is similar to that in New York, with the consultancy giant and the banks joining forces with local public bodies – in this case the Technology Strategy Board, the Mayor’s Office and the City of London Corporation – to accelerate financial services startups. Applications will be accepted until the start of November, and six startups will win a place on the 12-week program.

Applicants will already have to have a working beta, and will have to demonstrate that they will really benefit from the access to senior banking executives that comes with the course.

“London is the world’s number one financial centre and a global leader in technology innovation, which is why the FinTech quest for entrepreneurs is such an exciting proposition,” mayor Boris Johnson opined.

If the original iteration is anything to go by, the London FinTech lab should come up with some interesting services. Recent grads from the New York operation range from ‘gamified compliance’ mobile apps (TrueOffice) to big data search tools (EidoSearch) and analytics engines for combating fraud (Centrifuge. Not the sexiest material, but all useful to the big names lined up behind the scheme.

And what a roster that is, with many names – Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and UBS – being familiar from the New York version.

“In the UK, the intersection between the technology space and financial services space perhaps didn’t have the sort of accelerator that we’re looking to set up,” program manager Karl Meekings told me. “There’s obviously a whole array of accelerator programs that exist, but nothing focused on the financial services sector in this way. So we thought this was a good way to identify technologies which are relevant to financial services and which could improve upon the efficiency of the industry as a whole.”

From the organizers’ perspective, setting up the London lab makes sense: while anyone is free to apply to these programs, they need to relocate if they’re accepted, so it’s a natural move to have at least one European base. Meekings also noted that initiatives such as Tech City showed there was “something we could already tap into” in the London scene.

Could we see another of these labs elsewhere in Europe? Doubtful: if Accenture and pals are looking for that magic confluence of tech innovation and high finance, there aren’t too many places outside New York and London to look. If anywhere’s next on the list, my guess would be Singapore.

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Thrive has been one of the hottest New York VC firms and has backed names like Instagram, Fab, Kickstarter, Warby Parker, Codeacademy and GroupMe, which sold to Skype. One of Thrive’s early bets was on Hot Potato, which, like Instagram, eventually sold to Facebook.

The new fund will give Thrive more ability to go after bigger deals. But it doesn’t change the firm’s basic strategy, which is to be geography and stage agnostic, with an eye toward backing ambitious and transformative companies in the Internet and media space.

Thrive has succeeded, in part, by getting in on some of the hottest New York deals while investing in other major non-New York start-ups, such as Instagram and Dwolla. Kushner believes that New York is still very much on the upswing though he believes opportunities are opening up in all kinds of places.

“It is evident by what has been built over the last years that New York is home to some of the most creative people in the world,” he said. ”The Internet has evolved. Individuals can build transformative businesses from anywhere. Human capital is the most important driver of change.”

Kushner, whose father was real estate magnate Charles Kushner, got the startup bug in college when he launched Vostu, an online gaming company in Brazil. Though he’s become one of the biggest VCs in the city, Kushner casts a low-key profile, avoiding a lot of publicity. That is reflected in the firm’s website, which is barely more than just a contact page.

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