New York is filled to the brim with startups and Mayor Bloomberg is so happy about it. In fact, he unveiled exciting news at the Internet Week HQ. He unveiled an interactive map that displays the locations of all the tech startups in the city. The sidebar also displays which are currently hiring.

The map was his initiative alongside chief digital officer Rachel Sterne, NYCEDC president Seth Pinsky and Branch co-founder Josh Miller.

The map is dubbed the “Made in New York Digital Map”.  It “also locates the offices of investors, making it an excellent tool for entrepreneurs in search of capital, and includes over 30 tech incubators,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “We expect this map to be another tool that helps propel our tech industry forward.”

“Right now, there are over 600 startups, investors and incubators listed on the map, and we invite others to submit their company because this is an interactive resource,” said Sterne. Over 400 companies in the map are hiring. This equates to more than 1,000 open jobs in the city. The map can be viewed here.

It seems like the Mayor is the industry’s biggest fan as he promises that this is only to start and he strongly believes that the Big Apple is the right place if you’re growing a tech startup. But did he live up to his New Year’s Resolution and finally learned to code? We’ll have to wait for his word on that.

Source: Betabeat

Fab is upgrading its platform today with Fab 3.0. The site now focuses on improved social shopping. The update has over 100 enhancements including a cleaner look, live feeds and social network links with Facebook and Pinterest.

With the Facebook integration, users can now filter the feed to see what friends are buying,  favoriting and sharing. This step brought 15% to 30% of the site’s traffic. This is way ahead of the contributions of Twitter (2%) and Pinterest (2%) and the recently dropped Google+ (non-existent)

Users will experience the freshness when they log in to Fab 3.0. They will land immediately in the “Featured Today,” page where popular sales and categories are posted. The top navigation is cleaner where the “Stores” and “Sales” tab have been replaced by a “Search” button. A live ticker is also added to display trending items.

The Live Feed section browses by category, color and price and eases the shopping experience because you can buy the item directly from the feed.

“How do you help people dig into a site, discover and browse?” Goldberg says of how Fab, now 4 million members strong, has approached these new changes. “It’s like the anti-Amazon. Amazon is the best place in the world if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but you don’t browse Amazon. Fab is like going shopping with your friends, or maybe you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you want the fun of discovering stuff,” he says.

The update should be live now on Fab.com.

Source: Techcrunch

Lenddo, a New York based lending startup, has raised $8 million in Series A funding round. Its investors include Accel Partners, Blumberg Capital, Omidyar Network, iNovia Capital, and Metamorphic Ventures and angel investors Geoff Judge, David Kidder, Scott Heiferman, and Barry Silbert. Lenddo’s aim is to provide support for the middle class in emerging countries.

Lenddo is a cross between a traditional bank and Facebook. Individuals in need of loans sign up on Lenddo’s sites and invite other to sign up and “add them as friends”, just like in Facebook. As the user adds friends, he builds “reputation score”. This metric is the basis for their credit worthiness.

Lenddo’s creators Jeffrey Stewart and Richard Eldridge were inspired by the lending models of the 1900s, where one gets a loan based on their reputation in the community, rather than their credit score.

The one-year-old startup was part of the inaugural FinTech Innovation Lab, a new 12-week program sponsored by the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture.

Lenddo’s membercount doubles every few months. The company has also expanded services in 35 countries. It currently gives microloans in the Philippines and Columbia. The company also said that today it plans to use the recent funding to expand into other markets in Asia and Latin America.

Source: Xconomy

When startups are launched, we often hear the names of venture companies and angel investors as those who backed the project. But in New York, one investor seems to drift quietly in the shadows: New York State pensions.

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli manages New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYSCRF). He dropped by offices of 2 startups his office funded;  Movable Ink and Truveris. Movable Ink helps users serve up dynamic live content in emails. Truveris helps customers with pharmacy costs.

Both are funded by the 3rd largest pension fund in New York through investment in Tribeca Venture Partners.

NYSCRF has invested $608 million in 208 companies, 139 of these from NYC. Last year, Mr. DiNapoli added an additional $10 million exclusively to startup companies.

Investing in startups may sound risky for the future pension recipients, but NYSCRF claims that it only allocated a small portion of its $140 billion fund to the program. Mr. DiNapoli also says the program has an internal rate of return of more than 30 percent on exited investments–with $322.1 million returned to the state pension fund on $206.2 million invested.

”Most pension funds are investors in almost every asset class. Venture capital for sure is on the riskier part of the curve, so as a percentage of the assets of a large public pension fund, it’s very, very small. But you don’t need to invest a lot of dollars in this asset class to make a big impact.” said Brian Hirsch, cofounder of Tribeca Venture Partners.

Investing in companies is just one of the strategies NYSCRF does to increase its funds. It is probably the riskiest, but with amiable returns. And aside from their benefit, the investments also supports the NY Tech Industry.

Source: Betabeat

Fancy Hands is a New York startup that links everyone up to personal assistants around the city. The startup has raised $1 million for investors like SV Angels, Lerer Ventures, Beatworks and David Tisch.

Fancy Hands is fast rising because time is money and a little monthly fee is worth it to get the menial jobs out of our hands. Customers can choose from 3 different monthly plans: 5 requests for $25, 15 requests for $45 and unlimited requests for $95.

A Version 2.0 of Fancy Hands is also coming out soon. “Up until today, our site looked like it was created by some cracked-out programmer in the middle of the night, because that is exactly how I first built it,” said founder Ted Roden. “Today, about two years after our launch, we’re rolling out a new site, which thankfully had a real designer working on it.”

With Version 2.0, customers can now pay for items through Fancy Hands and have their assistants buy them, have assistants book dates on their calendars and use one credit card for multiple users.

Requests range from different tasks and cover different categories, from general requests to asking help for specifics like weddings, travel arrangements, research, restaurant reservations and help at home.

Here are  some typical requests:

Call a Allen Car in NYC and have them pick me up at home and take me to the airport tomorrow at 7am. We’ll need a car seat for an infant provided.

Set up a meeting with my accountant (CCed), if she’s paying let’s go to Balthazar, otherwise our office.

Source: The Verge

Tumblr has fast become one of the largest websites around. With thousands of blogs posted per day, the normal user will find it hard to sift through it to fin great content. Tumblr has realized that and devised Storyboard to help out.

Storyboard will be posting regular features from the Tumblr community with an interesting story to share. It can range from anything to highlighting content from writers, musicians, animators, scientists, comedians, whoever. The Tumblr-launched platform will feature one story per day. It is also a social network of sorts, opening windows for in-depth conversations between users.

“We could never possibly tell everyone’s story, even if we told 100 stories a day,” Tumblr Editor-in-Chief Chris Mohney said in a video post via storyboard.tumblr.com. “But we can help bring people to light that one sector of the community may never encounter through their natural organic reading of Tumblr.”

Storyboard launched with features from former R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, The New York Times, Afghanistan, and the design mechanics of the Tumblr dashboard. If you only have time to browse the creme de la creme of Tumblr posts, Storyboard is the place to go.

“There’s never enough time or space to tell every story, but there are many ways to tell it.” Storyboard encourages submissions as well, just create a Tumblr post with the #storyboard tag.

Chris Mohney, formerly senior vice president of content at BlackBook Media, is the editor-in-chief and Jessica Bennett, previously a senior writer editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, is the executive editor for Storyboard.

Source: Mashable

Photo credit: James Lopez ‏(@imjamesjlopez)

Startup Weekend NYC had a first when it focused on music and gaming in its recently concluded event. Present were some 110 engineers, designers, developers, and other teams at the General Assembly campus, all wanting to be the best music or game-themed software.

Music has been a steady fixture in New York since everyone has “to make it there to make it anywhere.” but gaming has also been steadily growing in the city. The entries may only be in their early stages but the 54-hour event gave a glimpse of the software future.

The winners at the day’s end was Type That, a text-based game app where friends battle it out for the title of fastest typist. According to judge Arie Abecassis, the app won because, “just about everybody uses text, [The game] has this social and viral element to it that gives it an opportunity to spread pretty quickly.”

Type That won a package that includes a $1,000 hosting plan with cloud service Digital Ocean as well as classes at General Assembly to help the team improve their craft.

Jam Session snagged second place. It is an app that helps musicians connect with each other and find places to rehearse. The third prize went to The Startup Trail, a game that mimics the trials of putting up a company.

Chieh Huang, director with Zynga Mobile New York and coach for the event, was surprised by the amazing turnout. “I’m going to guess some of them were in enterprise technology and now they are branching out to consumer-facing startups,” he said.

Source: Xconomy

Box, a file sharing platform based in Palo Alto, CA, is planning to expand to New York. It has already started gaining buzz in Gotham by sponsoring the NY Tech Day Fair and other events of its own.

Box targets small-to-midsize businesses and has raised $162 million since it began in 2005. But with competitors such as Dropbox and Google Drive (launched last April 24), Box needs to step it up a notch and seems to be doing so by tapping the New York developer pool.

Box is exploring options to put up a New York office either in late 2012 or early 2013. Setting up in NYC would bring the company closer to customers in financial services, pharmaceuticals, media, and entertainment. 

The Big Apple is also the best place to expand with all the budding startups. “The war for talent is crazy out here [in Silicon Valley],” says Chris Yeh, Box’s vice president of platform. “If we can tap into new sources of talent in New York, that would be great.”

The company has its eyes on local innovators such as Producteev and Lua Technologies. Lua is used to schedule crews for entertainment and production companies.  “We have an entertainment launch coming up in the next few months. They fit into part of what we want to accomplish from a go-to-market point of view.” says Yeh.

“New York is primarily known for its consumer tech and media tech,” Levie says. “We want to put a spotlight on the development going on [in enterprise software] in New York. There is a lot.”

Source: Xconomy

We all know young billionaire Mark Zuckerburg as the brains behind today’s most famous startup. Today we look at other young people who just might be the next big thing.

Jake Schwartz, CEO of General Assembly

Jake Schwartz is founded General Assembly an impressive startup school that trains hundreds of entrepreneurs. The schools are based in Manhattan and London. Prior to General Assembly, Schwartz founded a few other companies and attended UPenn.

Lily Liu, CEO of Public Stuff 

Public Stuff is an online platform that quickly connects people to the government so they can report problems and give opinions about their cities. Liu knows her public stuff as she worked as Acting Assistant Director for Michael Bloomberg’s office and was a senior analyst for the city of New York’s Department of Education.

Bre Pettis, CEO of Makerbot

Makerbot makes the 3-D printer cost-effective for the average person. This makes every citizen a manufacturer. Prior to Makerbot, Pettis’ creativity was used for video producing at Etsy.

Wiley Cerilli, CEO of SinglePlatform

SinglePlatform distributes a merchant’s storefront across thousands of sites, including major publishers, IYPs, media companies, mobile applications, travel sites, and more. It also makes local vendors’ items and services available with accurate prices on the web. Before SinglePlatform, Cerilli was CEO of Seamless.

Jason Baptiste, CEO of OnSwipe

OnSwipe is a platform for publishers and advertisers to lay out their content on tablets in a visually appealing way without having to make mobile apps. ”Something about Jason is very infectious, and I mean that in a very compelling way,” says one of his investors. “He’s a scattered, beautifully engaged kind of guy.”

Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media

Solve Media turns CAPTCHAs into ads and it has type-in video placements too. Instead of watching a 30-second Mercedes ad, you can type in M-E-R-C-E-D-E-S instead. According to Solve Media, this technique increases brand recall by 111 percent. Jacoby is a former Google consultant and he co-founded VoiceStar.

Nihal Mehta, CEO of LocalResponse

LocalResponse helps advertisers target relevant people via social media in real time. So if someone tweets about a Slurpee, 7-11 can immediately follow up with a DM or Facebook timeline message. Mehta also founded Ipsh!, a mobile marketing startup that sold to Omnicom in 2005; he is an angel investor in startups like Neverware, AdMob, Tapad and Hashable.

Jordy Leiser, CEO of StellaService

StellaService is a mystery shopping and rating system for e-commerce sites. It pays people to test out the buying experiences on sites like Gilt and Zappos. The shoppers write reviews and StellaService comes up with scores for each site. Prior to founding StellaService, Leiser attended Bucknell University and was a JP Morgan analyst.

Joe Essenfeld, CEO of Jibe

 Jibe helps you attach mutual friends to your resume when you apply to a job online. Prior to founding Jibe, Essenfeld was COO of Insomnia Cookies.

John Laramie, CEO of AdStruc

AdStruc is making it much easier for media buyers to purchase out-of-home placements such as billboards and taxi ads. All the numbers to call are available online through Adstruc.

Jonathan Hefter, CEO of Neverware

Neverware makes old computers run like new by accessing the latest software via the cloud. It’s a good solution for schools that can’t afford to keep updating computer software. Prior to founding Neverware, Hefter attended UPenn.

Aaron Schildkrout and Brian Schechter, co-CEOs of HowAboutWe

HowAboutWe is a dating site for all types of couples. Unlike Match, HowAboutWe is more focused on what people do together rather than introducing two people. Last November 302,047 messages were sent and more than 400,000 dates had been posted on the site since launch.

Source:  Business Insider