On a Monday morning late last month, at the headquarters of the Finger Lakes Wine Country Tourism Marketing Association, the promotional vehicle for a vineyard-speckled region about four hours northwest of Manhattan, something was amiss with Foursquare.

Namely, the Corning, N.Y.-based tourism group's account on the location-sharing social-media site was doing something funny: It was triggering friend requests. That's not supposed to happen with a Foursquare account that's set up as a brand or business page--users should be able to automatically follow the brand or company, rather than having to wait to have their requests … Read more

After a high-profile search that began over six months ago, New York City has hired new media entrepreneur Rachel Sterne as its first "chief digital officer."

It's the latest major move made by the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a billionaire entrepreneur, to shove the establishment-heavy Gotham into the 21st century.

Sterne's job won't involve wrangling the scores of small tech start-ups that have popped up like mushrooms in the city over the past few years. Rather, her focus will be to help the city government use digital technology to better communicate with residents, … Read more

Arriving on New York's streets with a backpack and a dream has long been a narrative emulated by the young, ambitious, and eager to "make it." But for one San Francisco company looking to bring its change-the-world voracity to Gotham, it may be even more of an uphill battle than the average striver's tale implies.

The central question: can a tiny start-up go up against New York's army of taxicabs?

Young and tech-savvy San Franciscans are likely familiar with Uber, a limousine-booking start-up that launched last year to rave reviews, interest from high-profile angel investors, … Read more

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y.--The first words publicly spoken by a talking computer named Watson were, "WHAT IS JERICHO?"

Watson was following the rules. Like any contestant on game show "Jeopardy," the IBM Research-built machine was required to phrase his answer in the form of a question. And Watson was playing "Jeopardy." More specifically, it was a test run this morning at IBM Research's headquarters in preparation for a televised weekend challenge against famed "Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and Watson nearly shut out those champions in a category … Read more

NEW YORK--There must be something squirreled away in the human brain that is hard-wired to go absolutely bonkers at the sight of anything that's shiny, slick, and begging to be touched. That, after all, is how Apple CEO Steve Jobs sells products.

But an iPad is only as good as the things you can do on it, and in this sense the device is implicitly a bit of a challenge, an Everest to climb or an English Channel to swim, for developers and entrepreneurs: What can you do on this? How can you take advantage of the features it … Read more

NEW YORK--"Over here, that's a clam learning how to use the Internet," Yosi Sergant, the publicist best known for promoting Shepard Fairey's now-iconic "HOPE" poster during Barack Obama's presidential campaign, said as he led a tour of RE:FORM School.

RE:FORM School is weekend-long exhibit in Manhattan designed to raise awareness and funds regarding the need to reform American education.

On the wall of a corridor in a downtown building that for decades housed the oldest Catholic school in the city--it was closed last year due to underenrollment--sure enough, there was … Read more

NEW YORK--Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg talked about a lot of things in an on-stage discussion Wednesday afternoon with Huffington Post co-founder and namesake Arianna Huffington: the roles of women in the business world, the controversial nature of "The Social Network," and the unsanctioned cinematic retelling of Facebook's early days that premieres on Friday.

"The movie's really fun, and it's very Hollywood," Sandberg said, a cheerier reaction to the film than Facebook executives reportedly made behind closed doors upon seeing an early cut of the David Fincher-directed film. She did, however, classify … Read more

QUEENS, N.Y.--It was an almost inevitable question when you walked into the World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science this weekend: What do all these hardcore-indie home brew and crafting aficionados think of the fact that Ford Motor, Red Bull, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Time Warner Cable (and this site's own parent brand, CNET, which had sponsored the Maker Faire preparty on Friday night) had attached their brands to the festival?

After all, the culture of "making" has gone mainstream. Gerard Nebesky, the chef in charge of Maker Faire's traditional paella dish, … Read more

QUEENS, N.Y.--They did it, mostly: The artists and engineers who dreamed up, built, and now operate a large-scale version of the classic board game Mousetrap took center stage at this weekend's World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science, with the aim of flattening a New York taxi with a two-ton safe through a series of deployments of their massive Rube Goldberg machine. Standing guard were the Lifesize Mousetrap operators--a half dozen clowns, a few women in tasteful burlesque costumes with mouse ears and tails, and a man in a gorilla suit.

If this all … Read more