Manhattan
Latest
T-Mobile is selling fiber internet in a 'very limited' pilot program
T-Mobile has launched a pilot offering fiber optic home internet service in New York City.
Despite the HQ2 debacle, Amazon will add office space in Manhattan
Early this year, Amazon pulled the plug on plans to build an "HQ2" in Queens after a number of local leaders and activists pushed back against the $3 billion in tax breaks and incentives it would receive. Now the online retail giant has confirmed plans to lease 335,000 square feet of office space in Manhattan, according to the Wall Street Journal. The new NYC expansion will be located in the Hudson Yards neighborhood with more than 1,500 employees. It's a much smaller footprint than what Amazon had proposed for HQ2 -- which shifted to other locations in Virginia and Tennessee -- but it comes with no tax breaks or incentives, and no nationwide contest to lure the company's business. US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response to the news "Won't you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway - *without* requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways."
New York set to legalize e-scooters and e-bikes
New York lawmakers look set to legalize electric scooter and bike sharing services throughout the state. A vote on a Senate bill is likely to take place Wednesday, just before the end of the legislative session. Since Governor Andrew Cuomo seems to support the legalization of electric scooters and bikes, the bill looks likely to come into effect.
Tenants win right to have physical keys in NY smart lock case
The landlords of one Manhattan apartment building have agreed to provide physical keys to tenants who don't want to use smart locks. The decision was reached in a preliminary settlement after tenants sued their landlord for installing Latch smart locks last year. As CNET reports, this marks one of the first times legal professionals have had to weigh in on how landlords can use smart home technology.
The Shed and the art of the flex
The Shed's concept is simple: It's the 120-foot tall building that moves. This idea is both its architectural hallmark and its metaphor for the future of culture. Opening on Friday, New York City's half-billion dollar, hybrid museum-meets-performance space can shapeshift to double its indoor perimeter in five minutes.
'Inventory' preserves street clutter with photogrammetry
Most of the time, we barely notice the lamp posts, bollards and road signs around us. They're street clutter that barely registers in our brain as we go about our busy lives. But Oddviz, an art and design collective from Istanbul, looks at them differently. The group sees this 'street furniture' as important culture capsules that evolve as they corrode or get covered in posters, stickers and graffiti. Society doesn't protect them, though, like an iconic landmark. So Oddviz has started documenting them -- a form of digital preservation -- using a 3D modeling technique called photogrammetry.
GM aims to be the first to test self-driving cars in New York City
It looks like New York City will be hosting its first test of fully autonomous vehicles very soon and surprisingly, they're not from Waymo or Uber. Instead, General Motors and Cruise Automation have submitted the first application for sustained testing and are aiming to do so in Manhattan.
Uber's carpool service sacrifices convenience for efficiency in NYC (updated)
In the wake of its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2017 (yup, and it's only just May), Uber has been doing a lot of work to improve its service. As an extension of the "smart pickup points" trial from London and other cities last year, the ride-hailing company is augmenting the Uber Pool service in Manhattan, enhancing the option's awareness of more direct routes and bus lanes. "After realizing that a short walk could save people both time and money, we knew we were onto something," the outfit writes in a blog post. "Our data was starting to show that we could pick more people up and get riders to their destinations faster."
Amazon is opening a Manhattan bookstore this spring
Amazon is opening a brick-and-mortar bookstore in the middle of Manhattan sometime this spring, the company told the WSJ in an email. That confirms a rumor from last summer that it would launch a New York City location, though the retail giant is opening it sooner than expected and in a different spot. Rather than being at the upcoming Hudson Yards development, projected to open in late 2018, it'll be located at Time Warner Center in Midtown at the edge of Central Park.
New York City now lets you pay for parking with your phone
New York City is making good on its promise to have smarter parking meters before 2016 is over. As of December 19th, the first ParkNYC-capable Muni-Meters are live in midtown Manhattan -- you can now pay for parking through a smartphone app (or the web, or a call) instead of fishing for cards and coins. While you'll need to load a virtual wallet, you can extend your parking if you're in danger of running out. The days of racing to the meter to top it up will soon be over, then, but so are the days of pleading with traffic officers when you're a little too late.
Snapchat Spectacles are available in New York City
You knew it was just a matter of time -- after stops in California and Oklahoma, Snapchat is now selling Spectacles in New York City. If you can make it to 5 East 59th Street in upper midtown Manhattan (conveniently facing Apple's iconic 5th Avenue store) and can afford to queue up, you too can score up to two pairs of the purposefully hard-to-get $130 camera glasses. The store will stick around through New Year's Eve, although it'll unsurprisingly be closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
The Big Picture: It's always sunny in Brooklyn
Google isn't the only company looking to map out urban skylines ahead of the solar revolution. The folks at MapDwell create surveys similar to Sunroof using technologies developed at MIT, and for more cities to boot. The company has already mapped out New York City, as you can see above, as well as Boulder, Colorado(for growing solar-powered hydroponic kush, obvs), all of the confusingly-named Washington County, Oregon and now San Francisco. "We range irradiation (energy that falls onto the surface) for each city," MapDwell wrote to Engadget. "From zero (dark brown) to maximum or ideal (bright yellow), we call this Solar Access Index or SAI." As such, the southern tip of Manhattan probably isn't the best place for a solar installation. And unfortunately, the service does not also extend to solar-powered food carts.
iPhone encryption has locked out Manhattan cops just 74 times
You'll frequently hear law enforcement complain that it can't break the full-drive encryption in newer smartphone operating systems, but how often do the police run into that problem, really? Thanks to a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, you now have a better idea. The Manhattan District Attorney's office has revealed that, out of the 92 cases where an iPhone with iOS 8 has been involved so far, the cops have been locked out 74 times. District Attorney Cyrus Vance portrays this as proof that officers need backdoors or other forms of guaranteed access, noting that there's at least one case (in Illinois) where evidence from a victim's iPhone led to a conviction. Police shouldn't simply be told that there's "nothing [they] can do," he says.
New York's getting 500 solar-powered food carts this summer
Street food is an celebrated (and inescapable) facet of New York City culture but many of those gas-fired mobile food stalls aren't exactly environmentally friendly. "I breathe it in, I get the fumes, I get the smell of the food," Don Ward, a Manhattan shoe shiner who works next to a cart, told the Wall Street Journal. "I get home and my clothing smells like gas." So to help combat air and noise pollution this summer, Queens-based MOVE Systems plans to distribute 500 "green" vendor carts. They'll be outfitted with solar panels and rechargeable batteries in addition to sinks, refrigerators and grills. The carts, dubbed MRV100 Hybrids, measure roughly 5 feet wide by 10 feet long and reportedly can be adapted to serve a wide variety of cuisine.
Staples breach may have affected over a million credit cards
Good grief, the hacks just don't stop. Now office-supply store Staples believes that it suffered an attack that compromised some 1.16 million payment cards. Between August 10th and September 16th this year, 115 stores were afflicted by malware that "may have" grabbed cardholder names and payment information, and two stores possibly fell victim from July 20th to September 16th this year as well. The retailer isn't fully owning up to the attacks just yet, but it's offering a mea culpa all the same: free identity protection, credit reports and a host of other security services to anyone who used a card at the affected stores (PDF). And even though four Manhattan locations had reports of fraudulent payment use from this April to September without any malware or suspicious activity taking place, the outfit is extending the aforementioned benefits to customers of those stores as well.
Amazon apparently testing bike couriers for some Manhattan deliveries
While Amazon deals with regulatory hurdles for its drone-based rapid delivery service, it's apparently testing an option that's a bit more, well, human in the meantime. The shopping juggernaut is holding time-trials for bike messengers in New York, according to The Wall Street Journal, with the idea being to get certain purchases to Manhattan-based folks within a few hours of ordering. Cool if you need an HDMI cable in a pinch, but we seriously doubt that the 4K UHDTV you ordered along with it will arrive by bike too. WSJ's sources claim that a "at least" a trio of courier services are auditioning for the job, and Bezos and Co. will choose the fastest and safest for the forthcoming Amazon Prime Now delivery option.
NYC plans free public WiFi expansion in all five boroughs by December 2013
A handful of neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens and the Bronx will have high-speed WiFi access available for businesses and residents by the end of this year. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an expansion today that'll roll out over the next few months, lighting up parts of downtown Brooklyn, lower Manhattan, Harlem and other areas by December 2013. Companies have invested $3.4 million in the new infrastructure, and the city has contributed $900,000 to get the job done. We're still a long way from having a city blanketed in completely free high-speed wireless internet, but with widespread availability in key areas, thousands of residents and smaller businesses should be able to drop their current internet providers before the ball drops to welcome 2014. [Image source: AP/Frank Franklin II]
Google to help set up free WiFi blanket in NYC's Southwest Chelsea neighborhood
While Google's offered free WiFi access in NYC subways from time to time, it's apparently now set to help get a permanent solution live in a Manhattan neighborhood. There are no details regarding a time-frame, but the company's linked up with the Chelsea Improvement Company to provide the access in Southwest Chelsea. Aside from the perks of pro bono interwebs for all, the initiative will serve to provide internet to likes of low-income and student housing in the locale -- though, it seems a natural undertaking given Google's office in the area. At the very least, it's another nice chip toward municipal WiFi in the Big Apple. Full presser after the break.
Time Warner Cable expanding fiber broadband coverage in NYC, only businesses to benefit
Google, we're not in Kansas anymore, we're in New York, where Time Warner Cable is planning to drop $25 million on expanding its (up to) 1Gbps fiber broadband infrastructure. Specifically, the additional network is hitting neglected areas in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but it's not for general consumption -- it's strictly for businesses. Don't feel too disheartened though -- you might not be getting a slice of this particular fiber pie, but it's all you can eat, all the time at the free WiFi buffet.
Wall Street Journal to offer free WiFi hotspots in NYC and San Francisco during September
Oh New Yorkers and their marvelous, no-cost WiFi access points. Only a few days after Google Offers and Boingo happily announced they'd brought gratis wireless connectivity to additional underground locations within the city, The Wall Street Journal is now let it be known it too will be kind enough to gift the NYC crowd with some WiFi hotspots of its own. The nice gesture will bring around 1,300 network units to areas such as SoHo, Greenwich Village, Union Square, Chelsea and, naturally, the renowned Times Square during the month of September -- all in hopes of giving "people the opportunity to sample The Wall Street Journal." Meanwhile, folks in San Francisco can also grab the internet-friendly freebies in a couple of different places, including Nob Hill and Fisherman's Wharf. And don't worry, there won't be any donkeys involved here.
