City Launches New Effort to Aid Media Sector
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Columbia University and the city plan to open a new lab that will aim to stimulate the local media industry, city officials said Monday.
The NYC Media Lab is the latest of several steps by the Bloomberg administration to boost the city's traditional and digital media sectors. Earlier, the city launched a program called JumpStart, a training program to assist displaced workers looking for digital-media jobs, and it also founded a co-working space called the Hive at 55 in Lower Manhattan for freelancers working in media and technology.
"This is an incredibly important growth area for our city, and the media lab is really going to enhance New York's already strong leadership position in that industry," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
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The lab will help media companies license new technologies developed at the participating schools and contract out new academic research for use in projects, said Kurt Becker, associate provost for research and technology initiatives at NYU-Poly. Other local universities will also be able to contribute.
NYU-Poly's campus in downtown Brooklyn will house the offices of NYC Media Lab, but most of the actual research and development will take place on the campuses of the participating schools, said Orin Herskowitz, executive director of Columbia Technology Ventures.