Bits: F.T.C. Member Starts ‘Reclaim Your Name’ Campaign for Personal Data

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Cornell NYC Tech, Planned for Roosevelt Island, Starts Up in Chelsea

The sparkling, sprawling new campus on Roosevelt Island filled with gee-whiz technology — still just ink on paper. The thousands of students and staff, the transformative effect on the city’s economy, the integration with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology — those all remain in the future, too.

But just 13 months after being awarded the prize in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s contest to create a new science school, Cornell NYC Tech got up and running. Eight students enrolled in January in what is being called the beta class, a one-year master’s program in computer science. And Cornell has made it clear that, in many ways, this is not the usual university program.

Not long ago, three young high-tech entrepreneurs sat with the students, talking about failure. They talked about questionable technical, financial or personnel decisions in start-up businesses they had created or worked in, about companies they had seen disintegrate, and about detours into projects they later discarded.

A question was asked about Andrew Mason, co-founder of Groupon, who had been fired a day earlier as the company’s chief executive.

“We should all be so lucky as to build a company that the investors care enough about to fire us,” Tim Novikoff, the C.E.O. of a small company making mobile phone software, said with a wave of his arm around the table, prompting laughter from the students and knowing nods from the Cornell Tech staff. A rail-thin man with the deep-set eyes of someone who could use a little more sleep, Mr. Novikoff is in his early 30s, making him the oldest of the three visitors.

“It’s a miracle if a start-up gets off the ground,” he said. “The last six months I’ve had no income, I have no health insurance. But I got to fly out to a C.E.O. conference and talk with Ashton Kutcher about mobile video for 10 minutes.”

The visitors urged the students to take risks but to expect, at least at first, a precarious existence, riddled with setbacks, that will require obsessiveness and a thick skin — and they made it sound like the grandest of adventures. None of them made the reference, but they could all have been citing Samuel Beckett’s maxim: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Scenes like this play out each week at Cornell Tech, part of an unorthodox curriculum designed to eschew the traditional detached, highly academic approach to learning. Instead, business, technology and real-world experience is baked into the coursework.

“There’s no parallel to that in any traditional computer science program I’m aware of,” said Dan Huttenlocher, dean of Cornell Tech. “We’re taking a page from business schools.”

The practicums are organized by Greg Pass, a Cornell alumnus who was the chief technology officer at Twitter and now is the chief entrepreneurial officer of the graduate school. They are held in an informal setting each Friday with entrepreneurs from the city’s blooming tech sector, who are often no more than a few steps ahead of where the students are.

Reinforcing the sense that the work produce practical results, the United States Commerce Department has stationed a patent officer on the premises to help with patent applications and commercial strategies — an arrangement that federal officials say is a first.

A business class is mandatory, in addition to the usual technical courses. And the students are required, in each semester, to work with mentors from the private sector to design and create new products. Two of the students, Alex Kopp and Andrew Li, are working with a Google engineer on open-source software that predicts the severity of weather events.

“In Ithaca, you take a bunch of classes and then you have your one master’s project — you work on it alone,” said Mr. Kopp, who transferred from a master’s program at Cornell’s main campus. “It typically doesn’t have a business aspect to it, or you might be working on something that a professor is doing. This has a very different feel to it.”

Information technology is the common thread through the eight degrees the school plans to offer. Three will be dual master’s degrees from Cornell and the Technion, based on three “hubs” rather than traditional departments. One hub program, “connective media,” has largely been mapped out — though professors warn that it is subject to change as technology changes — and will deal with designing the mobile, fragmented and endlessly malleable technology that makes everyone a media creator as well as consumer. The other hubs, still under development, are being called “healthier life” (systems to improve health care delivery as well as personal technology) and “built environment” (computing applied to the physical world around us, from robotic devices to smart building design to real-time traffic information).

Richard Pérez-Peña covers national higher education for The Times.

Huffington Post Starts Italian-Language Web Site

PARIS — Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy who left office last year in the depths of the economic crisis, resurfaced this week in a new place: the Italian-language Web site of The Huffington Post.

An interview with Mr. Berlusconi, in which he insisted that speculation about his private life was “disinformation and defamation,” gave The Huffington Post a typically juicy scoop as it accelerated its international expansion. The Italian site, L’Huffington Post, which made its debut Tuesday, is the fifth version of the Internet news outlet outside the United States, following its rollout in Canada, Britain, France and Spain.

Arianna Huffington, the site’s founder, said she did not plan to stop there. Germany is next, with an introduction planned for January, and discussions are under way with potential business partners in Japan, South Korea, India and Brazil, executives said.

“There are obviously huge advantages editorially to being in all these countries, when the world is so closely linked by all these economic problems,” Ms. Huffington said by telephone from Milan.

In addition to the interview with Mr. Berlusconi, L’Huffington Post featured contributions from a range of bloggers on its opening day, including Giulio Tremonti, a former Italian finance minister, and Oscar Farinetti, founder of the food and wine emporium Eataly, which has branches in Italy, Japan and New York.

To try to demonstrate its political impartiality — an unusual feature in Italy, where newspapers tend to have a left- or right-wing bias — the site featured voices from both sides of the spectrum. While Mr. Berlusconi and other figures from his government were featured, so was Maurizio Landini, a labor leader.

Some critics said, however, that they would have preferred to see fresher journalistic faces rather than the people in charge when Italy got into its financial mess.

“It’s an interesting project, but it might be better if they invested more in young journalists rather than old politicians,” said Francesco Siliato, a professor of communications at Milan Polytechnic University. “The power of The Huffington Post in the United States was young people, not politicians.”

The Italian site features the now familiar Huffington Post mix: bold news headlines, interviews with public figures and a mix of political, economic and lifestyle news, as well as links to articles in other publications and copious comments from readers.

It is a joint venture with the Espresso Group, which publishes the newspaper La Repubblica and the magazine L’Espresso, among other titles. The Espresso Group handles advertising sales and other business functions, while The Huffington Post, which is owned by AOL, is in charge of the editorial content.

L’Huffington Post employs the bare-bones staff model that The Huffington Post has used in other markets, with only about a dozen paid, full-time editorial employees. L’Huffington Post has some paid freelance contributors, but also relies on bloggers who provide unpaid material in return for the exposure.

The Italian edition is being overseen by Lucia Annunziata, a former foreign correspondent for La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, and the current host of a news program on RAI, the Italian public television company.

Ms. Huffington said she was happy with the growth of the international editions, though she declined to say how much revenue they were generating. The British site, which was begun in 2011, attracts 4.6 million unique visitors a month, while the French site, which was started this year, draws 2.2 million, according to comScore, an Internet data provider.

The United States site is still far bigger, drawing nearly 44 million unique visitors each month, according to comScore. But Jimmy Maymann, head of international operations for the AOL Huffington Post Media Group, said the company’s goal was for the international sites to equal the United States edition in readership within three years — by which time, he said, there might be as many as 10 international editions.

Ms. Huffington said she had already selected a business partner in Germany, though she declined to identify it.

It might not seem like an opportune time to introduce the site in Italy, which is still mired in an economic crisis. Ad spending in Italy is in a deep slump, with analysts predicting double-digit declines this year. Online advertising is expected to do better, however, with gains of about 10 percent.

Online advertising remains underdeveloped in Italy compared with some other European countries. Italian online ad spending, which last year totaled 1.2 billion euros, or about $1.5 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, was less than a quarter of the level in Britain, a similar-size country.

Analysts said that generating a following could pose a challenge as well. In news coverage, the site was widely referred to as a blog rather than The Huffington Post’s preferred description of itself as an “Internet newspaper.” While bloggers like the comedian and politician Beppe Grillo have fared well on the Internet, online newspapers have experienced less success in Italy.

Still, L’Huffington Post lined up four prominent introductory advertisers: the leather goods company Tod’s, the carmaker Citroën, the energy company Eni and the telecommunications provider Wind. Each of the partners has invested 1 million euros, or about $1.3 million.

The Italian site alone expects to generate 5 million euros, about $6.4 million, in annual advertising revenue by the third year, said Massimo Ghedini, chief executive of the Espresso Group’s advertising sales arm, A.Manzoni.

“Italian advertisers are always looking for two things: results, in terms of a return on their investment, and positioning,” Mr. Ghedini said. “The Huffington Post gives them both. It brings readers into the conversation, and the Italian edition will spread knowledge of Italian style around the world.”

Bits Blog: Amazon Starts a Shopping Site for the Environmental Crowd

Amazon.com is going after the environmental crowd with a new site called Vine.com for buying green products.

Vine is part of Quidsi, the company that Amazon bought in 2010 that also runs sites like Diapers.com (baby stuff), Wag.com (pets) and YoYo.com (toys). Vine will sell everything from cleaning supplies to baby accessories, beauty supplies and clothes — as long as they are green.

That means wildly different things to different people, but Vine has created its own formula. Products must fall into one of the following categories: they must be designed to remove toxins, energy-efficient, natural, organic, powered by renewable energy, reusable, made of sustainable materials or water-efficient.

For example, bamboo cutting boards make the list because bamboo is sustainable. So do reusable cloth diapers, organic cotton bedding, low-flow shower heads, water filter pitchers and paraben-free cosmetics.

“This is a site that is not necessarily about saving the planet, though we feel the products are useful in that regard,” said Josh Dorfman, the site leader, who previously created the Lazy Environmentalist books and radio and TV shows. “It’s really saying to mom, ‘If you care about raising safe and healthy kids and you feel green products without chemicals can help along the way, we’ve figured out ways to help you do that.’”

A package that says natural is not enough, Mr. Dorfman said. Vine has asked vendors to verify that their products meet certain standards and has scanned ingredient lists to make sure they do not contain banned substances. Seventh Generation is an initial sponsor on the site.

Vine is catering to other civic-minded shopping trends, too, with sections stocked with fair trade products or products made within 100 miles of a shopper’s home.

None of this squares with the way people typically think of Amazon and the other e-commerce sites that it owns. Some small, local retailers say Amazon puts them out of business. Huge amounts of energy are spent operating warehouses, shipping products and wrapping them in bubble wrap and cardboard boxes.

“It’s a fair point that no matter how you’re going to engage in commerce, there’s going to be an environmental impact,” Mr. Dorfman said. “We’re not promising to be the greenest company right away, and we’re owning up to the fact that it’s not the way we operate across the entire company.”

It won’t be obvious on Vine.com that shoppers are buying from Amazon, just like on other e-commerce sites that Amazon owns, including Zappos.com, Shopbop.com and Woot. But it is another instance of Amazon’s spider-like reach in the online retailing world in its quest to sell people anything they want to buy.

Like Diapers.com and Quidsi’s other sites, Vine will deliver in one or two days, with the help of robots that pack boxes in the warehouse within minutes of an online order, and will emphasize customer service and easy returns. And Vine shoppers who just want a tube of Crest toothpaste or nonrecycled toilet paper can add items from other Quidsi sites to their shopping carts.

RoboCop Starts Shooting

Director Jose Padilha's RoboCop begins principal photography this Saturday in Toronto.

"It's exciting to think that we're going to be starting production on RoboCop," said Padilha. "I have a dream cast and an incredibly creative production team, and we are all supremely dedicated, working together to make a movie that will not only live alongside the first film but also break new ground, be relevant for modern audiences, and stand on its own."

The film features an all-star cast including Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, and The Killing's Joel Kinnaman as the title character. MGM and Columbia Pictures are currently eying a release for August 9, 2013.