Friday, June 13, 2025

June 13, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Friday, June 13, 2025 

Welcome to another Friday edition of the Tech:NYC Digest, featuring our favorite five highlights in New York tech this week.

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Consumer tech's cool kids have a new ZIP code (Business Insider)

  • In Obviously NYC news: Don’t look now, but NYC has become a hotbed for consumer tech. 👀

    • Take Fizz, a Gen Z social app, for example. Founder Teddy Solomon recently moved his 20+-person staff from the Bay Area to SoHo because he realized “New York was becoming hotter than the Bay Area.”

    • Added Alexandra Debow, the CEO of the photo-sharing app Swsh: “New York is culture. New York is TV. New York is 'Gossip Girl.’” XOXO. 

New York inches closer to San Francisco as tech capital: report (Crain’s New York Business)

  • Another day, another new report showing that NY’s tech sector is catching up to Silicon Valley as the top tech hub in the world. 

    • Contributing to this: $15 billion in early-stage funding from H2 2022-2024, $166 billion in VC funding from 2020-2024, and 130,000 new STEM jobs over the last decade.

    • The not-so-good news: As this was published, legislators in Albany passed the RAISE Act, threatening the advantage New York has built in AI. More on that here. 

For the sheep of Governors Island, a final New York summer (New York Times)

  • Bowie, Chad, Evening, Jupiter, and Philip Aries are the heroes we didn’t know we needed. They’re the sheep eating up the baaahhd — er, invasive — species on Governors Island that can cause irreversible problems.

    • The sheep can clear out the species faster than humans, and in a more eco-friendly way than machines.

    • This is the fifth and final summer the sheep will be needed. 🐑

Brooklyn teacher wins Tony Award for Excellence in Theatre Education (PIX11)

  • Gary Edwin Robinson, head of the Theatre Arts Program at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, made history last week as the first New York teacher to be awarded the Tony Award for Excellence in Theatre Education. 🎭

    • “I’m getting an award for going to work and enjoying what I do. I love it,” he told reporters backstage.

Modern day, ‘West Side Story’-style love affair between ducks of different feathers flourishes in Central Park (NY Post)

  • We’ll leave you with a New York (duck) tale of supposed forbidden love. 💗 A male wood duck has found love with a female mallard — an unusual pairing of different species that has been wowing city birdwatchers.

    • The two have been swimming together throughout Central Park’s reservoirs and ponds since January, and the male duck has been shooing away any ducks that approach them.

    • You have the best chance of catching a glimpse of the love birds by visiting the reservoir’s east side near East 91st Street.

Your AI-generated cartoon of the week, conceived entirely by humans.

  • Tech:NYC prompted ChatGPT to create a black-and-white one-panel cartoon.

    • The concept for the cartoon was entirely thought of by a human, and a human put on the finishing touches manually. But AI drew the bulk of it.

Here’s this week’s cartoon. Click on the image for a bonus NYC story!

Have a wicked weekend, New York! 🧙

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