Friday, June 20, 2025

June 20, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Friday, June 20, 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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New York, five years later (City Journal)

  • We’re five years removed from a COVID-19-induced city-wide shutdown. But New York’s industries — tech in particular — are thriving. 💪

    • One reason for tech’s surge, as Tech:NYC President and CEO Julie Samuels tells City Journal, is that tech workers are New Yorkers first and techies second.

    • They’re “committed New Yorkers who just happen to work in tech,” she says.

These robots do windows (New York Times)

  • Window-washing NYC’s iconic skyscrapers is inherently dangerous, and the job has high turnover. Enter: robots. 🤖

    • Ozmo, the human-monitored robotic window-washing system from Skyline Robotics, can clean windows 60% faster than human window cleaners (and dance the robot 100% better).

    • On hand as Ozmo worked last week was New York Robotics cofounder Randy Howie, who noted that robotics in NY is becoming more than just a tech story. It’s about the “future of the city’s industrial base,” he said.

For formerly incarcerated New Yorkers, Citi Bike’s growth is a job opportunity (Gothamist)

  • Bike Path is a three-week workforce development course that prepares formerly incarcerated men and women to become certified bike mechanics. 

    • The course, launched in 2019, just graduated its latest cohort and boasts a nearly 100% job placement rate.

    • With the rise of micromobility in NYC (Citi Bike is the largest bike-share program in the world outside of China), most grads of the program end up working for Motivate, a New York-based micromobility company that maintains Citi Bike's fleet. 🚲

Art goes underground at former subway storefronts in murals from New Yorkers with disabilities (The CITY)

  • As part of the MTA’s efforts to find new uses for former retail spaces in the subway, the agency teamed up with YAI — a nonprofit providing services and housing to people with autism — to display murals inside one-time newsstands at the Jay Street-MetroTech station in Downtown Brooklyn.

    • “All the artists are lifelong New Yorkers, they’re the people that take that transportation every single day and to be able to have their artwork in these spaces is so beautiful and important. It’s kind of like an ode to their city,” said Mallory Perry, who oversees the YAI Arts studio. 🗽

Shop cats run the city (New York Times)

  • There’s a growing movement to legalize bodega cats in New York. And their fans are legion. Meet Drew Rosenthal, the creator of “Shop Cats,” an “interview” web show with NYC bodega cats. 🐱 

    • Since its debut last September, the show has garnered over 740,000 followers on TikTok and just took home a Webby Award.

    • Asked for comment on when she’d like to see the potential legislation pass, our local bodega cat had just two words: “Right meow.” (Sorry.) 

Stay cool this weekend, New York! 😎


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