The officials appeared at the symposium to describe their initiatives for improving their residents’ lives using digital technology. These represent quality of life and business issues rather than the most pressing urban problems. Each speaker was allotted only ninety seconds, so here’s a brief snapshot:

New York City: Last year the Big Apple launched its Made in NY website to promote local entrepreneurship. Since then they’ve expanded the effort with increased access to workspaces, partnerships with academic institutions as well as other programs and competitions to assist startups.

Boston: launched its Street Bump app, a citizen enabled sensing device for potholes. This project was introduced following extensive road construction, including the Big Dig tunnel project that lasted several years and took its toll on locals’ automobiles.

Philadelphia: The PHL program is a social enterprise partnership with funding from Michael Bloomberg. The civic challenge asks entrepreneurs to identify, select and pilot new programs that solve a host of local issues.

Chicago: Mayor Emmanuel’s ‘Broadband Challenge’ is aimed at improving the city’s fiber network by offering free wi-fi and low cost connectivity. The process even involved updating the sewer network infrastructure.

Quebec City: The Canadian city has its own social network and also has the capability for residents to send personal text messages to help with snow removal. That way they don’t ended up stranded in their cars during snowstorms.

Ottawa: The Canadian city encourages citizen engagement and government transparency. Through an open source website, the public has access to all data. The Apps4 Ottawa open data contest rewards developers who create the most valuable uses and visualizations of the open source data.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Remember on “Mission Impossible” when messages would self destruct after an agent listened to them? In this episode of “Elevator Pitch,” Alan Meckler speaks with Jacob Robbins about his startup “Burn Note.”

“Burn Note” allows you to send a secure email and set a timer to destroy the message after it’s read…forever…without all the smoke and drama.

For more videos, check out mediabistroTV, and be sure to follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

They came on the mediabistroTV series “Elevator Pitch” hoping someone would take a chance on their ideas. In our new show, “Elevator Pitch Fast Forward,” host Alan Meckler checks up on the new business owners to see how they’re doing.

In our first episode, we dropped in on I-Ella CEO and founder, Ella Gorgla to see where the fashion insider’s marketplace is today. Gorgla showed us how giving clients a red carpet experience put new life into her business. She also gave “Elevator Pitch” hopefuls some solid advice to make sure their startups never go out of style.

For more videos, check out mediabistroTV, and be sure to follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The company decided to create this division (homepage here) after its success promoting the 3Doodler, or the “world’s first 3D pen”. The project raised $2 million in less than a month, and Dynamo hopes to help other tech innovators reach their goals via media exposure.

We have a feeling that many Kickstarter entrepreneurs are too economically challenged to afford proper PR services even after they raise the money they need, but we think you’ll agree that this is a very cool idea.

Now here’s the 3Doodler’s promo video:

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Of course, in order to receive such press mentions, businesses usually require the services of people called publicists or PR professionals who specialize in pitching the story of the scruffy startup to big name glossies, trade papers–or even lowly blogs like ours!

But for those who want to get all those press mentions on your website without actually, you know, doing the work, we present The Startup Legitimizer–a single webpage that can fill all your startup PR needs with a few simple clicks. Which publications would give your cred the biggest boost? The New York Times? TechCrunch? BuzzFeed? TED Talks?!

These famous names, divided into the “kind of legit” and “really legit” categories, even come in pre-organized bundles like “innovators” and “game changers”, which are totally different things. Just choose your favorites, copy and paste the HTML code and say goodbye to pesky PR flacks forever! Check us out!

(Just kidding. Startups absolutely should invest in PR services. And thanks to Digiday for the tip.)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In case you haven’t seen Foodspotting, it’s a fairly inventive little app that allows users to search for, say, New York City’s best cheesecake (which isn’t at Junior’s, no matter how many people tell you otherwise) and displays other users’ shared photos of said cake. It’s a purely visual food community that’s about to get even bigger–and this means that the “playing with our food” debate won’t be over anytime soon, no matter what David Chang thinks.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Of course we always wanted to answer “yes”, but now we have some testimony to back that answer up. According to Ken Gaebler‘s recent PR Daily post, a PR investment “boosts a company’s chances of getting acquired”. He cites his own personal experience, writing that his own tech startup used PR services to help make the big sale–and that any emerging business that chooses to avoid PR firms could end up depressing the value of its own product.

Gaebler’s points:

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In this episode of “Elevator Pitch,” host Alan Meckler talks with Warren Liao and Derek Tian, founders of “Black Lapel,” a website specializing in making custom luxury menswear at an affordable price. Find out if they make the cut.

For more videos, check out mediabistroTV, and be sure to follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Hardawar appeared on a panel at a PCNY event on Tuesday that also included NYC-based editors and reporters covering the tech and startups beat from GigaOM, Mashable, Business Insider and WNYC’s New Tech City morning radio show. The event was a follow-up to a June PCNY panel centered on mobile–and this time the topic was breaking through in the complex tech and startups space.

Recent stories the panelists wrote or produced should give PR pros some hints about the angles that hook them. Ki Mae Heussner, staff writer for GigaOM, focused on content hackathons as the future of textbooks. Alyson Shontell, an SAI editor for Business Insider, wrote about the size of startup companies’ user bases and whether ten million is the new one million when it comes to users. WNYC’s New Tech City radio host Manoush Zomorodi produced a segment featuring reporters learning to code. As Zomoradi observed, “their visits to different code training venues added texture and flavor” to reflect the reporters’ experiences.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

But thanks to the wonders of social media, we’re closer to the stars we love and hate than ever before. Now a new company wants to revolutionize the celebrity PR game via social media–and it’s making publicists and agents all over Hollywood very nervous.

What is TheAudience? It’s an alternately “stealthy” and “mysterious” startup backed and promoted by two of the biggest names in the West Coast media world: Napster/Facebook co-founder Sean Parker (who you may know as Justin Timberlake) and Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel (who you may know as Jeremy Piven).

But its driving force is Oliver Luckett, a former programmer, Disney PR man and full-color personality whose hobbies, according to The New York Times, include driving around LA in an Aston Martin and traveling to Iceland (our new favorite country) “to to compete against Bjork in a gingerbread house-building contest”. We like the guy already! His key selling point? He’s figured out a way around the traditional Hollywood PR system.

What does TheAudience do, exactly? The company effectively manages the social media presence of celebrities who don’t have the time (or interest) to do it themselves. But this is no automated status update machine: Team members feed fans a steady stream of content via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus, keeping them occupied with exclusive comments, pictures and videos.

The key difference between old-school PR services and this newfangled arrangement is that the content truly does come from the celebrities themselves:

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1. Make sure you’re prepared for the attention. Essentially, the time to ensure that your website looks good, works well and places highly in search engine results is before you put out a press release.
2. Build your PR toolkit. You may be excited to let the world know how great your company is/will be, but don’t do it without well-written summaries, executive bios, and jpegs (bloggers have to use something as the featured image, you know).
3. Know your Market. Seems like a no-brainer, but we take this to mean you need to truly know your market–don’t just guess at who your target audience might be. Figure it out through research.
4. Find partners. It’s much easier to navigate the media minefield when you partner with someone who knows how to do it. Gerritson advises startup PR folks to emphasize that relationship by posting on a partner’s blog or holding jointly sponsored events. Both great ideas. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In this episode of Elevator Pitch, host Alan Meckler meets with TwoChop founder Mo Lam and AppAddictive CEO Mike Onghai about their gamification venture, TwoChop. If you run a blog or other content oriented website containing text, music, or images, TwoChop can take the content and turn it into a game.

For more mediabistro videos, check our YouTube channel, and be sure to follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The site looks like the leader in crowdsourced funding right now, and we don’t think we’re going too far out on a limb in saying that it has revolutionized the blunt and often ugly art of raising money for artisans and organizers who don’t have much.

The site has helped fund everything from graphic novels to “comeback” albums for troubled jazz veterans to full-length films featured in some of the world’s biggest festivals. We were particularly drawn, via Fast Company, to the tale of a team looking to build an underground park in an abandoned warehouse on New York’s Lower East Side. The video and photos of the “LowLine” project are impressive and, dare we say it, a little inspiring:

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Of course, such things don’t happen in a vacuum: The heads behind Metro are also associated with Long Island’s masters of hospitality, WordHampton Public Relations. Restaurant owners and PR pros looking to enter the edible arena should keep an eye out. The rest us will practice using our Instagram filters just in case anyone actually DOES want to check out the sweet lobster rolls we ate last night.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In the latest episode of mediabistroTV’s “Elevator Pitch,” host Alan Meckler meets with Yago Amerlinck Huerta, whose startup, Wyst, gives users the ability to send a digital message in a bottle from their iPhones.

For more videos, check out our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.