Note To Self

You could think of New York City's Digital Roadmap, published in the spring of 2011, as the founding document or charter for the city's push to make municipal government — and the citizens it supports — more high-tech. The brains behind the effort was Rachel Haot (née Sterne), the city's first-ever Chief Digital Officer. The 29-year-old former tech entrepreneur was hired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg with a clear-cut mission: Make New York City a leader in digital technology. Now, more than a year later, Haot's office, NYC Digital, says it has achieved 80 percent of the goals laid out in the Digital Roadmap. Among other accomplishments, it has introduced more Wi-Fi in public places, hosted the city’s first hackathon and launched the @nycgov Twitter handle. This week on WNYC's New Tech City, host Manoush Zomorodi talks to Haot about the state of the city when it comes to technology. Haot discusses the steps the Bloomberg administration is taking to retain top-level software engineers, expand broadband service and reach out to New Yorkers who don't have a computer or smartphone. She also explains NYC Digital's most recent program — the Small Business Digital Toolkit — a set of online and offline courses to teach business owners 21st century skills like e-commerce and how to use social media or build a website. "Ninety percent of people, when they are looking for a small business, will immediately search for one online," Haot said. "But only about 60 percent of those small businesses even have a website or a digital presence." In an August report called "Smarter Small Businesses," the Center for an Urban Future argues that small businesses in the city face the threat of extinction if they don't adapt to changing technologies. "People aren't going into the Yellow Pages anymore," said Jonathan Bowles, the organization's executive director. "If you don't advertise on Google, if you don't advertise on Facebook, a lot of these neighborhood-based businesses are missing out on a lot of potential customers." With that in mind, WNYC's Dan Tucker talks to small business owners along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to see whether they think going digital makes sense for their stores, saloons and delis.

Motorists in Midtown may find their cars at a standstill Tuesday as the UN General Assembly kicks into high gear and President Obama heads to Jay Z's 40/40 club near Madison Square Park for a celebrity-studded fundraiser. While world leaders who tend to cause the biggest traffic jams — like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — won’t be in town until next week, lesser-known dignitaries also bring on checkpoints, street closures and the inevitable gridlock. The bottlenecks and detours are a headache for the drivers and cabbies plying Manhattan's roadways. But they're also the perfect opportunity to explore how the MTA and the city's Department of Transportation are — or are not — using technology to help New Yorkers get around more efficiently. This week on New Tech City, we tackle the intersection of transportation and tech. Host Manoush Zomorodi talks to Transportation Nation's Alex Goldmark about the latest technology helping New Yorkers navigate the city by car, taxi, subway and bus, as well as what's missing from the city's plan to ease congestion on the roads and rails. Then, around 5.3 million people ride New York City's 22 subway lines every day, but no one gets uninterrupted cell service below ground.    Reporter Tracey Samuelson investigates just how long it will be until underground subway stations and the tracks between them get outfitted with Wi-Fi. Plus, we'll introduce you to the perfect smartphone app for that New York stereotype: The neurotic subway commuter.

No one knows who the next Mark Zuckerberg will be, but 135 high schoolers at New York City's Academy for Software Engineering are stepping up to the plate with coding textbooks in hand. At the new high school near Union Square, incoming freshman are already taking computer science and statistics classes as well as teaming up with mentors from New York City's booming start-up scene. For the aspiring next-gen tech geeks, it's the first step toward building apps, developing websites and thinking up operating systems for smartphones, tablets and devices yet-to-be created. Silicon Alley continues to thrive just blocks away, but the coders who build the back-end for websites and mobile apps are in short supply. It's part of national trend, according to AFSE instructors, administration and board members. "In a time when we have more jobs than people to fill them, we're seeing a decline in interest," said Leigh Ann DeLyser, AFSE's computer science curriculum consultant. The number of software development jobs is expected to surge by 30 percent this decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But only about 20,000 high school students take the Advanced Placement Computer Science test every year — a sliver of the more than 150,000 that take the AP Calculus exam. This week on WNYC's New Tech City, host Manoush Zomorodi goes back to school and gets a tour of the Academy for Software Engineering to see how it is addressing the growing high-tech skills gap. But budding software engineers at specialized high schools aren't the only students getting a high dose of high tech in the classroom. Later in the episode, Betsy Corcoran, founder of EdSurge, weighs in on how technology is shaping classroom instruction and whether private companies operating in schools should be a concern for students and teachers.