When Jack Hidary, the latest candidate to join New York City's mayoral race, talks about the future of the city, the words "startups," "broadband," and "computer science," keep coming up — and he seems to know what he's talking about.

If you think that's hardly something worth noting, you may have missed that time when poll-leader Anthony Weiner said that MakerBot sounded like "a beer they serve in a Williamsburg bar" or when a few candidates made it apparent that they didn't really understand the difference between an iPad and a Kindle.

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Hidary, 45, on the other hand, is a self-described "nerd" who went to computer camp and learned his first computer language when he was 14. And his geek credentials don't end there.

At 19, as an undergrad at Columbia University, he helped set up the campus network, and posted flyers that said "Get email! It works!" to convince people to get an email address. Then, in 1995, he created EarthWeb, one of the first consulting companies for the tech community, which went public in 1998. He later bought tech career website Dice.com, in 1999.

Hidary is a first-generation web person, and the only candidate running to succeed Michael Bloomberg who has extensive experience in the tech world. "There's no other candidate that is in the race that has the connections that I have in Silicon Valley," Hidary, who is also on the advisory board of Google X Labs, told Mashable in an interview at our office in Manhattan.

Despite being a techie, he knows that he can't run his campaign on technology alone. In fact, he spent most of our interview talking about how to improve schools in New York City — and he's running as part of his own Jobs and Education Party, a name that he says underscores his campaign priorities.

For Hidary, schools still rely too much on the old, textbook-based model. What schools should do instead is make kids work in small teams, solving problems, even "tinkering" as if they were at Maker Faire (the "festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness").

In other words, and here Hidary draws from his education in neuroscience, "It's called blended learning, because it's hitting different parts of the brain, not just one part of the brain. It's hitting the visual part, it's hitting the team-based part, it's hitting the problem-solving part — not just memorization and writing some answers down."

A more dynamic, interactive way of learning is not the only change Hidary wants to see in schools. He wants to teach kids computer science starting in elementary school — and give schools fast Internet.

"We can not expect our kids to be part of the future if they are stuck in buildings in the past," he said.

Wiring up schools and improving their broadband is also part of Hidary's plan to improve Internet access in the city. The aspiring mayor thinks he can improve access to broadband without waiting for the federal government.

For Hidary, the easiest things to do would be to "aggregate demand," creating shared workspaces for startups, and convince companies like Time Warner Cable or Verizon to pre-install fiber cables in the buildings. Shared Wi-Fi networks like fon.com can also help improve bandwidth, and even wireless mesh networks are something worth looking at, he said.

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Shared workspaces are another of Hidary's main talking points. His plan would be to get them to expand past Manhattan, with the goal of helping small businesses in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island.

At the same time, Hidary wants New York to keep pushing in its fight to become a big tech hub. That's something that would benefit the entire city economy, he said, citing a study (.PDF) by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, which found that every high tech job creates 4.3 jobs in other sectors of the economy.

One of the challenges in pitching that idea to tech companies will be to convince them that New York is a friendly place for startups that defy the status quo in old businesses like tourism and transportation. Successful startups like Uber and AirBnB have had some trouble in New York City, clashing against lobbyists and old, stiff, regulations.

"We need leadership that recognizes that technology sometimes leapfrogs regulations," Hidary said, without getting too specific.

As noted by The Observer, running independently will be an uphill battle for Hidary, not only because he won't have any large party support, but also in terms of financing his campaign. For that reason, Hidary is crowdfunding the campaign through CrowdTilt, where he raised more than $50,000 to open his campaign office in Brooklyn.

Financing aside, it might be hard for Hidary to convince New Yorkers outside of the tech scene that he's the person suited to lead the city, although he thinks that not being a career politician, like the other candidates, is a point in his favor. But this lack of experience may raise questions about his credentials in other areas, like crime, for instance.

When asked about the New York Police Department's controversial crime prevention program "stop and frisk," Hidary, perhaps surprised by the question, deflected it. "I think that in a modified form we will have stop and frisk, but I want to bring these other technologies to fight crime as well," referring to high-tech anti-crime technologies like ShotSpotter, a network of hidden microphones that detect gunfire.

Perhaps simply being the techie in the mayoral race won't give him a significant advantage over candidates like Anthony Weiner (even though he's proven he doesn't understand certain technologies so well), but at least Hidary brings an expertise in technology to the table. Geeks like us, and tech companies like MakerBot, will surely appreciate that.

Image: Jack Hidary Campaign