I've been thinking about this post from Blogspotting about whether or not the blind can use iPods.  Blogs are hard enough for them to read because of all these ridiculous columns and screwy formatting, but I figured that podcasts would really be the killer medium for the visual impared once iTunes included podcast support.

Turns out its anything but.  iTunes is nearly impossible to navigate if you're blind and, as I can attest to from listening to the iPod on my bike, the menus are really difficult if you're not looking at the screen.  I haven't spent the time to make a lot of playlists, so I generally just shuffle and skip past songs I don't like.  God forbid I accidently hit Menu, I'm totally lost and can't get back unless I stop the bike, pull over, and do it visually.  (BTW... I bought a helmet and use it all the time now.)

The sad thing is, since the iPod is programmable (you can even put Linux on it), it would take Apple all of about a week to develop an app that talks its way through the menus with basic text to voice.  No new hardware, just a software upgrade. 

So, how about it Apple?  Steve Jobs, are you listening?  How about an iPod software upgrade for the visually impaired?

Link: AFB's Blog Home.

Last week, the NYT published an article where a restaurant owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, interviews a blind man for a cooking position.  Now, I don't know if you've ever had any interaction with many blind people, but with the right tools around them, they can accomplish some pretty amazing stuff.  At GM Asset Management, there's a Canadian bond trader that is blind.  (Can you imagine all those quotes wizzing by on braille!  Amazing!) 

Anyway, so it seemed like this applicant had some trouble in these surroundings...  The article rips the guy apart with stuff like "His eyes wandered around in their sockets like tropical fish in the aquarium of a cheap hotel lobby..."?

I mean...   how do people get away with stuff like that?  The whole piece is basically making fun of this visually impaired job applicant.  How do you run a customer facing business with that kind of attitude?  I don't think would stand for an article like that if the owner was making fun of the applicant's race or even if the applicant was in a wheelchair.  How would Gabrielle feel if we made fun of a smaller female chef who couldn't carry a heavy item?

The article is here.

Gabrielle's restaurant is called Prune.  You know what's really ironic?  I checked out some reviews and I found these two:

From Dine.com...   "Prune Restaurant & Bar... opened it's doors to the discriminatingly hip east village crowd one year ago."   Yes...  definitely discriminating.

From Gayot.com...   "Prune may not be the most appealing name for a restaurant (it’s for the owner’s childhood nickname, not the fruit), but once inside any prejudice disappears."    Obviously hasn't been there lately...

If anyone knows Gabrielle Hamilton, I'd say they should urge her to write a public apology.

Link: Bokardo � Blog Archive � Learning More about Structured Blogging.

the “Del.icio.us Lesson”. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a personal level first. And I wonder, how will Google Base fare in light of this? What personal value are people getting out of it? Is it enough to make the service successful?

Big news!  I put a bid on a co-op on Monday night that got accepted on Tuesday, and now we're going to contract on it!  This will be my first real estate purchase.  Its very exciting.  What's also exciting is that I got a good enough deal that a car also fits into my budge.  Mustang GT Convertable here we come!  So, apologies to Rubel for getting up and walking out during his blog conference panel, but I was getting the news of my bid's acceptence right then and there.  Six months ago, I thought I was going to stay with GM, go up with them to Connecticut, and go to Stanford in the fall.  Now, I'm working at Union Square Ventures, and moving to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.   Just goes to show you how much plans can change.  I guess its what keeps you on your toes.
Its kind of strange to imagine that I'm moving back close to home.  I grew up in Bensonhurst, which is right next to Bay Ridge.  Basically, its part of my home turf.  I played baseball in Bay Ridge, and I'm moving not too far away from Gino's.  My parents are excited because now they have someone to watch their new dog once they get it.  (Yes, they realized they couldn't live without a dog anymore after having Puba for almost 15 years.)  Check out my Google Map of where I'll be, assuming all the legal stuff works out and the co-op board approves me.  (How could they not like me?  Should I show them my blog so they can get to know me?)   Details to come on the housewarming party...

Link: NY1: NY 1 To Go.

In a definite sign of progress, mediators who met separately with the transit union and the MTA all morning, announced Thursday that both sides have agreed to resume talks while the union takes steps to return members to work, thereby ending the strike.

Representatives from the union and the MTA unexpectedly returned to the Midtown Grand Hyatt early Thursday morning, where they met separately with mediators from the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).

No formal negotiations have been scheduled, but mediator Richard Curreri said the executive board of the TWU is expected to vote on the issue of sending members back to work as talks resume.

This is quite concerning...   I just went and ordered "The Seat".

Link: Serious Riders, Your Bicycle Seat May Affect Your Love Life - New York Times.

A raft of new studies suggest that cyclists, particularly men, should be careful which bicycle seats they choose.

The studies add to earlier evidence that traditional bicycle saddles, the kind with a narrow rear and pointy nose, play a role in sexual impotence.

Do you ever bump into anyone on the street and have to go through that ackward moment where you're not sure whether or not your relationship is actually worthy of a stop?

Yesterday, I walked by somebody I went to Fordham with going in the opposite direction, and neither of us skipped a beat...  kept walking as we said hello and how are you.

This morning, I ran into another Ram in front of the gym, but this time both of us were on our bikes.  Not only did we both stop, but we both got off our bikes and chatted for a minute.

At least both times we were on the same wavelength.

No one wants to be caught on the short end of the stick of that, where you stop and its obvious the other person was going to keep going.

Its like a card game, where showing your hand can mean a lot of social awkwardness.

Anyway... so now I might have a biking buddy if this strike continues.  HM, if you want to bike back to Brooklyn later, drop me an e-mail.

I've joked around with people about how the best way to get on the del.icio.us popular list is to come up with a top ten list...

...which means the ultimate del.icio.us popular item would be a Top 10 list of top ten lists.

Makes sense, no?

So, if anyone of you know of any great top ten lists, no matter what they're about, tag them in del.icio.us with for:ceonyc and I'll try to compile a list.

Not everyone I've recommended this movie to or watched it with likes it.  Its a bit slow and a bit long.  However, its just like Ice Storm in that its got a great cast and yet few people have ever heard of it.  It stars Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Steve Martin, Mary McDonnell, Mary-Louise Parker and Alfre Woodard.  So you're going to see a lot of Kevin Kline on this list--he just plays these great introspective characters trying to be stand up guys.  I like that.  I feel like all his characters could be Jesuit educated--men for others but also tortured by questions over what exactly that means. 

There's also this great scene where Kline explains why he's trying to get to know Danny Glover--because Glover saves his life and he can't help but wonder why people get placed in each other's path at certain key moments.  I do the same thing.  I don't let chance encounters pass me by and I wonder about the reasons behind them.  Maybe I try to make something out of nothing, which Glover seems to think Kline is doing, but I just think its wildly interesting why random people seem to have these disproportionately large impacts on your life sometimes. 

So, if you want good dialog and a nice story acted solidly by really good actors, this is worth checking out.  If you need action to keep you awake, you'll just have to wait to see Batman Begins this June 15th.

Ok, so I've been vocal about siding with the MTA and the city... and so have the millions of the rest of us who are stranded, inconvenienced, etc...  but I'm going to take a step back for a second.

Let's suppose, for a moment, that the current deal the transit worker's union is getting is a bad deal, and bad precident for labor in this city in general.  Perhaps that's true.

Contrast that with this Op/Ed from USA Today:

 

"Pity the New Yorker who commutes from Queens to Manhattan to work in a hotel for $25,000 a year, with no health care or retirement benefits. She couldn't ride to work Tuesday because the city's transit workers went on strike.

 

The bus drivers who get her there make an average of $63,000. They are balking at a proposed 3% pay raise. What's more, they, along with other transit workers, are indignant at a proposal that they begin making a contribution (of 1% of wages) toward their health costs. And they beat back a plan to make future workers wait until age 62, rather than 55, to get full pensions.

 

If this sounds as if it's a militant union leveraging its ability to wreak havoc, it is. New York transit workers receive better pay and benefits than most of their riders do."

That sums up a lot of what I'm hearing from the public. 

But maybe we're not getting the whole story, and that's my point.

If there is another side to this, the transit workers, and whoever runs their PR, has done an awful job of getting the word out.  I went to their website, and they had a few stories about workers with cancer getting docked for sickleave, etc...  but these stories aren't getting out there.

When cops, fireman, and teachers have labor issues, there are a lot of people who naturally side with them, because we see cops getting killed, fireman going into fires, and we care about the education of our youth.

But transit workers?  We associate them with our commute, which is a drag.  We don't really seperate the MTA from the workers.  We just know that when our trains are late, rerouted, etc., that we just hate the whole idea of a commute.  So, when a strike causes massive delays, millions of dollars in lost revenue, let's just say that some PR work is needed to get the public on your side.  So, if there are convincing stories to tell about the union's side, they're definitely not getting out there. 

Fabrice Grinda is a a successful entreprenuer who has spent a lot of time in New York City.  He wrote a good post yesterday on approaching VCs with consumer facing services.  Seriously, where else but on blogs can Joe Entreprenuer get tips like this?

He writes,

"It seemed to me all you had to do was write an amazing business plan, send it to a VC, organize a management presentation, do a brilliant job and all your problems were going to be solved."

Obviously, he's figured out its a little more complicated than that.  His suggestion is that entreprenuers take the time to get something up and running before they start raising a lot of money for their idea:

"If you wait until you have a functioning product and a proof of concept – even on a small scale – you will have proven that you can execute and that your go to market strategy has some merit and you will then find VCs to be much more responsive..."

This is largely true and the interesting word he used was "proof."  He talks about the difference between different types of risk, and that "VCs are willing to accept idea risk much more than execution risk," but I think there's something else going on with that relationship.  If you can build something that people use, in other words, get past execution risk, you have also, in a sense, addressed your idea risk.  After all, when's the last time a lot of people started using a product that was a fundamentally bad idea?  Particularly with web services, executing on a launch allows the consumers to judge which are the best ideas, rather than letting a VC make the call before the consumers have spoken.  Sure, consumer surveys might be helpful, but getting actual consumers to use a product is much more meaningful.

He also gives some good tips on how to approach a VC once you've got your service up to a useable status:

"Sending a VC a 50 page business plan and hoping to get a reply is not a realistic approach."

Well, you might get a reply, but he's right in that simpler is better, at least up front.  The same way you should have a two minute elevator pitch, you should probably have a document that someone could read in two minutes as well.

"E-mailing it to businessplans@vc_name.com is unlikely to work as that e-mail address is flooded with thousands of ideas and projects and your presentation is likely to get lost in the clutter...   The best way to approach a VC is through someone they know and to organize a brief voice conversation. "

Well, hopefully that's not the case.  Losing business plans would definitely be an issue.  However, I think the real key here is that getting recommendations from people you know go a long way to addressing another key risks VCs worry about: management risk.  A vote of confidence from a trusted source goes a long way.

Read the rest of Fabrice's post for a few more tips on how to get off the ground here.

So all these people were clogging up my bike route this morning, including Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.  What does a Borough President do anyway?

Yahoo just bought Delicious:

Here it is live from the source:
Link: del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!.

And here's our take, on our blog.

Link: New York Daily News - Mets - Mets add old reliable.

With Julio following in the footsteps of John and Matt, the Mets have had every player named Franco in major league history.

I was at MSG for Depeche Mode last night...    Great concert.  Took some phone videos:

View this clip on Vimeo

View this clip on Vimeo

SANY0100, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

So I'm in the elevator at work yesterday and this guy is kind of laughing to himself behind me. Before he gets off on 7, he taps me and says, "Hey, nice coat."

Great, me and my coat have become a hyperlocal celebrity--within the friendly confines of 915 Broadway. Too funny.

But that reminded me that I hadn't blogged about the coat yet, even though I've had it for a week. And let me tell you, it came none too soon, too, because its been as cold as snot in New York.

Link: Google Transit.

If I were HopStop, I'd be worried...   

GYM...  eating web services in a city near you....

How many friends can you have and still be a good friend to anyone?

How does that number change when your career takes off?  When you move?  When you get into a relationship?  When you get married?

Do you actively manage these changes?  Has anyone dinged you lately with "where've you been?", for not returning a phonecall, or for the dreded "viewed" with no response on a party Evite?

For as long as I know, I've always held on and tried to keep in touch with just about anyone that I meet that I find interesting.  Social networking on Friendster and MySpace help keep a lot of otherwise drifting friendships alive... and so does IM.  My evites are huge and I often forget how I even met half the people that I know.  However, I've never really had that small, closeknit group of friends that's always around.  My network is truly an expression of "small pieces loosely joined."  However, its catching up with me.  I'm realizing that you can't treat everyone like small pieces and expect them to treat you as anything more.   I think this happens a lot to people who spend a lot of time online.  Your relationship bandwidth gets spread over the long tail.

Please note some of the realizations I've come to:

• Evites with 100 people and group e-mails do not constitute friendship.
• Reading someone's blog or expecting them to read yours is not the only way you should be building relationships with the people closest to you.
• IMing isn't friendship if it never gets past "Hey... what's up?"  "Nothin' much."
• Any testamonials you leave on a social networking site should be said in person.

When I was in college, I went on some retreats and we used to have an exercise that would help you take stock in the people around you and come to the realization of who you were closest to and where, perhaps, your relationships needed work.  You would list people in your life and make little notiations next to the people you could count on for various things, and who could count on you.  It was a real eyeopening exercise.  I think it made a lot of people realize they were coming up short, and also that they were probably a lot closer to their parents or family than they realized.

We used to start it off by listing the phone numbers of our friends, but that was all the way back in 1998/99 before college kids ever had cellphones, so now that doesn't work.

So, instead, I've put together a new version:

Introspective Friendship/Relationship Inventory 2.0

1. Get a blank sheet of paper, open up a new blog post, or a document in Writely.
2. Divide it in three columns.
3. Down the first column, list the following people.  Don't double list anyone and if you have overlap, just add the one or two incremental people that apply.  Feel free to actually consult web applications to complete the list, especially for #4.
   
   1. Who are the first five people you would invite to be your contacts in a new social networking application?
   2. Who are the last three people that you've actually met in person that you have IMed?
   3. Who are three offline friends who don't have a blog that you wish would start blogging?
   4. List your immediate family members... parents, syblings, spouse, kids.
   5. Which two offline contacts have commented on your blog the most?
   6. Which three personal, offline contacts have gained the special priviliege of being communicated with through your work account, which also means you respond to them through your Blackberry/Treo, etc.
   7. Name three people that you know offhand appear automatically in GMail or any other mail application with autocomplete with just one letter typed.
   8. Who are the first three people you can count on to respond to an Evite?
   9. Who are the three people least likely to get pissed if you just walk away from IM without a goodbye?
   10. Who is the one person amoung the people you spend time with who is glaringly absent from this list?  (Did you forget a kid?)
4. Ok, now that you've got your list of people, add the following icons to each column as they apply.  So, for anytime its something someone would do/has done for you, put an icon in the left column.  For anything you would do or have done for someone else, put it in the right column.  In fact, take a moment to label the columns "for:<insert del.icio.us screename here>" (or just "me" if you don't use del.icio.us) and for:them".
   1. Make a little :) face next to all of the people who you would go to individually (not blogging) to talk about an idea you're really excited about... that goes in the right.  A :) goes in the left for anyone that has come to you with news about something they're really excited about.
   2. Place a :* (or a heart) next to someone you'd go to with a relationship problem on the right, and vice versa on the left.
   3. Put a $ in the respective columns when it comes to anyone that you could borrow money from and who could come to you.  (via Paypal, of course)
   4. Put a + for anyone you could discuss a spiritual issue with, and vice versa.  (You have to actually know Evelyn Rodriguez to actually list her, btw...)
   5. A <:) for anyone you would invite to a birthday dinner and the same for people who would invite you.
   6. A :.. ( for anyone you could cry in front of or who could cry in front of you.  (Do I have to keep explaining the columns?)
   7. Put a ! for anyone who would put themselves out there to defend you (if they blogged) in a Web 2.0 blogging flame war and the other way around.
   8. But an & for anyone you appear in a group photo with on Flickr or somewhere else on the web.  (both columns)
   9. Put a # next to anyone who you always pick up the phone, IM, skype, etc. for and hardly ever screen.  (Guess on who screens you and seems inordinately difficult to reach)
   10. Put a @ next to anybody whose house and/or local coffee shop you've been to in the last month and the same for people you've invited into your home. and/or local coffee shop.
   11. Who would you go to for advice or to destress if the RIAA got to you because of your illegal music downloading?  Put an "i" for that.  (for iTunes)

Who got the most icons in each column?  Where is there an inbalance?  Any surprises?  Who got overrepresented or underreppresented because their relationship with you is stronger offline vs. online, or the other way around?  Should your online life be reflective of your offline world or should it be the result of who is most easily accessable online?

I'm interested in the comments of anyone who takes the time to complete this...

David's got this right...

Link: VentureBlog: Social Networks 3.0.

After a fair bit of excitement and energy around pure play social networks, it became clear that the building and management of a social network was not, in and of itself, a compelling consumer experience. In a nod back to the earliest instantiations of social networking, entrepreneurs have come to realize that social networks are enablers of other compelling consumer experiences. Thus, social networks are becoming an important ingredient of all sorts of consumer experiences.

So Daniel Craig is the new bond.  Interesting.  I'll have to see him in action, but in the meantime, I think its time I brought the 007 franchise to my list.

But I can't pick just one.

So, instead, I'll make a "Best of" list....