I was talking to someone in the elevator yesterday and someone else chimed in with a "That happened to me, too... that's so funny."

I turned to her and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I don't allow comments."

Web 2.0 is fueled by data.  Mashups don't mashup technologies, they mash together information.  The more data you have, the more interesting the applications can be.

Unfortunately, we are suffering a data crisis.  To be honest, there really isn't much data out there that is open that is useful to the average person, and I think that's why some Web 2.0 applications are having trouble getting traction in the mainstream.

There are still too many closed pools of data out there, and opening them up would make for some interesting new services. 

Here's my The Top 10 Data Pools That Need to Be Open

1) Medical records - There's really just no excuse for this.  Its my body.  Any information that any doctor gets off of it should be owned by me and accessable online.  I should be able to chart my cholestorol levels, weight, etc, going back to when I was born. 

2) Credit card purchase history - Three months?  This is silly.  Not only should credit cards have my total history available to me online, but there should be APIs on it, too, so that financial data services can help me analyze my spending.  I wouldn't mind if they did item level breakdowns or started pumping in SKUs, too, so I can reorder things, but that's probably just a pipe dream.  Still, I think retailers would benefit a lot from giving the CC companies more data on each purchase.  This also solves the Amazon purchase history problem as well.

3) Elias Sports Bureau - Why is there no consumer version of this?  If I want to look up Frank Tanana's home record on Wednesdays, I should be able to do that in an ad supported site.

4) Public transportation - If I leave now, am I going to catch the R train or just miss it?

5) Friend behavior - First off, who are my friends, really.  I hope whoever succeeds at doing MyWare can help me figure out who I actually talk to the most across the phone, IM, email, MySpace comments, etc.  Then, I'd like to be able to see at least the aggregate of what they're up to.  Are they all swarming around the same local news article?  This is not a database that needs to be opened... its one that needs to be created and then opened, with permissions of course.

6) Local item availability - Does the local hardware store carry sun protectant stuff for vinyl convertible tops?  No?  Who has this item within a 5 block radius?  Searching Best Buy's inventory is cool, but knowing where I can cheap dental floss would be even better.

7) Web traffic - Most of the tools for measuring other people's web traffic are pretty crappy and never work.  Why don't we call just join a collective and share that data amongst ourselves?  Maybe SiteMeter needs to have a site where you can search by website like Alexa to get the traffic and do comparative analytics.

8)

9)

10)

Tuesday night, 50 young entreprenuers and potential entreprenuers gathered at Manatt Phelps and Phillips to hear about what it takes to start a business from people who have either done it before or supported those who had.

We had a great lineup of experienced NYC tech leaders taking part in the roundtable discussion:

Jason McCabe Calacanis, CEO, Weblogs, Inc., An AOL Company

Ian Landsman, Userscape Software

Jay Rand, Partner, Manatt

Jackie Reed, Business Consultant, Administaff

David S. Rose, Angel Investor

Peter Semmelhack, Founder, Antennae Software, BugLabs

Michael Volpatt, Partner, Larkin/Volpatt Communications

Albert Wenger, President of del.icio.us through Yahoo! acquisition

It was really a strong turnout by the up and coming NYC tech crowd and I think we all walked away with a lot of food for thought from the speakers.   Seems like nextNY is turning a momentum corner here as we start to contribute more back to our participants and trying to identify what people feel like they need to be successful.

You'll see us do more of these Community Conversation events in the future and if you're a young member of the NYC tech community, please join us.  Help us run future events or just generate ideas.

I'll also echo our desire to have a more balanced representation in our community...  so all if you NYC geek girls, join us!

Thanks to all who participated!

Reactions to the event:

From Ian...

From Sean...

From Umair...   We should really all chip in and get him this for his neverending crusade on behalf of us edgedwellers.

"Let me make that more concrete: Media is deeply personal, social, cultural, human, creative - "

Ok.. just stop right there and think about that for a second.  Sink in?  Good.

"...and so it's economics aren't those of simple technological scale, because, more often than not, technological scale kills those things (think Clear Channel roboDJs). The real opportunity is in leveraging the new forms at the edges of the firms - markets, networks, communities - to explode just how personal, social, cultural, human and creative media can be...

 ...If there's a single lesson those industries yield today, it's that that entire way of thinking about business is deeply out of touch with the new world of consumption. And ultimately, that's the flaw at the heart of the Googleverse - consumers play almost exactly the same role in it that they did, suprisingly, in the industrial economy.

        NB: No, I'm not saying that "empowered" consumers will begin composing sonatas and producing movies to rival         Kiarostami's . Rather, I'm pointing out that the economics of cultural industries change when consumers connect, and we should see greater (returns to) creativity; not necessarily because consumers make them, but maybe only because consumers are better at helping choose them."

Read the whole thing here...

It really deserves this quote:

"I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. I'm going to show them a world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."

This is from Tom Evslin.

let us think back about the good old mail. Maybe it can help us to think about the problem from a different angle. Yes, mail!

Do you know the ROI of your mail account? Does your company know the ROI? Sure, it does know the costs. Even IBM and Microsoft cant tell you the real value of mailing. You cant calculate the ROI of mailing systems. Nobody ever could. Even if its a 30 years old technique!

Why? You cant live without mail. Everybody has mailing systems now. 20 years ago some rare users had mailsystems. But know everybody communicates with each other by mail.

So, its not about ROI, its about communication infrastructure(!). The costs of infrastructure systems can be huge. Think about the transportation infrastructure (via highways, via railroad, via air). Very expensive, but if you havent invest into that, your economy will suffer badly. Its a vital factor!

As you need transportation systems for your economic goods, you need your communication infrastructure. If everybody uses mail today and suddenly tomorrow they use blogs to communicate you have to invest in your communication infrastructure once again as years ago into your mailing systems. But if you ask about the ROI you never will get into blogging :-) Therefore you will cut your future communication channel. You will suffer from the lack of investments in this area.

When businesses are paying $20K site licenses for mission critical data applications, and something goes wrong, they e-mail, they call...  you hear from them and its not very difficult for your support staff to track bugs in the system.

But what about consumers?

When is the last time you used a consumer app that you weren't "testing" and something was a little bit buggy, so you e-mailed the company with the details of the problem?

Ok, for us tech geeks, maybe that was just this morning, but for most people, they just move on and ignore it.  That presents a difficult problem for designers of consumer facing apps who need to know how their system is working and where its not. 

Consumers don't generally want to e-mail for support, but they might flag things.  The funny thing is, even though they aren't willing to commit much in terms of communicaion, they definitely want communication back.  They want to know that someone is working on something.  Maybe every app should make their trouble ticket list public and searchable, and include how many other people flagged an item.

The folks at nextNY have been talking about building a New York City tech calendar of all the events, from Meetups to Drinkups to Mashups.  We think it would be a great service to the community.

The problem is that there isn't any calendaring software that actually has a calendar and allows for anyone to post to it without an account or password.   

We'd like to avoid mashing up two services...  like posting in Upcoming and subscribing to a feed in Gcal to publish it in calendar form.

It would be really easy for someone like Kiko or 30 Boxes just to allow someone to create a calendar and allow public posting with some sort of approval or notification... sort of like a cross between a wiki and a calendar.

It would be ideal of we could also subscribe to RSS feeds of other tech events.

It sort of strikes me as odd that all of these Web 2.0 calendars would put limitations on the most basic calander element itself--posting. 

If anyone knows someone at a Web 2.0 calendar company and can get them to create something where anyone can just come and post and display a calendar somewhere, let me know!  We'd like to help pull something together that is of great benefit to the local community here.

Too funny...   thanks for the head's up, Dave.

Kaz Matsui gets traded to the Arena Baseball League... umm... I mean the Rockies, along with 4.5 million Pepsi points.

The Mets take four from the D'Backs as the Yanks lose four to the A's.

My fastpitch softball team mercies the other team twice, winning their seventh game in a row.

I got to hangout at the boathouse all day Saturday and yesterday afternoon.

And a bunch of my friends showed up to hangout at the rooftop of Bar 13 on Friday.

Not to mention getting to hangout with my favorite blogger through most of it.

Ahh... yes, it was a good weekend...

Familiar Logo, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

hmm...

So, after moving all of my stubborn Typepad feed consumers to Feedburner, I received a bump of 100 subs.  I'm now up to 750.

I'll be honest, its hard not to look and to get excited when it goes up.

But to be honest, what it should really be, at least for anyone who blogs about their industry and is looking to make professional connections, is a measure of your contribution to others, not their consumption of you.

So, as the theory goes, if I make an intentional effort to post more useful things here, take part in more conversations by linking to other blogs and commenting on other blogs, my subscriber numbers should go up--more so than if I was just trying to get more people to come here to read.

Its a subtle philosophical difference, but I think it means a lot in a culture of authenticity.

So, basically, I'm going to try, over the next month, to contribute a 1000 sub's worth of value.

There are a handful of people making great little businesses out of introducing the best ideas to the cash and advice needed to make them great.

Frankly, I'm not a fan of this model at all.

I don't think you should have to pay to meet a VC if you're an entreprenuer.  You should be able to pour all your money into your idea, making it successful and visable enough to garner interest from the more aware and relevent VCs in your space. 

So if you're an entreprenuer debating whether or not you should "dress up and save up" to present at a big conference or even a local "summit" to meet people who might fund you, well, you can do what you want, but I just don't like the principal of the whole thing.

I think we should be paying to meet you.  I mean, the reality is, while a startup can bootstrap itself and doesn't necessarily need VC money, a VC fund can't bootstrap itself.  Without entreprenuers, VC funds don't exist, but the same is not true in the reverse.  We need you more than you need us, so an entreprenuer paying to meet us seems like it should be an economic anomaly.

What do you get when you cross The Bridges of Madison County with Speed?, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

The Bridges of Speed County.... Ummm... I mean, The Lake House.



"This house will explode if our love goes below 50 miles per hour..."



Gag me a river.

Remember Rick Ankiel?  At 20 years old, he started Game 1 of the NLDS against the Braves in 2000.

He took a lead into the third, and then had a complete meltdown.  He threw five wild pitches, walked four and that was about all she wrote for his whole career.  Not only did he not have what it took to pitch in the playoffs, but his performance so shattered his confidence that he never succeeded again in the majors.

And conversely, look at Mariano Rivera and flash back to 1995.  (I know... he plays for the bad guys... I'm just trying to make a point here.)  Rivera was a starter when he first came up... made 10 starts actually...  and finished the year with a 5.51 ERA.  Nothing special by far.   But all it took was 5 1/3 innings of shutout relief in the first round of the playoffs against Seattle to see that this was a guy who thrived when the game was on the line in a clutch situation. 

Rivera had "it" and Ankiel didn't... and there was nothing up until those key series for each player that could have predicted their success.  There wasn't a scouting report out there that could have told you enough about their mental makeup to clue you into whether they would wilt or shine in a tough spot.

And even if there was, its still a matter of what happens on the field.  A lot of people show their character in different ways.  How about John Rocker?   Sure, he was mean, angry...etc... things you'd probably normally want in a closer...   but he turned out to be a complete head case.

So, while velocity and control might be key measures of effectiveness to a scout, a lot of the times what is really predictive of success has nothing to do with a person's natural talent.   That sometimes makes predicting success an exercise in character judgement more so than it does a job of looking at someone's historical track record.  Should scouts be conducting character reference interviews?  I wonder if they do at all. 

What about as you are building a company?   Particularly in venture, when you might be asking people to do things that no one has ever done before, a lot of times, you find yourself betting on character.  This is made so much more important because of the size of the staffs you are adding to.  If employee #5 is a bad hire, its a lot worse than a bad hire for #5000. 

So what are the keys to checking someone's character out and also the rightness of fit with an organization?  Certainly, you've got to sit them down and put them in front of as many people you know and trust as possible.  That was certainly a key for me when I got hired.  While Brad and Fred never bothered to check out my resume, because they saw my work first hand in my due diligence of their fund, they focused in on my references and the impressions I made on people in my office.  I'm quite sure that my interview with Kerri, because I was going to be sitting right next to her, was probably just as important as whatever I had put on my resume, had they seen it. 

I guess its a little bit like dating.  You just don't know exactly if you're going to be a match, and no profile, quiz, etc. is going to prove compatability for you...  sometimes you just have to take a chance on someone you get a good feeling from... someone you wouldn't mind facing a little bit of the unknown with.

Right where I left it..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I love beating the system.

Fuckin' bike flat...    maybe I'll walk home to Bay Ridge today.

Link: ABC News: Police Investigate New York Subway Terror Threat.

The New York City Police Department is investigating what it deems a credible tip that 19 operatives have been deployed to New York to place bombs in the subway, and security in the subways will be increased, sources told ABC News.

Link: Gothamist: Critical Mass Clashes with Police Again.

New Yorkers, probably more than any other kind of people, are really good at making issues out of things that shouldn't be issues.  The combined mental and emotional effort that has gone in to these silly bike rides could be spent doing lots of other things that would make much greater impact on society.  How about helping kids to read, spending time with the elderly, or feeding the homeless.  If I was sick in a hospital bed, watching TV because I had no one to visit me, and I saw these people protesting their "right to bike in a big group", I'd be pissed.  And then, I'd probably cry.  So, next time one of these mass rides comes around, instead, why don't you think for a moment about how you can directly improve the life of one of your fellow human beings.  Spending more time with your family counts, too.  You should be ashamed of yourself if your best contribution to the good of society is causing traffic.

Over the weekend, I installed a ceiling fan in my bedroom.

Now, you might not think this is such a big deal, but keep in mind that I've had absolutely no experience dealing with anything electrical whatsoever.  I think it runs in the genes, though, because my grandfather could do almost anything with electricity.  He used to have this little bulb with two wires on the end of it that he would use to test to see of the sockets he installed were working.

Of course, it would have been easier and probably safer to have an experienced professional do this for me, but I just had to take a crack at it myself.  My "flashlight helper" was betting that I'd "smash and break" something...most likely me.

Once I think I have some understanding of how a system works, I can generally take a very methodical approach to dissecting it and problem solving.  This one included turning on all the lights and appliances to map my circuit breakers and figure out which switch controlled which outlet.  I went to Home Depot to get the fans and also pick up some rubber handled pliers and a wire stripper. 

What I realized yesterday and what I've been thinking about since my last review here at USV is that this is the kind of challenge I'm really meant for...  taking something new to me apart, figuring out how it works, and taking a crack at building it up. 

When I first joined here, it was pitched to me as a two year position, but to be honest, I largely ignored that.  I sort of figured that I'll just make myself so totally indespensible that there's no way anyone would want to get rid of me.  Then, after a while, seeing the tech landscape evolving, meeting smart entreprenuers who tackle tough problems, and seeing the business world get changed by the power of the consumer, I've had this growing urge to want to join the fray. 

But really, who doesn't?  (And who isn't?)  I guess what I'm saying is that I'm slowing realizing that this isn't a new thing for me... that this need to be in the middle of the building process goes back to when I used to sit on my bedroom floor and build sprawling LEGO towns.   

So what does that mean for me next?  Well, first off, I'm a big believer in the idea that you don't go anywhere unless you get the job at hand done first.  So, I'll still be nose to the grindstone here at USV working on all the great deals we're looking at now.  (We're closing on two this week... news to come...)  But as I look at these deals, I'll also be looking to try and understand where it is that I think, should the opportunity arise, where I could have the most positive impact by working more closely with a company. 

So, as I write here, don't be surprised if I start doing a lot of self assessement, thinking about my future, etc.   I certainly welcome any conversation from people in a similar boat and I've been talking to a lot of very experienced mentors and peers lately about the subject.