Our Jeep Compass Karaoke Site won Adobe's Site of the Day today.    I can't really sing, but if anyone sends me their performances, I'll be happy to post them!  Charlie@oddcast.com

Last year, I broke two Treo 650's, and got my camera stolen.  Today, I sunk to a level of idiocy I am capable of, thankfully, ever so rarely.  We opened up at Pier 40 today and it got pretty choppy in the afternoon.  I had my Fisher C-1 in my pocket and decided to go out for a paddle.  I was on a high sit on top boat that kept me pretty dry.  However, I decided it would be a good idea to try and actually land the boat on the dock by catching a wave. 

Not smart.

I got about 3 feet up on the dock and just hung there for a moment before it capsized.  I immediately realized my camera was in the water and pulled it up and out as soon as I could, ignoring the boat, which got swept under Pier 40.  The camera was fried and the boat lost in the depths beneath the pier.  Not all was lost though.  I was able to scoot underneath the pier and retrieve the boat with a tow rope.

Also, more importantly to me, the Flash card was ok, too, so I didn't lose the pics I had taken.

So, anyone have any suggestions as to what camera I should buy?   I guess I want 6+ MP, small, very good video and I'm somewhat price sensitive.  If anyone has links to pics they took with a specific camera, and videos, please post them and the name of the camera.  Thanks!

  5 Star Treatment 
  Originally uploaded by ceonyc.

For our VIP guests, like Seth Godin, we provide an extra level of service here at Union Square Ventures.  Tommy Cohen will carry your hat and coat for you...even your liar's nose.

So DTUT has become a “they” company.   

They’ve killed the wireless internet after 7PM.  I asked the guy behind the counter what the reason was, and he said that it “ruined business”, because the laptop freeloaders would order the minimum amount or nothing at all.  I looked around.   I’ve never seen the place so empty on a Friday night.  I wanted to just reach across the counter and explain to him all about incremental profits and overhead, but, I realized that it would probably be to no avail.  Counter Guy doesn’t care.  Now, perhaps it’s true that the people using the wifi do order less, but the point is, they order something, and, there is incrementally no cost to keeping the wifi on all the time.  The only legitimate financial argument you could make is that, somehow, the overabundance of laptop freeloaders drives away higher paying customers—that the place is already at capacity and it ruins the mix.  Of course, that’s not the case.  People rarely walk out of the place because it’s too crowded.  I mean, sometimes its packed, but like right now, its pretty empty.  (I’m typing this on Word because I already bought my green tea without realizing the wifi deal.)  Do I usually only order a green tea while I’m here?  Sure.  But…  so what?  What’s the margin on a $2.25 green tea?  90%?   In other words, at eight visits a month, I pay for half the wifi myself.  Do I take up the space of an otherwise higher paying customer?  No, definitely not.  In fact, the wifi is really the only reason why I come here in the first place.   And, in fact, one thing they fail to take into consideration is that because I’m here all the time freeloading off the wifi, it becomes my central hangout place and I’m used to coming here.  So, when I’m looking for a place to go to with friends, this is also my number one stop.  Now, however, I’m annoyed, and their ridiculous retraction of the free wifi has created ill will.  I’m less likely to come here the next time.  In fact, I’m less likely to come here at all.  I have a feeling this won’t last.  Although, perhaps it will, because the downtown location of DTUT just closed, so perhaps they’ll run this place into the ground before they have a chance to change the policy.

This afternoon, I finally closed on my new co-op apartment...  and only nine days after I moved out of my old apartment.  :\ 

Thanks to Joy for letting me crash in her empty pad while she was away.

Apartment and neighborhood tour to come soon, but for now, I'm just glad to be in my own place.  So, over the next few weeks, I'll be getting another couch, a bedroom set, and some office furniture.  I may sit in reception at work, but in my own place, I have an office!!  Woooo.  I'll be painting, too.  I'd say it will be ready for a housewarming party by the end of the month. 

I'm sorry...  That's just way too morbid.  If I was a dad, there's no way I let my kid get into that guy's car.

When we moved from Pier 26 due to the renovation (total destruction) project that leveled the Downtown Boathouse, we moved most of our stuff up to the shiny new boathouse at Pier 96 at 56th Street.  We didn't move everything there, though, and we still wanted to maintain a downtown presence if we could.  So, we rented some space at the south end of Pier 40 (at Houston St.), but it took almost all summer to get the right permits to put a dock in.

Finally, this Saturday morning, the Downtown Boathouse will open up the Pier 40 location and make its triumphant, if not a little disorganized, return to downtown.  You have to walk down the pier a little ways on the south side to see us.  We don't have as many boats there as we used to at Pier 26, and all of our trips will still run out of Pier 96.  But if you're used to dropping by on us at Pier 26 because it was close by, come see us on Saturday to see what we're up to.  Even better, come help out!  I'll be there from 9-5:30, but the closer you come to either end, the more you risk that we'll either be just getting organized or closing early because no one showed.  :(     Hope to see you there!

I've been working really hard today, so I took a ten (err..  20...) minute break to make a Chuck Norris avatar for my sidebar.  More reasons to reorg the sidebar...    I gotta find a way to make him randomly repeat different Chuck Norris facts.

When I shaved off my facial hair, TONS of people came out and told me how much better they thought I looked without it and how they never really liked it in the first place.

Why the hell didn't they say anything before?

I had facial hair in some form of another for like four years!!

Maybe I wasn't listening? 

Oh well, what's done is done.  Its obvious.  My layout is for suck.  Message received loud and clear.

I will change it.  Black background: gone.

So, now I need more ideas, more feedback.

I REALLY don't want to have the generic Typepad page look.  I want something different.  It doesn't even have to be that good, frankly, just different.

How about this:

I have been beaten.  Suggestions welcome.  This took me like three minutes to do in paint.  If anyone takes the time to do a little rendering, I'll post it.

One thing I'm going to miss about being at Union Square Ventures is being a part of the conversations that inspire blog posts on Fred's blog.  Fred, Ben and Caterina are talking today about something we were talking about at Union Square Ventures for months... the idea that you could, and maybe should, do business development without ever talking to an actual business development person. 

We were trying to help get Indeed to be featured on an online social network, and then we noticed Dice.com's functional ads with a job search box on Fred's blog.  The social network came back and told us pretty much what Caterina says she told QOOP... use existing inroads to build a path into our service.  In Flickr's case, it was an API, and in our case, they said to run a functional ad powered by the information available in their member database.   

Feedburner accomplished something similar with Typepad.  Instead of doing a distribution deal from a position of weakness on day one, they built their product so that it provided something really useful to the users, RSS stats and ads, that worked with Typepad's feeds.  By the time Typepad agreed to integrate their service, I'd say the bulk of the power Typepad users were already using Feedburner.  Porting my Typepad feed users over was kind of an afterthought.  It became a need to do deal requested by the community which was alreasy using Feedburner.  There was no guesswork as to whether or not it would be worth it.

There are a few key driving forces behind the fact that any of this is possible:

• Interoperability: APIs are making "integration" a matter of plug and play versus recoding anything.
• "Open" for business: Even Facebook is opening up...    Its one thing to create an API from a technical point of view.  Its another to realize that your service can become much more robust and it is in your capitalistic interest to open up to others creating services around you.   I mean, where would MySpace be without the Free MySpace Layout Nation?
• Word of mouth:  Discovery and viral marketing from the ground up is now a legitimate distribution strategy.  I mean, I don't remember seeing any ads or press releases about Pandora.  Even my non-techy friends found it somehow and just said, "Wow this is fuckin' cool...  Hey, did you see this?"   Sure a good biz dev deal can get faster distribution (unless it takes 3 months to do the deal, of course...) but I dunno...  Web 2.0 moves pretty fast.

So what exactly is the place of business development on the web?

Well, I'll give you the other side of it. 

• API's really only go so far...  and they're designed that way, lest you suck the service out of a service.  Certain levels of integration, by design, require negotiated business relationships.  Its nice, however, when you can only focus on the business relationships that are pulled to the table by actual usage.
• Not all the doors are open.  Google's placement and integration into Firefox or XM's appearence on AIM Triton require a few lines of code and hardwiring.  Not every site is open, either.  I'd love to get avatars into every social network out there, but not all of them are as open as MySpace.  I think they'll all become more and more open, but its going to be a long time before I can put my guy in a suit on my LinkedIn profile.  (Come on Reid, how cool would that be?!)
• Content.  Usergen content is easy to mashup, but unfortunately, if I want to use the Goverator's "I'll be back" as my avatar's away message when I'm on vacation, I'm sure I'm probably supposed to pay someone.  Involve licensed content in new and creative implementations, and you're bound to need a bucket of lawyers, some softball bats, and some very crafy and patient biz dev people to get it moving.

MORE:

Someone just asked me if I do any business development in my current role at Oddcast.  I have to admit, part of me wants to say, "Yes, I develop business by trying to be a great product manager."  That wouldn't be the whole truth, though, because there are particular relationships where advanced integration with a cool partner would go a long way to creating significant value for users.  Still, right now I'm basically head down helping to create and if I do this right, consumer distribution will be a function of user value.

Track this meme and add to it:

http://del.icio.us/tag/bizdev2.0

If I met you at a cocktail party and you turned to me and said, "How do I get someone more important than you to listen to me and to pass on what I'm saying," I think I'd prety much walk away right there.

So when Nick Carr rants about how difficult it is to get "A-listers" to link to him and calls its "open and democratic and egalitarian" nature "an innocent fraud", I'm sort of offended... on behalf of all the onesie and twosie readers of really small blogs and all the bloggers with little or no traffic who keep writing. 

When I teach blogging at Fordham's MBA program, I always stress that its not about getting traffic, but its about making sure you're available to be discovered.  Take this blog about custom labeling.  You think he really cares about links from "A-listers"?  He just wants to be known to the
custom labeling community...  his community.   What's great about blogs is that your community will define itself, because discovery is so easy.  Stake a claim on Technorati, tag your posts, and make sure you ping the right servers and the right people will find you.  So, if Peter only has 15 subscribers for his label blog, its probably the right 15 people and I'm sure engaging in a dialogue with them is worth it.

You don't have to influence everyone... and sometimes just influencing one or two people in a meaningful way can change your life, your business, your career, etc.  That, to me, is what blogging is all about.

I like MikeCrunch's take on this as well...  that its all about the power of the community.  Its not about your blog or my blog, but if word of mouth gets passed around that cocktail party, and we're all talking about it, that's very powerful.

I also think that blogging, if you really want it to have an effect, on you or others, needs to be a lifestyle.  I don't mean that you have to post everyday... but, for example... I'm very forthright about the fact that I blog.  Its on my outgoing e-mails as a footer link.  I know so many people who hide their blogs, but one of the most rewarding things is when someone who just happened to get an e-mail from me, six months later, sees me in person and says, "Hey, what you wrote the other day really made me think...   that you're completely wrong."

Can't win 'em all...   

IAC just bought a majority stake in Connected Ventures, which owns Vimeo, College Humor, Busted Tees, and most importantly, BigShocker.

While I hope that all of these sites continue to grow and develop, I hope IAC lets Zack, Jakob, Josh and Ricky loose on some of their other properties, too, because then these really becomes a fantastic deal.  All of these big media companies are buying up these cool social sites, but until the DNA of these sites gets spliced with the rest of the company, they'll just be purely financial acquisitions, which would miss a big opportunities.

Way to go!  Another NYC startup company hits it big.

nextNY is holding its first ever Pitch Camp.

Here are the details...  (As of this morning, there are 11 spots left... you must RSVP on the site.)

Pitch Camp – An opportunity to hone your message and delivery for pitches to investors, customers and partners.

August 16th, 7-9 PM

Columbia Business School
Room 330 in Uris Hall [map ]
3022 Broadway
New York, NY 10027

Format:
Hour 1 – 6 teams get 2-3 minutes for an elevator pitch. Feedback is provided by the judges, and teams then give another pitch based on feedback.

Hour 2 – 1 team presents a full 20 min investor pitch (10 min presentation and 10 min Q&A). After this, we spend 40 minutes breaking down the pitch and Q&A session in depth with the coaches. While individual parts might be repeated to emphasize a point, the entire pitch will not be delivered again at the end.

Pitch Coaches:
1.  Jay Rand
2.  Alan Kelley
3.  Ken Berger
4.  Kush Wadhwa
5.  David Rose

I'm now the top ranked Charlie O'Donnell on Google, surpassing the Wheel of Fortune announcer.  That's gotta hurt.

40 years on nationally syndicated television and he gets outranked by some punk VC blogger. 

You know he's probably Googled himself and seen this, too.  It was a long run, Charlie, but it had to end sometime.  Sorry, buddy.

New York City snowfall tally as of this morning...   13 inches.  Dorean came by to play in the snow around 11 last night and we threw snow at each other like eight year olds and then went over to Carl Shulz Park.

Her dad built an igloo on 86th Street with his snowblower, and of course, I had to get in it.  The snow wasn't piled to high yet, as you can tell from my car, which we wrote on.  I think it continued through the night, though, and this is how things looked outside my window this morning.

____________________________________________________________________

I've posted about this before, but its come up again.  Last Election Day, I tried to doublecheck my polling place by e-mailing the NYC.gov website.  They finally got back to me in late January.

Well, today, they replied again, for good measure I suppose...

"SORRY FOR THE DELAY, YOUR POLL SITE IS:PS 290, LOCATED AT 311 E 82 ST."

And they want us to believe they'll figure out electronic voting without a hitch?

This would be funny if it wasn't true.   On Election Day, as I was walking out of my house, I wanted to doublecheck my polling place.  I was pretty sure I knew where it was, but it was my first time voting in my home district (no more trekking back to Brooklyn.)  Anyway, the NYC voting website had an e-mail address for location inquiries, so I e-mailed them.  Today, on January 26th, I finally received a response...

Waiting for friends across from MSG, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

..with Jamba in hand.

I'm still not exactly sure what Userplane does, but I know every page that MySpace loads seems to call a userplane server.  Seems to be a pretty integral part of the system, which makes AOL's acquisition really interesting.

I hope their social networking know-how can provide a nice boost to AIMpages.  I remember back when doing your AOL profile was the 1998 version of MySpace and still feel like anything powered by AIM has the potential to be a great social network.  Adding folks who have been doing it for five years can only be a good thing for Team Yellow Guy.

Or at least, that's what I'm worried about with the Mets.  We've been on cruise control all year, and will probably cruise right into the World Series (although if Maddux keeps that coccoon in his poll, maybe there will be a formidable NL competitor).   But if we show up the way we showed up last night, we're going to get our asses mailed back to us in little Etsy knit pouches.

This Nady trade really blew...   You mean we couldn't have gotten a Roberto Hernandez quality reliever for a smaller bat than Nady?  Or some minor leaguers?  Now with Floyd hurt, we're talking dealing for Sean Green and his salary.   Is he that much more of an improvement than Nady?  Nady certainly came a lot cheaper and had more upside.  I thought Xavier Nady might have turned out to be this team's Kevin MacReynolds...  not a huge bat, but a solid and consitant one.  Oh well...   so much for that.