The New York Times featured an article about Fordham's plans for expansion at its Lincoln Center Campus--a plan that includes "a high-rise quadrangle for 10,600 students would be created on the Columbus Avenue end of the superblock between 60th and 62nd Streets, with seven new buildings around a 1.5-acre courtyard."  This plan is far from new, though.  In fact, the sketches that appeared in the article detailing what Fordham Lincoln Center might look like in the future actually appeared much earlier in The Ram--the University's student run newspaper in 2000.  (I'm pretty sure it was 2000, because I think it was related to Fordham in the new Millenium.  Anyway... I'm quite sure I've seen this before).
If I remember correctly, the plans also included moving the undergraduate business school to Lincoln Center as well.  As much as I hate to say it, this makes a lot of sense.  While I enjoyed my time at Rose Hill, if you are going to have a more competitive business program, it really needs to be in Manhatten.  That is not to say that you won't have students living at Rose Hill taking classes at the Lincoln Center business school.  Having the classes in the city gives the school better access to local businesses for internships, recruiting, and for having professionals contributing in the classroom with speaking engagements. 
Even if this wasn't in the Ram before, it doesn't take a lot of effort to realize how valuable Fordham's location on 60th and Columbus is, and how underutilized it is in terms of the numbers of students it serves. 
This is ambitious thinking and I hope it comes to fruition.  I have two hopes for the plan, though.  First, and most important, I hope the expansion is done in such a manner that it maintains all of Fordham's traditions--which include a very personal touch with small class sizes, accessable faculty, and a tight community of students.  This also includes maintaining the influence of the Jesuit philosophy.  I hope expansion of the student body doesn't dilute the amount of people interested in what this philosophy brings to bear.
Second, I hope that the alumni start opening their pockets when those little envelopes come in the mail when the school is headed in the right direction like this.  The percentage of alumni who donate, especially relative to the number of people who got some kind of scholarships or financial aid, is pathetic.  There's really no excuse for it.  I hate it when people say, "I gave them enough money."  Do you water a plant with a gallon of water the first day you get it and then forget about it?  These percentage giving rates count bigtime in college rankings and the school, which doesn't run off of its endowment like Harvard or Princeton, really needs the money as it ramps up to become a premier institution.  If the giving rates go up, then Fordham can actually see these ambitious plans through.  Then, all of the sudden, you got a degree from the premier Catholic college in the country.  What's that worth to you?  Is it worth $100 a year for the rest of your life?  Sounds like a lot?  $5000 over the next 50 years doesn't sound like a lot to me, especially if all of the sudden you went to the 25th ranked school in the country (That's where Georgetown is right now...  Fordham is 70th.)  Anyway... enough of my grandstanding.  This move is good for Fordham.  I just hope they do it right and that the alumni give the school the support it needs to get there.

So I received a couple more comments on the 10 Reasons to go Short on Second Life post and now I have a new line of thinking here... but first I want to make a couple of points.   Rick Schettino wrote:

"...And kids will be as deft in VR as today's kids are in MySpace or YouTube. Second Life is a whole lot more fun and adventurous than ANY "flat" entertainment centered website..."

Thinking that, because a technology is superior, that the product has more utility is certainly logical, but I don't think it's accurate.  That's the same kind of thinking that makes people think that voice chat is better than IM, and so far, voice on the web hasn't even made a dent in IM usage.  Sometimes, "old" technology has a usefulness that would disappear if upgraded.  I like that IM is just text.  I like that I can partially ignore it and still have a conversation with someone who is also partially ignoring me.  I like that I can talk to 8 people at a time on IM which I cannot mentally do on Skype.  It's not old or broken, it is what it is and it works.

Flatness is not the bottleneck in MySpace or YouTube, it's portability, relevence filtering, etc.  If I could get the people most like me or videos I love recommended to me in a better way, that's infinately more useful than a more complex 3-D profile or viewing experience.  We talk about the same thing in the avatar space.  Are there better looking avatars out there rendered in 3-D?  Absolutely.  Is that going to make people want them more?  I think the jury is still out on that, but certainly the simpleness of their avatars doesn't seem to be hurting Habbo Hotel, for example.  If I had a choice between a lightweight, portable avatar that could do more stuff, versus a heavier one that was less interactive, but 3-D and rendered in video or something else besides Flash, I think I gotta go with the little flat people... at least that's the bet that Oddcast is making. 

On more point from Rick, who I'm glad commented along with Stephanie is keeping me thinking on this.  Commenters rule!

"It's not for everyone yet, SL won't benefit a wallpaper manufacturer as much as it will an energy drink brand."

Absolutely...  and marketers need to realize that it works better for some than others.  However, I think that's one of my fundamental issues with it as a platform versus the web.  Wallpaper manufacturers can buy Google keywords and let the web work for them just as much as Coke can build out a whole music video website that has an immersive brand experience.  The web as a platform works for everyone and if you have a platform that is only going to be useful to a subset, that hinders the experience.  When I needed a replacement pen for my Toshiba tablet, I googled "Toshiba replacement tablet pen" and got paid results that I clicked through and bought.  There's nothing about 3-D that could have helped my experience.

The experience that I will certainly bet on, and the original point behind my post is that, fundamentally, I do believe in a better merging of the web and reality, but I don't think it comes from building a reality on the web... in VR.  I think it comes with assitive technology that is useable in the outside world.  I'd rather walk around in a real showroom with a pair of glasses that gives me Robocop/Terminator like product information based on what I'm looking at versus sitting at my computer walking through a virtual showroom.  VR is going to make it's way into my shades before it pulls us all further away from reality online, in my opinion.  When I'm walking down the street, and I look in a store, I should be able to say, "Do they have red socks?" and get an answer because my shades know what I'm looking at and they are connected to the store's database.  I want my shades to plot my course in reality with little assitive arrows to the nearest Jamba Juice.  That's were the web and reality get merged... not in a big constructed experience online, in my opinion.  That's where marketers can spend better dollars...    with floating coupons over there offline stores in real life targeted to me.  Of course, we're a little ways a way, but not that far. 

But that wasn't the point of my post, actually.

• SIMILE | Timeline
  (tags: timeline widget a ajax)

When industries change, new job opportunities are created.  Nowhere is that more true than in digital media right now.  A lot of times we complain about the lack of adapting going on in this space and how content players and brands are slow to move, but there's a real human resource bottleneck going on.  New trends are creating needs for unique combinations of skills and knowledge, and having a real tough time finding them.  Here's a set of positions that are sure to be very lucrative going forward.

Commercial Online Video Production:  There's been tremendous growth in the amount of online video content and it's only going to continue.  About half the online population has the means to capture video and only about 11% actually uploads it anywhere.  In some way shape or from, that's all going to be monetized.  If you think that all of the TV commercial folks are going to thrive in the world of the 7 second spot, think again.  Not only that, but with better targeting and plummeting costs of producing content, more and more commercials will get made to uniquely suit each audience.  If I were to start up a creative business now, I'd start making cool video commercials tailored for the web.  Demand is sure to skyrocket and the tolerance for branded messages interrupting my video consumption will be very low, so they have to be great.

Brand and social network savvy designers are going to be king in the sponsored world of free content.  In a skinnable web, pimpin' ain't easy, especially when you've got to mix in a brand that isn't normally associated with coolness.  Demand for branded MySpace layout desginers should be at an all time high.  Some Winamp skins are a great example of branded design whose look and feel is so attractive, that people actually demand your brand.  AIM has opened up Triton to interactive and branded immersive backgrounds and YouTube is sure to have more sponsored channels coming.  It takes a certain kind of eye to manipulate the elements of a brand, retain their brand identity, but make them fit seemlessly in a visually appealling way to the irregular, non-IAB standard world of sponsored channels, skins, widgets, bling, etc.  Oh, and did I mention they can't look like an ad?  PS, if you can do this well, I might have a job for you at Oddcast.

Interaction architects.  Digital advertising isn't flat anymore.  More and more brands are building environments that resemble web applications or casual games than they do banner ads.  That's kind of a different animal than a lot of production folks are used to, particularly when we're trying to stay social media optimized at the same time.  Where does the embed code go?  What should the user see when we're processing their video?  Does every creation have it's own unique URL?  Development of a good interactive site is sounding a lot more like you're trying to build YouTube than an ad.  I think a lot of former information architects and developers would be well served to look into working at advertising firms to help build environments that make sense to the end user.  Developing a branded application with the end user in mind, like you would try and build a useful online service, can often end up with a different result than something meant to promote a brand identity first.

Social media caretakers.  Who follows the buzz on the web about your product?  Who answers the comments on your blog and comments on the blogs of others?  Who accepts and adds friends on your brand's MySpace page?  Being in a conversational and social environment has created a whole new set of tasks.  Its easy to think that you an hire a college intern to do all of these little things, but keep in mind that these interactions are often the most visable and forward facing part of your business to end users.  Its a balance. Theres a need for someone not so senior that they won't roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty but someone experience enough to keep strategic messages in tact and also know when to run things up the flagpole to upper management.

What's consistant about all of these positions is the presense of three basic, human, non-automatable, non-outsourceable skills:

1) Communication skills
2) Creativity
3) Ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes

Know how to express yourself, be constantly generating new ideas, and realize that you aren't  representative of anyone but yourself.

• feed on feeds - about
  (tags: rss)
• SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check - Valleywag
  (tags: secondlife skeptic fordhamclass myoddcast)

• Lastings Milledge Facts
  (tags: funny mets)

One thing I haven't meantioned a lot is that I like to play pool.  I tend to play at Amsterdamn on the Upper West Side or Slate on 21st.  I'm a bit streaky, but I can hold my own.  Perhaps nextNY should do a pool tourney sometime.. 

I found this on College Humor:

It's widely accepted that a good strategy in Monopoly is to buy just about everything you land on. 

So, here's a thought question for you...   Given where Google's share price and multiple is right now, why wouldn't they do pretty much the same thing, particularly with revenue generating businesses? 

Just about any profits they could buy that are trading cheaper than their own stock would be, even growth stocks.

So where's the natural limit to this idea?  Surely they can't integrate everything all at once, but when you've got this much house money to play with, is there a really good reason not to go all out on an acquisition strategy.  YouTube should be just the beginning.

Starting later on in the afternoon yesterday, I had an unprecendented streak of productivity around the apartment.

Remember the vacuum cleaner that Mom offered me?  (Even though Mom was virtual, the vacuum was indeed real.)  Well, it turned out that she had tossed it in the garbage before the offer and pulled it back from the curb when I said I wanted it.  When it was on the curb, someone cut the electric cord off of it, meaning some vacuum cleaner surgery was necessary.

I give you, Frankencord...

I also put up vertical blinds, too.  This should have been a lot easier, except for the fact that all of the window and door frames in my apartment are metal.  This makes putting anything up in a window a huge chore.  I have a cobalt tipped drill bit for this, but the frames are hollow on the other side, so there's nothing to catch the screws.  I came up with a clever way to hang the blinds despite the fact that the screws aren't really anchored at all... I'll spare you the details.

After the blinds were done, I put up Christmas lights, which came out great because, coincidently like my old apartment, I'm on a corner due to an adjoining garage.  That gives me windows on three sides actually, two which are visable from the street.

I even have them set on a timer, so from 6:30PM to 2AM, there are lights on 75th Street. 

I sort of want to just leave them up year 'round, like in my college dorm room, but I guess that's not really socially acceptable when you're an adult.

In addition to the cleaning and window dressing, I also did some cooking...  a new batch of tomato sauce.  Some of this is going to wind up on a pizza, because I was at Cangiano's over the weekend with my grandmother so I bought some pizza dough.  I have some great pizza pans for this, too. 

This is what happens on winter weekend days without kayaking.  Things actually get done.

One of the most productive meetings I've had since joining Oddcast was one that I was probably the most cynical about at first.  Adi, our CEO, invited me and our VP of Biz Dev to sit down for an hour and just talk about all of our "nightmare scenarios" of all of the worst things that could possibly happen to our consumer product.   I'm a bit headstrong and when I think I'm headed in the right direction, I barrel forward without looking back too much.  So, to reevaluate everything so late in the game seemed to me to be a little bit of a waste of time.

I was completely wrong.  We dove down into the very basic functionality of the product and more than kicked the tires on every assumption we made... we deflated them.  What resulted was some of our best thinking about new ideas for the product and not simply ways that we could hedge our bets, but small things we could do to ensure that our product has as broad an appeal as possible.   It was truly out of the box thinking and it got us very excited about our new ideas.   

Obviously, you need conviction to your ideas, but conviction doesn't mean burying your head in the sand either.  It's important to be willing to turn everything on its head once in a while just to make sure you're still anchored in reality and that your thinking isn't just the rationalization of momentum.

• 'Second Life Liberation Army' Targets Brands · MarketingVOX
  How long before the "I got shot by the Second Life Liberation Army Outside of American Apparel" t-shirts come out?
  (tags: secondlife mevertising)

Fantasy baseball draft at Mondial Tiles.

I have a closet with three Container Store shelves, each with two large folded piles on it.  The piles are:

• Nice t-shirts
• Grey and black t-shirts that used to be nice, but are maybe a little faded, so they're good for wearing underneath button down shirts
• Decent gym t-shirts
• Not so nice gym t-shirts and things with sleeves cut off
• Gym shorts and pants
• Random shirts with specific usage, like ZogSports t-shirts, softball jerseys, etc.

I have no sweaters.  I always lock the bathroom door, even when I'm in the apartment alone.  I bounce my right leg up and down when I'm sitting without even noticing it.  I hate soccer.  I fall asleep before my head hits the pillow and would easily sleep uninterrupted for 12 hours every night if it wasn't for my alarm clock.  I do not trust the snooze button...  I reset the alarm even just five minutes from now just to be on the safe side.  I have a fear of heights.  I'm eating craisins right now.  I once broke down in a U-Haul truck in Mechanicsville, PA.  Ironically, there was no one around to help us until the next day.  I nearly pass out over needles.  I have a discoloration on my right hand where I tore off a big chunk of skin playing street football when I was 15.  I broke the toilet in my old apartment by standing on the tank to weatherproof the windows.  The whole tank tore from the floor and toppled over.  I managed to get it back, but it was sitting precariously for a month before I left.  Seattle is the next major US city I would like to visit that I haven't been to. 

When I yawn, my eyes tear uncontrollably.  That's my que to go to bed.

This is a must read for anyone interested in mobile.

Jason Devitt has a three part series on the market forces that might bust open the carrier crunch.

Part I.

Part II.

Part III.

You should really check out Ask City. 

Links to businesses, movies, events...  And I can draw, annotate, and put my own pins in the map.  Didn't think anything would get me off Google Maps but one use and I'm hooked.

Link to pizza, 7423 Ridge Blvd, Brooklyn, NY 11209 - Ask Business Search

You should really check out Ask City. 

Links to businesses, movies, events...  And I can draw, annotate, and put my own pins in the map.  Didn't think anything would get me off Google Maps but one use and I'm hooked.

Link to pizza, 7423 Ridge Blvd, Brooklyn, NY 11209 - Ask Business Search

nextNY is now 459 members on a listserv...all coming together in about 10 months.  We've averaged about an event a month, and probably somewhere in the neighborhood of averaging 45-50 attendees per event.  Already, there's a nextChicago and talk of the next concept appearing in other cities.  A lot of people have asked me how it got put together, so I thought I'd share.  Sorry if this is a bit long and rambling, but that's a lot like how the group unfolded.  It wasn't a part of some big master plan... it evolved.

First thing I did was to e-mail a small group of about 5-10 people who represented a good cross section of the community...  people that I had met in person on several occasions.  I wanted to get ideas and feedback from people involved in the NYC tech community from a number of different perspectives.  These weren't A-listers that hardly knew me...   They were people I knew I could count on to be enthusiastic about passing on the word about what we were doing.   The first few people you involve really need to be enthusiastic. 

Our first goal was just to get people together in person socially.  From the beginning, I think everyone involved agreed that it was important to build real social ties within the group before we attempted any kind of grand undertaking. 

Everyone involved e-mailed me to RSVP and I just put everyone on a big "BCC" list.  When the number of people responding got out of hand, I moved pretty quickly to a Google Groups list.  That accomplished two things.  First, I didn't want our messaging to just be about me broadcasting.  The group should be able to talk within itself rather than just get talked to.  Plus, that allowed everyone in the group to set their own participation level.  Most people get every group e-mail as it comes in, but some get digests.

Here's how the listserv works for us.  The listserv is private and you have to get approved by a moderator to join.  Sound sort of walled garden?  Maybe, but I think granting access to people's inboxes should require some level of oversight.  That being said, every single person who asks for approval gets it and the only thing I do sometimes is to respond back to a generic e-mail address and ask them who they are.  I think it's good to watch who is coming into the group--first to make sure they are actual humans and second to direct them to others they might want to get connected to.  (Or just to say a friendly hello.)   Having a second or third admin is important, too, even if they're not doing approvals.  You never want a situation where someone can say that you were unilaterally dictating any policy.

This fits with some basic guiding principals that I've tried to stick with:

• The group is owned and run by the community.  We have no board, no officers.  Everyone's voice gets to be heard.
• That being said, it's not exactly majority rules, because we try to stay clear of voting.  Voting doesn't always work, because not everyone will bother to vote and some people put more work into the group than others, so the question of whose vote counts more would come into play.  The group is really driven by legwork and feedback.  If someone has an interest in something, they do the work to lay it out and gather support.  Social capital is a big factor.  Generally, if someone gets a lot of pushback on something, it's not worth costing yourself a lot of social capital to try and push ahead against the expressed wishes of the group.  It works amazingly well.  At least three of our events were completely driven by members of the group who just announced an interested, gathered support, and made it happen.
• So far, we've been able to avoid anything to do with money, with the exception of renting gym space for our dodgeball tournament.  No membership fees and no other charges for admission.  Our event spaces have been donated as have been our web properties.  I think when money is involved at the group administration level, it dictates that you need more hierarchy and structure, and when you start building that in, you leave open the possibility for more disagreement on how things should be run. 
• Commitment to offline.   I think it is important for a group like this to run regular in-person events.  It doesn't matter if you only get 10 people, but make it a point to try and do something every month... and commit to it over the long term.  Don't do two, see how it goes, and give up.  Not everyone wants to take part in a listserv, but if you have something concrete to direct people to, it helps when you're trying to spread the word.  "Hey, come show up to our next event on xx date..."   The participants will come and go, but you'll grow a stronger core group over the longer term that sticks with it that you'll get to know even better.
• Everyone in the group should feel like they can lead any effort. 

Ok... back to technology.   One thing about a group of techies on a listserv is that you can debate which technology to use forever, and often people want to use the latest and most complicated thing, when sometimes all you need is drop dead simple.  For us, I think the best technology decision we ever made was to make the site out of a wiki.  Our website is built on top of Stikipad and it has served us well.  Anyone can create a page for any purpose and we do all our event RSVPs from it.   The website was created by volunteers from the group who offered to design and implement it.  My part?  I secured the domain name.  It was rough, I know... but I pulled through it.

We just launched our blog a short time ago even though blogging was something we had discussed a long time ago.  We voted a blog down initially, b/c we didn't want to broadcast quite yet before we even knew what our goals were or whether or not the group would have any staying power.  Plus, we were avoiding the question of "who is allowed to blog".    That question came up again, and we've opened it up to anyone, but we do have a blog policy.  We encourage members to discuss what they'd like to write about, because we're very conscious about people writing things that may not be representative of the group.  So far, we've done more covering and promoting than opining and that's probably the better way to go.  Opinion pieces are probably better left to the personal blogs of members.  Oh, and we used SquareSpace for the blog, which wasn't "standard" in the tech world, but it's a NYC based company and it has served us very well so far.  More so than what people want to use, you need to pick a platform that is liked by the person who is actually going to set it up, because blogs don't create themselves, plus they all pretty much work in a similar way.

On the name...    There are two things about a name that I was looking for.  One, something that implyed a younger group.  That's where "next" comes in... it implies the future, the next generation...whatever.  Also, the word tech is not in the title and that was on purpose.  Technology, particularly in NYC, also needs to encompass digital media and I wanted to make sure that we got folks from the design, advertising, marketing and PR worlds as well, because it's really about the whole community, not just the builders of technology.

One thing I got a lot of questions upfront about was the whole "young people" thing.  In fact, I got summarily booed at a NY Tech Meetup (which I'm proud to say) when I mentioned age.  We don't have any specific age limits and since then, I've sidestepped the question by saying "up and coming".  That's a better way to put it and actually closer to what I intended.  I wanted to meet other people who were looking up the ladder... who were trying to figure out what the next thing was going to be.   We always like meeting more experienced people, and they come as speakers to our events, but having "up and comers" makes the group more about learning, advice, helping bring other people up, and less about just making business contacts.  In a way, it was sort of selfish, because that's what I was looking for at the time.

We also try to make sure that our events reflect our stated focus on participation by the community.  Even when we invite expert speakers, we invite them to "Community Conversations" and put them in the audience to help drive discussion, not sit on a panel and broadcast. 

Last thing.  I'll repeat one thing.  The group would not survive if it had to live and die with the leadership of one person.  Everyone in the group really needs to feel empowered to initiate and follow through while at the same time, keeping an open dialogue with the group.  I'd like to think, in fact I know, that if I walked away from nextNY right now, it wouldn't skip a beat and that's the best thing I could have hoped for it.  A lot of people have told me, "Hey, you know, you could really turn this into something much bigger for yourself."  The truth is, I couldn't.  If I did, I wouldn't have all these great people wanting to participate.  They're participating because of their interest in the community. 

Also, what could be bigger than meeting 400+ enthusiastic local folks who share your interests?  That's pretty big, to me.

I hope you found this helpful.  Feel free to start your own next community in your area.  We don't own any rights to anything and we actively promote active community building, no matter where you are. 

• The Blogging Times » Quest For Web 2.0 Person(s) of Substance: The Husband/Wife VC Blogger Teams
  (tags: couples vc nyc fredwilson marriage)
• MySpace to Apple: Fix that worm | Tech News on ZDNet
  (tags: myspace apple worm)
• Brand Autopsy: The Results of Refuting versus Relishing
  According to an Adweek article from Sept. 4th, “Mentos has attracted over 300 submissions, which have been viewed more than 400,000 times. The Coke Show, which wrapped up its first contest last week, got only 35 videos, with none getting more than 2,000
  (tags: marketing video viral youtube fordhamclass)

Hopefully, enough of you stick around so that this sticks, but for now, my Feedburner RSS feed count is showing four digits for the first time.  Yup...  1,012 readers. 

Now each of you just need to recommend this blog to 150 other people and we'll catch TechCrunch in no time.  :)

Actually, the thing that always gets me is that I have no idea who most of you are.  So, like I've done once before...   Here's your opportunity to introduce yourself, particularly if you've been lurking this whole time.

Please feel free to announce your presence in the comments...  Tell us who you are, how you got here, what you do... feel free to link to your own company, blog, flickr photos, last.fm page, LinkedIn, whatever...     I'm always happy to meet more readers.

And thanks for reading!   

USS Intrepid - Departing, originally uploaded by tom_hoboken.

Nice work Tom from Hoboken!