Excited about meeting folks at SXSW
I'm so glad I signed up for SXSW. Not only does the content seem really interesting, but there are going to be some great people there who I've never gotten to meet in person. I'm really excited to hear danah speak and to finally meet up with Rob May from BusinessPundit. I've been reading BP and chatting with Rob by e-mail for probably at least two years. Matt Winn will be there, too, but unfortunately, no record of the event will get painted. CultureJunkie Stephanie is also going to be in attendance.
Also, a bunch of nextNYers including Noel, Andrew, and Michael.
Fred's also going to be there and so is Brian, which is good, b/c I owe him a meal.
If anyone wants me to look them up or wants to join me (or others) at particular sessions, I've posted at least through Saturday of where I'm going to be on my PBWiki.
Are you ready for some FOOTBALL!!
My ZogSports Football Team, "Ludacris Speed" is having its first practice today at 2:30 on 52nd/11th. Wooooo.
MyBlogsterbookrtube5.net: Assembling Social Networking 3.0 from the 10 best attributes of the social networks we have now
So Cisco thinks that by buying Tribe.net after buying Five Across that they're going to connect the world by way of all their big corporate clients.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen. Social networking is not about chips and routers or code or even design. It's people.
So what is the next wave of social networking? What features would the ultimate social network have? I think I can piece it together from what's already out there. Here's what features I think the ultimate social space would have:
- It should be a safe place to play, like Facebook. No spam, no viruses.
- It would allow people to attach themselves wherever they wanted to live, and dynamically by their natural actions, like MyBlogLog. Being social shouldn't be an overt action...it should be the result of social behavior, like blog or photo content consumption.
- It would have to be a platform like MySpace. A place where other people could build on top of it and skin it, but freely, without fear of being shut off and clearly established business rules for participation and revenue sharing
- It needs to work for me alone before it works for the group, like last.fm or Flickr or del.icio.us...all of which display my own content and behavior in an interesting and useful enough way to the individual user that they are worth using even before they get networked up.
- It needs to be focus on communication, like AIM. AIM represents the closest approximation of my real life network... the people I'm most interested in actually chatting with are the people I'm most likely wanting to be connected to.
- It needs to cater to a wide variety of interests and be hyperlocal like Craigslist.
- It should be dynamic and flowing in its display of activity, like Facebook, but in a way that is open to bringing in activity from other places, like SuprGlu.
- It should be conversational, like Google or Yahoo! Groups, but with features that allow conversations to splinter into sidebars.
- It should be mobile... Facebook has a great mobile site... prob the most functional and easy mobile site I've ever been to... Throw in a little Twitter, Dodgeball, GPS, etc...
- It should make my life on the outside, in the meatspace, better, like Meetup... because, as much as I'm jacked in, I don't want to live my life virtually.
Please feel free to add to this in the comments, on your own blogs, etc.
What I Learned at nextNY's "NYCHub"
Last night, nextNY had a great event at the midtown offices of CRESA Partners called NYCHub. (We had originally called it Alley 2.0, but then we found out there was a breakfast earlier in the week with the same name, and so I just left it the name of the wiki page, to avoid confusion. We had some great participates, including Jerry Colonna, Dennis Crowley, Alejandro Crawford, Saul Shapiro, and nextNY's own Darren Herman, and I'll write more about that later, but for now I just want to get my thoughts down and I'll blog more about it over the next few days.
- The need for space in NYC isn't about needing a place to build your business, its about a place to aggregate community and meet other creative people.
- Real estate is a red herring... no one seems to be having a real issue affording to live here. (Bay Ridge as tech center?)
- There is a serious lack of angel funding, and the expertise and guidance that comes with it, in NYC.
- Our "heros" have their volume set too low. We need to put a megaphone in front of the charismatic personalities of NYC and get them out in front of more people.
- We need to refocus on our natural business advantages. Instead of having the next nextNY open houses at AOL or IAC, the "tech" companies, we need to be having them at CBS Interactive, NYT Digital, Digitas, MLB Interactive and Goldman Sachs.
- UPDATE: After reading Darren's post, I realized I forgot the NYC education system as a point. NYC students need to hear a lot earlier about entrepreneurship as an option.
More thoughts on this to come!
Public market, where have you gone?
The market crashed or something yesterday.... or so I heard.
It really is amazing how far I've gotten away from paying attention to public markets. I'm a finance guy by background, and when I was in college, I rode the boom and bust like everyone else.
But, when I graduated in 2001 and took a job in the private equity group at GM, I started to get away from it... focusing more on pricing multiples when we were doing buyouts than anything else. By the time I got to an early stage VC firm, what the public market did from day to day was just a distant memory.
Now that I'm on the product side... who knows. I just toss the max amount allowable (hey, its pretax, why wouldn't you?) into my 401k, set it and forget it. I don't really believe I can "beat the markets" so I allocate based on risk tolerance. I guess as a homeowner I'm investing more in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn real estate than anything else at the moment.
Following the public market, to me, is a fulltime job, and I just don't have the time anymore. I pop on TraderMike every now and then just to see what he's up to, but man, that's a lot to keep up with. Not for me, not anymore. Sorry markets... I'm on autopilot.
Because New York Geek Girls are Where Its At...
CNET Reporter and nextNY Caroline McCarthy is trailing in ValleyWag's VLog TechBabe Contest.
Show some NYC pride and vote for the hometown girl! She's only a hundred or so votes behind, so a big push from this blog should put her over the top.
LinkedIn adds easy search for webmail... Upload your Gmail contacts and connect
More LinkedIn fanboy action at TIGTTB... Now I can just login with my Gmail account and easily connect with all my blog friends. My comment notifications and nextNY listserv e-mails all get sent to Gmail so a lot of my contacts are sitting over there. Every service should have this... death to CSV files!
links for 2007-02-25
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So I asked myself what the strength of a radio station is and the answer’s apparent: promotion. A station can drive a sizable audience to something new online.
I just spent entirely too much money on tickets to the Police at Giants Stadium
I guess its one of those things you have to amortize over a lifetime of just being able to say that I saw them, though... like when Sting dies 30 years from how or whenever... I can tell my kids that I saw the Police play live. I'll also be able to tell them that I saw the Stones, too, but that would be that big a deal b/c they'll still be touring then.
Who knew this guy would be a trendsetter?? I don't remember this in the Tipping Point...
A while back, I posted a blurry picture of a older guy with a huge safety pin sticking out of his collar, and tried to come up with some kind of explanation for it. I think it was one of my funniest posts ever, but maybe my humor isn't for everyone.
Well, it turns out that safety pins in clothing are now the hottest thing.
Who knew one old dude on a train could touch off a fashion phenomena?
Non-commerical use? Yeah, right....who's going to stop me?
There's a lot of talk out there about freemium, premium, etc... but what about products where you have one market that gains real economic value from usage, and another market segment that you really want using it that gains none? Can you offer the same exact product to two different classes of users and simply say that one group has to pay and the other gets it free, and expect no cheating?
That's what "Non commercial use only" implies. There are many examples of software out there that you're supposed to pay for if you're a business, but if you're a person, you can get it for free.
The question is how to enforce that and how many users slip one past the goalie and get away with it? Are most people honest? How do you enforce that?
There's a lot of open source stuff out there that works in this manner, and I'd be curious to see research or first hand accounts of management of this... and potential for "cheating". I mean, are developers and users of open source code just a more respectful and sophisticated class of users?
Could this work if MySpace adopted this model? I think MySpace's issue is that the little guys, like my local pool hall, would be hardpressed to pay thousands of dollars for their page... but what if there was a way to set appropriate pricing... that they had to pay 5 bucks a month for their page. Could you enforce that?
Flat tire on first bike ride to work of 2007
Do you know how hard it is to get a bike on a rush hour express train? I was halfway...couldn't go back.