Meeting up with some MIT MBAs Tonight
There's a group of 10-15 MIT MBAs coming into the city today to learn about opportunities in the NYC tech world. We're meeting up after work for happy hour at Link Lounge by Union Square if you're interested.
Here's the link on NYCtechevents.com.
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Comment of the Day
Re: Founder's Club
"Oh well, you should create your own club. Oh, that's right. You did. And it's open. Nice." - Nate
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Michael Eisner on User Gen Content
"How many times can you watch a kid get hit in the groin?"Answer: Over and over and over again.
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I can haz one feedz, plz: Why I won't Tumblr
I saw David Karp present Tumblr last night and its posting interface was really slick. It even allows people to suck in RSS feeds of other blogs.
I asked David whether he ever intended on making it go from suck to blow.
In other words, I have ZERO interest in maintaining two places for posting, like Fred and Michael are doing. I find it really annoying that I need to subscribe to two feeds for someone for basically the same stuff. I consider Tumblr a blog, mostly because I read it in a feedreader. Sure, I also consume Fred's last.fm feed and his Flickr feed, but I consume it in the context of those sites, which is what I want. I don't want my whole content experience dulled down to RSS...just blogs.
If the best part about Tumblr is the ease and format of posting, why not separate the two? Let me post a Tumblr style post to my Typepad account. Who cares where it's hosted?
Actually, to be honest, Flock already does some of what Tumblr does. I can right click a picture and autopost it to my blog and the same with a link. Still, Tumblr supports more formats.
And if Oddcast was paying attention, they'd propose a way to allow Tumblr users to quickpost a Voki. Perhaps that could be part of the business model there...paid inclusion. If you want a "post an X" button on Tumblr, you can pay them for it. The group of Tumblr users out there is a very influential and cool group...definitely people you want to market your widgets to.
Guess our Founder's Club invites got lost in the mail... happens all the time.
Live from New York, it's Founders Club--with M.C. Hammer | The Social - CNET News.com
Caroline writes, "So who was there? It was more like "who wasn't there?""
Um... Alex and I weren't. We were too busy hitting the refresh button continuously so we could be one of the exclusive group of 400 people to eek our way into to the Tech Meetup.
I mean, who wants to hangout with Lindsay Campbell and Hammer anyway? Yawn. Besides, the horse drawn pumpkin that we were riding in last night got a flat on 23rd, so we never would have made it over in time.
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links for 2007-11-06
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Who says peer production isn't useful??
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Did they make many Web 2.0 investments to begin with?
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I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!
Perfect!
Nothing like buzz over a Yahoo! social network focused on careers to remind you that, even on the day you close some money for angel financing, you have exactly zero seconds in the life of a startup to sit back and relax.
I will absolutely be writing lots about KickStart, but for now, we're focused on building Path 101, not competitor watching.
I have to be honest, though, I thought it was going to be a little bit more of a competitor. Yahoo! seems bent on getting attention away from Facebook and LinkedIn, rather than trying to work with them, and we're happy to let them play that game. A social network around jobs is the last thing we want to be.
That being said, if anyone wants to be my KickStart friend, I'm here. In case you're on mobile RSS, and can't see the link, just remember, the web address is:
http://kickstart.yahoo.com/profile/?QOiLyFc.jlgCr_MDRvWLjlE-
Got it?
Got an invite to an event about shopping for tech gifts "When You Don't Understand Tech"
"We wanted you to know we are holding an exclusive event for New York area bloggers and editors (if you happen to be in town) at Olives Restaurant at the W Hotel Union Square on Wednesday, November 14th and would love for you to attend. Should be a first-class affair sponsored by Staples (who will have all of their latest holiday tech offerings there).
Tory Johnson, of Good Morning America, will be speaking about "How to Shop for Tech Gifts…When You Don't Understand Tech," as well as giving an informal hands-on demonstration of the hottest, newest tech gifts on the market for this holiday season. "
... Jeez... Is my tech blogging that bad??
"You will learn tech lingo, tips on decoding buzzwords, how these can apply to your life, and be the first to check-out these new gadgets to share with your family, friends, and readers!"
Decoding buzzwords? Yeah... like what's that RSS thing everyone keeps talking about? And Web 2.0? Please enlighten me.
Can I send my parents?
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My Leisurely Nine Hour Drive to Boston
TheDay.com - On I-95, A Deadly Day
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon answering e-mails, managing the sending of documents around back and forth to our lawyer about our financing, and speaking with some folks from a university career office.
I did this all from my car, on my phone, parked, engine off, in the middle of I-95, miles behind an accident that blocked traffic in all directions and stuffed up a good portion of the roads in Connecticut. It was one of the most utterly ridiculous driving experiences of my life. Wherever you went, there were cars, cars, and more cars, and backwoods Connecticut roads that couldn't handle the backup. Eventually, I made my way up Rt. 85 up to I-84 and over to Boston, but stop and go most of the way. I'm finally glad that's over.
Still, I fared better than the folks involved in this terrible accident.
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Updated presentation for Path 101
I've been trying to come up with an over presentation that I could just leave on the Path 101 site and forget about--so people who randomly stumbled in could get a better sense of what we were up to. I tried Google Docs, but I really wasn't happy that I couldn't do some kind of animation and walkthrough. Then again, I really don't like adding my voice to these things, even though people seem to like it. So I created an animated presentation on Powerpoint, and used Jing (along with its 5 min limit), to capture it. It exports a Flash SWF, which is now sitting on screencast. I have a few issues with the result, but I don't think it's that bad.
- It might be a little too fast. I'm not sure, because I've seen the presentation a million times. I prob should have combined the team slides into one and I'm sure there's one other slide I can can.
- I really, really wanted to embed it smaller somewhere on the site. I can't for the life of me figure out how to make the Flash smaller. I can make the embed smaller, that's easy, but to squeeze the actual Flash into a smaller embed... no idea.
Here's what I wound up with... any suggestions? Converting to video would have solved that, but I couldn't find a good conversion tool that converted at a good resolution. UPDATE: I used Slideshare at the suggestion of others and it came out MUCH BETTER!! - If I convert it to video, perhaps I'll give in and add a voice track... but it takes a long time to speak through.. and I want to keep it at 5.
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Tags: path101, presentations, flash, ppt
links for 2007-10-31
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This I'm definitely going to get... great idea.
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hmm.. there might be a good sushi place in Bay Ridge after all
Please add me to the "Make my web ads completely effin' irrelevant list"
There may be some legislation in the works to ban tracking of consumers for behavioral targeting on the web.
Great!
It really bothers me when I'm in Gmail, talking about kayaking, and I get offered kayaking gear in an ad.
Or when I'm looking at a small printer for the office, then I go check a free weather site, and there's an ad for a great deal on exactly the kind of printer I'm looking for.
It's invasive and I'm just not going to stand for it anymore. I don't want anyone to know anything about me. I want my ad experience online to be just like my television experience, completely untargeted and irrelevant.
Bring on the mortgage ads!
If AOL/Tacoda gives me a chance to opt in to sharing more about myself, I'm on it.
I'll give them my del.icio.us tags, my Twitter stream, fill out a survey, whatever they need me to do... as long as it doesn't mean MORE ads... just better ones.
This is different than Do Not Call. Phone calls interrupt my day and they're annoying. Web ads... web ads currently suck and they NEED more data about me... and at least on the web I know that you can engineer privacy controls like Tacoda has so that they don't need to know who I am exactly to target me.
Hey privacy wonks... go work on something useful, like helping people opt out of cellphone contracts without paying $200.
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Facebook: Worth a Trillion Billion Zillion Dollars?
Nope.
But if I link to this post, I'll wind up on Techmeme and you'll all get drawn to this post like lemmings.
Silly lemmings.
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Tags: facebook
No More Worlds to Conquer? Hardly!
"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer." - Hans Gruber (Or Plutarch, take your pick.)
Are there stupid ideas out there? Sure.
Are there great ideas out there? Absolutely.
Most of the time, you can hardly tell the difference.
Twitter? At first, I didn't get it. Now, I'd pay for the service.
Flock? Why the hell would I need a new browser? Turns out I did... and it has changed how I work on the web.
I still don't get Tumblr, but everytime I recommend it to a non-techie friend, they eat it up, so I won't go all Bogatin on it and dismiss it out of hand without some additional thought.
Steve Rubel thinks we're in a bubble.
- Companies that have way too much money to spend and can afford to hire big fancy PR firms, show up at conferences, and throw big parties.
- Companies that have no clue how to do marketing, so they just mindlessly throw themselves at the inboxes of popular, but completely irrelevant bloggers.
Not only that, but smart companies are realizing that they're better off spending time in their niche than out in the blogosphere circle jerk. Phillip from Snooth, the wine recommendation service told me that he doesn't go to tech events. He goes to wine events. Unless Steve's a wine connoisseur, there's another company he's likely never to meet.
If we're in a bubble, why aren't these guys fully funded yet? Oh... wait.. .that's because they're not anti-stealth. They're not stealth either... They're just a bit lax in telling the the world about their cool app. Impact Games is taking their award winning concept from a game about the middle east they built called Peace Maker to the web, and turning the news intro an interactive, community driven game experience. Imagine fantasy baseball meets CNN. They're not looking for ridiculous amounts of money either, and Asi and Eric are great guys... so someone go fund them.
There are lots of cool, innovative companies that are completely under the radar of big tech/pr bloggers who only collect press releases instead of getting out there in the community--the real community, not the community of people who can spend $1000 on a conference. Take PeerDecision. (See Jack, two posts in a row.) They're trying to break open the whole college admissions process and if they keep at it, and figure it out, that could make a HUGE impact on millions of people. They're not likely to see Steve at an expensive trade show, but they would have met him at StartupCamp, if he went, which was free and sponsored by Sun, or a nextNY event, which is always free. But bigshot PR bloggers rarely attend these kinds of community events so the Web 2.0 that they see is the heavily funded, heavily hyped world of people who can afford to play in the same circles of events.
John Heilemann is in the same boat. In his recent piece for NY Magazine, he calls New Work "a sad-assed backwater when it comes to the Internet industry". How does he know? Caroline McCarthy is just about the only journalist that spends any time with the "two people in a garage" stage crowd. Maybe if John or any other bubble breaker journalist showed up at a nextNY event, you know, with the little people, he'd get a better sense of the crowd here. At least he could fly around NYC in 3D in UpNext (another cool NYC company).
Are we better than the Valley? We're different. So is Boston, Seattle, and Denver. It's not a competition, the last time I checked. Are we serious about the internet? Very much so. I mean, if we weren't, why would Google keep buying up more and more real estate here? Why would AOL move its headquarters here?
Hey, check it out, Donna's actually on the right side of this one. See, people aren't all bad. She corrects Steve's assertion that "No one’s casting a cynical eye anymore." Aren't you reading, Steve? She casted a cynical eye on us just the other day!
It's like I tell umpires in softball...
"Open your eyes, blue... You're missing a good game, here!"
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Anti-Stealth for College Applications
In the same way that Path 101 wants to bust open the data lockbox for the job market, showing you what others like you are doing with their careers, PeerDecision is aiming shed light on college admissions. This is fascinating, because I don't think there's anything more competitive and cutthroat than college admissions (except maybe Upper East Side Nursery School admissions), and so I could imagine students swarming on this in a hurry.
I wonder if the anti-stealth nature of it might cause a little fudging. I'm sure Jack actually got a 1480 on his SAT, but how do we really know for sure? :)
This is data I think everyone wants to see, but perhaps this is a case where public profiles aren't a good idea. If people start comparing themselves to others, is that going to open up some really negative interactions? I think people want to compare aggregate numbers, but I think singling out individuals might get too personal, and maybe even downright ugly.
They also have voting, where you could vote people up or down depending on whether or not you'd make certain schools. Again, this might bring out the worst in people.
So, I REALLY like PeerDecision, I just think people are evil... especially overambitious high school kids.
One thing I might consider is flipping the voting a little. Have people try to gauge themselves... vote which schools you think you have a good shot of making and then show me the aggregate data. This way, I don't have a reason to mess up the voting, because I'd only be screwing up my own account.
Another thing they need to nail that Path 101 needs to nail as well is a reason to get people to add this data. I could join and tell people what schools I made, but what do I get back immediately from that? For Path 101, we can do some job skills and trend data, but PD is tackling something that's even a bigger data black hole... so I'm not sure how you could even prime the pump here.
What about maybe a way to gripe? "What's the school that turned you down? Tell us about it...add other schools".
It's interesting... check out their site... It's a process I'd love to see them succeed in opening up more, but I'm not sure how to do that.
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The Origin of the Dancing Guy from Mighty Mighty Bosstones
So where did the inspiration for the dancing guy... Ben?SECTION 3 - mighty mighty bosstones interviewThe inspiration was we were friends and we were a group of kids that hung out all around Boston going to shows, and we met going to shows. So we came up with, "what's the easiest way to get into a club? Well, that's to be in a band; and not only will we get in but they'll give us free beer." It's as simple as that. We never expected it to go very far. We had fun doing it and we put alot into it, and having no talent wasn't really an issue because if that was the case then I sure wouldn't have been in. I think Ben was still young at the time and he couldn't just be a roadie. We tried that trick and we're like "no," 'cause you have to be in the band to get in these clubs. We just got him on stage and put a microphone up there and had him dance, and it's always been part of that. I think it's at least some representation of the type of friends we are.
It gives you that "big party" feel, too...I think so, and half the time I don't even know what he's doing. I'll run into him on stage, say hello, you know, dance with him or whatever, and he'll fill me in later on what's going on in the band. He's there and I love him, and I'm glad he's gone through it with us.
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