The other night, well over a hundred people packed Antarctica Bar to celebrate the 2 year anniversary of nextNY.  In two years, our ranks have grown to 1500 people, with probably close to 1000 different people attending our events at one time or another. And the group is a neat story in itself.  Anyone can start an event.  There are no titles, everyone is a participant.  The listserv buzzes with questions, comments, recommendations, from a wide spectrum of tech and digital media folks in NYC...  entrepreneurs, investors, designers, developers. And yet, no NYC based reporter has ever written about it. I just read this Investors Business Daily article about how networking groups in L.A. are helping to put that city on the map as a tech center.  We'd love something like that. Besides Caroline McCarthy, we never even see tech reporters at our events...  yet I always get calls from people asking me for intros to cool companies and wanting to know the latest buzz. What gives?    

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Matias was institutionalized after trying to set a car on fire with his children inside in Pennsylvania, police said. Family members said it was only after one of his sons said goodbye to his sister that Matias changed his mind and decided not to torch the car.

It was not clear why he continued to have visitation rights.

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From the NY Times...

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Tonight, at Antarctica Bar, is nextNY's 2 Year Anniversary.  Yup, that's the place we first got together back in February of 2006.

Come and catch up with people you haven't seen in a while, people you've never met, or people you'll be hanging out with for the 4th time this week because of all the other tech parties going on in NYC this week.

Antarctica is located on Hudson Street, between Dominic and Spring.   The closest subway is the Spring St. C, E.   We'll start showing around 7PM.

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• The Problem with Social Media Marketing - Bokardo
  Social Web Design by Joshua Porter
  (tags: marketing socialmedia)

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Michigan and Florida decided to move their primaries up ahead of Super Tuesday, against the wishes of the Democratic party.  So, the party decided not to count those primaries and all the candidates decided not to campaign in those states. 

After she won them, and now that she's behind in the delegate tallies, now Hillary wants those primaries to count. 

Obama's name wasn't even on the Michigan ballet!!

She says she worries about disenfranchised voters, but then when the casino workers in Nevada officially endorsed Obama, she filed suit to prevent them from caucusing inside casinos during that state's primary.

And then there's the issue of superdelegates.  WTF even knew these people even existed before this election?  Here you are thinking that your vote counts for something, and then you find out that a bunch of political insiders can outvote you come convention time. 

Obama wants superdelegates to vote along with the people of their states.

Hillary wants superdelegates not to vote for the candidate that the people in their state voted for, but to "vote their conscience."

To me, that's just about the most objectionable stance you could possibly take on this issue.  It's less democratic. 

She thinks that superdelegates should not"be swayed by current trends"...   You know, like the trend of people not voting for her.

Her campaign strategist, himself a superdelegate, said that superdelegates should vote by keeping in mind "their best judgment in the interests of the party and the country."

I hope they do just that.  

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I found out the other day that Alex has started naming our servers after famous chefs.  It made me wonder what other naming conventions people might use, so I Twittered a message asking for people's responses. 

So far, here's what I got:

Rick Stratton writes, "We always had super heros... Batman, robin, superman... Got down to grn lantern."

Mark Ghuneim writes, "our naming convention for boxes uses people who got away with murder : shug, oj, philspector etc..."

Zelnox added, "We name ours after energy drinks, like redbull and guru. ^_^"

Jason Baptiste chimed in as well.  "famous spaceships. ie- apollo, voyager,etc."

C.C. Chapman names his after, "characters from Shakespeare."

What about you?  What's your hardware nomenclature?

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• Mom's Perfect Pork Chops
  (tags: food recipes)
• Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche - ReadWriteWeb
  In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top ...
  (tags: blogs)

• 60+ Killer Open Courseware Collections for Web Designers - College Degree.com
  The Internet being what it is, web designers do not have a hard time finding resources. However, there are times when you have to call in the big guns.
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Starting next Wednesday, I'll be teaching ITAC's Fast Trac business boot camp program. 

What is Fast Trac?

Fast Trac is a 12-week comprehensive business boot-camp that helps companies develop a well-honed business plan, solidify strategies, understand the investor mindset and better position themselves to attract capital. The program is suitable for NYC businesses in a variety sectors - technology, new media, green...

The cost is usually $1000, but is $800 for anyone who comes through this blog and mentions me.  It includes all materials, weekly reviews, one on one session with finance pros and a final review of the Full business plan.

Why should you go?

Could you just read a bunch of startup blogs or books and do a bunch of informational interviews with folks and get a lot of the same content?  Maybe.  Are you actually self-directed enough to do that?  Eh.  Are you going to get one on one reviews of your business plan with people who have no other interest than to just make sure graduates of the program turn out to be as successful as possible?  Not likely. 

ITAC has a track record of having over 300 companies attend over the past few years and those companies have, gone on to raise over $90 million.

FastTrac runs for 12 consecutive Wednesdays from February 20th to May 7th, 2008, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

The following two forms are due this Monday. 

Business information form

Application

Please send them to Veronica Price at vprice@itac.org.

Full disclosure, I am being paid to teach this course, but my compensation has nothing to do with how many people sign up for it.

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Dear assorted financial and professional services salespeople who have been contacted me since I announced the incorporation of Path 101,

    No matter how much you try, you all seem the same to me... and the same to every other entrepreneur and new business.  You're selling something and we don't have a lot of money to buy stuff.
    Our initial inclination is that what you're selling we can somehow get on our own--besides which, other than computers, most of us have never made purchases the size of your average bill...  particularly not for services that we imagine the web will outsource, open source, crowdsource, steal, hack, borrow, remix or simply disrupt.

    Let me tell you the story of how one business differentiated themselves in a world where everyone seemed the same, the prices were high, and entrepreneurs didn't quite understand what they were getting...

     When I started with Union Square Ventures, Fred and I were blogging on our personal blogs, and our website was some professionally designed but utterly useless brochureware.  We initially wanted to address the issue of how we prevent our personal blogs from being seen as the faces of the firm and so I made the suggestion that we just use a blog as our corporate home page. 

    It wasn't long before we fundamentally changed the nature of the relationship between venture capital firms and entrepreneurs.  We opened up our process, our thinking, and most of all, we wanted, and got, lots of feedback.  People thought of us differently than every venture firm out there who just had a form or info@ e-mail inbox to dump business plans in.  It became, and remains, a real sustainable advantage.  While other VCs have created their own blogs, to my knowledge, there aren't any firms that have gone the full monty and changed their official corporate presence into something so interactive and open.  It reflects the fact that while there are many individual VCs who think differently about VC relationships, there are few firms who make openness and communication part of the very core of their principles.

     Frankly, it was inspired by the very companies we want to interact with.  Nearly every single startup maintains and gets value out of a corporate blog.  It's how we do our PR, our marketing, our community feedback, and sometimes business development. 

     So, financial and professional services salespeople, why then do you insist on e-mailing us mailing list form letters, or sending us PDF attachments to propriety market research?   I can't reblog a PDF and all your form letters sent from Salesforce look the same.

     I'm busy right now.  Really busy.  I'm running a company that's trying to get product out the door.  You want me to make time for you, but what have you done for me?  Clearly, you're reading blogs enough to notice when people raise money, but you're not actually reading them for content.  You seem to have missed the new business model: provide as much value as possible and demand less.

    What do I mean by that?  How about, for starters, creating a company blog for your firm.  If you're a recruiting firm, start writing about how to negotiate offers.  Start releasing all the data you can on salaries you're seeing the market.  Weigh in on the "finding developers in NYC" debate.   Talk to us how we talk to our community... in an open and interactive way.  And how about throwing me a freebie?  What's the lifetime value of a recruiting client that runs a successful business?  What's your margins?  I'm surprised that recruiters don't ever offer heavily discounted or free referrals because if they found someone good for me, I'd be convinced of their value and probably use them again and again later on... and probably also make lots of referrals.  Right now, I'm still convinced I can find people on my own, so show me someone I would have never ever found.

     Real estate salespeople?   Tell us what the going rates are.  Tell us the pros and cons of sharing real estate with other companies.  Blog your best deals. 

     Insurance agents?  Well, insurance seems kind of important, but we don't really know.  What do we actually need?  What's a ripoff? You could get a lot of buzz by releasing some really good articles about what things to consider in the lifetime of a startup.

     I have a meeting with a young recruiter next week who's been really persistent and has engaged me in conversation about the market, but after that, I'm not making time for any salespeople who don't provide me and the rest of the community value first.  I want a link to your blog...  not a form letter.  Send me a "Hey check out our firm's article on the current state of the NYC real estate market."  That's all I need.   It's how we communicate with our market and its how you should, too.

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• The Resume, Rebooted: A Look at Web-Enabled Job Hunting - ReadWriteWeb
  Traditional resumes are boring. They become stale and out-of-date, they can't really showcase your work or achievements, and they end up just sitting in the bottom of someone's ...
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More than 1000 of you got fired today.  You should all come talk to me...   Why?

Well, certainly anyone already in or willing to work in NYC...  because:

1. I started a group of over 1400 up and coming NYC area tech and digital media folks called nextNY.  We're having our 2 year anniversary party.  Come and mingle, network, drink your sorrows away, etc.  In any case, because of my visibility in the group, people tend to come to be a lot looking for positions to fill, running their startup ideas by me, etc. 
   
2. I started a company called Path 101 that helps people figure out what they want to do with their careers.  I've been running mentoring and internship programs for years and always seem to be the unofficial career counselor to everyone around me.  I suppose I can be somewhat thoughtful about career stuff so I'm just happy to chat and help out.
3. Did I mention that I started a company called Path 101 that helps people figure out what they want to do with their careers.  We just raised some angel money from a top tier group of people and we're looking to hire.  So, if you're a developer, designer, or even someone in business development, come chat.
4. My blog has 2400+ subscribers... so if I talk to you, we can't use you, and I post your resume, a fair number of people are going to see it.
5. I'm just a nice, friendly, approachable guy.

• The Naive Approach to Hiring People
  (tags: data hiring path101 resumes rgp)
• 10 Reasons why you have a job, but not a career
  (tags: careers advice jobs)

On Friday, I hit four years of blogging.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to say about it. 

For the first time, I sort of feel like marking blogging anniversaries is like marking the day you first started talking to people.

Sure, it's a transformative and pivotal event in your life that changes the way you relate to other people--but imagine the alternative.

I used to say that blogging isn't for everyone.  Now, I think that blogging like I do isn't for everyone.  You don't have to talk about yourself, or blog everyday, or post pictures. 

But, to me, there are a few things about blogging that I just can't see people going without, because blogging is... 

...writing practice, and since most people can't write particularly well or just can always get better, is worth it to build that skill.

...a way for people who share interests to find you.

...a way for you to find others who share interests with you.

...a way to get feedback on your half-baked ideas.

...a way to differentiate yourself in a competitive job environment, because a resume sucks as a means of describing your depth of character, experience, and thoughtfulness.

...a way to sharpen your thinking by forcing yourself to make sense of streams of disconnected thoughts.

...a way to remember where you were and what you were thinking at any given time.

...a low maintenance way for acquaintances to keep up with what you're doing.

...an open, inviting way to communicate that says, "I want people to interact with and engage me."

...a way to contribute your best thinking at the time to the world, instead of keeping it all to yourself, or even worse, behind the locked doors of subscriptions, members only, or just hidden away in library stacks.

So, write about whatever's on your mind.  You shouldn't care about now many people read or how often you post, or even what your is called. 

Just whatever you do, don't stop communicating.  Here's to another four years of all this...

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• Koolwire converts files by e-mail | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
  Convert files without any software using Koolwire, a free, convert-by-e-mail service.
  (tags: email fileconversion files pdf)

A couple of months ago, I broke out of using Outlook on my desktop and killed off MS Exchange and I've been loving the results. I use a combo of GMail on the backend, Thunderbird+Lightning+Provider on my desktop, Plaxo (including Win Mobile software) for syncing contacts and GooSync for syncing calendars to my phone. It's all been working pretty well, except that GMail IMAP was losing message bodies left and right on my phone. It was a posted bug and now they seem to have fixed it. So, that leaves the fact that Lightning doesn't do offline calandering as the only buggy part of my experience. I didn't notice it for a while, because I'm pretty rarely offline, but its a real issue. It's also a slight performance issue, as it's always pulling calendars live... should def be caching for that reason if nothing else. If you switch windows, unplug, and then go back to Lightning, your calander will appear empty.

I'm sure that will get done soon enough, but all in all I've been really happy with my experience and have just cancelled my Exchange host.

Snow Park Under Construction at Union Square, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I guess they're going to have some kind of snowboarding thing over the weekend.

I had a long conversation the other night with an entrepreneur about her product.  While sitting at a bar near the NY Tech Meetup, we brainstormed a slew of new features.

I confessed, though, that none of the ideas I gave her were original. I see as many new ideas and try as many sites as anyone and I'm really good at pattern matching. I can reappropriate useful tools from other sites for relevant situations pretty quickly, making me quite the snappy little regurgitator.

So, if you ever meet with me to talk product, this is what I'm going to suggest you build in: (I think they can almost universally apply to any site.)

1) Rotating cube landing pages - I've written about this before, but Baseball Reference is the most brilliant site on the web, right up there with IMDb.

It's a simple concept:

- Built up a database.

- Structure a limited amout of link dense template pages

- Make it all public.

On BR, you find a baseball player, all the teams he's played on, the rosters for those teams, more players, more stats and teams... player, team, player, year, team, player... click click click... You can go sideways around that site forever. Same with IMDb... movie, actor, movie, director... click click click. So what does your database have? How few templates could you build to expose the whole thing? Sportsvite for example, helps you manage rec sports teams. They have fields, games, teams, players, sports. A public exposure of those templates could get them a lot of traffic, especially with fields. Ever try to Google for directions to a softball field? It's a nightmare. A Sportsvite page with that field, directions, schedule of games, teams that have played there, photos from games, and some hooks to sign up for Sportsvite would quickly rank pretty high. You could then click through to the sports played, the teams, even the localities.

2) The selfish data sucking helper tool - Hubspot created a brilliant lead gen tool for themselves and others with its Website Grader. You submit your website, it grades you on various SEO stats and requirements, and then gives you the option to save a report by giving your e-mail. Not only is it a pretty useful tool, but its going to be great leadgen for their sales team.

The key here is that if you want data, you need to provide something useful first...and for your first user if you're a social site, it's not going to be intros to relevent other users. That's why del.icio.us and Flickr worked so well. They both worked just fine as tools for yourself, so you didn't mind that you were also contributing tag data. So what kind of stats and info could you give to your first user that gets them to handover valuable data to you?  User #1 has to have something useful to do, and calculation/discovery tools that ask for a user's data are a great way to fill your empty database while still providing value.

3) Kiss the ring management tools for groups - Angelsoft is software that helps angel groups manage their deal flow.  The company could have just as easily published an open website whereby companies post their own financing needs and angels just go searching.  That would have eliminated the need for angel groups, many of which survive through paid membership. 

Why not do that? 

Well, first of all, creating direct to consumer businesses on the web are hard.  It's hard to generate traffic.  Plus, you'd piss off a lot of angel groups who would badmouth you by trying to get in on their gig.  But, if you can build something useful for existing powerholders in your space, people who already have traffic, it may be better off than going out on your own and everyone wins.  The key is if you can piggyback off groups like this and still somehow leverage your own business to be disruptive. 

I'm experiencing that in Path 101,  where rather than compete with career planning offices in colleges, we'll most likely build some tools for them to use to make their lives easier.  This way, they're more likely than not to promote us as well.  Still, I'm not depending on them either.

4) Crawled data - If you can find a way to gather data that's already out there to pre-populate your website, it's a highly cost-efficient way to build your business.  Otherwise, you often wind up building big empty databases. Google does it with local reviews.  I don't think very many people would care to put reviews into a Google database, but there's nothing stopping Google from just crawling reviews it finds on Citysearch and other similar sites 

This way, again, you have something to show user #1, instead of 100% relying on your users to build your business for you

5) Revolving e-mail door for data - Creating user generated content sites depends on the ease of being able to get content into the system.  One of my favorite ways of doing this is to rely on e-mail.  Contrary to narrowminded belief, e-mail is not dead. 

In fact, more and more people are getting smartphones so they can be connected to their e-mail 24/7.  Sites that take advantage of easy ways to add content via e-mail will benefit from this trend. Disqus, for example, now allows me to respond to comments posted on my blog, and post them up on the web, 100% over e-mail.  They've gotten past the need to force everyone to visit their posting page, because they realize that the value is in the data.  The more people comment the more useful the service gets for everyone, so allowing comments to get responded to more easily by just letting me post by e-mail is brilliant. 

6) People like me - People like me can be a simple feature or a hard one... it all depends on how many PhD you want working on it.  I'd be very interested in seeing people like me across many of the sites I visit, and I think last.fm does it best.  (Amazon shows me what people like me bought, but not who those people are.) 

I have friends on last.fm, but I don't get much value out of them because they don't listen to the same music that I do.  However, my "neighbors" are awesome.  It's a totally passive feature and I didn't have to do anything to get a list of people with similar music tastes for me to explore, friend if I want to... that's what social should be about. 

I want that on Twitter.  Do some text analysis.  Who twits about the same stuff that I do?   How about on Newsgator?  Who reads what I do?  Anytime you have a lot of data, you can instantly make a site more social, without all the fuss of "friending" by showing me people like me.

7) Temporary accounts - Path 101 had a great meeting with David from Tumblr about integration.  It was pretty obvious that he's had this in his mind for a while--how can he make his site friendly for partnering?   

People who have intense registration processes often find it difficult to create partnerships.  Who owns this data?  Will you pass it to me?  Is a partner account a real account?  Whose logo will they see?  It's completely stupid because no one really "owns" the user anyway.  You want to own data, not users. 

As long as you get data back, you should do all the white label partnerships you can (unless perhaps you're building a network tool that just would splinter an audience and degrade a product).  In order to do that, you need to develop a way for your system to work without a full registration. 

What's the least amount of data you need to run an account for someone?  Answer: a single unique identifier and a way for a partner to authenticate their sign-in.  That's it... no name, age, birthday, zip, etc...    If you can get those from a partner, great... if not, now you have more users and more behavioral data (plus all the content) and you should be able to monetize that.    

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