Month: March 2011

@NYC

NYU’s CrowdPitch: Space Exploration Startups and Beyond

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With plans to be in New York City yesterday, I ended my day in Manhattan a little later by attending a two-hour pitch-fest at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

CrowdPitch’s concept is simple enough: an audience (students, would-be entrepreneurs, startup groupies, bloggers) act as angel investors with pretend dollars in which to fund startup ventures. The companies are real, though, and have four minutes to make their case for getting the make-believe moolah.

A panel of Stern professors and other industry experts are there to critique the presentations, crunch the numbers on the business models, and then offer advice for when these companies face real angels and VCs.

While the overall quality of the pitches was high, you quickly learn that to attract investors, startups should strive to be scalable, frictionless, and vertically integrated—biz speak for nice fat margins with minuscule marginal costs and no competition.Continue reading

Social Studies

Harvard Business Review: Caveat Groupon

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Last week, the HBR blog turned its attention to the recent infestation of daily deal sites that are causing great harm to businesses.

After much study and multi-regression analysis, they’ve decided that sites like Groupon and LevelUp, are really offering … price promotions.

I was kidding about the multi-regression part. But HBR blogger Utpal M. Dholakia, Distinguished Associate Professor of Management at Rice University, warns that “price promotions are fraught with danger and are suitable only for very specific purposes.” Continue reading

@NYC

Sunday Afternoon at a NJ Hackathon

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There were all the signs of a long weekend of coding at the Converge Coworking space on the Kean University campus (Union, NJ). Stacks of empty pizza boxes, coffee cups, wireframe sketches scattered on desks, and developers staring at screen emulators on their MacBooks.

New Jersey Mobile Meetup was concluding its first hackathon, and I had arrived just as the iPhone and Android warriors were chowing down on one last hot meal before the final presentations.

The winners of this contest would gain serious boasting rights, and some Twilio and Odesk credits to be used on future projects.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC: Usage Based Pricing is a Non-debate

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Missed Aspen Institute’s IDEA Plenary (“a transatlantic dialogue to address common interests in a free and open Internet capable of enhancing economic growth”) held in Brussels, Belgium yesterday?

Not to worry, FCC Chairman Genachowski was there to address the gathered international leaders,  and his talk, “The Cloud: Unleashing Global Opportunities”, was posted on the FCC site today.Continue reading

@NYC

Startup Weekend NYC is Here

 

Startup Weekend  NYC is back in town next month (April 15-17). I’ll be attending the final presentations on Sunday.

I visited SWNYC  last June, which was held at my alma mater,  NYU’s Courant Institute, and I definitely felt the creative buzz.

There were mega-watts of entrepreneurial energy leaping between  creatives, marketers, and developers. It certainly boosted my opinion of the startup scene here in the NYC Hackopolis.

Looking forward to it.Continue reading

@NYC

Kikin Edge: Likable, Not Lovable

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I recently received a gentle reminder that Kikin, a browser plugin that brings additional relevant content to Google search results has been updated and is accomplishing more than, as some blogger put it, filling in feature holes.

That blogger would be me, and the Kikin version I was reviewing at the time was duplicating the functions of Google’s left navigation column—the one that, um, brings you more relevant  content.

In February, Kikin revamped their Firefox plugin, it’s now called the Kikin Edge.

Time to take another look at it.

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@NYC

HTM 3/21/11: IT Doesn’t Matter, Customer Experience Does

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I had a lot of fun listening to Craig Kanarick, the co-founder of Razorfish, the proto-interactive agency, at last night’s Hoboken Tech Meetup.

I could definitely envision him pitching Fortune 500 companies during the dot-com years and explaining the Web to the “suits”. Did he really do a presentation once-upon-a-time with his hair dyed blue?

No matter. He’s still at it, and yesterday he radiated lots of thought beams on the current digital technology environment. As part of his talk, Kanarick delivered a completely entertaining and spot-on summary of our post-WW II consumer economy—rise of marketing, power of brands, and now the preeminence of real-time on-demand media.

One idea of his that most resonated with me, considering the context of speaking at a tech meetup and having just followed a few demos, is the challenge of being a tech entrepreneur when there is so much open and available IT.

Paging Nick “IT Doesn’t Matter” Carr!Continue reading

The Rack

NYC Apple Store: 3/18/11

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On Friday, I dropped by the Apple Store on the Upper West Side of NYC near Lincoln Center to touch the feathery light iPad 2.

As I approached and looked through the plate glass storefront, the interior was less than crowded, practically empty by Apple standards.

Then I noticed a sign taped to the door, which said that the iPad 2s had sold out for the day and that customers should come back tomorrow.

It just meant that I wouldn’t have to wait in line to try out this thinner, faster, and dual-camera-ed  iPad.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

A Peek at Cloud Telephony: SIPfoundry’s sipXecs

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My curiosity got the better of me.  While I’m completely content to use turn-key cloud telephony–OnSIP, in my case—the lure of DIY telecom is sometimes too enticing to resist.

This led me to SIPfoundry’s sipXecs, an open-source PBX that many are using instead of an on-premises metal-based solution.

SIPfoundry has grand goals for open VoIP solutions. They are an independent non-profit that hopes to promote “free and unencumbered” telephony. Which is another way of saying their sipXecs PBX software is 100% standards based. So if enough companies, small and large, install sipXecs on their servers, we can all communicate via SIP over the Internet and not pay a dime in per minute charges.

I thought I’d experiment with sipXecs to see what all the shouting was about.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Broadband Data Caps: Worldwide View

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With the announcement that AT&T will be ending its all you can eat broadband for DSL and U-Verse customers, I decided to take a look at how US broadband compares with the rest of the world.

And I mean beyond Canada.

I perused data  from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),  which tracks broadband metrics, among many other economic indicators, internationally.

The US now joins Iceland, Australia, Turkey, Ireland,  and the UK,  as a place where major ISPs market monthly pricing plans with overusage charges.

From a global perspective, it appears that AT&T’s plan is (gasp) generous: a ceiling of 150 GB  for DSL (250 GB for its fiber-based U-Verse) and $10 per 50 GB of additional usage.

Continue reading

@NYC

A Gathering of NJ Angel Investors

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I found them last Friday just off the Garden State Parkway, exit 131-A. The Woodbridge Hilton to be exact.

At the New Jersey Innovates Conference 2011 organized by NJ Entrepreneur, a group of Jersey-centric angels shared their  business experiences and their current investing approaches with an audience spread out across the startup curve.

Based on the David S. Rose investment course I completed last month, these private investors fit the angel profile and their advice followed familiar angelic principles but with exceptions—this is Jersey after all.Continue reading

@NYC

Update on Mission Fifty: Hoboken’s First Shared Work Space

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Mission Fifty, the new Hoboken co-working space, is well on the way to opening its door to NJ coworkers.

The principals involved— Michael Pierce, Gregg Dell’Aquila, and HTM’s Aaron Price—already have the space lined up, at 50 Harrison Street. It’s now just a matter of working out the details of what the coworking community is interested in, office-wise

Are you phone- or IM-centric, prefer meetings behind doors or at the nearest cluttered desk?   Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Google's SIP Tease

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As has been reported everywhere, last week Gizmo5 users learned that Google will soon be hanging up on this open-source softphone.  Acquired by Google in 2009, the SIP-based Gizmo5 service will do its last “INVITE” in early April.

Now some fleeting good news: Over at OnSIP, the cloud-based PBX company, there’s an interesting post about a SIP door that  opened over the weekend and then just as mysteriously closed.

For a shining moment, Google Voice numbers had associated with it a SIP address of the form: +1GVnumber@sip.voice.google.com.

In other words, it was possible for a few days to make free calls on any device that supported a SIP stack!

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Archaic Telecom

What the Heck’s Going on in NJ with A-3766?

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New state telecom and cable regulations are not the stuff of compelling headlines. But here in New Jersey, the optimistically named “Market Competition and Consumer Choice Act” , which was recently approved in the Assembly, has actually attracted the attention of our local news outlets.

Also known as  A-3766 ( S-2664 for Senate folks), this legislation has managed the neat trick of drawing complaints from both consumer groups and local municipalities.

This latest effort to modify cable franchising rules can be seen as the end-game to a 2006  law that introduced state-wide franchising (aka “The Verizon Act”).Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Universal Service Fund Follies: The XO Files

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I raise my cup of espresso to the FCC for starting the process to reform the Universal Service Fund with the ultimate goal  of modernizing a rusting regulatory structure that is not up to task of universal broadband service.

Reading the beginning of the FCC’s recent Proposed Rule Making on the USF, I was all to ready to discount the glib appraisals of the Service Fund as “inefficient” and “broken”.  Sure it’s not perfect, I thought, and of course there are loopy incentives encouraging some inefficient activities, but…

A dispute between XO Communications, “one of the nation’s largest communications service providers”, and the Fund’s administrator, the Universal Service Administration Corporation or USAC, unfortunately seems to validate some of the harsh criticisms hurled at the current USF regime.

It has all the makings of an on-the-edge-of-your-seat FCC caper: battling attorneys,  hyper-diligent auditors, endless bureaucratic procedures, ambiguous forms, battling attorneys, and battling attorneys.Continue reading