The MissionFifty coworking space opened its doors yesterday to the public.
I stopped by for a late afternoon visit to find workers busily finishing up this makeover of what was a manufacturing loft.
Even in its almost-complete state, you can get a good sense of what this will soon become: a place for NJ entrepreneurs, designers, developers, and, ahem, perhaps a blogger or two to hatch businesses and get things done while tapping into the collective energy of other Fiftiers.
While I was there, MissionFifty co-founder, Michael Pierce, gave me a brief tour of the office-scape.
I saw common meeting areas with whiteboards, glass-enclosed private rooms equipped with Polycom VoIP phones (good choice), kitchen area, and a comfy mini-living room with sofas.
I took lots of picture, which I’d love to show, but … my camera’s XD memory card somehow managed to fry its bits.Continue reading
Shouts, in the context of audio messages used on the Internet as part of social media, have been given trademark protection by the US Trademark Office.
I couldn’t resist.
I missed the New York Tech Meetup on Tuesday and didn’t get to hear a presentation from the New York State Senate’s information officers.
I wasn’t brave enough for sitesimon, the browser add-on that lets you share your click stream with the world.
With an alpha invite in my inbox, and since I haven’t seen enough videos in my lifetime, I tuned into Shelby.tv.
It’s a slow afternoon here, so I had a little time to consider one mind-numbing regulatory aspect of the growing number of group messaging and conferencing startups.
Reuters reports that the Royal Wedding, scheduled for April 29, will be live streamed on YouTube over the The Royal Channel.
Startup Weekend NYC is back in town next month (April 15-17). I’ll be attending the final presentations on Sunday.
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.
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.
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.
Bantam Live just announced that they had been acquired by Constant Contact, the e-mail marketing company.
Mobile World Congress is happening now in Barcelona. As much as we’d like to buy our paella salads at the La Boqueria before a day on the trade show floor, the editorial team is instead stuck here in NJ.
I first learned about Megaphone Labs’ DialPlay TV product last month at HTM. This startup turns a boring DTMF keypad from your cell phone into a remote control for TV games, surveys, and trivia contests.
Yesterday, Netflix released bandwidth data measuring how well leading ISPs do at transmitting its HD videos to subscribers. All the usual suspects were listed, but it’s interesting, although not altogether surprising, that cable companies grabbed the top spots over the traditional carriers.
Ubiquisys, a startup backed by Google, lays claim to “the words’ first attocell—a personal femtocell.”
After burning off my holiday calories shoveling out of Snowmageddon 2010, I was ready to settle down with a good book and a flagon of mulled cider. Perhaps I was still looking for more Sisyphean exercises, so instead of Harry Potter, I reached for my MacBook and downloaded the FCC’s complete Report and Order in the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet, otherwise known as the Net Neutrality rules.
I was finally able to spend quality time with the Parse.ly Reader, an app designed to show some of the capabilities of the underlying Parse.ly platform, called P3, which is currently in beta. To be clear, unlike many other players in the recommendation patch (GetGlue, Xydo, Hunch, etc.), this NYC-based startup is not in the business of providing a direct service to users.
In case you weren’t at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this month to hear FCC Chairman Genachowski, O’Reilly has published the interview on YouTube. My Google Reader had already bombarded me with excerpts of Genachowski’s remarks (“net neutrality will happen”) and his unhappiness with the Google-Verizon proposal.
On Friday, the FCC sent out a letter to Fox and Cablevision requesting both to state how they are meeting their statutory obligations ( “to negotiate in good faith”) over their current retransmission dispute. As Yankee fans are painfully aware, Cablevision and Fox had an agreement that expired on October 15 to carry WNYW, WWOR, and WTXF channels. Cablevision pulled its rebroadcasting of local MY 9 and Fox 5 television, which carries the Yankee games in the New York area, in a disagreement over its payments to Fox.
I’m in a neologistic, word-coining mood this morning. Like you, I have one eye on my Tweetdeck, half-consciously absorbing facts, information, memes, and other synaptic nourishment that’s flowing around me. At some point in my day, I’m inevitably walking an idea back to its source, which involves unproductively scrolling through streams of posts.
Holy Heisenberg! Scientific American, the magazine better known for writing about dark holes and gene splicing, has editorialized earlier this month on the state of US broadband. While SA has in recent years taken on more topical subject matter, there opinionating on broadband was a bit of a surprise to this long-time reader.
I practically did a spit take while drinking my coffee this morning and reading The New York Times story about a municipal broadband project in Tennessee. I learned that Chattanooga’s community owned power provider, EPB, has plans to offer up to 1 Gigabit per second to its fiber-to-the-home subscribers by the end of the year. True, that can cost you almost $350 per year (lower if you bundle in voice and video).
Here I’ve been getting excited about new user interface niceties such as voice rec in Windows Phone 7 and Android, while completely missing the bigger picture. The National Science Foundation has announced it will be funding a NeuroPhone, “the first Brain-Mobile Interface (BMI).” This “high risk, exploratory research,” to be conducted at Dartmouth College, involves developing a consumer-level wireless EEG (electroencephalography) headset to interface with a mobile device. From what I can decipher from the proposal abstract, they will study ways to digitize and interpret brain wave activity.
For Skype customers and just about anyone else who’s every typed phone numbers into a virtual dial pad, Gmail video and voice chat, even with its new ability to make free calls to cell and landlines, may warrant a big whoop. I had the dubious pleasure of retrieving voice mail through my email at some point in the late 1990s, so some of this telephony novelty has worn thin.
Another weekend, another hackathon. But the one that was just held in Seatle concerned itself with Gov 2.0 projects. And Technoverse favorite Tropo was there, along with open data service provider Socrata.
I decided to take a break from watching Google-zilla’s next move. Yes, the search monster has some interesting news today with Voice Actions for Android. Terrific. But there are also capable speech rec apps outside their orbit, in the competitive world of what the FCC calls information services.
Is this what Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg metaphorically whispered into the Google founder’s ear? I’m still reeling from the Google-Verizon non-aggression pact and what it will mean for a competitive and open Internet. Some have pointed out that the proposal is merely a regurgitation of the FCC’s six freedoms for an open Internet.
Last Tuesday, Google introduced a translation service to its cloud-based word processing software, Documents. I abandoned the Microsoft Word ship a long time ago—I think my last release was Word 2002 — and use Documents for all my text entry. So this additional feature is a neat novelty that just makes my move from MS even sweeter.
WordPress just announced an interesting—let’s say somewhere between quirky and neat— addition to their hosted blog site. You can now phone in a blog post! With help from Twilio’s unified communications APIs, the WordPress.com software will deposit an audio file attachment to the post. Now roving reporters can literally call in their stories. 
At Internet Week in June, I got a quick look at a 3-D printer or fabricator that was being demoed by the folks at MakerBot Industries. Their device is one part of a larger do-it-yourself movement in which both serious inventors and designers or ordinary hobbyists can prototype products in their own living rooms.
Kikin is a NYC startup that, as their web copy says, “brings you more relevant posts, tweets, videos, and other cool stuff from popular sites,” by automatically displaying interesting links on your browser page. Its proposition is that you trust your social network, so the Kikin software trolls your Twitter and Facebook streams for relevant content that has been contributed by friends, family, and co-workers.
I had been meaning to set up a database containing all the startup companies that I’ve been following in this blog. Finally, with enough entries and notes in my spreadsheets, and some spare time that opened up this week and last, I was able to put something together. You can peruse the results of my efforts under this blog’s 
Google may have accidentally-on-purpose scooped up data while (war)driving in Germany, and its new option to change the background on its home page is just plain silly, but they did do something right in the last few weeks.
Shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Freescale’s 7″ tablet 
I’ve been so focused on apps and trends outside of the office space that I thought I’d have a difficult time grokking the keynote speeches at Voicecon 2010. 
In the National Broadband Plan, there is hardly any mention of a wholesale or “unbundled” model of fiber-to-the-home. That’s unfortunate. There are many examples of successful deployments of fiber in which the physical part is built by the public sector (or through public-private partnerships), with private providers stepping in to resell access for voice, video, and data at the retail level. For a nitty-gritty description of one European city’s experience laying fiber under cobblestones and into canals, you can read about Amsterdam’s CityNet project, 
