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Hoboken’s MissionFifty Goes Online

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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

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News from Share With 911

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Share With 911 was hatched earlier this month at NYC Startup Weekend.

This crew is on a mission to capture and filter social media for any content related to an emergency or natural disaster, and then distribute it to first responders on their mobile devices.

We and the judges were pretty excited about their project—by the way, they took in first place at NYCSW.

Anyway, they’ll be launching a beta version of their mobile app, which we saw in raw prototype form during final presentations, in the coming weeks.Continue reading

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NYC Location-Based Apps Meetup: 8/24/11

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Where do all the geo-based startups gather to learn, mingle, and make presentations to each other? That would be the NYC Location-Based Apps Meetup, which held an event last night at the AOL HQ on lower Broadway.

I came to hear Brett Martin, founder/CEO/waterboy at Sonar, who I first saw present at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this summer. My hunch was that it would be a good idea to hear more about his startup in AOL’s cozier sixth floor venue.

It was a good move. As a bonus for attending, I got to see my friends at Taap.it, who also gave a short demo, as well as watch an intriguing presentation on LoKast, a proximity based social network.

And I met briefly with NYC LBA organizers, Michael Fives (co-founder of Grapphic) and Gauri Manglik (check out her SpotOn app).

Not a bad evening’s work for me.

So was I the only one who heard Martin’s hidden reference to David Foster Wallace when he said the goal of Sonar is to get us out of our “skull-sized kingdoms”?Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

US Government to Improve Customer Service?

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Taking a break from a hard-to-start assignment, I scanned my Google Reader looking for a diversion.

And then this improbable subject line appeared: “Federal Agencies to Improve Customer Service”.

We’re no longer citizens, I thought for a second, but customers in USA, Inc.

Reading what was a press release from a call center company, I learned that in an Executive Order from President Obama—that would be “Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service”—US agencies are charged with using best practices from the private sector to improve interactions with the citizenry.

Holy Biden!Continue reading

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BillGuard: Consumer Protection 2.0

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One of the remarkable things I learned talking to Yaron Samid, co-founder and CEO of BillGuard, is the level of credit card fraud that’s publicly reported on the Web.

Currently in beta, BillGuard has a mission to catch both unwanted and unauthorized credit transactions—there’s a difference—based on crowdsourced input from its subscribers.

As with a lot of companies that rely on the crowd, BillGuard faced a cold start problem: with few signed up to review and mark questionable charges, there’s little data.

BillGuard cleverly solved it by mining Twitter, consumer complaint forums, and other sites. For kicks, search Twitter for “credit card fraud” and prepare to be surprised

And you know what, according to Samid, they achieved a 20% hit rate matching complaints against vendors culled online with credit transactions from their existing pool of subscribers.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Back at the FCC: Congress Responds to AT&T Merger

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With everyone on vacation or preparing for vacation, the FCC released letters from our Congressional representatives regarding their feelings on the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile.

None of the opinions express should come as a surprise to anyone following this debate. The longest and most detailed letter was drafted by Rep. Herbert Kohl, Chairman of the House Anti-Trust Sub-Committee.

Kohl strikes a blow for smaller regional wireless carriers, noting that they already pay high access charges to AT&T and Verizon to complete cellular calls.  And with these two former Bells acting as primary toll collectors for long-distance connections, regional wireless players are not very motivated to go national and face steeper chargers or other barriers. Continue reading

Quote of the Day

We are marginally approaching zero cost to launch a startup. Just to give a concrete example: FourSquare got to 100,000 active users on $20,000.

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Albert Wenger’s Age of Disruption

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You should never pass up an opportunity to listen to Union Square Venture’s supremely confident Albert Wenger.

Mine came last night when I attended an Entrepreneur’s Roundtable event in Manhattan. The ER group is a collection of mentoring entrepreneurs and investors who recently started an incubation program in NYC called ER Accelerator. Their first class graduates in a few weeks.

Back to Albert. Wenger was asked to judge a few startups at this ER meeting, but first he gave a short, but thoughtful presentation on the startup scene and the future of the Internet.

Continue reading

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Taap.it’s Artistic Ambitions

 

The Taap.it crew has been busy this month reaching out to the artist community in the NYC area.

This Manhattan startup has a geo-aware mobile app—one of our small biz favorites—that brings together local buyers and sellers. Besides all the usual items found in the classifieds, Taap.it also has a special section devoted to art.

In my quick browse through this category, I found Andy Warhol lithographs, arty photographs, needlepoint, and a Mickey Mantle painting. Something for everyone.Continue reading

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NYC Startup Weekend: Pitches for a Rainy Afternoon

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The last time I attended a NYC Startup Weekend at General Assembly I found myself wedged against the wall near the kitchen serving area with just enough elbow room to jot down a few notes.

While it was less crowded on Sunday evening during the final presentations for this August SW—maybe something to do with the monsoon rains and flooded subways—the energy levels were still very high and it was great fun watching these raw but spirited pitches.

After a careful review of my notes, I’ve come up with my list of favorites: LockeRoom, ReadBak, OinkerBox, Walkey.me and Sharewith911.

This time around I was in partial sync with the judges’ choices: Sharewith911 garnered a first, and ReadBak took second place.Continue reading

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Shoutomatic Trademarks Shout

 

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.

This is of course good news for Shoutomatic, the web service that allows you to record and deliver short audio messages via Twitter or Facebook or directly from their own web site and who did the actual trademark submission.Continue reading

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NYC Big Apps Ideas Winners

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New York City Economic Development Corporation announced the winners of its Big Apps Idea Contest.

These are not actual apps, but ideas for applications, which were submitted and then voted on by the public.

The wise panel of judges, including Clay Shirky, NYTM’s Dawn Barber, and BMW iVentures’ Alex Diehl, picked 10 winning cerebrations.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Summer Fun: Baseball and Phono

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Last week, I wrote about the under-appreciated but impressive Phono, a jQuery plugin that lets you embed a softphone into any web page.

Phono is made by Florida-based Voxeo, a long-standing and innovative telephony software vendor.

With a pinch of JavaScript, anybody—developer, HTML-phobic designer—can add a voice channel widget, accessible from laptop, smartphone, or tablet.

What’s cooler than an embedded JavaScript softphone?

Connecting said softphone up with Tropo, Voxeo’s server-side telephony environment.

I usually free associate baseball, not JavaScript, with the month of August, so I decided to take on a small Tropo project to read back current major league baseball scores into my Phono widget, which I’ve conveniently inserted into this post.

Go Yankees!Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Test Your VoIP Connection with OnSIP

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OnSIP, the virtual PBX service that we use, has a web page that allows you to test your VoIP connection.

It simulates a voice conservation to OnSIP’s remotes, measuring packet loss and jitter or variation in transit times.

My performance over my information cable provided by Comcast here in NJ was pretty good: no packet loss and .9 ms in jitter. Continue reading

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Aussie Angel Opens Shop in NYC

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It’s Friday, and what better way to end the week than to learn that another angel investor is doing business in NYC.

Haig Kayserian is an Australian web entrepreneur, who according to the press release we received, is making investments in three US startups though his new NYC-based KAYWEB Angels.

He is divvying up $900K to Cafrino (gaming), Minute Lister (mobile ecommerce), and You Need My Guy (business networking).Continue reading

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Meetup at Google NY: JavaScript Gets Serious

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I was at Google last night, at their 8th Ave. location in NYC, attending a JavaScript Meetup.

I almost didn’t make it: I was on the waiting list up until the last minute.

So what brought over 125 people into the 10th Floor of Google’s Manhattan franchise?

(By the way, Googlers know how to dress for a NYC summer: they were pouring out of the building around 6:30 all wearing cargo shorts and comfy T-shirts.)

Anyway, we were all there to hear about their JavaScript in-the-cloud service, called Apps Script.

Who would have thunk so many so many passionate developers would be coming out on this rainy night, and why would Google put a client-side language into the stratosphere?

It all became clearer by the end of the talk.

Continue reading