They gather at their East Village temple to listen to their leaders chant arcane codes involving greek letters as they attempt to divine the future.
I am of course referring to the NYC Predictive Analytics monthly meetup held at the 6th floor of 770 Broadway, AOL headquarters.
I stopped by last night to see if I could learn how to create my own digital crystal ball. Continue reading
Is it the right time to put together a golden oldies album of our public phone system’s greatest app hits?
I think so. Even the FCC is currently scrutinizing carrier comments on sunsetting the copper wires and rusting switches that gave us five 9’s of dial-tone.Continue reading
I launched my own StartUp Week festivities by attending last night’s Entrepreneur Panel at NYU’s Kaufman Auditorium, a place I’ve become quite familiar with lately.
Having reached saturation on pure software startups, I decided to take in the Biotech-Cleantech-Social panel that was scheduled for the second half.
I wanted to hear, for a change, about entrepreneurs who made or had more intimate connection with actual physical stuff, in this case drug molecules, smart thermostats, and software that maps and helps preserve flora and fauna, the organic stuff of the world.Continue reading
Telecom companies have long held dominance over the way we communicate, specifically by controlling phone calls. The Internet is threatening to change this entirely – …
IP transmission, in itself, is not ‘magic pixie dust’ that somehow creates a regulation-free zone.
Maybe it’s the result of a second espresso I had this morning, but Google’s recent comment on the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making on Universal Service Fund reform doesn’t read like a typical carrier screed.
It’s their engineering culture. They won me over a little when they said that “IP transmission, in itself, is not ‘magic pixie dust’ that somehow creates a regulation-free zone.”Continue reading
Mayor Bloomberg just announced the winners of the NYCEDC’s Next Idea Contest.
And did we call this or what?
Congrats to Radim and Babak of VerifEyed, and Andy Tsai and his team at ReFleX.Continue reading
Sometimes grand visions, say the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, can depend on something as basic and overlooked by the lay person as a utility pole.
Think about it: to wire up the country with high-speed fiber, carriers need quick access to utility poles.
The Communications Act as amended in 1996 weighs in on this matter, calling for “nondiscriminatory access to any pole, duct, conduit, or right-of-way owned or controlled by it.”
Think of it as net neutrality for wiring.Continue reading
I missed yesterday’s New York Tech Meetup. I’ll be fine.
However, I would have liked to have seen the Readability demo and learned more about this company’s plans.
Their FireFox plug-in de-clutters a typical web page, removing graphics, Flash, and other visual ephemera leaving you with just the nutritious text.
The software was reviewed by David Pogue in November 2009. And it ended that year with a coveted Pogie Award.
Since the Pogie, Readability added some new features to boost the original text-centric idea. And then in a move that as far as I’m concerned nailed their dedication to the written word, they’ve installed a micro-payment system for authors. Continue reading
The New York City Economic Development Corporation is an agency tasked, not surprisingly, with stimulating the local economy. This includes our booming information economy, and in fact NYCEDC are the folks behind the BigApps competition.
Final presentations for another idea of theirs called, naturally, NYC Next Idea, were held this morning at Columbia University’s Shapiro Center. The six startups that made their presentations to the judges—as assortment of entrepreneurs, investors, and Steven Strauss, an NYCEDC director— had been winnowed from over 150 worldwide entries.
The common theme among this group of university student finalists was their desire to set up shop in NYC.Continue reading
Having declared victory over DNS (Domain Name System) for my sipXecs project, I vaguely recall that a Supreme Court justice wrote extensively about DNS in …
Two weeks ago I contracted the cloud-based telephony bug and found myself experimenting with sipXecs, SIPfoundry’s 100% SIP communications system.
I only advanced so far: just enough to visit and push the buttons on the sipXecs web-based configurator before I ran into a brick wall called DNS.
Translation: without an Internet phone book to look up addresses, I couldn’t register a SIP phone and actually use this thing
Figuring that it would be good for my soul, I decided to spend a few lunch hours last week learning just enough DNS to set up a cloud-based sipXecs system that actually was usable.
I assumed that this effort would reward itself in spiritual IT and SIP wisdom.
Now that Larry “Willie Wonka” Page has named Kansas City, Kansas the winner of the golden gigabit contest, residents there will soon be like kids in the broadband candy store.
If all goes to plan, they’ll be gorging out on super high-speed Internet goodies in 2012
You’re probably asking what the broadband situation is like in Kansas City currently, and what about a color-coded map based on the FCC’s 477 data?
We gave this project to our own oompa loompas, and they’ve cheerfully come with just the right map.Continue reading
Google announced that it will build its gigabit fiber network in Kansas City, Kansas. Pending approvals, service is planned for 2012.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
