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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