Mike Bloomberg, Amit Gupta

Image via WikipediaI think I first heard about it from Anu Shukla on Facebook.

Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla
The Highlight Of My Internet Week

I am like, I know Anu Shukla, but I don't know the guy. I know of him, but I don't know him. There are many people in the NY tech ecosystem that I know of, but don't know. On the various social media platforms when you follow the people you know you end up coming across people that you don't know but you "see" so often that you end up kinda sorta knowing them. Plus, it is only a few clicks to getting to know the outlines of someone's life online, especially of those in the tech space. I learned about the guy in one paragraph. Small world.

But I am like, the guy looks fine, he is healthy. And there are a bunch of Indians out there. He will find his match. If we Indians have one thing, it is us. There are only like a billion of us.

And then the guy started popping up a few places. People were reblogging his blog post on Tumblr. The first time I saw it it had been reblogged over 6,000 times. And I am thinking, he must have already found his match.

I saw him a few different places, at a few different updates. Then I saw him in Charlie O'Donnell's events newsletter that I like to skim through on Monday mornings.

Inviting Charlie O'Donnell To A Pillow Fight
Charlie O'Donnell At His Inspiring Best
Charlie Bit My Finger

Then Tikva Morawati announced the name at Ignite NYC.

I felt shadowed.

How do all these people know I am Indian? I felt targeted. Wherever I went offline and online, the name Amit Gupta followed me.

The guy even shares last names with my childhood best friend: Gupta.

And then it happened all over again at the New York Tech MeetUp. Because Mike Bloomberg showed up - big, big surprise - and although I am pretty sure it was someone else who made the Amit Gupta - I don't even know the guy - announcement, I keep thinking that guy was a stand in, Mike Bloomberg himself made the announcement. I mean, this guy rules the city, right?

That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I am like, okay Mayor, I am showing up for the party Friday. I will do the cotton swab thing.

But what if I win the lottery? Don't you have to go under the knife or something? I was a biology major at high school. I know bone marrow is not a skin level thing. Do they use antiseptics and anesthetics these days? Because back in the days they didn't. I mean, for a guy who has never donated blood.



I'd rather Nihal Mehta went under the knife. One of the places I learned about this was also from his tweet.

Nihal Mehta: No Sellout
Nihal Mehta: Being Mysterious About Local Response

Truth be told, from minute one I have been thinking, this thing needs to be outsourced to India. If it is a one in 20,000 thing, divide a billion by 20,000 and this Gupta dude - who I do not know - ends up with more lives than a cat.

New Work City
412 Broadway, Floor 2
New York, 10013

Friday, October 14, 2011 at 9:30 PM (ET)

Brown bones? This event was put together by some white guy. You can tell.

I guess I am going. Thank Mike Bloomberg.

Amit Gupta: Scared Shitless.

Bloomberg On Immigration

Image via WikipediaI am a living martyr to the cause. The immigration laws in this country are so fucked up, it's not even funny. We might as well bring back Jim Crow to take race relations to new Tea Party heights.

Ugh, Immigration (4)

I understand racism. I understand the need to keep people away from your dinner table. But that is not what is going on. The current immigration laws in this country are designed to keep food away from the American tables.

Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC

For the past few years I have been flapping my wings on the beach like one of those birds that became victims to some oil spill while lesser tech entrepreneurs have swam into the ocean depths, flown into the sky. How much window shopping can you do? I wear the glorious title of tech consultant.

Independent For Bloomberg

The immigration bureaucracy in this country moves at Third World speeds. They had me disappear the precise day the national primary ended in 2008. They feared I might miss the message. Fuck the machine. We are the machine now. My guy is in the White House. When they released me six months later, they gave me a court date in Chicago. They still feared I might miss the message. A change of venue for something like that is automatic, but they would not grant me that. In June 2009 they gave me a court date for June 2011. That too has been postponed. If they give me a new court date for 2013, I am going to think there is a Tea Party conspiracy going on.

Digital Efforts Have To Be About Transforming NYC Into A Small Town

I don't know Kirk Love. I have never met Kirk Love, although I hope to some day. The guy shows up in my Gchat window on and off, and it is because one day I pitched him to come in as an angle investor. Why not? He said, no thank you, I can't, but nice meeting you too. (The Google/Facebook Of Microfinance, My BusiCopy Cofounder Anuj Bikram Thapa)

I started following him on Tumblr because he was on David Noel's list of people to follow. David Noel is out of Berlin. (My Tumblr Just Got An Upgrade) Just from following Kirk on Tumblr I had seen many, many pictures of his wife.

Lilian Riveros met Kirk on an online dating site. Apparently they clicked enough when they met in person to end up married. Lilian is a New Yorker, of course, a Paraguay native.

FourSquare Day Tomorrow: Rad

Let's see. I don't drink but I like meeting people. Oh hey, this year they are doing it three different venues. I like that. What are the chances I can go to all three? Or maybe I will pick two. Or just one.

Last year on my way out of the party I saw Vin Vacanti still in line.

"I am leaving so you can get in," I said only half jokingly. They were down to only letting people in after someone left.

I just got this info below from Dennis Crowley's tumblog.

5-8pm @ Agave (8th Ave @ Charles Street) 140 7th Ave
7-10 @ Sidebar (15th Street @ Irving) 120 East 15th Street
9-11 @ Village Pourhouse (3rd Ave & 11th St) 64 3rd Avenue

You Don't Need Billions To Take Care Of Your Family

Image via CrunchBaseThis news is heart warming to me. Now I wish a 200 billion dollar valuation upon Facebook. Zuck just warmed up my heart. If you think how minuscule the UN's budget is, this effort by the two mega billionaires Gates and Buffett stands out. And, believe me, money is the smaller part of the message, big as it is. The bigger part of the message is the gesture itself. This sends a loud message to the people in dire need, the people who are working to help them, and people who need to help them but are not. Poverty is truly an artificial thing. It can be made to go away. It doesn't take much. And it all starts with caring. Once you decide you care, things start to happen.

Model Job Offer Scam Threat

from Tammy Thomas tmiy12345@gmail.com
to Paramendra Bhagat
date Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 4:57 AM
subject Re: Model Job Offer!
Nov 19 (3 days ago)

You must be very foolish and stupid for you posting the info of the company at http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2010/11/model-job-offer-scam.html...

Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising

Image via CrunchBase

Michael Arrington going after Anu Shukla a few months back would be like Michael Arrington saying Google is an evil company because click fraud happens, link farms happen. Click fraud happens despite Google's best efforts. Crime happens in New York City despite Michael Bloomberg's best efforts. "The safest big city in America just became safer."

First Anu has to work within the FTC guidelines and she does, or she would not be in business very long. Then there are the Facebook guidelines, and Facebook has chosen to have higher standards than the FTC because they don't want to compromise the user experience in any form or fashion. And if Anu did not follow those Facebook guidelines, some of the games Anu is involved with will no longer be on the Facebook platform. But they continue to be. That is to say they follow the Facebook guidelines. And Anu's company Offerpal Media has strict guidelines of its own. Because they know not compromising the user experience is good for their bottom line. And Anu's company allows its vendors to kick out individual advertisers from their platforms without having to explain why. You don't have to be a fraudulent advertiser to get kicked out. If a particular game does not like you, you are no longer welcome on their platform.

Despite these half dozen layers of policing, some slimey stuff does end up happening. And that can be talked about. That has to be talked about, sure. But to make that slimey stuff the center of the focus is to miss the fundamental point, which is that Anu has done nothing less than found the new frontier in advertising.

Image via CrunchBase

Yahoo used to do banner ads. Then Google came along and said no to that. They said, we don't want to have any ads on our main page, and we want to offer contextual text advertising. At some level that was like going from color movies to black and white, from colorful ads to text ads. But Google had hit the new frontier in advertising at the time. Zuckerberg said search contexts are less relevant than the social graph. And that was the new frontier all over again. Anu has come along and said, wait a minute. Banner or text, context or social graph, you are missing the point. The real action is that people are interacting. That is what gaming is about. The ads and the money transactions have to be part of that gaming experience, not a banner apart. Now that is fundamental insight. That is a paradigm shift.

More than 160 million people and counting play Farmville. Of those less than 100,000 file complaints. Most of those complaints are people saying I paid real cash for virtual coins, and I did not get my coins. Farmville takes care of all those complaints. Usually it gives players more coins than they paid for but say did not get.

Michael Arrington wrote 22 posts on TechCrunch about those 100,000 people. I look forward to seeing 35,200 posts on TechCrunch about the rest of the "scamville" users.

I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

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