Incredible India

Funny English signs across India

Mike Bloomberg, Amit Gupta

The Dalai Lama On Homo Sapiens

Via Ryan Brown

Alexa Von Tobel Of LearnVest

Source

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.

Happy Birthday Amitabh

Nexus Prime: A Birthday Gift To Me?
Tweet 1, Tweet 2

Events: Week Of October 10

Monday, October 10
6:30-10:00pm Ignite NYC 13
Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, 811 7th Avenue, The Metropolitan Ballroom, Second Floor
B/D/E 7th Ave

7:00-9:00pm Google Presents: HTML5 and Modern Web Apps Overview
New Work City, 412 Broadway, Floor 2

Tuesday, October 11
7:00pm NY Tech Meetup
NYU Skirball Center, 566 Laguardia Pl
E/F to West 4th

Wednesday, October 12
5:30pm Web 2.0 Expo Startup Showcase
Central Park West

Thursday, October 13
6:00pm-9:00pm ER Accelerator Happy Hour
Connolly's NYC, 121 West 45th Street, 3rd Floor

Friday, October 14
5:00-6:30pm South Asian Journalists Association: Meet Imran Khan & Bobby Ghosh
Columbia Journalism School
Lecture Hall, one flight up from the lobby
116th Street & Broadway (#1 subway to 116th St stop)

9:30pm Amit Gupta Event
New Work City
412 Broadway, Floor 2

tyDi Featuring Tania Zygar: Vanilla

My Take On AirTime

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeSean Parker's AirTime Could Net Him Tens Of Billions

I have not read up on it much, frankly there is not much to read about, not much has come out. So some of what I am going to say is based on my own thoughts on the space.

(1) It has to be video. It can't be audio, and it can't be photos. Global broadband will get there.

(2) It has to feel like you got into a private plane to fly around the world.

(3) I should have the option to make myself unavailable, and when I am busy talking to someone already, I am unavailable by default.

(4) I should have the option to flag and block people. A person/account flagged/blocked by a certain number of people should have their account reviewed, possibly suspended. Could be 100 blocks. The person being blocked should get a count of how many times it has happened.

(5) Random connections has to be the starting point of the experience. No real names, no real identities. If people want to wear masks, fine. Their choice.

(6) The "next" button is key to the idea of random connections.

(7) When trying to find people to talk to I should have the option to specify geographical area of interest, language preference (or lack thereof), and topic of interest. That would still be random connections.

(8) If both parties to a talk give each other a thumbs up they should have the option to connect again at a later time of their choosing through the service itself.

(9) This need not be a two person thing. People should have the option to engage in five or 10 people talks. Still random. Group talks on a shared topic might be more fun than a two person talk.

(10) The option to "friend" a stranger after a certain number of successful conversations.

(11) How would you define the social graph in this space? That is very much an open question.

(12) Keep it simple starting out.

Sean Parker's AirTime Could Net Him Tens Of Billions

Sean Parker is a billionaire already at a net worth of over two billion. The guy is 31.



Napster, Facebook, Plaxo, Causes, Spotify, AirTime. Before today I did not even realize Causes was his thing. You live and you learn. Plaxo was annoying, don't you think? And yet that is the company he is most proud of.

I learned of AirTime very recently. But you only have to do a search on the term Chatroulette at this blog to get a feel for my passion for the topic. Just like the Google guys gave jobs to people like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, Sean Parker should rope in the Russian dude, give him a small cut, not legally required, but might be beneficial.

Chatroulette Is For Real
ChatVille Is Live Now: "What ChatRoulette Should Have Been"
Chatfe Happy Hour With Paul Orlando
Penises For Sale: The Russian Mafia Is On It
Chatfe: Audio, Interest Based Random Connections On Skype?
Paul Orlando In The New York Times

The social graph that Facebook has mapped is not really all that cutting edge. I mean, I already knew these people. I did not need help knowing them. But I do need help, a lot of help, getting to know people I don't know, I might never meet. AirTime could help map that uncharted social graph, and that is big.

The Color Social Graph Might Work Better For Books, Movies, Music
Finally Facebook Lets Me Reach Out To Non Friends

In many ways I am looking at AirTime as Sean Parker's first startup. This is the one he gets to do his way. This is the one he gets to own a big chunk of.

I really like this guy. He is always thinking big. He paints in broad strokes. His visions tend to be sweeping, panoramic. Not for him is incremental innovation. He is always wanting to do the next big thing. And now through AirTime he is trying to tackle the most virgin aspect of the web. The landscape of what he is trying to navigate is so shapeless right now.

Maybe the guy should rope me in in some kind of an advisory role. I could not think of a better preparation as I gear to launch my own microfinance startup. I think I am in a position to contribute.

Sean Parker's 2009 Email To Spotify
Sean Parker: Mystery Man
Sean Parker, F8, HTML5, Android
Sean Parker: Video: Facebook, MySpace
The Sean Parker Analogy
Sean Parker, Billionaire, Was Really Poor Once
The Day I Got Called Sean Parker
Paul Graham: Wrong About NYC
White Male Conspiracy To Drive Me Homeless

Sean Parker's 2009 Email To Spotify

Image via WikipediaImage via CrunchBase
----- Original Message -----
From: Sean Parker
To: Daniel Ek; Shakil Khan
Sent: Tue Aug 25 13:49:35 2009
Subject: thoughts

Daniel/Shakil,

I've been playing around with Spotify. You've built an amazing experience. As you saw, Zuck really likes it too. I've been trying to get him to understand your model for a while now but I think he just needed to see it for himself.

Facebook has been in partnership discussions with various companies to fullyintegrate music download with the Facebook profile. Most of these deals would have resulted in the wrong user experience and I've done my best to stop them where they didn't make sense. In particular, there's no way that iTunes could enable the right experience on Facebook. Business development teams have a bias for working with the top player in a given market, especially when they don't understand that market. Unfortunately, partnering with iTunes would not only have created the wrong user experience, it would have had disastrous consequences for the emerging digital music industry.

I'm looking forward to meeting you guys sometime in early September, though I'm pretty excited about what you've done and I can't resist sharing some of my thoughts with you here first.

Your design is clean, elegant, tight, and fast. While it's clearly lacking some important features (the social stuff you alluded to, etc), I think you've done a great job with sequencing. You nailed the core experience around which everything else can later be built.

Twitter Asks

Well, Jack, I am glad you asked. Finally. I have been spouting over the months without even being asked.

Twitter: Too Complex
Twitter At Five: Not Spitting Out Well
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting
Screw Twitter, Screw Facebook
Tweet Embed Option Needed
Twitter: $45 Million To $150 Million To $250 Million
No, Biz, Twitter Has Real Issues
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?
Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas

My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher

Twitter Trouble?
Why Jack Dorsey Invented Twitter
The Mother Of All Twitter Lists
The New York Times Is Bullish On Twitter

The Good

(1) That Twitter exists. That it got invented. It was necessary. Twitter could become Google size. Or maybe it is too late.

The Bad

(1) 2000 was when Twitter's time had come. Waiting all those years was a bad move.
(2) Removing the Founder CEO was a bad move. I don't know all the gory details, I don't even want to know. But that was a bad move. If the same would have been done to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook also might have been by the wayside. It is a DNA thing.

The Ugly

(1) You don't get to delete my tweets. All my tweets are belong to me. And I want them available, to me and to all interested third parties. Real time also means real time as it happened yesterday. I want to be able to search through all my tweets.



Feature Requests

(1) I want to be able to delete many Direct Messages at once, not one at a time.
(2) I want to be able to search through my Direct Messages like I can my email inbox.
(3) I want Facebook like notifications for new tweets where I am mentioned, new Direct Messages. I am talking about that red button on Facebook that shows up with a number.
(4) I want to be able to embed tweets in my blog posts in an easy way. There should be an embed button like there is a reply button, a retweet button. Generate one or two lines of code max. If YouTube can do it with videos, I mean.
(5) Why only 20 lists? I want to create more lists. If you can't give limitless, give me 50, give me 100.
(6) From the Home page, when I click on the Retweet link at the top next to the Mentions button, I should end up on a page that gives me an overview of all my retweet data/information.
(7) Same with the search button. I should be able to customize my searches. Search all of my tweets. Search all of my tweets from this time period to that time period. Search all tweets by people who follow me. Search through all tweets by people I follow. Search all tweets. Search all tweets from the specified period. Search all tweets from a specified geographical location, might be a city, a country, region, a continent. Search through all tweets from a specified location and a specific time period (for when I want to relive a revolution). Search only through tweets with images attached. Search only through tweets with videos attached.
(8) Clicking on Lists should also take me to a page that should automatically display the timelines for my top two or three lists.
(9) I don't have this problem yet, but after I become rich and famous (like you) I want to be able to read many tweets at once. Give me visualization options so I can read 100 tweets at once. As in, these are the last 1,000 tweets from people you don't follow in one infographic. And I would want an embed option on that "read." I want bragging rights.
(10) My profile page should have links to my Facebook page, my blog, my LinkedIn page without taking up too much real estate.
(11) I can now upload a picture directly to Twitter. Thanks. That should also apply to video clips that are a minute or less.
(12) First and foremost - and I repeat - do the search thing.
(13) Tell Sean Parker I said hi.

Breakfast With Albert (Wenger)

I don't want you to think I was sitting across the table from Albert Wenger, and we had breakfast. That is not what happened.

There were 100-200 people on two floors. We did have breakfast, cupcakes and milk. And Albert was there. But he showed up on stage mysteriously from behind.

Events: Week Of October 3

8:30am - 10:00am CreativeMornings/NewYork with Albert Wenger
Galapagos Art Space DUMBO, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn

So there was breakfast. And there was Albert Wenger.

I think he gave a great talk. It is a shame people like him get outgunned by stupid people lobbying really, really hard on Capitol Hill to defend old industries that can not be defended.

I was sitting in the front. I got to ask the first question. I asked him if he were to put together a trillion dollar stimulus bill for this economy what might it look like? He said the biggest part of it would be about getting cheap broadband to everyone. That reply was in total sync with my own thoughts on the topic.

America And Europe Need To Learn From Japan
The Mini Me Stimulus Bill Lacks Imagination



What Are You Doing Monday? Come Meet Al Wenger

Steve Jobs: 1997