NYTM 03/09/09: Fashion Institute of Technology

FIT - Haft Auditorium

27th St & 7th Ave
btw 7th & 8th Ave
New York, NY 10001

March 9, 2009

- Drop.io
- FourSquare
- KindlingApp Your org's democratic suggestion box. Ideas + Collaboration + Voting = Progress!
- enjoysthin.gs : A website dedicated to collecting and sharing things you enjoy.
- the 3 you vote in
- and Prof. Panos Ipeirotis from NYU talking about the EconoMining project.

http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/messages/boards/thread/6233383/


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This was a new venue for the New York Tech MeetUp. The Diller building was razzmatazz. But this was a bigger venue, a better location, and nobody was pushing you out of the building as soon as the show was over. I paid cash so I had to wait. They did let me in right before the beginning, after having processed all those who paid online.

The presentations were great. The stage was great. Nate did a great job of hosting. Although I think he should say no to all announcement requests like Scott had decided to. Later I told him one one one, Nate, you are a public figure, one of the most important skills you will learn is to say no. He said, but if I were to say no to you you'd think I am a dick. I said you already said no to me, and I respected you for that. That was in reference to a funding advice I sought from him over email.



The presentations were great, but the mingling right after was greater, and the after party after that was the greatest. Thanks Alicia for buying me a drink, and thanks for the tip to go to the Sloan group on LinkedIn to try and get a MBA person. I shot out a few quick emails once back home.

Oh, hi there Stan.

I went from booth to booth afterwards and did the tech version of nice pin, nice tie. Met the guy who organized the Shorty Awards. That is for Twitter, for those of you who don't know. They just did the first one, now they will do it every year.

Most presentations tend to be dot coms seeking to add value in the online space. Some are going for ads, others are seeking to charge users for use. There were some remarkable applications on show.

Bloomberg To Help Ex-Wall Street Execs Start New Firms by Wall ...
Technorati: Discussion about “Bloomberg Announces $2 Million Fund...

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- Drop.io
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- and Prof. Panos Ipeirotis from NYU talking about the EconoMining project.

Jeff Jarvis: Bold Restructuring

Video: Eye To Eye With Katie Couric: Jeff Jarvis (CBS News)

Image via Wikipedia

The Great Restructuring by Jeff Jarvis

This is a great blog post by Jeff Jarvis, someone I got to meet in person on February 3 at the Diller building. (NY Tech MeetUp: 02/03/09)

Davos 09: Open Bank full disclosure of performance and compensation. ...... a means to confirm that customers understood what they were buying ...... Bankers are in fortress mode ...... eimagined retail, education, and government. ....... obert Scoble, who has been arguing that the way out of our mess is to start a million companies ....... Shimon Peres, who made a forceful argument that the future will be secured with investment in technology (including biotechnology) and education (which he as much as said was the next thing to come after the internet wave). ........ giving trillions of dollars to the incumbents, to people like that sneering banker ....... We should, instead, be investing our money in entrepreneurs and technologists, the people who will change old industries, reimagining them under new rules with new people ..... need to look at replacing rather than just repairing these broken institutions .... We are bailing out the past. Instead, we must bail out the future.
Scenario For News news - on both the content and business side - will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative. ....... provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together ........ open the process of news in blogs ...... Editors will become more curators, aggregators, organizers, educators. ....... less about controlling a flow than encouraging and improving creation. ....... nvestigations matter more than ever ....... Do what you do best and link to the rest ........ covering a niche deeply ....... The old syndication model will die ..... he wire-service model is in jeopardy ..... any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms ........ EveryBlock will organize data; Outside.in will organize geo content; Daylife will organize news; Publish2 will organize links; Digg will help the crowd curate; Clickable will help sell ads; Google will serve ads; YouTube and Brightcove will serve videos ......... algorithms mining newly transparent government documents ........ Seth Godin’s prescription for The New York Times ..... Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site?
The Link Changes Everything The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads.
Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy



Jarvis is an imaginative optimist.

Instead of seeing job losses and folding companies and wrecked futures and dislocations he sees capitalism's creative destructions. Historic parallels still apply. What is happening right now to the economy seems to happen once every 70 years, has happened four times in a row now. After each such crisis the economy has come out better than ever before. Jarvis is suggesting the same is about to happen all over again. He is focused on the impending good news.



Not all the observations are his, he borrows as freely as he expounds. But they together are a great narrative to these wildly depressing times for the most. Many jobs are lost forever. But new, better jobs have to be created, and people need to be helped to transition to those new jobs.

What are some of his observations, and that of others he mentions?

• The market is rightly bringing down the artificially high prices on a host of things.
  
• An old building is being brought down so a new building can take its place.
  
• This fundamental restructuring is to the economy but also to society. How we relate to each other is changing.
  
• Many jobs lost now will never return. "In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business." (New York Times)
• Not just jobs, entire sectors of the US economy might disappear.
  
• Newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast media, all are experiencing upheavals.
  
• A lot of retail is going online.
  
• Business travel will for the large part be replaced by more efficient communications.
  
• Dirty energy will "shrivel."
• Real estate construction will decline.
  
• Health care and education will see reinvention and growth.
  
• Ditto government.
  

The good news?

• This is a great time to launch startups.
  
• "Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King. Each opened during a period of economic downturn."
• Jarvis emphasizes creating platforms and networks. He talks of "a network of spaces for independent work (the inverse of Starbucks: good with space and services, OK with coffee). Add payroll, insurance, hosting, and all sorts of services."
• "Radical transparency" for banks.
• He wants to "rethink the auto industry in the image of the computer industry: disaggregating the car so we can reaggregate it from many new suppliers."
• There's "new scenarios for news."
• There is "rethinking and remaking advertising."
  

"Every one of the collapsing industries listed above will be replaced - in a different image, at a different scale - and that presents opportunities."

The promise is a new economy, a new society, a new world. Help people see through the transition.

Credit will have to flow again, spending will have to grow again. But they will go in new directions.

But right now we are in the destruction part of the cycle. Let the creation begin as soon as possible.

Jarvis has done a good job of describing where we are now and we are or should be going, but he has not done a good job of connecting the two. How do we help people with the transition? How to minimize disruptions? How to move people from lost jobs to better paying jobs?

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Twitter And The Time Dimension

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Twitter is real time search. That is its functionality.

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Facebook is more about space, the human space, the "social graph," as the Facebook people call it.

The next Twitter does not only text and links and photos but also video. And that might be a hardware and connectivity challenge more than a Twitter challenge. But it is only a matter of time before that video part also seeps in. But I don't wish to emphasize that too much. Text and links are enough for the most part. Photos are a plus, but not all that essential.

The next Twitter is not necessarily richer features, it is a Twitter that has 10 times more users and so is more useful to the existing users. An internet with more computers linked in is more useful. A Twitter with many more users will be more useful. A few Twitter users in every town on earth, and we will really have tipped the scale.



And it can't just be about real time search. The search functionality will have to get much better. Users should be able to dig into the archives and make sense. So Twitter can't be just about real time search, rather it has to be about snapshots in time and space.

Facebook will benefit from switching to real time status updates, but it will make a mistake in thinking it is competing with Twitter. They inhabit two quite separate spaces. The biggest lesson Facebook could learn right now is that just like to the Eskimo there are many different kinds of snow, there are many different kinds of friends. There are family, relatives, close friends, classmates, colleagues, acquaintances. Right now Facebook is at the one snow level of sophistication. And that is not good enough. Inner circle interaction should feel different from outer circle interaction. Facebook is not there yet.

How about adding a Hello function to Facebook which would be like the Follow function on Twitter? I can follow anyone I want on Twitter. On Facebook if we are not friends we are not friends, but I think I should be able to say hello to anyone I want to say hello to. They should see I said hello, and they should have the option to check out my profile, maybe they want to say hello as well. And maybe we talk. And decide to become friends down the line.

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