Silicon Bowery

Last night Andy and I hosted the first installment of VC Demo...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:30:52 -0400

Last night Andy and I hosted the first installment of VC Demo Days. Basically a classic rip on the traditional demo day, where this time the VCs pitched to about 250 entrepreneurs as to why you should take their money. Some interesting insights:

—True Ventures has partner meetings 2x weekly - entrepreneurs can’t wait a week and they take pride in speed and transparency.

—First Round Capital was founded on the premise of re-inventing the VC space and since they’ve launched have built great community and products through things like Key Hire Wire, CEO Emails, Secondround.com, and their recent Exchange Fund.

—Brian Hirsch and Greenhill are really funny. They took the best prezo award hands down. (note the pic above is from the video)

—Metamorphic loves high valuations - they are believers above and beyond everything else.

—IA has the best domain expertise to help you solve big data problems. If you’re an entrepreneur in this space they should be your first call.

So much more insight than I can put into this quick blog post but it was great to see everyone and we’re really excited to do this all again in a few months.

Congrats to my good buddy Henrik Werdelin on his recent...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:04:49 -0400

Congrats to my good buddy Henrik Werdelin on his recent marriage. His wife played this at the wedding for him (she made it), which basically makes him the luckiest man on the earth to have a wife as cool as this. Congrats Henrik!

Ways to be cool.

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:19:44 -0400

Ways to be cool.

"Justice Scalia said he doesn’t care what people find out about him on the Internet,” said Fordham..."

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:17:50 -0400

““Justice Scalia said he doesn’t care what people find out about him on the Internet,” said Fordham Professor Joel Reidenberg. So Reidenberg challenged his information privacy law class to cyber-stalk Scalia as a lesson in the transparency of personal information online. The students compiled a fifteen-page dossier on Justice Scalia, including his restaurant preferences, the value and location of his home, and photos of his grandchildren.””

- Great article by Kashmir Hill on information privacy. Creepy but insightful.

Last night, we kicked off Tech Founders NYC at AOL Ventures...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:35:19 -0400

Last night, we kicked off Tech Founders NYC at AOL Ventures (AOLV) and it was awesome. Josh from GoodCrush literally called it “the best thing to happen to the NYC tech scene ever!” In all seriousness, it was great to see the huge turnout of engineers and I can’t thank Francis and Jake enough for including me in helping bring it to life.

A quick aside - when I started at AOLV a few months ago I was really happy to be given a ton of freedom around bringing events to our offices to add value back to the NYC ecosystem and help get AOLV out there. After a few months, it’s become pretty clear to me that the biggest resource needs are out of the engineering/technical community. As a result and other than the current things that I’m helping out with, we’re likely to only host engineering/technical meetups going forward (it’s all I can handle).

tmblg: The Dangers of Getting Stoked Getting stoked should be...

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:50:07 -0400

tmblg:

The Dangers of Getting Stoked

Getting stoked should be banned!

These guys have fun.

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:04:39 -0400

These guys have fun.

Leroy Stick - You Are My Hero

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:40:13 -0400

Leroy Stick - You Are My Hero

Photo

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:13:29 -0400

Thoughts On Email...

Wed, 12 May 2010 10:00:00 -0400

I met a great company today in the email space and couldn’t help but think to myself how much the larger web-mail properties could use some of the thinking and solid things that many of these emerging players are creating. Email, for the most part, still sucks and I’m amazed that the category hasn’t really evolved. Some things that I am seeing that are awesome right now in email:

1) Social CRM - Isn’t it crazy that I still don’t know who I have been out of touch with? Where is the pane that maps to my sent mail folder and tells me who I have not connected with in 30, 60, 90 days? Better yet, where is the form email that gets deployed (i.e. ‘hey, we should catch up’) based upon how far out our last point of contact was? While still early and just scratching the surface, I really like how businesses like Etacts, Gist and Rapportive are thinking through this.

2) Scheduling - Going back and forth with emails trying to schedule meetings is a nightmare. Unless you are in the walled garden it’s really tough to map schedules and get something on a shared calender. I like tungle.me and think you should too.

3) Task Management - Do you star emails? Do you put all your emails in a folder as follow ups or, better yet, keep them all in your inbox? Craziness. Likewise, I’m a big fan of sites like Basecamp but for simple tasks that are not complex projects I don’t really want to work through a separate environment. Producteev is a good solution that I am starting to use.

4) Organization - Things like confirmation emails really annoy me. I can’t do anything with them and they only really help me on the day of the trip (what’s that confirmation number again?). Tripit and others take a novel approach to that email and really help from an organization standpoint.

Other than these folks, I’d like to see some companies think more around the funnel of the inbox and what really needs to get to me directly. Email overload is not even funny anymore, and it’s not like we are all going to unsubscribe from everything tomorrow. Why can’t newsletters have a separate pane that refreshes every day? They don’t really need to hit my inbox and I rarely read them anyways. Why can’t someone parse transaction emails or email alerts effectively to take them out of my inbox and place them somewhere else (i.e. I don’t necessarily need the email telling me that I need to pay my AMEX- why can’t that automatically show up in a chat window, a calender invite, a calender alert or maybe be added as a task automatically)?

There is still a ways to go and this is hardly an exhaustive list, but I love how these and other folks are thinking through the problems within email.

youngmanhattanite: Go fuck yourself.

Tue, 11 May 2010 14:22:11 -0400

youngmanhattanite:

Go fuck yourself.

Congrats to the Advertising.com folks for the launch of Ad...

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:59:48 -0400

Congrats to the Advertising.com folks for the launch of Ad Desk. While self serve advertising is not incredibly new (YHOO + GOOG already have it), it’s a definite competitive advantage for mid-market agencies and advertisers to now have access to AOL properties and the Ad.com network that was previously unavailable. While available to everyone, the self-service tool really helps advertisers spending as little as $300 over three days, or $3,000 over 30 days. Building this has been a serious priority for the team since the spin-off and it’s great to see them finally getting this out of the gate. Congrats!

While you drank and slept Saturday night away, 80 people at...

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:28:00 -0400

While you drank and slept Saturday night away, 80 people at iPadDevCamp this weekend, including developers, idea people, and local startups came together to form teams and develop extremely polished iPad applications in 48 hours. AOLV in addition to B&N and Apple sponsored it and The Hatchery put the whole thing on. It was amazing to see the innovation in such a short time and we can’t thank everyone enough for coming through and hacking away at the iPad. Some of the coolest projects were:

1.    Campers – Roast virtual food and marshmallows with a group of friends on your iPhones when you hold your phones close to the simulated fire on the iPad.
2.    Ghost in the Machine – Ouija board for iPad. Very collaborative and definitely speaks to the device as ‘board game of the future.’ The ghost was pretty hilarious.
3.    Dragonflies – Enables kids to explore a virtual backyard to collect, inspect, learn more about and squash virtual bugs.
4.    WeeAtlas – Map exploration application for kids which allows them to see an overview of different countries in the world, and watch a video introduction to each.

Special thanks to Doug Fulop, our intern, for writing up this and crushing the event.

Music deals are hot right now. Q1 total capital invested on a...

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Music deals are hot right now. Q1 total capital invested on a y/y basis is also up, but likely due to Spotify, Sonos and Guvera raising big rounds. Not sure who buys all these guys, but awesome to see so much innovation going on in the space.

The fire is burning at 285 Grand Street. No joke - epic 7 alarm...

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:53:24 -0400

The fire is burning at 285 Grand Street. No joke - epic 7 alarm fire in Chinatown tonight. Thanks for the vid Amber.

Sleeping insects covered in dew. Wow.

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:23:28 -0400

Sleeping insects covered in dew. Wow.

Urlesque turns to Urkelesque for a day and Jaleel gets involved.

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:30:38 -0400

Urlesque turns to Urkelesque for a day and Jaleel gets involved.

Genius.

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:17:15 -0400

Genius.

Call a spade a spade - the little Asian kid is the clear winner...

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:23:59 -0400

Call a spade a spade - the little Asian kid is the clear winner here. Flash mob awesomeness by H+M. Congrats Elyse!

Greg's Stuff: Drinks with Merton

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:03:48 -0400

Greg's Stuff: Drinks with Merton:

Ross Martin and I had drinks w/ Merton of Chat Roulette fame tonight.

What a great guy. He’s most certainly not Ben Folds, although he is a fan. (Aren’t we all…)

I’ve always been a huge fan of Tom Lehrer, who’s satirical songs were hugely popular in the 50s & 60s and who inspired…