As many of you know I have been fairly focused on the question of how to improve the state of the technologist community in New York.

Unfortunately, we do not have the same kind of technologist community as other geographies such as Silicon Valley, and while there are many many technologists in the New York area, in my view there is not sufficient connectedness among us. Many of you are buried inside much larger institutions such as investment banks, and other organizations for which technology is more of a necessary means to an end, than something in and of itself to be interested in or excited about.

So today, I am proposing the creation of a group called the Geek NY.

Geek NY will be modeled on several ideas that I have seen work, and that I think could be effective. The anchor of the concept, which I hope can be similar to the NY Tech Meetup, is a monthly meeting where one or two people will present a technical idea or issue that would be of interest to the technology community at large. An example might be someone coming in to talk about the concept of map/reduce as a new paradigm for programming.

The idea is, at the monthly meetings, to offer presentations that are broadly valuable to the technologist community. Presenters will be a mix of local technologists, and presenters from the corporate or academic world. However, the idea would never be to promote specific products, but more to discuss new ideas, processes and thinking.

Once we begin to improve connectedness, I believe there will be an opportunity to tackle some of the broader issues that keep New York from really being on the map as a great place to create technology and to build technology companies.

Several months ago we formed the New York Tech Boosters mailing list, which I would encourage everyone to join, as it will be the starting point for all discussion about Geek NY. If you are in the Tri-State area, join us.

I was asked to do a marketing workshop at the most recent ITAC FastTrac led by Charlie O'Donnell (I just did that interview with him on nextNYers). FastTrac is a 12-week comprehensive business boot-camp that helps NYC companies develop a well-honed business plan, solidify strategies, understand the investor mindset and better position themselves to attract capital. One of the attendees took prodigious notes at the presentation and posted them on his company's blog. Check them out!

NY-based Magnify.net has launched v3.0 of their software today including a new enterprise model and more social tools. Magnify.net is now able to import social content from services including: Twitter, Flickr and Mogulus. Magnify.net lets you create a themed video channel by importing videos from YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, Veoh and other online video services. Magnify.net picked up $1 million in additional funding last month. The company is now referring to their service as an "Online Social TV Network".

Similar to NY-based white label social networking provider KickApps, Magnify.net now offers three pricing plans: free, pro and enterprise. Free allows you to share in the revenue generated from your pageviews, pro allows you to "buy" the inventory and display your own advertising and enterprise is for their larges customers including The Weather Channel.

Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage.

In the interest of anti-stealth, I’m going to publicly announce one of the for profit ventures that I am currently working on. Incidentally, what exactly happened to the NextNY anti-stealth movement? There was a lot of activity at the end of October, and then the whole movement seemingly collapsed.

Anyway, a friend and I have started exploring the idea of a new campus based venture. Many of you who are students are probably familiar with the few awkward minutes that you spend every few hours in an elevator traveling to and from class. While you are in the elevator, wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice LCD displaying current campus events that might be of interest to you, or perhaps an ad telling you about the discounted food at Chipotle down the block this week?

Our idea is exactly that, we would like to create a network of LCDs in campus elevators that would stream both campus events as well as advertisements. A well established player, Captivate Network, currently does this in the office building market. We would like to stay away from office buildings at the moment, and focus purely on college campuses (Facebook vs LinkedIn analogy?).

Since both of us are current Columbia students, in fact both BME PhD students, we have decided to use Columbia University as a pilot site. I haven’t had time to put together a powerpoint presentation yet, but I will definitely post it in the next few days. For now we are tackling several thorny issues:

• Is it even possible to do it in NY? We are currently checking the New York Fire Code. Safety code for elevators and escalators : an American national standard by the American Society for Mechanical Engineers will be our guide. Looks like I won’t need sleeping pills tonight.
• We have done some back of the envelope calculations to see whether the idea is sustainable and scalable. If we intend to get more funding, we will have to produce a full financial projection. The projection itself is of course of no great importance to either investors or us, since reality almost always deviate significantly from the projections. Though it’s important to have one anyway, if nothing else than to show that due diligence was performed.
• To start campus based businesses that depend so much on campus infrastructure, we are clearly going to need a faculty champion. We have started approaching various members of the engineering faculty, the business school faculty, as well as Columbia’s Science and Technology Ventures group to begin soliciting feedback and buy-ins. We’ve had a lot of success getting people excited about the concept, but haven’t found a champion of the project yet. If you know of a Columbia faculty who might be interested, please let me know!
• I will also begin to approach NYU and CCNY about the idea as well, in case Columbia falls through as a pilot site.
• We will clearly need a powerpoint presentation down the line. I’ll put up version 1.0 of the presentation in a few days.

Since we are still very early in our planning stages, we are open to all suggestions and ideas. Let me know if any of you have any feedback or have seen existing implementations on college campuses! If you happen to be a college student / faculty, and are interested in joining our team, shoot me an email: mail @ jackpo dot org.

NY-based CafeMom has announced a new round of funding in the amount of $12 million. The round was co-led by the company's original investors Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Including this new round, the company has raised $20.3 million to-date.

CafeMom is working with some of the largest CPG companies and retailers in the U.S. including: Walmart, Playskool, Disney, HP, Kraft, General Mills, Nestle, Unilever, JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson and Best Buy. I spoke with head of design Matt Zarzecki who explained that custom campaigns average between $200,000 and $500,000. 

The site is currently running over 120 million pageviews per month with 6 million visitors. CafeMom is an interesting startup for me to watch given my history in the CPG online business and having been involved in a similar site from inside a CPG company. Moms are one of the "richest" segments online and CafeMom has done an excellent job capitalizing on this demographic. I put them on acquisition watch last week.

Check out my interview with two of the executives from CafeMom.

The March 2008 episode of BigScreen LittleScreen will be taking place in the real world on Monday, March 24th at 6:30pm in the For Your Imagination studio. Tilzy.TV featured this opportunity for web video content creators in New York City in a recent article as a great place to promote your work. BigScreen LittleScreen, hosted by Matt Semel from 10ton.tv and Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination, is a unique forum for online video and interactive content creators and enthusiasts to show and share their work with their colleagues, potential customers and partners. Space is limited at this event so make sure you RSVP.

See Jeremiah’s coverage of the lunch here (his photo above)

One of my favorite things to is show off the best of Silicon Alley to people visiting Silicon Valley - especially influential folks.

Today, I did just that, by having folks converge on Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for lunch with Forrester Researcher Jeremiah Owyang who writes the influential Web-Strategist blog. I’ve known Jeremiah since Frank Gruber introduced us at Blog World Expo in November.

Anyway, those in attendance for lunch were (aside from Jeremiah and myself):

Kyle Bragger
James Gross - Federated Media
Matt Zarzecki - CafeMom
Dan Lurie
and Ryan Anderson from Fuel Industries

I was especially glad to introduce Jeremiah to Kyle, as he had been following BricaBox since back in November.

Also, it was great to have Matt there because their community stuff at CafeMom is of such interest to Jeremiah’s work. I hope they stay in touch going forward.

Overall, though, it was just a treat to show off Silicon Alley and show that with just a few Twitters you can have folks coming out of the woodwork to a nice lunch. Hopefully Jeremiah’s post finds it back through the Valley and they learn how great our community of tech people here are.

British startup Naked is fundamentally rethinking online communication. Email, IM, text messaging and social networking all fall short on points and don’t work together.

Naked proposes a cross-platform alternative they call Open Messaging. There’s already an international private beta. US mobile support will be added before the end of this month.

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Charlie O'Donnell, founder of nextNY - a NY tech community organization comprised up and coming entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, strategists, bloggers, designers, and more in New York City, is the featured interview of this week nextNYers. The surprise in the video is that Paul Kontonis, CEO of For Your Imagination, is the guest host of the interview, temporarily substituting for Courtney Nichols. nextNYers is a weekly web series  which interviews the top executives of the hottest up-and-coming technology, new media and Web 2.0 companies in New York brought to you by CenterNetworks, nextNY and For Your Imagination.

The first-ever Internet Week New York will take place from June 3 - June 10, 2008 and will include a variety of events around NYC. The executive council includes a variety of names from around the country who specialize in online media including individuals from: AdAge, Federated Media, The Onion, BoingBoing, Avenue A/Razorfish, WNBC, and CondeNet.

An initial schedule has been posted which includes information on the Conversational Marketing Summit and the Webby awards. Both of these events were held outside NYC last year. The full schedule will be posted in April.

From what I gather, this is a combination of some NYC companies, some NYC events plus events and companies from outside the NYC-metro area. It looks like it's going to rock. Just one question, couldn't we have pulled off this on our own as a showcase of what NYC has to offer?