Google has announced that their Google Maps product now supports public transit directions. This is very exciting news for me as a person who loves public transit. In my testing this morning, I give the system a grade of C. It's a good first start and will get you to your destination but they have a lot of work to do. For example, there are many places where multiple trains share the same tracks but Google Maps only pushes you to one train. This could cost tourists 10+ minutes waiting for the train that Google suggested. There are also times where hopping on a local if it arrives first makes sense but Google also misses that. This is a project I'd love to be involved with.

The problem is that Google Maps is missing a real human expert who would say "take the 4 OR 5". It will be interesting to see how today's Google Maps launch will affect HopStop. Google has apparently been working on this system for a year notes ReadWriteWeb.

Here's a demo video that the Google Maps team put together. Be careful if you follow their directions from the Met to the Mets. It takes you through 2 extra transfers and a bit of walking that's not needed. The best way is to take the 4/5 at 86th and transfer to the 7 at 42nd and if it's in the afternoon, take the 7 Express. Any NY'er knows that :)

The NYSIA monthly meeting for September consisted of a boot camp for startups. I was able to capture each of the segments on video and this session was around the accounting aspects of starting a business. Mike Lopez, from Amper Politziner, and Mattia begins by explaining the importance of looking at the eventual exit and making sure that the transactions throughout the business are completed correctly.

Mike looks at the tax implications of the different business entity types and a variety of accounting issues including revenue recognition, software development costs and stock-based compensation. As a former accountant myself, I agree with Mike's comments about keeping a good set of books. It will help you throughout your business and will keep the overall accounting costs down.

My notes from Jason Fried of 37Signals at the NY Web 2.0 Expo:

Software business is a great place to be . You can build anything you want. Don’t have to worry about physics, raw materials, regulation, cost of change, geographic locale

You do have to worry about some issues most people don’t worry about:
- lack of feedback loop. Water bottle is immediately apparent as a quality design. Software is too nebulous. Doesn’t have edges or weight. Can expand infinitely.
- If software were physical, what would it feel like?

Versions 3 or 5 of software tend to be the best. If you say yes to too many customers, you look like MS Office.

You should think of yourself as a curator. Curator’s job is to say ‘no’.

Listen to customers, but innovate on behalf of entire customer base

Tend to bloat over time. Hard to go back over time from bloat.

Customers only represent what they know is possible, not what is ultimately possible.

When you get a request, attach a cost to it (dollars, time, etc.).

Q: How would you redesign Microsoft Office?
A: Make it much more social. It’s fine.

Q: Who should be the curator?
A: Steve Jobs is the ultimate curator in business.

Following are my notes on the Friday keynotes from the NY Web 2.0 Expo

Jay Adelson, founder, Digg

We’re about to add 90m Facebook users as registered Digg users.
Collaborative filters are key to monetizing of social networks

Ben Huh, icanhazcheezburger.com
LOLcats started out in primordial soup of the internet.
Every piece of web 2.0 content came from a user.
In 4/07, 8m page views/month. Had grown from blog to web 2.0 component, because it allowed people to build LOLcats.
100% user-generated content
8,000 submissions/day.

9/07: 15m page views/month
Huh and some other investors bought the site.
Our goal: make users happy for 5min/day
6 posts a day
9am ET start, when people come to work
Strict promotional guidelines
We normalize the system

Rules: we don’t allow photos of cat on a stove with the flame on, but it can be next to the stove
3/08: 37m page views/day
3/08: launched a network: ROFLrazzi.com . Just acquired failblog.com, which is growing faster than icanhazcheezburger
Now 100m page views/month.
8 sites.
5 FTEs who moderate comments, pictures.
We lower the bar for content creation. The lower it is, the better content you’ll have.

Shawn Fisher, head of strategy/M&A for IAC
Future of video games.
Instant Action is defining the $2b online core games market.
Overall video games market is $34b

2 types of video games:
-$7b in console based: $400 for hardware, $60/game. Add an extra $50/year for cost of ownership
PC is $150/year for online connectivity, and $60/game. Much cheaper because you don’t have console cost.

Only 8% of console titles reached 650K units (breakeven on avg. investment)
It’s an expensive product, takes a long time to produce, expsnvie for users…but high engagement.
We see room for breakthrough in this market. See see new category of games: hardcore games moving to the web. Most publishers won’t focus on this — too disruptive and cannibalistic.
Altenative: full and engaging video games that function 100% in browser.
Advantages: low cost, rapid development, entirely online distrution, high engagement, free for basic access
That’s what we’re building.

New brand :instantaction. First web-based videogame platform. Multi-player game. Console quality delivered in the browser.

We fund and develop original IP.
700K registered users. 30mins./day avg. time on site.
Over 127 countries
50% users in US, 50% outside. Core demographic male 13-34.

Dan Lyons, Fake Steve Jobs

Just joined Newsweek as a columnist.
As an old media guy, attending this conference is like attending your funeral in advance.
Started this in June 06
He put Fake Steve Jobs on hiatus when he saw Steve looking so sick.
Wrote book, “options”, on his secret life.
Started blog, RealDan, which everyone says sucks.
He started the blog because:
1) had free time
2) fear. I saw what was happening to the news business. I tried to get a job on the dot-com side of Forbes, but was rejected. I was 48, grey hair.

I wanted to parody both Steve and also blogging as a form. This was mostly fiction. This was a comic strip that evolved into news.

Some people thought I was steve and wrote to me asking for features.
In a few months, I had 90,000 people reading this. That’s more readers than I had at the first newspaper that hired me. Soon I had 1.5m readers.

Rich Karlgard (Dan’s boss) launches search for who fake steve jobs is. Dan told him who he was.

Brad Stone of the NY Times broke the story. At this point, at least 100 people knew about it, so it’s not surprising I was outed.

Why does it work?

Once I was outed, this still worked. The community really liked his stuff.
- Consume & create
- Fake Vladimir Putin: a character who lived entirely on my blog, who argued with fake Noam Chomsky.
- It’s a performance space

Last October we interviewed MyPRGenie CEO Miranda Tan at her office in NYC. MyPRGenie offers a way for companies to distribute their press releases for free or low cost depending on the selected options. Today MyPRGenie is launching the 2.0 version of their platform.

Miranda notes that the updated service is a, "social media communication platform and publicity engine". When you create an account on MyPRGenie, you can search a database of 550,000 press contacts for distribution. The contacts come from a new partnership with PR Newswire. The goal of the new version is to allow PR professionals and companies can use our platform to connect, manage and track all their PR outreach. 

MyPRGenie will also allow companies to upload media/text files into a company news portal which journalists and writers can pick up when needed for a story.

Perhaps this new version of MyPRGenie could be exactly what I've suggested regarding conferences. Create a conference portal where all companies post their information and journalists/bloggers can login and select the information and companies they are interested in meeting and/or learning more about.

With the latest announcements of T-Mobile releasing the HTC Dream phone running Android on October 13th, we deemed it appropriate to show a preview of Unype on Android:

One of the best speakers at the NY Web 2.0 Expo was Josh Schachter of delicious, who spoke on Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems:

BACKGROUND

Built delicious in 2003, sold to Yahoo in 2005. I just left Yahoo a few months ago.
Billions of page views/month.
4m users at time of sale

3 kinds of scale: technological, personal, and software.

Technological scale
- partition users into multiple sets (sharding, clustering). I built delicious into one big database.
- caching. Avoid going into the database.
- replicas. Must have multiple copies of the data.
- mysql issue: we got a 60x performance speedup by making some changes
- autoincrement: will hurt you later. Don’t do this.
- put proxy in front. Don’t let the dialup user take up your whole server
- sloppiness. Use an offline process to decouple interactive processes from the rest of the system.

Social Scale
- different features at different scales
- at beginning, make it easy for users to find one another. Don’t let them say ‘hi’ and see no one respond. Minimize barriers to entry and minimize transaction costs.
- as you grow, you have to design features to mitigate traffic. E.g., on delicious, the ability to follow your friends.

3 reasons a social app has value:
- utility, network effect, revenue
- Delicious initially focused on utility.
- have to provide value to the user *before* there are a lot of users online
- you have to provide these motivations in this order: 1) provide utility, 2) get a network effect, 3) monetize

For a long time, biggest apps on Facebook were Superpoke, etc. They have very little functionality, but a lot of users, because they are simple enough to spread rapidly.

App must be self-marketing without requiring sign-in.

Compare initial marketing vs. actual functionality. Initial marketing of delicious was: bookmarks for people with multiple PCs. But really, we became a search engine for bookmarks.

Half our traffic came from RSS.

Figure out drivers for infection. Firefox Extension was our biggest driver.
Choice of language matters: key to say ‘do not share’ instead of ‘private’, to discourage not sharing. ‘Not sharing’ sounds like something your mom would criticize you for.

Kids change their social network partly because it allows them to update the network to reflect their current status

Delicious doesn’t have a chat feature because I didn’t want the flame wars you see on wikipedia admin pages

Must prepare to deal with spam and abuse

Lengthen or destroy feedback loops.

If you kick off a spammer, you’ve taught them what they did wrong. But they’ll be back. So on delicious we let them use the system but didn’t let anyone see them.

When xdrive had problems with spammers, they just inserted a 20sec delay on downloading files. That frustrated them and they moved to a different system.

Make pretty URL’s; they’re easier to remember & forward.

We were one of the first sites with a public API. I used this as a tool to recruit people who might have built competitors otherwise

Scaling yourself. The first thing you do will be wrong. Iterate quickly.

Write down all your ideas. It’s good for future patent work.

If people in engineering have to read support tickets they’ll build around problems

Figure out user motivations

put the whole staff in the listening session. Measure and record everything.

Average user has 60 tags.
8% of users will use 12345 as password
Another few % will use 123456
And about 15% will use your domain plus their ID

His best observation: SMS is the next command line. The next 1b people online will only have SMS.

NY-based private file sharing service Drop.io has announced the launch of geo-location based drops. The concept works like this -- you upload files into your drop. Once uploaded you can tag the drop with a location. Users can search on locations and drops that are set as public will be returned. Some examples would include: "Grand Central", "London's Speaker's Corner" or "Berlin Ubahn". For this new location service to be effective, they will need a large number of drops to identify their location so searches return actual results.

The Drop.io Location functionality utilizes Skyhook Wireless' Loki JavaScript API for the location detection services. Drop.io's CEO Sam Lessin says today's launch could help drive a "location-publishing platform".

This new location service is an interesting change for Drop.io. When the service launched, everything was about privacy and the private nature of drops. The idea was that the only way to find a drop was to know the specific URL. Today's location announcement changes that - drops can now be indexed...will they be indexed in Google next?

Check out our video interview with the Drop.io team along with all of our Drop.io coverage.

Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson gave a little history lesson on New York’s web/tech startup scene, including a plea to once and for all bury the Silicon Alley moniker.