If you want to watch a video online of a cat opening a jar, that’s easy. A haunted Ouija Board? Not a problem. But if you want to watch the City Council hearing on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to reduce poverty, you’d be hard pressed to find it.
Councilmember Gale Brewer would like to change that. The Technology in Government Committee, which she chairs, held a hearing this week about a bill to offer live webcasts of all public meetings and archive them online.
The city developed a webcasting pilot six years ago, but Web video has developed increasingly farther since then. For example, live webstreaming is available for free to anybody with a digital camera and internet access (Brooklyn Heights Blog just used one such service to broadcast their debate between State Senate candidates Daniel Squadron and John Chromczak).
In fact, New York city is behind most other big cities on this front, as CityRoom pointed out.
Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, said in written testimony that webcasts are the “obvious next step” in the city’s efforts to use technology to promote accountability and transparency.
But she would also like to see that written testimony available on the council’s Web site.
After implementing webcasts of public meetings, she suggested, “providing copies of all relevant documents that will be discussed at meetings in [PDFs] on the website.”
Hearings for technology related issues - like the recent “white spaces” and small technology business sector hearings - usually result in a spattering of testimony posted online. But they are posted by those who gave the testimony. As such, only those who choose to post them are available, and even those are sprinkled around in various corners of the Web.
Brewer has said she supports posting testimony on the council Web site.
But webcasting and video archiving are the priority for most.
“Video records come alive in a way that a transcript simply does not,” said Joshua Breitbart from People’s Production House in written testimony, which was posted on his Web site. (He is also the technology columnist for Gotham Gazette.)
“While City Council hearings may never get the same audience as otters holding hands (about 12 million views at last count), this measure sends a message to all New Yorkers that there is important, relevant content for you online.”
Earlier this year NY-based Buddy Media raised $6.5 million for their social application network. Today I spent some time at their office in Manhattan. Walking into the office I wasn't sure I was in the right place as Don King welcomed me and all of the other employees were dressed up for the holiday.
Below is my discussion with CEO Mike Lazerow. You will note that Mike apparently also plays the role of Captain America but he took off his super powers suit for the interview. Buddy Media creates social applications for their corporate clients to reach end consumers online differently than the traditional banner ad. We discuss social metrics and the education needed to get consumer brands to buy into "non-traditional" online spending. Mike also discusses the Buddy Media "brain". At the end of the interview Mike speaks briefly about the economy and the differences you will see with startups moving forward.
In my post, The J-Curve: The Evolving Value Of A VC Portfolio, I describe the two factors that create the perception that a VC’s portfolio loses value before demonstrating value creation: unsuccessfully companies shutting down quickly and a delay in re-valuing successful companies. However, it appears that the companies poised to fail aren’t shutting down as quickly as they have in the past.
The speed at which they close shop is partially a function of the VC market. When capital is easier to acquire companies can be kept on life support for longer periods of time. However, as the venture capital market continues to cycle in and out, the companies don’t appear to be failing as quickly.
My assumption is that this phenomenon is tied to the declining cost of technology. Technology costs have continued to decline as open source software has become more robust and widely available, and the costs of bandwidth and storage have plummeted. During the boom every startup owned servers. Hosting is now outsourced to companies that realize the benefits of scale and can provide those services at much lower rates. Similarly, writing code was at one point done in 1’s and 0’s, but has now been simplified by languages and platforms that expedite programming.
As tech cost have dropped, startups have been able to maintain lower and more flexible burn rates. When times get tough, startups strip down to their core teams and make the money last much longer.
This behavior ends up impacting the J-curve. If poor performers don’t close their doors relatively quickly, the value of VC portfolios may not decline before the successful portfolio companies have their valuations marked to market through a subsequent investment round. This appears to be flattening out the bottom of the curve, creating more of a hockey stick shape.
Unfortunately, changing the shape of the J-curve probably won’t affect actual returns much (unless a second chance is really all some of the would-be-failures really need). However, it does point to an important operational consideration for VCs; they may sit on the boards of companies that will eventually fail much longer than they used to.
Kathryn Jones, For Your Imagination's VP of Branded and Sponsored Entertainment, is the executive producer of a live readings of letters addressed Sarah Palin called, Real Women Respond to Palin. This is a fantastic and historical web video event in one of the most important presidential elections of our time. Congratulations Kathryn!
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
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By murat at Unype blog
Last night’s E.R.7 hosted generously by Joe Daniels from Fulbright&Jaworski featured Gil Beyda from Genacast Ventures and provided some very timely and useful information for all entrepreneurs who were in attendance.
Gil first talked about his technical and entrepreneurial background, which includes a series of very successful startups with big exits such as RealMedia (sold to 24×7Media) and Tacoda (sold to AOL). He pioneered the first ad server at Real Media as well as inventing Behavioral Targeting while at Tacoda. He setup Genacast with Comcast Investment Fund after meeting them while closing Tacoda’s E-round. Genacast invests upto $500K (or in syndicates upto $1.5M) in seed and series A rounds and the investments do not have to be strategic invesments for Comcast. It is a very new and open-ended fund with a current size of around $25M. They have made 2 investments so far and they are looking to make around 8 investments per year. Gil and Comcast are the only LP’s in the fund.
After brief introductions by the more than 40 entrepreneurs in attendance, Gil described his deal flow and how he makes his investment decisions at Genacast. His selection criteria include how much money is sought, valuation, if the space is familiar to him (since the fund helps its investments using their knowledge, experience and rolodex), evaluation of team risk, technology risk and execution risk and how realistic and thoughtful the founders are about their business. He usually has a 1-hour call after his initial screening of around 100 deals he goes through in a month. After stressing that the terms on a seed-round usually get carried onto the subsequent rounds, Gil recommended to all the entrepreneurs to become very familiar with the freely available documents (such as sample terms sheets) at nvca.org.
The last half hour of the meeting, we had an open-call for impromptu on-the-spot 3-5 minute pitches to Gil. After Gil promised to have conference calls with everyone who would pitch to him on the spot, we had 5 great pitches:
Gil provided great and very useful feedback to each of them on the spot and he will be talking to each startup who pitched to him in the coming weeks. The meeting ended with networking.
Nearly everytime I write about NY-based AdaptiveBlue, I always note that while their technology is good, their ability to connect with a mainstream audience has been very limited. They seem to always push big tech words over what value the services actually provide. Last week I started playing with a new version of the AdaptiveBlue service which is a huge leap forward in attempting to reach out to the mainstream audience.
The AdaptiveBlue BlueOrganizer is no more. In its place is Glue, what the company calls a "contextual network." Here's the basic concept behind Glue. You install the browser plugin and then as you browse the Web normally, a menu shows up on any pages where Glue has information to share. These are typically pages dealing with movies, music, books, music artists, restaurants and wine. You can also browse the full list of sites available in the Glue network.
The Glue bar shows up on the top of sites that Glue has a match for and is actually a HTML injection - this means it becomes part of the page and not a plugin that sits active at all times. The bar is a simple way to shows friends information related to the current item being viewed. You can see which of your friends like the item, which have commented on the item, along with where the person viewed the item. You also see a sample of others outside your network who liked the item - this helps with discovery.
You can click on a friend to see more information about them and the current item. From there you can select other services related to the current item including item purchase. There's a "2 cents" option which lets you add comments about the item directly into Glue. I assume if they get enough traction on this 2 cents concept, it could lead to a very rich reviews destination site.
Their business model continues to be based on affiliate comissions through the use of the Glue bar. I hope they will look to diversify their revenue potential as I am a bit concerned that there won't be enough sales to drive enough total volume. But affiliate revenue is good as a piece of the overall business model pie.
I think today's launch is a great step forward towards the mainstream for AdaptiveBlue. Now the really tough work begins on getting mainstream user adoption - they need a strong number of users and friend relationships for the service to be effective.
Here's a demo the company put together about Glue:
As many of you know I am a travel and deal hunter and love helping people make trip plans. So I was looking forward to my chat with John Peters who is the Tripology CEO. Tripology launched in June of 2007 and John was brought in as CEO in June 2008. And Tripology is a NY-based startup.
John describes Tripology as a matchmaking service for "travel specialists" and consumers looking for travel advice. They have filled 5,000 travel requests to-date and have 9,000 travel specialists in the system. As with most marketplaces, the key is getting the demand, the supply is easy.
Their focus is on the long tail and complex tasks, not your basic trip from point a to b. Based on Tripology's matching criteria, it's almost like having a travel agent who knows exactly where you want to go just down the block from you like back in the old days.
Here's how the service works:
Customer comes to Tripology and fills in a form with their needs
Tripology runs their query through their system and finds the top 100 matching travel specialists
Three travel specialists select the query, and pay Tripology $5 to "accept" the query
The travel specialists then work directly with the customer and they handle the bookings (Tripology is basically out of the game at this point)
Their current marketing plan focuses mainly on SEO and SEM. They selected NYC for their HQ because this is where the travel industry is.
What I'd like to see is a travel specialist reviews listing. Also, with 9,000 travel specialists in their system, I bet they could create a very strong blog/community site which could provide an additional revenue stream. Imagine if they required each travel specialist to supply one blog post about a destination twice a year to remain active in their system.
A short time ago, I got invited to testify in front of the NYC Council. The hearing is supposed to:
"...focus on improving the city???s technology small business sector. The hearing will examine the state of a business sector that NY has traditionally lagged behind in, specifically the recently created NYC Seed program, which will provide up to $200,000 (per company) of investment into New York-based technology start-ups. The hearing will also examine what steps can be taken to better fund (i.e. venture capitalism) the growth of startup technological companies in order to make NYC more competitive with other cities when it comes to the technology sector."
Co-founder & CEO of Path 101 (www.path101.com), Founder, nextNY (www.nextNY.org), Blogger (www.thisisgoingtobebig.com), #71 on 2007 Silicon Alley Insider Influentials list, Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship - Fordham University, Instructor - ITAC FastTrac
First, I'd like to say thank you to the Council members who continue to have a strong interest in the NYC technology community. Having a critical mass of influential people committed to maintaining and improving New York City as a place for innovation is half the battle.
Unfortunately for an organization as large as the New York City government, the other half of this battle is a ground war. The ideas that will have the most impact on the local technology community are those that go house to house, school to school, wifi node to wifi node. The stumbling blocks to improving our area's ability to promote innovation aren't simple--they're nounced.
Take, for example, the NYC Seed program. There has never ever been a lack of capital in New York City--for any kind of investment. Many startups have been funded by people in the financial or real estate industries, when they're not funded by traditional venture capital firms. No, money is not the issue, as I have written about before. The issue is that there are not enough dedicated institutions who are economically incentivized to build community and business infrastructure here. Owen Davis, at the end of the day, is one guy with $2 million who will get the chance to help 10 companies over the next year. That's fantastic, but what if policy changes lead to the abandoning of this program. Other than those 10 companies, which early stage statistics assume that at least half probably won't make it anyway, what will be the permanent impact of his work?
If he had, let's say, a four year window, as most venture capital firms do, he'd have the time to build the necessarily relationships with all of the places where innovation comes from here in the city. If he had a staff member or two, he'd be able to spend time not just investing, but working to create permanent channels to schools, businesses, professional groups, and technology centers--and he'd have the time horizon to accept longer term return on investment from building these relationships. Institutional investors give their VCs a four year mandate to make investments across economic cycles--there's no reason why NYC Seed shouldn't have the same runway.
At the end of the day, longer committments and more people on the ground are needed because innovation comes not from technology, but from people--and New York City technology has a people problem. Local schools, with few exceptions, are not consistantly developing students focused on creating value through entrepreneurship and technological innovation. You can build all the incubators you want--unless you're seeding students as early as high school or junior high with the idea that they could build the next Google here in New York, and giving them the learning tools to accomplish that, it's never going to happen.
Here are two suggestions I'd make for New York City to make a bigger people impact:
First, I'd create the position of a technology community manager. Large websites have community managers to make sure that they're aware what's going on in their communities, and that their communities are aware of all of the site's resources. I'm as involved in the local community as any entrepreneur, and I still can't tell you the difference between what the NYC Council's mandate is related to technology and how that differs from the EDC, the Department of Small Business Services, how they relate to NYSTAR, etc. A community manager would be a single point of contact whose mandate would be to familiarize themselves with all city services, local university programs, community groups, large businesses interested in working with the local tech community and other initiatives. For example, nextNY is looking to run an event on business development best practices for startup companies. We're looking for some space to run the event for between 50-100 people. We have no budget. I know there's probably some big company with a sizable conference room who'd love to have a bunch of startups come in and talk about business development one night. I just don't know who that is and how to contact them. A tech community manager could do that--and significantly help with these types of issues that involved local entrepreneurs try to solve on their own all the time in addition to their dayjobs.
The second thing I would do would be to refocus on technology education in not only the public school system but also work with private schools and universities as well. It needs to start early, too. We can't have all our creative and talented youth thinking that their only opportunity for success in NYC is to work for a Fortune 500 company, because small business and entrepreneurship is what drives the growth in our economy. How about a charter school built around information technology entrepreneurship--one that works with the best local computer science programs to provide scholarships to students trying to create their own businesses? We need better answers to the question, "Where do world class developers come from in NYC?" Right now, the school system isn't the answer to that question.
More than anything else, though, I think it's important that our local government--the individuals--lead by example and participate in the local technology community. The local community is hyper connected through blogging, social networking sites, and a quirky but rapidly growing service called Twitter that ties people together one 160 character short form message at a time. There are currently almost 2000 up and coming technology and digital media professionals on the nextNY listserv--are any of you on it? Sure, it's kind of geeky in it's content, but you can set it to provide a daily digest. If you're not on it, and can't spare the time to read the one daily digest e-mail of the group's activities, I'm not exactly sure how you're really going to be able to be supportive of the local tech community. Communities are growing organically on these sites--like the 500+ people who have attached themselves to the Shake Shack Twitter account, mostly local tech folks, in order to navigate the long lines at our favorite local food establishment. These communities are growing largely without the participation of local government leaders. How many of you have a blog on your own websites that gets at least one posting a week, or a social networking profile that you yourself actually login to with similar frequency? If you're not doing this, you're really not going to be in the flow of the needs of the local community.
NYC-based Crispy Gamer has announced that they have raised their first round of funding to the tune of $8.25 million from Constellation Ventures and company founders. The site offers editorial game content and a community for gamers. No insight was provided into how they plan to use the funding. The site has game reviews, a blog, game videos and a message board. It looks like they have about 800 game reviews.
Crispy Gamer says they have taken a "bold stance" in refusing to accept advertising from game publishers. In my testing, the site showed basically all remnant ads.
Eric Krangel wonders regarding their advertising decision, "Seems like a noble experiment, but with online display ads expected to contract next year, how long can Crispy go on shunning its most lucrative advertisers?"
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