Archive for December, 2009
NYConvergence ORIGINALby: Amy Berryhill"When people think about New York they think about food, fashion and entertainment. We want them to think of technology," said Donn Morrill, founding chairman of the New York Technology Council. Cheers filled the bottom floor of the Houndstooth Pub in Manhattan's Garment District, where supporters had gathered to celebrate the launch of the council. The goal of this newly formed group is to make technology a cornerstone of the New York City marketplace. "The three pillars on which we will base our success are business, academia and local government," said Morrill.
The New York Technology Council was founded by Morrill, Paul Ellis and Ted Brown. Brown is executive director of the CUNY Institute of Software Design and Development and has spear-headed a program to place CUNY students into local technology internships by providing 1/3 of their pay, up to $1,000. The organization is also working closely with New York City Council Member Gale Brewer, the chair of the Committee on Technology in Government who said, "we are always looking for ways to make this city more tech friendly to business."
On the business side, the New York Technology Council has secured Google, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Verizon as sponsors, and are working with IBM to finalize an official partnership. A spokesperson from Google was on hand to remind the crowd that the technology giant employs some 800 programmers in the Big Apple, reiterating that New York is already a major player in the worldwide technology scene.
The long term ambition for the newly formed council is to pave the way for "people to come to New York with their technology ideas," according to Morrill. In the short term, the goal is better coordination between the businesses, government and academic institutions already present in the city of New York. Related:> NY City Council Cttee To Examine Small Biz Tech Sector
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
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By CEO at This is going to be BIG.
When Josh Kopelman and I first spoke about me joining First Round Capital, we talked a lot about alignment of interests—what First Round Capital was interested in with regards to investing in New York City, and also what my interests were with respect to my own career. Given that our discussions had only started about a week and a half before my last fulltime day at my startup, I hadn’t really had a lot of time to think about what my next move was going to be. It didn’t really make sense for either of us to commit to a big four year engagement when I couldn’t say for sure what my goals were. Josh suggested that I help First Round firm up their footprint in NYC over the next year while I figure it out. So, that being said, what am I actually doing with my time? The Entrepreneur-in-Residence title is a bit of a misnomer. Traditionally, EIRs are out looking for the next thing to build, and are only peripherally out looking to help on dealflow. I’ve been quite the opposite. It took me 7 years to decide I wanted to build something in the career guidance space—I highly doubt I’ll gain enough passion for a new idea anytime soon, so I wouldn’t look for me to start a new company. I’m spending about a third of my time looking at deals, another third meeting with folks that see a number of startups to boost our NYC dealflow, like angels, lawyers, etc., and then a third of my time on what I’m calling “community support”—helping to make NYC a better place to build a startup. A rising tide lifts all ships, so that not only helps the community, but helps First Round, other NYC investors, other local startups, people looking to build tech and digital media careers here—the whole ecosystem. Here’s a little more detail on each of those endeavors: Deals One thing I realized is that many people in NYC don’t actually realize what First Round does and how it differs from a typical venture capital fund. Actually, you can think of us more like an angel investor more than anything—one that has the ability to follow on. We’re one of the few places in NYC, other than from an individual angel, where you can get a check of $100k. We’re more than happy to lead a $500k angel round by being half of it, and we don’t need to get 20% of the company upfront. One way I measure my own dealflow is on how many people have a finished Powerpoint deck. If they do, I’m seeing them much later than I want to. I want to meet people when they just started hacking or they’re vetting the idea—not when they’re shopping it around to every investor. I think I can be pretty helpful, having just gone through raising angel capital for my own startup, in helping people think about their financing plans, product viability, business models, etc. So if you’re raising an angel round in New York City, thinking about it, or you’re in an angel round, please do make sure you come talk to me. (charlie@firstround.com) The best thing we can do for you is to be a really value added investor around the table, and the worst thing we can do is just give you a quick no—or tell you what’s missing. My role at First Round from a deal perspective is to uncover as many interesting startups as possible, but also as early as possible, and help vet them for the team. We have a very team focused approach to deals and all of the partners, with the support of the rest of the team, get involved in decision making. I remarked to another VC the other day that the idea of “Partner X’s deal” seemed so foreign to the way things get done at First Round. (It’s actually quite the well oiled decision making machine, actually… you should see our meetings. I was impressed when I first saw it.) I think a lot of local entrepreneurs feel like they’re too early to talk to us until they’re ready to raise a million bucks. Please do come see us much earlier than that—even without a deck. I know one entrepreneur in particular that I’m helping write her deck so she’d be better at pitching us. Other Players in the Ecosystem You’re a lawyer, a school running an incubator program, a designer who has worked with startups—let’s talk. First off, I have companies that might be able to use your services. Second, let’s chat about the NYC market in general and what we can mutually do to help make NYC a better place to build a company. Third, undoubtedly you’re seeing a lot of companies that might be thinking about financing. Send them my way. Don’t worry about screening them. That’s my job. Screening is what I get paid to do. Community Support Like I said before, the better that New York City is at supporting startups, the better it will be for First Round and for everyone else in the community. I’m very dedicated to making that happen, and the team at First Round is also committed to participating in that effort. I want to run a lot more events for nextNY and for First Round in New York City that are relevant, educational, and productive. Sure, I’ll probably get roped into running another Shake Shack event, but what I really want to do is more events like we did last night at TechSales—where 100 professionals, like sales people, developers, product managers, etc., get together in a room on a focused topic and have a great discussion. That’s the kind of thing that has brought the community together over the last five years. Give me a room for 75 people and I’ll push the community forward—or rather set the stage for the community to push itself forward like it’s been doing. That’s the kind of thing that I think is hard for folks in government, for example, to understand. When they do surveys and hearings about what the community needs, I tell them the community needs easy access to free event space for 75-100 people and a single person to just run around connecting everyone. Seems too small, but that’s what innovation is. It’s a house to house ground war, with conversations taking place just a handful of people at a time. So if you’re a company with space to host 50, 75, 100+ people, trust me, I’ll fill it with innovative folks from the NY tech community and their ideas, arguments, and accumulated wisdom. Does it need to be explicitly branded First Round? Not really. We have a great network in New York and I’ll be making sure that network not only mixes with itself, but gets out in front of the community. So, expect to see a lot of experienced pros from the First Round portfolio on various panels and out at events more often, but don’t expect a lot of in your face banners and schwag.
I enjoyed participating in a panel tonight on "Market Research for Entrepreneurs", as part of the Founder Institute’s first series of New York programming. The other speakers were Nicholas Butterworth, President & CEO, Diversion Media; and Steven Haines, President, Sequent Learning Networks.
My slide deck is below; I’d love to get your feedback.
NYConvergence ORIGINAL The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy's new book, From Disaster to Diversity: What's Next for New York City's Economy?, a blueprint for post-recession governance, is being released at an event at which Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to speak tonight in Manhattan. The book offers policy ideas for NYC, including the opportunities which new media offers and the challenges that this developing industry has yet to overcome such as:
- The Huffington Post's original reporting, which has propelled the Web site's traffic from 2.3 million to seven million unique visitors per month but has critics such as Michelle Hainoff noting that this is largely due to the approximately 4,000 bloggers who contribute to the site for free.
- Gawker Media's performance-based bonus system which one former contributor likened to "working in the digital equivalent of a sweatshop."
In addition, the book highlights aspects of the mayor's MediaNYC 2020 program and the benefits it will provide NYC, including,
- the NYC Media Lab, modeled after MIT's and Stanford's
- a "high-tech center" for media freelancers in lower Manhattan
- a digital media training program for “displaced or entrepreneurial” media workers
- a competition for web developers who use city data to create useful applications
Previous:> NYC Mayor Launches Media Initiative
NYConvergence ORIGINAL
by: Amy Berryhill
The New York Gaming Meet Up gathered at Gallery Bar in Manhattan's Lower East Side neighborhood last night to demo four new creations and discuss process with the game developers, animators and programmers. Batman BrawlBatman and friends, or enemies rather, box in this web based fighting game. The set-up is a classic single opponent boxing layout with the splashy animation expected from the Batman The Brave and the Bold franchise. "The challenge was to figure out when to allow the keystroke to allow for your punch. We tried some that were too fast and others that were to slow. I think we designed a somewhat more realistic boxing game than most," said programmer Steve Mead of Upper Cut Animation.
Route-rageous and Friskies Cat Food iPhone Game
Both of these games were originally built as web based Flash applications, from which the Codewalla team worked to port them to Facebook and the iPhone.
Route-rageous was ported for Progressive, who had seen success with the game online and wanted to bring it to Facebook. The game allows users to direct a car around a course and, when they inevitably crash, a reminder about the benefits of Progress Concierge Car service pops up. Work to bring this game to the iPhone is ongoing.
The Friskies Cat Food iPhone Game is a seek and find game that Codewalla ported to the iPhone. According to presenter Rakesh Raju, one of the concerns about the game is that, because so many items were animated simultaneously, the frame rate took a hit. None the less, the demo showed a sparkly fantasy land of levels that could keep a 5-year-old quiet for hours. Elliptic TwistThis is a space shooter game that was created with fast, cheap and good in mind. The gun moves around an elliptical path as manipulated by the user. The goal is to shoot meteors that fly through the air and out into the deep space backgrounds of the various levels.
The game was built to be intensely easy and, as a result, presenter Orchun Koroglu of Mihar Games said there has been great feedback from users that are outside the regular demographic for these games, like women and elderly users. The hope is that the circular motion of the game will allow it to be cross-compatible with platforms in addition to the PC. The development has so far taken four months and the hope is that the prototype demoed will be finished in the next month.
5 lives of Criss Angel
This game was built for A&E to promote the television show of the same name. It requires the gamer to print out a marker that the application can focus on via webcam. The user then rotates the printed marker to manipulate a ball along the path displayed on the monitor, much like the ball on a wire child's toy. According to Patrick O'Shaughnessey from Circ.us, one of the downsides to the game is that it requires a lot of light, so the demo in the dark bar was a little shaky.
Another issue with a game like this is that there was concern users might not know what to do. To help with this a demo was created to demo the process of printing out the marker and manipulating it to control the game.
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
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By Arun Krishnan at The Pontiflex CPL Blog
NYConvergence ORIGINAL About 2,000 fans RSVPed for the Boxee Beta event last night at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, but only the first 650 to arrive were allowed to enter given the venue's capacity (Those who checked in using mobile social-networking service Foursquare were also awarded a "Boxee Fan" badge.) The rest (some of whom stayed in line well after Boxee CEO Avner Ronen took to the stage to demo the latest version of the platform) were offered a free drink at nearby Brooklyn Bowl, the site of the event's afterparty.
The even itself kicked off shortly after 7 PM, the official start time, with a demonstration of the beta by Ronen, highlighting the "friend feed" which draws recommendations from friends, the inclusion of "featured videos" in the center of the screen, a new "search feature," and the ability to pause and restart videos from where a user was last watching (When this feature was used to play the Muppets' version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," the beta version of Boxee crashed. While Ronen announced that this "is a feature," he had to resort to manually killing the malfunctioning software to bring the beta back online.) Four new content partners also presented their additions to the apps available to Boxee users, Clicker, with its index of online television shows, The Escapist, a videogame-review ser vice, Qurious, developed by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts to let users find out more information about actors, music, or products that appear in a program, and Suicide Girls, which now has an application to view the Web sites galleries of pin-up girl photos and videos. Following a musical performance by The Gregory Brothers (pictured, right), Boxee Chief Creative Officer Zach Klein
showed the attendes the Boxee Box. Created by D-Link, it stands no taller than a soda can, has USB ports, includes HDMI (Boxee's preferred output), and is expected to cost no more than $200. Klein didn't go into specifics about the guts of the device, saying that information would be shared at the upcoming CES in January 2010. The evening concluded with a Q&A session and an afterparty at Brooklyn Bowl where the spillover crowd had been sent earlier in the evening.
NYConvergence ORIGINAL
On Wednesday, December 16, at 10 AM in the Council Chambers of New
York City Hall, the Council Committees on Technology in Government and
Small Business will hold a joint public hearing to examine how small
technology startups are "surviving in this tough economy," according to a press release received by NYConvergence. The Committee on Technology in Government will be live twittering (www.twitter.com/nycctechcomm and with the hashtag #nycstartup) during and webcasting (www.livestream.com/nycctechcomm) with a live chat enabled for this entire public hearing. If you are interested in attending and/or testify at this hearing, please contact Kunal Malhotra or Samuel Wong via e-mail or by phone at (212) 788-6975. Previous:> NY City Council Committee Hearing Webcast
Monday, December 7th, 2009
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By CEO at This is going to be BIG.
This is syndicated from an e-mail list I’ve been sending this out to over the past four weeks to hundreds of people. If you’d like to receive this on Monday mornings, please sign up here: http://eepurl.com/e3On
Welcome to Holiday Party Season!
No doubt your inbox is full of places to imbibe with friends, clients, and investors under the guise of holiday merriment. Just try not to overdue it and stay off your hipster scooter if you've had a few too many. Here now, we present a list of things to do that won't necessarily lead to yuletide blackouts. Monday, December 7th 7PM: Boxee Beta Unveiling - If you haven't figured out by now that this is the**EVENT OF THE WEEK** then you need to hangout with cooler friends. At the event they'll demo the new Beta, launch new applications from partners and start a 4-weeks early-access for users to test the Beta before we release it to the public at CES on Jan 7th. You know what they say--750 people in Brooklyn can't be wrong. Music Hall of Williamsburg 66 N 6th St Brooklyn, NY 11211 RSVP: http://boxeebeta.eventbrite.com Tuesday, December 8th 6:30PM - 9PM: MatchupCamp II is the reprise of a past successful nextNY event. It is all about startup networking, creating a place for ideas and talent to meet. MatchupCamp has the sole objective of bringing together people looking to start, expand, or join a startup in New York (and the tri-state area). If you want to get your hands dirty and build something new, this is the place. For Your Imagination Studio 22 West 27th ST RSVP: http://matchupcamp.eventbrite.com/ 6pm – 9pm: Launch Party for Hive at 55 – Downtown New York’s newest coworking space. The Hive at 55 is a workspace for freelancers and small business owners. 55 Broad Street, 13th FLoor More Info: http://www.downtownny.com/news?nid=222 RSVP: hiveat55@downtownny.com Mediaite Launch Party 6:30PM - 8:30PM Plaza Hotel RSVP: I wish I knew, because Rachel Sklar is pretty cool, but I didn't get an invite. Oh well. Wednesday December 9th Digital Dumbo: Purple Sangria Digital Festivus Bringing together the Digital Minds of NYC, Digital Dumbo facilities idea sharing and networking all while drinking purple sangria. This months event is sponsored by Purple Rock Scissors. Galapagos Art Space 16 Main Street RSVP: http://digitaldumbo.eventbrite.com/ 6PM -8PM: Insider Tips from the Big Apple's Best Tech and Digital Media Sales Professionals - Sales Pros Only! We've assembled some of the Big Apple's best tech and digital media sales talent for a very interactive discussion that every new and accomplished sales professional in tech should attend. Deutsch Inc 111 8th Ave RSVP: http://www.nextNY.org/TechSales Thursday, December 10th 5PM- 7PM The DEMO New York City Meet-up is one stop on the DEMO Innovation tour where Matt and the DEMO team will travel around the country to connect with the DEMO community in search of the best innovation to showcase at DEMOspring 2010. 3 Ten Lounge 310 Bowery RSVP: http://demoinnovationnyc.eventbrite.com/ 7PM URDB (http://urdb.org/) Presents: World Record Appreciation Society #10 Following a brief NYC hiatus and two sold-out events on the West Coast, the World Record Appreciation Society is coming back strong with holiday-themed world record blowout extravaganza. Odd addition to our list? Perhaps, but I'm showing up purely to see Andrea Rosen set the record for "Fastest Time To Open An Advent Calendar And Eat All The Chocolates In Order". How awesome is that? Pianos 158 Ludlow St RSVP: http://guestlistapp.com/events/6627 Real Time Twitter Booze NYC If you're building a business around the real time web or just tinkering with a few product ideas, you'll want to get drunk here. The founders of Stocktwits, fourSquare, Bit.ly, Hootsuite, and Winetwits will be in attendence. Swift 34 E 4th Street RSVP: http://realtimeboozenyc.eventbrite.com/ Friday, December 11th and Saturday, December 12th Open NY Summit & Codeathon The Open NY Summit will be the first of many events produced by open government practitioners and volunteers. Two day conference includes Open NY Co-working, discussions, and a hackathon. Revolution! The Open Planning Project 148 Lafayette St Penthouse (PH) RSVP: http://opennyforum.org/2009/11/open-ny-summit-09/ Sunday, December 13th 12:45PM: NY Tech Gives Back - Ice Skating is a day for the NY tech community to come together for a good cause through volunteerism and giving. For our inaugural event, we are partnering with CampInteractive, a not-for-profit organization that empowers inner-city youth through the inspiration of the outdoors and the creative power of technology. When asked what event the kids would most like, they chose ice skating. We're making it happen. Your ticket will pay for you + 1 CampInteractive child to go ice skating (+pizza). RSVP: http://techiesgiveback.eventbrite.com
NYConvergence ORIGINAL Wired magazine hosted a cocktail reception in support of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's Tck Tck Tck campaign yesterday evening at the publication's pop-up store in Manhattan's Meatpacking District.
Tck Tck Tck is a global initiative that is calling for a "fair, ambitious, and binding" climate change agreement to be made at the United Nations' Climate Conference in Copenhagen taking place this month. The evening featured performances by by tck artists, Mark Ronson, Dan Black, Jamie Burke's Delilah, and Theophilus London. Previous:> Moby Plays for a Packed House at WIRED Store Opening
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