This, the first of our regional blogs, is authored by the technology and financial journalist Dominic Basulto. Dominic is a New York native, has been a senior editor at Corante since day one and has written for a number of online and offline media companies. Send tips or story ideas to: basulto@gmail.com.
About this weblog
Here we'll report daily on the latest tech and business developments in New York City. Impossible we concede: comprehensive coverage of the city's every story. What we hope you'll find: tips, tidbits and perspectives you won't find elsewhere. As well as unique insights, original interviews and more that should be of interest to New York's vibrant community of technologists and those who track, invest in and report on them.
Government Technology points out that Mayor Bloomberg and Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) Commissioner Gino Menchini have launched a new online database of registered City lobbyists and their clients.
According to Mayor Bloomberg, the new database ("NYC Lobbyist Search") is good news for concerned citizens:
"This is a big victory for open government. The lobbying industry has nearly tripled in the last five years, but access to its public records has been severely limited... We have created a user-friendly database that will put information about the activities of lobbyists, previously available only in paper form, at the fingertips of anyone with access to the Internet... This is a major step forward in our work to make government more transparent..."
What's a brand name worth on Wall Street? Apparently, either a lot (when things are good) or nothing at all (when things are bad). Credit Suisse First Boston will now be known simply as Credit Suisse, thank you very much. First, the Frank Quattrone IPO scandal and general discontent about the dot-com bust tarnished the company's image. Then, the Swiss banker-gnomes in Zurich didn't much like the cost-cutting and head-chopping mentality of the American investment bankers when Morgan Stanley-bound John Mack was trying to right the ship.
As Crain's New York points out, it's the end of an era: "Add First Boston to the growing list of Wall Street brand names that have been retired... The investment bank's Zurich-based parent, Credit Suisse Group, said that at the start of next year it will drop the name whose roots go back to 1932. First Boston will join such distinguished brands as PaineWebber, Bankers Trust, and Kidder Peabody that have vanished from the scene."
Steve Brotman of VCBall says that any entrepreneur only needs to remember two rules in order to be successful: "Don't run out of money" and "Don't be greedy with your equity."
Brotman, a successful New York venture capitalist, explains: "The root of every business failure 100% of the time lies in the breaking of one or both of these two rules... the rest really is commentary. I've never heard of a venture failure that did not boil down to breaking one of these two very simple rules. The solution to almost any business problem lies in these two rules as well, if you think hard enough about it."
(Note: Yeah, this post from Brotman is almost two months old, but it's timeless in its wisdom... Just re-visiting some of the folks on the ol' blogroll and ran across this entry.)
Steven Berlin Johnson returns from vacation and discusses how the media is responding to his new book, Everything Bad is Good for You. There's a "long and entertaining profile" in the Washington Post. And there's also a mention of his new book in a recent Doonesbury cartoon:
"You know you've hit some kind of weird zeitgeist critical mass when your book shows up in Doonesbury. (It's being spoofed, of course, but hey -- it's Doonesbury!)"
Adam Balkin of NY1 checks out some of the goodies at the Digital Experience 2005 event. You know, the types of gadgets and gizmos that could start popping up on Christmas lists in December:
"Lots of that tech stuff you'll no doubt be drooling over come the winter holidays - that's how you'd describe the Digital Experience 2005 event. It’s the coolest of the cool."
Among the items previewed by Balkin: a PC tablet from Lenovo (the Chinese company that bought IBM's ThinkPad line), a digital media player from Archos and a new phone from Nokia.
"Cameron Marlow (creator of Blogdex and a friend) is running a survey about weblogs. If you're a weblog author, it will take you about 15 minutes to complete and asks some straight-forward questions about when you started blogging, what you link to and why, etc. Don't worry, no essays are involved, you just check some boxes and click some buttons. Please consider taking a moment to participate if you're a blogger."
Reuters reports that Sirius Satellite Radio is launching Chinese and Korean language channels in order to "court a contingent of listeners generally underserved by mainstream media." Sirius will partner with MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting, which owns 44 U.S. radio stations, to create a mix of news, music, and entertainment in Chinese and Korean. These foreign language/ethnic channels will join the 3 Latin music and 3 Spanish language channels that Sirius already offers.
On the news, investors on Wall Street sent shares of the company up 5%. Memo to self: increase the value of anything by 5% by announcing some kind of tie-in to the Chinese market. Corante Beijing maybe?
Looks like everybody except John Mack has been voted off the Morgan Stanley island. The Financial Times is reporting that the big Wall Street investment bank will name Mack as its new head sometime within the next 48 hours. For Zoe Cruz and Stephen Crawford, the two other frontrunners for the position, it looks like it's time to pack your bags. The Morgan Stanley Tribal Council has spoken.
Rumors are already circulating that Mack plans to reinstall all the trappings of the Old Regime and bring back all of his Morgan Stanley cronies who have quit in recent months.
We're messin' with you, Red Sox Nation. The Concord Monitor reports that the Web site and phone lines for enrolling in New Hampshire's E-ZPass program could be down until Thursday, due to a burst water pipe in New York. So what do water pipes have to do with Internet pipes? Plenty, it seems, since the New York-based company responsible for phone registration and Web site operation for E-ZPass has been struggling to patch together a busted water pipe since Sunday.
Ahh, what will those Williamsburg hipsters think of next? Apparently, trucker hats were not enough. Now Capture the Flag games are springing up all over New York. In fact, 50-plus people showed up for the first game in Williamsburg. Gothamist has more on why Capture the Flag is taking over certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
Call it whatever you want -- grassroots content, user-generated content, a bottom-up creative process -- but Internet content created by and for the masses is all the rage right now. In fact, a senior executive at Yahoo notes that "sharing" (in all of its various forms) is everywhere: "It's the next chapter of the World Wide Web." Yahoo is putting its money where its mouth is, too: the company recently acquired photo-sharing site Flickr and is rolling out a new service called My Web 2.0.
Last week, CNET News.com reported that audio publisher Audible plans to offer New York Times podcasts via RSS. In addition, Audible plans to offer content from the Wall Street Journal, the "BBC News Hour," "The Charlie Rose Show" and National Public Radio's "This American Life" via syndicated feeds.
Maybe I missed something, but the New York Times has podcasts? I think the article is really referring to the "audio digests" of the New York Times, available at the Audible.com site. I guess it's just a definitional thing.
Virgin Atlantic is going after the hip, tech-savvy tourist with a series of podcasting guides to New York City that can be downloaded from the Virgin Atlantic site. The four guides include a look at the "10 coolest restaurants", a shopping guide, a guide to the city's unknown treasures, and a list of the 10 best things to do for the first-time visitor.
Shares of Google broke through the $300 barrier yesterday. It's been quite a ride at Google -- in the 10 months since the company went public in a blow-out-the-doors IPO, the stock price has skyrocketed, from $85 to $300. With that in mind, The Motley Fool considers a Google stock split to bring the company's stock price "down to more conventional tech stock pricing."
It's hard to get a true handle on Google's valuation, but plenty of Wall Street analysts say that Google is still "cheap" at $300. In fact, James J. Cramer of TheStreet.com says that Google is even "cheap" at $350.
In case you haven't noticed, games aren't just for kids anymore. Americans spend more money each year on games than at the box office on Hollywood films. Check out the nearest Blockbuster store -- see how much of the shelf space has been given over to video games? With this trend in mind, MTV has launched MTV Games, a new division aimed at developing and producing online and video games. The Viacom unit will also develop partnerships with independent game developers and work with publishers and other industry partners to produce and market original video game titles.
And that's not all: Viacom being the huge, advertising-dependent media conglomerate that it is, the move into gaming means that consumers should prepare for the next generation of "in-game advertising." The company is already working on a partnership with Midway Games.
Gothamist points to a Daily News story about the MTA's plans to use satellite technology and electronic message boards in order to give New York City bus riders real-time information about the arrival of buses. Basically, satellites will track buses as they navigate the traffic-clogged streets of the city, relaying real-time information to curbside electronic message boards posted at bus stops across the city. (London and Paris both offer this feature, apparently, so it's not rocket science.)
The SEC is investigating some of the accounting numbers at IBM, concerned that the company may have improperly accounted for stock options in the most recent quarter. Right now, it's only an informal investigation, so there's no need to panic and dump your IBM stock.
However, it does raise the rather thorny question of how companies can account for stock options in a way that won't raise any eyebrows at the SEC. (anyone with even a passing familiarity with finance knows that the valuation of stock options is really a black art, not a science) IBM actually seems to have been more cautious than it needed to be in expensing its stock options -- which makes the SEC investigation a bit unusual. In fact, one Wall Street analyst says that the SEC is "over-reaching" its authority in the matter.
This product announcement sounds like the nexus of three cool technology trends -- blogging, video, and online collaboration. At Gnomedex 2005, New York-based On2 Technologies and Vancouver-based NowPublic.com announced a partnership to create the "world's first collaborative video blogging experience for news."
The founder and CEO of NowPublic.com comments on the importance of partnering with On2: "Teaming up with On2 has enabled us to quickly build on the momentum we've created by extending high quality, collaborative video blogging to our members. We've created a next generation video blogging tool that promises to help bloggers all over the world to work together."
The Online News Association has opened up early bird registration for its annual conference and awards banquet, to be held October 28-29 at the Hilton New York. The ONA also released some initial information about the speakers and panelists at this year's conference. There will be panel discussions on Web analytics and ethics for personal publishers, as well as a blogging "how-to" and a closer look at changes afoot in the world of participatory journalism.
Does oil at $60 a barrel scare you? How about $70? At what price does the U.S. become susceptible to an oil shock? Remember, Wall Street analysts have been talking about oil at $100 a barrel for months. To get up to speed on the topic - or perhaps to prepare for a Hamptons cocktail party at a hedge fund manager's palatial spread:
BBC News: What does $60 a barrel mean to you?
Paul Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital: The U.S. is as vulnerable as ever to an oil shock
Guardian UK: The black stuff has world order over a barrel
Reuters: U.S. economy healthy despite high oil
In a case involving the FCC and Brand X Internet, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that cable companies are "under no legal obligation to share their lines with smaller Internet service providers, dealing a major blow to independent ISPs, extending the power of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, and opening up the possibility of extensive deregulation in the telecommunications world." That's good news for companies like Comcast and Time Warner, who warned that having to share lines would "damage their business and discourage them from investing in new networks, delaying deployment of broadband across the country."
So is the court ruling in favor of the cable companies good for the typical consumer? ZDNet has provided a handy FAQ on the Brand X case to answer just that question.
Gregory Galant of Venture Voice interviews the controversial Philip "Pud" Kaplan, founder of the now-infamous F***ed Company Web site, in a 25-minute podcast. Anyway, Kaplan recently raised $4 million in VC funding for a new start-up after moving from New York to the West Coast and is ready to test the entrepreneurial waters once again. There's an MP3 available for download as well as fairly extensive show notes (i.e. podcast highlights).
We'll definitely be checking out future content from Venture Voice, which is bringing podcasting technology to the world of venture capital and start-up ventures. Interesting tidbit: the site is produced by Long Island's Gregory Galant, who was already an Internet entrepreneur/business prodigy at the age of 14.
The New York Times says that The Lawrence Journal-World of Lawrence, Kansas is rapidly turning into the newspaper of the future. The paper, which melds together the offline and online worlds to form a hyper-local resource for citizens in the local community, may only have a circulation of 20,000 -- but that hasn't stopped big city publishers from taking a hard look at what's going on in Kansas.
Daily Gotham has coined a new term for New York City's blogosphere: the Gothamsphere. (check out the site's blogroll on the right-hand side of the home page)
Anyone notice that the New York Times has signed James McManus, the author of Positively Fifth Street, to write a regular column on the world of poker and gambling? Interestingly, the editorial staff at the Times has determined that the column will be considered "sports" and not "entertainment." McManus, writing about the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, leads off by writing that "whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn poker."
Any coincidence that newspapers in general are confronting a lagging readership? That the New York Times has struggled to bring in more advertisers? Or that shares of online casino group PartyGaming are now worth upwards of 5 billion pounds after a wildly successful IPO in London? (For those keeping track, PartyGaming is now worth more than British Airways)
Newspapers, of course, will claim that they are only giving the American public what it wants. Which, apparently, is a generous dose of Michael Jackson, mixed in with the Runaway Bride, combined with a little gambling and NASCAR on the side.
Media executive Merrill Brown, a founder of Court TV and MSNBC.com, was named national editorial director of News 21, a new initiative that will go live next summer with the aim of helping journalism students get practical experience and training in the news business. The new program, funded in part by the Carnegie Knight Foundation of New York and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is also expected to help attract new and younger audiences to the field of journalism and bolster youth readership of newspapers.
NYWiki is a specialized wikipedia written by and for New Yorkers. NYWiki calls itself a "collaborative community that's writing the ultimate reference of every person, place, and thing in New York City. From Abe Beame to Zeckendorf Towers, this is an encyclopedia of New York and it's all written by New Yorkers like you." After launching last summer, NYWiki has already been profiled on WNYC radio and in Time Out New York.
Steve Lohr of the New York Times points out the symbolic impact of IBM's decision to lay off 13,000 workers in Europe and the U.S. while simultaneously adding 14,000 Indian workers:
"Those numbers are telling evidence of the continuing globalization of work and the migration of some skilled jobs to low-wage countries like India. And I.B.M., the world's largest information technology company, is something of a corporate laboratory that highlights the trend. Its actions inform the worries and policy debate that surround the rise of a global labor force in science, engineering and other fields that require advanced education."
Verizon Wireless has launched a next-generation high-speed wireless Internet service that will cover most of Long Island. It won't come cheap, either: Verizon has salted away close to $1 billion for future expansion of the high-speed Internet service in the New York metropolitan area. The new Verizon service, which uses a cellular-based EV-DO (evolution-data optimized) network, has been available in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens since early this year.
In Seattle, Verizon launched a similar service this week, which the Seattle Times calls "cool" and "speedy." (but also a tad expensive, if you start downloading games and TV clips and all the other goodies)
Some good news from CNET for any job seekers in the NYC metropolitan area: New York, together with Philadelphia and Boston, is one of three East Coast cities experiencing impressive growth in high-tech job listings. According to online recruiting company Dice, listings for jobs in the New York region increased by 38% to 8,644 during the first five months of the year. Moreover, the New York area ranked #1 overall in terms of total job listings on Dice.com, outpacing even Silicon Valley.
The folks at Fortune tipped us off about their upcoming Fortune Innovation Forum in New York City at the end of the year. Sounds like it could be interesting:
"How do you put innovation at the heart of your business strategy and culture? Neutralize the obstacles in your organization? Encourage your people to take risks on new ideas? Tune your antenna to spot the next Palm Pilot, iPod, or $7 latte? Find the opportunities in change and the lessons in failure? Incorporate customers in the innovation process?"
Maybe you've seen the Segway on the streets of New York City -- the NYPD experimented with them for awhile, and they're still available on Amazon.com and eBay. The problem is, nobody really seems to know what to do about them. They're cool, but a menace on the busy streets of the city. Even environmentalists are not so crazy about them. So... state lawmakers are huddled together in Albany, cooking up some legislation on what to do about the Segway:
"Lawmakers are making progress on something else: the question of how to classify Segways, the odd-looking, scooterlike contraptions balanced by gyroscopes, and whether people should be allowed to scoot around on them on sidewalks across New York State."
The big question for legislators is whether to define the Segway as an "electric personal assistive mobility device" or as a "motorized vehicle." Does it really matter, though? As one insider points out, "It's not like there's any real clamor from the public on this. This is a lobbyist-driven bill and it's getting play at the end of session when there's a limited amount of airtime for really pressing issues..."
The beta invitations to use Odeo, the new audio content/podcasting service created by Evan Williams (of Blogger fame), are going out fast and furious to all corners of the globe... Corante New York received an invite yesterday. Until we have a chance to play around with Odeo, here's some initial feedback from podcasters in Canada, Guatemala and Japan.
In the Wall Street Journal, William M. Bulkeley looks at how marketers are taking advantage of new technology solutions to find the "valuable insights" and "useful nuggets" lurking within blogs and other forms of consumer-generated media. There's even an ROI value proposition for these blog tools: "Purveyors of the new methodology and their clients say blog-watching can be cheaper, faster and less biased than such staples of consumer research as focus groups and surveys." As one PR executive explains: "We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror."
Some of the folks on Slashdot, though, aren't quite so impressed by these blog-oriented marketing strategies:
"Behold the future of the internet: 50% while be whiny, angsty teens complaining about the world in blogs with poor grammar. The other 50% will be companies data-mining those blogs for insights about what kind of products to market."
Andrew Rasiej, candidate for NYC Public Advocate, unveiled the details of his city-wide Wi-Fi plan yesterday on the steps of City Hall. The Rasiej Wi-Fi plan has generated a fair amount of buzz, and not just in the local New York papers. For example, Kari Chisholm of Blue Oregon has also picked up the story, calling the thinking behind the NY Wi-Fi Plan the "best description I've seen yet about why low-cost Wi-Fi should be considered a core issue of civil rights, economic fairness, and educational opportunity..."
For a total of $80 million (about $10 per resident), says Rasiej, it's possible to provide high-speed Internet access across the city, including free Wi-Fi in public places. The full text of the speech announcing the Wi-Fi plan as well as details about how it would actually work are available on the Rasiej campaign blog. (Thanks, Micah)
More on the internal mess over at Morgan Stanley: the latest frontrunner to become CEO of the Wall Street investment bank is the company's former president, John J. Mack, who lost out in the power struggle with Philip Purcell in 2001. According to CNN/Money, Morgan Stanley's board is under mounting pressure to name someone quickly -- either a long-time Morgan Stanley veteran or another respected name from a top-tier Wall Street investment bank.
A new report ("Stuck at the Turnstile") from the Public Advocate's office says that more than 25% of all subway MetroCard swipes have failed since the MTA replaced tokens with MetroCards in 2003. That's one in every four. Conspiracy fans will be heartened to know that the incidence of a "mis-swipe" is much higher in poor neighborhoods -- by some estimates, nearly 50% of all swipes fail in low-income neighborhoods. (The B/C subway stop on 116th Street in Harlem is, apparently, one of the worst places to use a MetroCard)
What's funny (funny sad, not funny ha-ha) is that if you ever ask a MTA station booth attendant (a disappearing breed) for help with a MetroCard, they look at you like you have the IQ of a piece of sushi and explain that the card is not working because you don't know how to swipe the card properly. This technique as a humiliation method is particularly effective during peak commuting hours, when the station booth attendant is speaking into his or her station microphone the way that a parent speaks to a small child, telling hundreds of swarming commuters around you that you lack the intellectual firepower and technological know-how to move a piece of plastic through a standard MTA cardreader.
Consolidation in the online brokerage industry continues: Ameritrade announced plans to acquire TD Waterhouse for nearly $3 billion after shaking off an earlier acquisition offer from E-Trade. The combined entity, to be known as TD Ameritrade, will become the largest online broker with 239,000 average daily client trades; annual revenue of more than $1.8 billion and about 5.9 million total accounts.
Forbes has more on the musical chairs in the online brokerage industry, which left E-Trade standing as the only one without an online brokerage partner. Forbes hints, though, that the bulked up TD Ameritrade may make a run for E-Trade sometime in the future, creating a mega-supersized online broker.
Feeling overwhelmed by technology and all the bells-and-whistles that seem to come standard with every electronic gadget or household appliance? Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal provides tips for keeping up with the Technology Joneses.
The #1 rule: "Insist on keeping the machines around you as simple as possible. The simpler things are, the less time it will take to learn how they work, to use them and to fix them."
Gomes also suggests actually taking the time to read the instruction manual for your latest technology purchase -- taking the manual with you on a long airplane flight, for example, or simply carrying it around with you on the daily commute.
David Pogue, the gadget guru of the New York Times, points to a tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign for the new iPod Flea:
"That's right: it's the logical progression in shrinkage from the original iPod, to the Mini, to the Shuffle - and now to the iPod Flea, which is the size of a Tic Tac and holds only one song."
Oh, and don't forget the Flea Collar and the Flea Bag...
Adam Balkin of NY1 previews RadioTime.com, which hopes to do for radio what TiVO did for TV. The new Web-based service "consolidates radio programming from all around the globe - music and talk - and makes it very easy to find, and then listen to it when you like and where you like." The annual cost is $39, which sounds reasonable, until Balkin reveals that "sound quality is considered one generation less than what you'd hear over the air."
It's still pretty cool, if all you want is talk radio and not music. Say, for example, that you wanted to hear live radio updates about what was happening with democracy in Ukraine. Well, there are a number of Ukrainian radio stations that are available via RadioTime (including 14 in Kiev!). Theoretically, you could time-shift these radio programs to East Coast Time and then listen to them at your leisure.
At the BIO 2005 conference, the Milken Institute released a study that ranked Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York as the top four biotech hubs in the country. For both Philly and New York, the Milken Institute noted the importance of access to "New Jersey's cluster of drug companies." Newsday has more on the goings-on at the conference.
Search engine Oodle has released a new beta service that allows Internet users to comb through the classified ad listings in the Greater New York area (i.e. New York City, Southern Connecticut, Northern New Jersey, Westchester and Long Island) with a new, easy-to-use interface. The classifieds are not only from the usual suspects like the major New York newspapers -- the listings will also come from Craigslist and eBay.
The CEO of Oodle explains the motivation for rolling out the new geographically-targeted service: "Whether you're looking for a used sofa bed or a new apartment, you want to find exactly what you're looking for and be the first person to jump on great deals when they pop up."
Journalists are ashamed to admit that they read blogs -- yet, a majority of them use them regularly as part of their work. According to the most recent findings of the 11th Annual Euro RSCG Magnet Survey of the Media, completed in collaboration with Columbia University, 51% of journalists are using blogs to do their work, despite the fact that only 1% believe blogs are credible.
Moreover, 28% of journalists are relying on blogs for their day-to-day reporting; 53% of journalists use blogs to find story ideas; 43% use them to research and reference facts; 36% use them to find sources; and 33% of journalists use blogs as a way of uncovering breaking news or scandals. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Not only are blogs influencing online readers, they are now "influencing the influencers," says the head of Euro RSCG Magnet.
Micro Persuasion explains the changes afoot in the world of media: "Clearly, journalists are hanging out in the blogosphere looking for sources, scoops and more. There's no excuse - no excuse - for not monitoring blogs. And clearly those companies that choose to start positive blogging conversations and maintain them will get more press."
Internet connects Brooklyn Cyclones fans from around the world
Thanks to the magic of the Internet, the start of the minor league baseball season in Brooklyn was eagerly anticipated in far-flung geographic locales around the globe, according to the USA Today. These fans are not always Cyclones fans or even Brooklyn fans -- but they do remember the glory days of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The article even quotes one fan from Italy who plans to make the "pilgrimage" to Coney Island later this summer to see the Cyclones play.
The New York Post reports on the latest probe into potential wrongdoing by floor specialists at the New York Stock Exchange. According to an enforcement official with the NYSE, this probe is "similar in magnitude" to the one that occurred just a few months ago. In April, a probe conducted by the SEC, the NYSE and the Department of Justice led to the arrest and indictment of 15 specialists for criminal fraud.
For the NYSE, the second probe couldn't come at a worse time -- the exchange is in the process of merging with electronic trading network Archipelago and is under increasing criticism that the specialist system (in which traders match up "buy" and "sell" orders in stocks) is an anachronism of modern capitalism.
Henry Blodget is at it again with yet another piece on Internet stock bubbles and investment manias, this time in Fortune magazine. Wasn't it just last week that he was comparing the Great Real Estate Bubble of 2005 with the Great Internet Bubble of 1999? He wasn't afraid to put a price target of $400 on Amazon.com when he was a high-priced Wall Street stock analyst, but he's getting kinda nervous now that shares of Google are starting to push past the $300 level.
Congrats to Heath Binder and Adam Wills, the winners of the Curbed 'Hoodwinked contest. They came up with RAMBO ("Right After the Manhattan Bridge Overpass"), which ended up winning almost exactly 50% of the online vote. For those keeping track, this humble editor's entry (TRUMPO) finished a distant 10th out of 10, with a paltry 0.7% of the vote.
Now we know how the Tampa Bay Devil Rays feel -- 17.5 games out of first, out of contention before the All-Star break, and facing the daunting prospect of trying to catch up with the Yanks and Red Sox with a roster comprised almost entirely of minor league prospects. A tip of the hat to RAMBO for running away with the race.
How likely is it that the U.S. government will attempt to crack down on online gambling operations? Well, according to one insider, it's about "as likely as drawing four aces in a game of five-card stud." A law professor from the University of Buffalo goes one step further: "It's so remote that the chances approach those of being hit by lightning..."
Michael Kanellos of CNET has tips for anyone trying to get their company's name mentioned in the local newspaper. It's all a question of getting the media to work for you. A couple of ideas stand out -- like trying to pitch a news story or product before 9 am. It's true -- if it's waiting on my desk in the morning, I'm much more likely to consider it within that 24-hour news cycle. If it limps in after lunch, well, it better be a headline that basically writes itself. Two other tips - "leak like crazy" and "don't make up words."
Oops! The New York Post points out that the MTA forgot to close down the conductor's booth during a trial run of the Robo-Train: "The L train's single-operator maiden voyage, with MTA bigs aboard, was going without a hitch yesterday — until a group of skylarking teens invaded the empty conductor's booth."
And, of course, the New York Post just happened to be there to photograph the scene...
Christopher Byron doesn't like Viacom, and neither should you. Here are 10 reasons to short Viacom stock:
(1) Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone is "midtown Manhattan's Mount Vesuvius of self-celebration"
(2) Viacom is "one of the biggest and ugliest outfits in the entire 'media conglomerates' space"
(3) The "wheels and fenders have been popping off the Viacom jalopy"
(4) Sumner Redstone never really cared about building strong brands or becoming a global leader in any category: "Redstone's game was all about making the price of Viacom's stock rise in the foamy bull market of the 1990s"
(5) Viacom has a "sprawling mish-mash" of entertainment-related businesses
(6) Under the Viacom corporate umbrella, there's a "kind of Mister Potato-head of media properties"
(7) Viacom was "fan-danced into the M&A brothel by Wall Street deal promoters"
(8) Redstone's spin-off plans are nothing more than "sticking one's investment mistakes on someone else"
(9) Redstone's strategy "really amounts to little more than a new and improved version of a form of financial engineering known as the tracking stock spin-off"
(10) Viacom's strategy is nothing more than a "new paper shuffle" and lots of smoke & mirrors
Andrew Rasiej plans to unveil his "New York Wi-Fi" Plan tomorrow afternoon on the steps of City Hall. If you're in lower Manhattan during lunch time, it's worth checking out. According to Rasiej, who is running for Public Advocate, the plan will bring low-cost wireless Internet to all New Yorkers.
The New York Times says that investors, Wall Street analysts and shareholders are puzzled by the Dolan family's $7.9 billion plan to buy out the public shareholders of Cablevision and spin-off the company's non-cable assets:
"So what are the Dolans really up to? Are the Dolans trying to put the company in play? Is the deal a result of the family's feud? Has taking the company private been the plan all along?"
If nothing else, the proposed break-up of the company into two pieces - one for Charles Dolan and one for James Dolan - could provide an "elegant solution to the family's squabbling."
With oil prices topping the $59 mark, there was a modest sell-off on Wall Street as concerns grew that higher energy costs -- especially during the summer months -- may slow U.S. economic growth.
Says one investment fund manager: "Oil prices going up and up is definitely going to slam the economy into reverse. Lower stock prices are certainly expected from higher oil prices."
The good news, though, is that these historically high oil prices may not last long. According to a report published in Forbes, there has been talk that OPEC may deliver an extra 500,000 barrels of oil a day and increase its production quotas in order to relieve some of the pressure on the market.
The New York Times points out that Zoe Cruz is one of the frontrunners to replace Philip Purcell as the CEO of Wall Street investment bank Morgan Stanley. For all the fellas out there, don't think working for a woman will be a piece of cake -- Cruz is a 24-year veteran of Morgan Stanley and is known as "Cruise Missile" (Cruz Missile?) to her peers.
About a month ago, the city honored four NYC-based small businesses that were named by Inc. Magazine as among the 100 fastest-growing inner city companies in the country: American Christmas Decorations, Artuso Pastry, Cynergy Data, and Mosaica Education. Two of the companies are based in Queens, and the other two are based in the Bronx. Yo, Brooklyn, what happened?
Senator Chuck Schumer is leading the crusade against violent video games, hoping to stop the next generation of hyper-violent games (especially the ones that encourage gamers to partake in all kinds of urban mayhem) from ever being sold in the city. Schumer singled out the new video game 25 to Life, which allows players to "attack police with an arsenal of Molotov cocktails, broken bottles and baseball bats." Last night's "Sixty Minutes," for example, had a segment ("Can a Video Game Lead to Murder?") about a 20-year-old kid in Alabama who played "Grand Theft Auto" so obsessively that he went on some kind of rampage at police HQ.
Senator Schumer explains why he's trying to block these games from being sold in New York City: "It's the worst in a series of violent and gruesome games that lower the common denominator of decency."
The Wall Street Journal counters the assertion that we're drowning in a sea of disposable news, gossip, unedited news snippets and sound bites. With 24-hour cable channels beaming news into our living rooms every hour of the day and small, fast-moving Internet news sites scrambling to send tidbits and headlines to your inbox, news has never been this fast and this furious: "Increasingly you can get your news however you want it – pushed to your desktop, digested in your email or shot out to your Treo."
But are we really "oversaturated with news"? Is "bad media" really crowding out "good media"? The Wall Street Journal says NO: the press is more enlightened than ever before, readers are more educated on important issues of the day, and there are more technological tools available to track the news on a 24/7 basis. We're not being dumbed down, we're being smartened up. Who wants to go back to the day of one daily newspaper and three major news networks?
In a plan presented to Cablevision's board of directors, the Dolan family has offered to buy the remaining portion of the company that it does not already own for $7.9 billion. Currently, the Dolans hold 71% of the voting shares in the company. Under the terms of the deal, non-cable assets (e.g. the New York Knicks, Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden) would be spun off as a separate public firm known as Rainbow Media Holdings.
Newsday has more on the deal: "The $7.9 billion deal would give Cablevision stockholders $21 in cash for each share they currently own, plus shares in the new company, Rainbow Media Holdings. That company also would include the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers, and several cable channels, like the American Movie Channel."
Not only will Cablevision be splitting in two -- it looks like the Dolan family will be splitting in two as well: Charles Dolan, the family patriarch, would become chairman of the private cable company, while his son James Dolan would become chairman and chief executive of the new holding company (Rainbow Media Holdings). And they all lived happily ever after...
Starting in mid-September, The Wall Street Journal will publish a new weekend edition that will concentrate on lighter topics, like sports, entertainment and food & wine. The goal is to "attract a more diverse base of advertising to pull The Journal out of its prolonged slump." With that goal in mind, the weekend version will have a "more airy, more casual feel." Karen Elliott House, publisher of the paper, explains: "The idea is to allow people to relax with The Wall Street Journal."
The New York Times' coverage of the new weekend edition from The Wall Street Journal is interesting -- mostly since The New York Times is facing the same kind of financial pressure to bring in more advertising dollars from different sources. According to the NYT, the WSJ is planning to "fluff up its editorial mix." The Financial Times already publishes a weekend edition, and that's not too fluffy. What's really fluffy is the new MarketPlace Weekly from the Times -- a few re-heated articles from earlier in the week and a ton of classified ads.
Game Daily Biz (via The Hollywood Reporter) reports on a new advertising technology ("the Big Picture") from New York-based Klipmart that provides marketers with additional ways to reach consumers with high-bandwidth Internet connections:
"When first encountered, the ad unit -- which automatically begins playing video as soon as the page loads -- looks normal. But when consumers accept the suggestion to roll their cursor over it, the video window expands dramatically and adds full audio."
"At first, we thought that the proprietors of the Chelsea Market, which occupies this entire block, were worried about organized criminal activity (”the mafia”). Then, prompted by remarks made by a news crew from CNN, we thought that the Chelsea Market was run by the mafia. …our current hypothesis is that the Chelsea Market is (also) the homebase for a federal anti-terrorist (”emergency response”) team."
Venture capital money is no longer as easy to track down as it was during the late 1990's, so the founders of ClearContext, a San Francisco-based software start-up, are using their winnings from Texas Hold'em to bankroll their new venture. At ClearContext, the winnings from online poker really add up -- at a rate of $100 to $120 an hour. According to CNET News.com, "the company's fund-raising technique may be a sign of the times in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs with new companies are adjusting to a more frugal reality after the go-go '90s."
Anyone know of start-ups in the New York metropolitan area who use their winnings from Atlantic City or Foxwoods as a financing mechanism?
