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.
New York Press, in its Best of Manhattan 2005 issue, has named ThePoliticker as "Best Political Blog" and Brownstoner as "Best New Blog to Feed Our Real Estate Whore."
In its Media & Politics section, New York Press explains why Brownstoner is worthy of a daily read:
"[The] web site is a refreshing breath of homespun air in the slimy world of real estate blather... While similarly minded Web sites like Curbed (2004's Best Blog to Feed Our Real-Estate Whore) attack the housing market with a cynical wink-wink, Gawker-style nudge, Brownstoner purveys a plain-talkin', no-nonsense approach. It kind of feels like a bearded, know-it-all dad discussing his favorite subject. Namely, brownstone Brooklyn."
"ChainHotels.com has compiled a national list of over 2,000 hotels that offer guests free Internet access at no additional charge. These hotels let you fire up your laptop and get online either through a wireless connection (WiFi) or direct connection through the Ethernet port. This is a very useful list to road warriors and vacationers who want to find a hotel and be sure it offers free access to the Internet..."
Among the national hotel chains now offering Internet access in rooms at no additional charge: Baymont Suites, Best Western, Comfort Suites, Courtyard by Marriott, Fairfield Inn, Hampton Inn, Hilton Garden Inn, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Homewood Suites, Microtel, Residence Inn, Springhill Suites, Staybridge Suites, Townplace Suites, and Wingate Inn. Not sure how many of these are in New York City, but it's still good to know if you're packing off for a business trip somewhere in Flyover Country.
The latest economic data for New York is out from the National Association of Purchasing Management, and it's perhaps no surprise that higher energy costs are slowing down economic growth in the city. However, the impact of higher energy prices has thus far been much less than expected: according to the New York Report on Busines, non-manufacturing activity was 65.5 in September, only slightly lower than the level of 66.2 recorded in August. In addition, purchasing managers are currently more optimistic about the future than they have been at any time in the past four months: "The outlook index, which reflects expectations of business conditions six months from now, stands at 70." (Any number above 50 is an indicator of economic growth)
On his blog, Donald Trump weighs in on the need for high school business courses (some of them, presumably, offered by Trump University online). According to The Donald, these high school business courses could go a long way in preparing high school kids for college - and for their future careers in the business world:
"I know that school systems have a lot of educational ground to cover in those four critical years, but I think they're leaving something out if they're not offering a good introduction to business course in high school. Plenty of schools offer basic accounting skills if students already profess an interest in that area, but I'm talking about broader-reaching, all-encompassing classes that would really get students ready to tackle serious business prep once they hit college... Imagine the advantage that these future business leaders would have if they had the chance to develop business skills early on in their education. I think it's never too early to introduce students to business concepts. High school would be the perfect place to start."
In today's New York Times, personal tech guru David Pogue reviews the new ThinkPad from IBM. Oops, make that the new ThinkPad from Lenovo. (The first four paragraphs of the product review deal with the "identity crisis" faced by Lenovo as it attempts to market the new Z-series ThinkPad.) The new ThinkPad, which is the first laptop to offer built-in EV-DO, also bills itself as the "thinnest and lightest" on the market. Overall, it's a winner, says Pogue:
"The Z-series laptop is an extremely attractive wide-screen model, loaded with features, cleverly engineered for light weight and reasonably priced. Some of its virtues, like the famous keyboard and the built-in EV-DO cellular Internet, aren't available from any other company. If its design and concept are as successful as they deserve to be, even Lenovo may soon grow comfortable with the phrase, "Lenovo ThinkPad."
Check out the satellite maps on the Central Park Web site. When I first saw the maps, I thought they were part of some kind of GoogleMaps/Central Park mashup (maybe it was the red Google-like balloons on the map), but the credit under the maps specifically mentions Zoomify. Anyway, it's still all good. With the interactive maps, you can zoom in/out and zero in on specific landmarks (Wollman Rink, Belvedere Castle, etc.) around the park.
Anyway, take a moment to check out the Central Park Web site. There seem to be a lot of interactive features on the site, like the ability to rate photos of the park. There's even a big shout-out to the Jaunted travel blog, which mentioned Central Park recently.
That's the question asked by Joe Sharkey of the New York Times. Sharkey is "getting fed up with being charged $9.95 or more in an expensive hotel for broadband Internet service" - especially when there are free Wi-Fi networks all over the city: "The next time an expensive hotel tries to jack me up with an Internet surcharge, I'm grabbing my laptop and heading for the park."
According to ZDNet News (via Reuters), most Brits have absolutely no idea what blogs and podcasts are: "A survey of British taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers - often seen as barometers of popular trends in the United Kingdom - found that nearly 90% had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70% had never heard of blogging." The results were tabulated by DDB, a unit of New York-based advertising group Omnicom. The lesson here is clear: the next time you hail a cab on the streets of New York, be sure to mention your blog. (As in, "Take me to the corner of 59th and Fifth, that's where I'll be blogging from today").
AXcess News reports that executives from Bodisen Biotech, "the first bio fertilizer company from China ever to be listed on an American stock exchange," rang the opening bell at the American Stock Exchange on Wednesday. Bodisen became an AMEX listed company on August 26, and even before that, had attracted the attention of U.S. institutional investors. In fact, earlier this year, Forbes ranked Bodisen as one of the 100 fastest growing companies in China.
However, there has to be a joke in there somewhere. I'm not sure at what I'm more amused by -- that Bodisen touts itself as "the first bio fertilizer company ever to be listed on an American stock exchange," that the company's ticker symbol is BBC, or that when I ran a search on Google News for "New York biotech," this is what I came up with.Yo, back in the day, we used to call bio fertilizer a four-letter word. Does that mean Bodisen Biotech is full of bio fertilizer?
How is it still possible, asks Murray, that real estate middlemen are able to pocket 5% on every transaction? The answer could be that real estate brokers are dipping into their bag of dirty tricks to fend off Internet competition. At a time when middlemen have been squeezed out of the online travel business and out of the stock brokerage business, real estate brokers are making record windfalls. This, at a time when technology (in theory) is making their work easier. Murray explains:
"It's remarkable that in today's economy, this classic middleman business model survives -- and not just survives, but flourishes, like a hardy breed of insect. There are more Realtors out there today -- 1.2 million -- than there were a decade ago. Compare that with what happened to stockbrokers, a similar breed who saw their commissions fall from dollars to pennies over the course of three decades. Or look at the even more dramatic fate of travel agents, whose commissions on airline travel plummeted from 12% to nothing between 1995 and 2002. In an age when information was scarce, Realtors could claim big commissions, because they controlled the gold -- the information on houses for sale. But in an age when information is ubiquitous, it's hard to understand how they continue to rake in such fees."
As Howard Stern prepares to make the move to Sirius Satellite Radio in 2006, Infinity Radio has been scrambling to find a replacement. Or, as the case may be, replacements. The latest word, according to Crain's New York, is that Infinity Radio will use "five or six people" to fill in for Howard Stern. In the process, Infinity passed on a number of other high-profile entertainment personalities:
"[The head of Infinity Radio] said his team began brainstorming Stern’s replacements starting back in December and that “we went to a lot of people from Jon Stewart to Whoopi Goldberg to Geraldo Rivera… but we decided not to try to replace Howard with one person and try to hit a grand slam..." CEO Joel Hollander declined to name the talent signed but said that some of the media reports were accurate and some were not. Adam Carolla, David Lee Roth, Erich “Mancow” Muller, Danny Bonaduce and Jonathon Brandmeier have all been floated as potential replacements."
In Central Park, Adam Balkin of NY1 caught up with Tiger Woods, who was in New York for the launch of his new videogame, Tiger Woods 2006. Tiger explains the newest features in the latest version of the game:
“We try to make it more realistic each and every year. We try and make the trees move with the wind, the grass move, the shadowing, try and get as the sun goes up during the day the greens dry out and get a little faster. It does the same thing in the game. I was a gamer all my life, going back to the Atari 2600 days and the 52, Nintendo, Pong, and I thought that was the coolest game ever then. We thought the graphics were incredible when Donkey Kong came out, so to see it now with the facial features, you didn't ever think that would happen."
Oh, and EA Sports has now included Central Park as a "new kind of fantasy course." EA Sports explains:
"In the past we've done locations such as Japan or the Caribbean where we bring in aspects of that country and do whatever we want, just making sure it kind of feels like that country. With Central Park, we've actually laid out the park, so the park is real. The bodies of water are all where they really are, the statues and monuments and all that stuff is where it belongs, and we just built a course around it."
Over at ZDNet, Russell Shaw notes that Google is now a sponsor of Bryant Park's Wi-Fi Network. According to Shaw, Google could be working on a new system for delivering Google Ads, based on one's physical location:
"Powered by Google." Hmm. Makes you wonder what they are up to. Maybe Google Ads, tied to mobile presence? Say they know you are in NYC's Bryant Park. Bryant Park is right next to the main branch of the New York Public Library. That's a place frequented by lots of educated readers, computer users, researchers - and hmm, Google users, too. OK, let's think about it some more. Maybe if I am a Google salesperson in the NYC office, I visit nearby merchants and sell them Google AdWords? Google AdWords or Google AdSense tied to mobile presence? Definitely."
Or, it could just be the fact that Google's corporate offices in New York are located about a block away. Maybe it's all part of Google's "Don't Be Evil" philosophy -- supporting wireless Internet in the parks is just a way of doing good in the world.
Ever wonder how the cartoonists over at The New Yorker consistently come up with humorous cartoons, week after week, year after year? At the Cartoonists Unleashed event at last week's New Yorker Festival, the secret formula was revealed (and later uploaded to Flickr).
In Column A, there is a list of words: grim reaper, robber, cat, pig, boss, shrink. In Column B, there is a list of words: dog, naked people, santa, receptionist. In Column C, there is a list of possible destinations: beach, business meeting, office, cocktail party, etc.
Then, all you do is combine Column A with Column B and Column C... A dog is talking to another dog at the office: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
An innocent comment by Fernando Ferrer on his mayoral campaign blog ("I was educated in public schools for most of my education") has generated a minor firestorm of controversy in the race for New York City mayor. As it turns out, Ferrer was actually educated in Catholic schools. While Ferrer has dismissed the discrepancy as "minor," the Bloomberg campaign sees it otherwise:
"Bloomberg's people today pounced on this - they said Ferrer is either lying about his resume or lying about who writes his blog. If you ask the Bloomberg team, this latest flap goes to the basic honesty of Freddy Ferrer."
The Ferrer campaign team has apologized, saying that the blog was "inaccurately edited." (Which, of course, leaves open the question of whether Mr. Ferrer actually posted the entry to the blog, or whether it was a low-level campaign staffer who posted it as "Fernando Ferrer.")
Eli Noam, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia University, has penned an interesting column in the October 2005 issue of Communications of the ACM: "Why the Internet is Bad for Democracy." Point-by-point, Noam deconstructs the principal arguments of those who say that the Internet promotes better democracy. In the process, Noam discusses why the Internet does not raise the level of political dialogue, why direct access to public officials is nothing more than an "illusion to access," and why the Internet does not necessarily facilitate political participatory action. Noam concludes by putting the Internet into historical context:
"The Internet does not create a Jeffersonian democracy. It is not Athens, nor Appenzell, nor Lincoln-Douglas. It is, if anything, less of a democracy than those low-tech places. But, of course, none of these places really existed either, except as an ideal, a goal, or an inspiration. And in that sense, the expectations vested in the Internet are a new link in a chain of hope. Maybe naive, but certainly ennobling."
Mr. Noam has been giving the same type of talk for years, so apparently little or nothing has changed in the past five years or so. From the Columbia University Web site, I found a link to a 2001 speech by Noam called "Will the Internet Be Bad for Democracy?"
According to Yahoo News, German department store chain KarstadtQuelle has started giving away free flights to New York with the purchase of a special edition winter coat (the $240 "puffer jacket"). The department store claims to have sold 4,000 puffer jackets already, with plans to sell a total of 20,000 jackets by the end of the promotion. Now other German stores are getting into the act with a number of "copycat offers." Does that mean that the streets of New York will soon be overtaken by German tourists in expensive puffer jackets? (Hat tip: Fark)
Monday marked the debut of NYP@Work, the new 12-page supplement in the New York Post devoted to professional lifestyle issues. There are stories on beating the CrackBerry addiction, comfortable shoes to wear to work during the morning commute (sorry fellas, this one is for the ladies), and trendy office supplies to turn you into a "professional powerhouse." Quite frankly, not a lot of meat the first time out. Despite a full-color BlackBerry picture on the front of NYP@Work that lured us in, there's not much inside to keep our attention.
Too bad. It's just the latest sign that traditional business news doesn't bring in the advertisers - look at the Wall Street Journal's new weekend edition and all the various changes at the New York Times. What brings in advertisers is product-oriented fluff (Hey, look at the cool new desk lamp from Target!).
A humorous item from Macworld (UK): UK's South Yorkshire police force claims that it had the first-ever "police podcast," not the NYPD. Across the pond, the South Yorkshire police force was "a bit shocked to read that NYPD were believed to be the first law enforcement agency to release a podcast, especially as we released ours a good while before they did. We launched our first podcast on August 2, we have eight under our belt so far."
"Crain's reports that Frank Gehry will be designing jewelry and tabletop items for Tiffany & Co. This is a big deal, as it's the first new designer Tiffany has "hired" in twenty-five years (Paloma Picasso was the last), but Gothamist is thinking one thing: Uncomfortable. While we expect Gehry to design something pretty awesome-looking like a hammered metal necklace or a warped vase ("Mr. Gehry...will work with precious metals, stones and wood"), we're not so sure it'll be practical. But that's not the point is it? Well, Gothamist would certainly buy a titanium Guggenheim-Bilbao shaped salt-and-pepper shaker set..."
In his weekly column for Wired, NYU assistant professor Adam Penenberg asks a question on the minds of many bloggers: Is it possible to strike it rich while blogging? Penenberg digs around several weblog publishers, looking for answers.
At Weblogs, Inc. (the weblog empire run by former New York-based Internet promoter Jason Calacanis), bloggers make anywhere from $200 to $3,000 a month - "about a quarter to half what a mid-level editorial job would pay, without the daily office commute." The standard deal appears to be $500 for about 125 entries a month ($4/entry).
At Gawker Media, the figures are a bit higher: "The amount floating around the internet is $2,500 a month per blogger plus traffic bonuses." Not satisfied with this estimate, Penenberg does the math and comes up with a number of wildly-inflated numbers for the various bloggers at Gawker Media: $5,000 a month (Gawker), $7,000 to $10,000 a month (Defamer), $7,000 to $8,000 (Gizmodo) and $7,000 to $8,000 a month (Fleshbot).
As it turns out, New York Magazine had the final say. In last week's issue on "Who makes what" in New York City, Jessica Coen of Gawker admitted to making $30,000 per year . That works out to about $2,500 a month.
Newsday reports that Long Island-based Computer Associates is signing a lease for a new midtown office in Manhattan. The company reassured investors, though, that it will continue to have a "large presence" on the Island. The new 67,000 square foot office at 520 Madison will become the new home for about 120 employees in February. Computer Associates explained the move: "Certainly Microsoft and everybody else has offices here, so it's not out of the question. For most companies, especially those of larger size, there's a need to have a presence in Manhattan."
The New York Post got us all excited this morning with the first sneek peak at the new subway cams. (see pic) According to the Post, contractors have been busy testing the cameras at a platform along the West 86th Street No. 1 line station in Manhattan and the 161st Street-River Avenue station, near Yankee Stadium.
As of Monday afternoon, though, it's unclear how things stand. Crain's New York is linking to an AP wire report stating that a deal between the NYPD and a private sector security and surveillance equipment maker has been scuttled. The report says only that the pilot project with MSGI was "improperly authorized" by an NYPD inspector. (In corporate lingo, that's known as "rogue spending.") The shares of MSGI have been on a rollercoaster ride over the past two trading days -- on Friday, rumors of the new subway video surveillance system deal sent shares up 41%. On Monday, shares closed 17% lower as investors reacted to the bad news of the aborted deal.
MSGI offered only a dry formal statement via e-mail: ''While MSGI has received no notice of cancellation from the NYPD Transit Police, we understand that the project is on hold so that the issues relating to internal police protocol can be properly addressed... There was a degree of miscommunication within the Police Department.''
Last Thursday, the NYC Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced the launch of the second annual New York City Green Building Competition. It all went down at Solar 1, a green-designed facility located under the FDR Drive. (An environmentally friendly structure located under the FDR - who knew?) According to a press release from the city, "competitors explore designs that incorporate less toxic building materials, reduced water and energy consumption, planning for transportation and vehicle alternatives, improved air quality, incorporation of the City’s land and streets to promote environmentally beneficial growth, and general preservation of natural ecosystems."
Last year, winners included the Queens Botanical Garden, the Roosevelt Avenue/74 th Street Station Rehabilitation, the Brooklyn Ice House, the 2nd Avenue Subway and the Studio 27 Regenerative Row House.
Last week, IBM announced a plan for some of its employees to teach math and science classes in New York City classrooms. Now, the company has even more good news - it's helping college students find jobs in the IT sector: "The new initiative allows students from accredited colleges and universities worldwide to post resumes to an online career center that will be made available to thousands of IBM clients and business partners that are hiring technology workers." The only catch is that students taking advantage of the service must possess at least one IBM professional certification.
A senior IBM exec interviewed by The Journal News explains what makes the initiative unique: "By linking business partners, customers and universities, we are taking the next logical step by connecting this talent with the information technology jobs of tomorrow,"
Who's a Rat claims to be nothing more than the "largest online database of informants and agents" that assists lawyers and criminal defendants who may lack more traditional resources, but the Web site's detractors say that the site could lead to reprisals against "stool pigeons," snitches and even undercover cops. Since the site was started by a Boston resident who was busted on marijuana charges, it's quite likely that the "Who's a Rat?" Web site is about more than just truth, justice and the American way -- it's about putting the lives of undercover NYPD cops at risk.
Christopher Byron of the New York Post must have spent the weekend sharpening his axe, since he came out Monday hacking away at the hedge fund industry. While we applaud Byron for his weekly exposes on criminal malfeasance and graft in the world of Wall Street, it appears he's overstating matters a bit in his denunciation of the hedge fund business. (Or, as he prefers to call it, the "hedge fund racket.") He also calls it the "murky and crime-infested world of hedge funds," where the latest case of hedge fund fraud is seemingly just around the corner.
For another take on the hedge fund industry, check out my article over at Tech Central Station ("Don't Trim the Hedges"), which makes the case that hedge funds actually play an important role in the international financial markets, supplying liquidity and promoting market efficiency. In terms of actual fraud cases filed with the SEC, the hedge fund industry is actually doing better than one would expect -- It's just that the media tends to focus on cases like Bayou, and not on the bigger picture. As I wrote earlier, hedge fund managers are not "James Bond villains with MBAs."
Stephen Bainbridge also agrees that the hedge bet is no winner, when it comes to the rule requiring hedge fund managers to register with the SEC:
"...Mandatory disclosure does not prevent fraud. Securities managers who are going to commit fraud will not be deterred from doing so by government disclosure rules -- they will simply use the approved disclosure form to do so. Hence, rigorously enforced proscriptions of fraud seem far more important than mandatory disclosure, insofar as one is the sort of thing that allegedly happened Bayou Securities."
According to the New York Daily News, New York State Senator Frank Padavan has launched a new Web site ("Get Back to the Train") that includes a petition for New York subway riders to call on the MTA to roll back recent fare hikes. The logic behind the petition is simple - the MTA should do its part to help commuters cut back on gas consumption, and lower fares could be just the ticket to help motorists kick the car habit:
"Restoring transit fares to their 2004 levels would save transit riders $38 million - an average savings of about 7% off the cost of a monthly commuter rail ticket - and encourage them to leave their cars at home... An immediate fare cut would save money, encourage the use of alternate transportation and lend to a better, cleaner, more cost-efficient New York."
The cash-strapped MTA, as might be expected, responded by stating that there was no way that it would consider a fare rollback. That's the unfortunate thing about "temporary" fare increases to balance a budget shortfall -- they are rarely, if ever, rolled back to previous levels.
The Wall Street Journal recently looked at the "etiquette quandaries" caused by Bluetooth-enabled wireless headsets. Not only do people wearing the headsets sometimes look ridiculous ("you look like a half-assimilated Borg"), social mix-ups are now commonplace, especially in busy urban environments like New York. If you happen to bump into someonone and are not aware that the other person is wearing a "robotic-looking" phone headset, the chance encounter could quickly turn into a comedy of errors. Anyway, these Bluetooth-enabled headsets range in price anywhere from $30-$150, and now there are even super high-end headsets for the fashion-conscious that are closer to $300 each. In fact, Oakley and Motorola recently teamed up to make a wireless bluetooth headset that clips on to Oakley's sunglasses.
Over at Tech Central Station, I wrote a follow-up on Andrew Rasiej's unsuccessful campaign for New York City Public Advocate ("The Technorati Candidate"). Despite a technology-centric platform that seemed to resonate with tech-savvy voters, the Rasiej campaign team nevertheless barely managed to win more than 5% of the popular vote:
"In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore found out that it was possible to win the popular vote, and still lose the electoral vote. In last week's Democratic primary for New York City Public Advocate, Andrew Rasiej found out that it was possible to win the blogger vote, and still lose the popular vote.
For the two months leading up to the primary election on September 13, Rasiej captured the hearts and minds of bloggers like no other candidate since Howard Dean with a technology-centric campaign that included a plan for citywide wireless Internet access, a video blog (in addition to a regular blog), and a plan for making 911 calls from the NYC subway. On the day preceding the election, in fact, "Rasiej" ranked as one of the ten most popular search terms on the blog search engine Technorati. Anyone convinced of the power of the blogosphere to determine the fate of political careers (Trent Lott, anyone?) would surely have guessed that Mr. Rasiej was on the cusp of sweeping into office with a broad new mandate to revolutionize politics."
Alas, it was not to be. So... will the blogosphere ever be able to elect one of its own? Are candidates like Howard Dean and Mr. Rasiej on the right track, or are all bloggers collectively participating in some kind of mass delusion?
Dawn Eden, who writes the weekly "Blog On!" column for the New York Daily News, has a few pointers to New York City pizza blogs. For example, there's the Brooklyn Pizzeria in New Orleans, which was hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina ("My business was in almost 4 feet of water, everything gone.")
There's also "the city's own pizza blog," SliceNY: "We're Big Apple-based, with a special affinity for New York-style pies, but we're wild about pizza in general. We're even warming up to the idea of deep dish." In a follow-up posting, the editor of SliceNY explains that the site is not a "for-profit enterprise, modeled on corporate-owned blogs like Gothamist," as the New York Daily News implies:
"Well, if we're "clearly a for-profit enterprise," the ad sales team down on seven here at Slice corporate apparently didn't get the memo. I'll have to talk to HR about poaching some of the Gothamist Corporation's sales reps..."
Last week in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, there was an article on "Bridging China's MBA Gap." Apparently, more than a few Western universities are pairing up with Chinese universities to offer international MBA programs. Two New York-area universities were mentioned in the piece: New York University, which has partnered with China-Europe International Business School and Tsinghua University School of Economics & Management; Fordham University, which has partnered with Peking University.
Then, later in the week, the Wall Street Journal appeared to contradict itself, running an article about the value of home-grown business talent in China. The gist of the story was that VC firms looking to fund new businesses in China are overlooking Western MBAs with slick marketing skills in favor of long-time China veterans with gritty (and more practical) business plans.
According to the chairman of Time Warner, bolstering the financial performance of AOL is a "priority" and the strategic key to unlocking shareholder value at the media giant. The New York Times points out that these comments from the Time Warner executive suite signal "a tweak in strategy and a belief that the stigma of the AOL-Time Warner merger is finally a thing of the past." What's strange is that if you read the first half of the article in the New York Times, it sounds like Time Warner is trying real hard to improve things at AOL and that AOL is definitely part of the long-term future at Time Warner. Then, if you read the second half of the article, it sounds like Time Warner still is thinking of selling off AOL to the highest bidder, whether it is Microsoft or Google or Yahoo.
Anyway, in early January, I wrote a piece for Tech Central Station ("The Internet Company That Time Almost Forgot") about all the reasons why AOL could have a big year in 2005. Maybe it's time for Mr. Parsons and Mr. Icahn to take a look.
Idle Words has an extensive narrative (with photos) of what it's like to journey down the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The canal, still an ecological nightmare, somehow has managed to find a special place in the hearts of Brooklyn residents everywhere:
"Like so much in life, the key to enjoying the Gowanus is lowering your expectations. The canal has been through a lot, and it has been hurt before. It knows that it is no supermodel waterway, it knows that it needs a good dredging and possibly a Superfund grant just to get itself halfway into decent shape. It does not pretend to be some golden-haired World Heritage estuary filled with cranes and egrets. Then again, neither is it the Cuyahoga. Given half a chance, aesthetically speaking, it's the hardest-working body of water in New York City, and you'll never tour a more grateful urban canal."
A must read for anyone concerned about urban renewal and the impact of economic development on the environment.
Google is planning to build out its own fiber optic network and become a top-tier player in the Internet telephone and wireless businesses, so it only makes sense that the company is looking to lease space in one of New York's telecom carrier hotels, says the New York Post:
"The company is reportedly in talks to lease a whopping 270,000 square feet in the former Port Authority Commerce Building at 111 Eighth Ave. at W. 15th Street. The massive building is one of New York's most important so-called telecom carrier hotels — home to thousands of Web servers and other critical technology infrastructure."
Google spokespersons offered no comment on the pending deal, but the Post article has plenty of speculation about what Google is planning:
"111 Eighth Ave.'s concentration of interconnected networks would allow Google to offer its new voice-over-Internet service, Google Talk, more efficiently and at lower cost because it would be able to connect directly to the networks of many of the world's leading telecom firms that are also housed there."
Crain's New York notes that "a prominent hedge fund manager is urging Citigroup to break itself up, arguing that the financial conglomerate is too large to grow significantly and snap its stock price out of its slumber."
Over at Bankstocks.com, the hedge fund manager (Thomas Brown) lays out his future vision for Citigroup:
"When the new crop of bigwigs at Citigroup sits down and starts to consider what direction the company should take, here’s one alternative we hope they seriously consider: break Citi up into a group of constituent businesses, and let the value bloom. I should say up front I was never a big fan of the supermarket strategy that was behind the 1998 creation of the Citi monolith in the first place. Huge scale doesn’t count for much in financial services, for one thing. And in financial services, smaller, focused players tend to outcompete large, diversified ones..."
The four units would consist of Citibank (retail banking); a revived Salomon Brothers investment banking juggernaut; a Smith Barney brokerage unit; and an international banking arm known as CitiGlobal. According to Brown, "The Citi is sleeping - break it up!"
If this doesn’t sound like a page ripped from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”, I’m not sure what would: Wednesday's print edition of the Wall Street Journal has a front-page story on Procter & Gamble’s efforts to win over the consumer at the FMOT (“first moment of truth”):
“Despite spending billions on traditional advertising, the consumer products giant thinks this instant [the FMOT] is one of its most important marketing opportunities. It created a position 18 months ago, Director of First Moment of Truth, or Director of FMOT, to produce sharper, flashier in-store displays.”
Within P&G, FMOT is referred to casually as EFF-mot. Moreover, the Director of FMOT commands a 15-person team to develop the type of store displays that can win over customers in the first three to seven seconds of the shopping experience. It’s an all-out war to win the battle for shelf space and convince shoppers to buy ever more Tide, Crest and Pampers. Alas, the article goes on to explain the business of in-store marketing (which has grown to become an $18.6 billion a year industry) without referencing Malcolm Gladwell at all. Instead, the article goes on to explain the importance of Wal-Mart’s in-store TV network.
Anyway, Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” was all about the importance of the first few seconds in making decisions and the value of rapid cognition. Most people claim that the book was nothing more than an apology for ‘snap judgments’ and ‘intuition.’ But the book went beyond that – it showed that too much information may actually hamper the decision-making process. Snap judgments are only useful if they contain an analysis of the two or three most important facts needed to reach a decision. For example, if doctors are given two or three highly relevant details in an emergency room operating environment, they can make much more effective decisions than if they were flooded with lots of minutiae.
It sounds like P&G’s head of FMOT is actually following some of these ideas. According to the director of FMOT, in-store packaging should “interrupt” the shopping experience and answer very succinctly three basic questions: Who am I? What am I? Why am I right for you? This is Gladwellian thinking, eh? If the consumer has to think too much, he or she will move on to the next aisle or decide that maybe it’s not worth the effort to buy toothpaste today.
On Monday, I received a small note from the head of Community Affairs/Media Relations at The New York Times about the new TimesSelect "premium content" offering. Towards the end of the correspondence was a mention that "plans are in the works for some Op-Ed columnists to produce weblogs."
Apparently, FishBowlNY received the same memo, and was just as surprised to find out about the new op-ed blogs:
"Excuse me? We're getting 8 brand-spankin' new blogs? I haven't seen this anywhere else but the mind frankly reels. MoDo, we'll link to you if you link to us! Details as we have them..."
JetBlue has posted 18 straight quarters of positive earnings, and now that streak could be in jeopardy, due to (even) higher fuel prices brought on by the threat of Hurricane Rita hitting somewhere along the Gulf Coast. Now, we've always been a bit skeptical of consecutive-quarter positive earnings streaks (the numbers usually look too perfect), but JetBlue is an exception -- a well-managed company that doesn't have to resort to a lot of creating accounting tricks to pad the bottom line. Anyway, the CEO of the Queens-based low-fare carrier all but admitted that Hurricane Rita is "going to put the final nail in this quarter..." In the first six months of the year, the five largest U.S. airlines posted $4.8 billion in losses. And there was the ugly bankruptcy at Delta, and so on, and so forth.
Information boards providing train arrival and departure times will soon be added to 131 subway stations over the next year, according to the New York Post. (Actually, the article says "stations" but I think it actually means "subway station platforms" or "subway station lines." Hence, the busy Times Square station would probably count as about 10 stations, for the 1,2,3,9,N,R,Q,7 and S lines.) The MTA's Chief Transportation Officer explains what it all means for New Yorkers:
"The new system gives date, the time of day and this one will have more detailed information about where the next train is, how far is it... It's a better system than we have today."
Anyway, it's a bit of clever psychology on the part of the MTA, actually. For the same reasons that some banks post waiting times and some delis hand out numbered tickets to customers, it's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that customers are willing to wait a significantly longer amount of time if they know "how long" they'll actually have to wait. So now, the MTA will have little or no guilt about admitting that the N and R lines are now running on the W line, and that means that the Q line is now running about 45 minutes late. Anyway, a big one-handed round of applause for the MTA.
Do you have a lot of loose change in your pockets or piles of pennies at home? Well, Amazon.com and Coinstar are linking up with a unique offer to get coin hoarders to spend the money online instead: "Under the new offer announced [last week] with Amazon, Coinstar will now allow users to convert their loose change into Amazon Gift Certificates that can be used online at Amazon.com." Even better, Coinstar won't charge an annoying transaction fee. In other words, $5 in pennies means $5, not $4.50 or $4.25 or anything else.
According to Coinstar, it's a win-win for everyone involved:
"Everybody wins, consumers get a fee-free transaction and Amazon can now offer their customers an easy and convenient way to use cash online. Coinstar attracts new users by providing a no fee transaction and the host retailer (supermarkets) benefits through increased store traffic."
Actually, I guess that's a win-win-win-win for everyone involved.
The New York Daily News reports that six New York City residents have received $500,000 "genius grants" from the MacArthur Foundation. Among the winners: "a Bronx activist fighting to revive Hunts Point, a Brooklyn writer who waxes lyrical about Boerum Hill... a Manhattan painter who is redefining abstract art... and Brooklyn documentary filmmaker Edet Belzberg." A big hat tip to each of these winners.
For any Wall Street types out there -- three former Oxford students have launched a new Web site, ConsensusView.com, that allows professional traders to post their forecasts on stocks, futures and currencies. After posting their forecasts, these traders can see the consensus views of all other contributors. Each month, the site will award a prize of $1,000 for the most accurate forecaster.
On the op-ed pages of Monday's Wall Street Journal, Chris Mayer, a real estate professor at Columbia University's B-school, and Todd Sinai, a professor at Wharton, explain that the "Chicken Littles" of the real estate market have it all wrong:
"Yet basic economic logic suggests that this apparent evidence of a bubble is anything but. Even in the highest-price cities, housing is, at most, slightly more expensive than average. Here's why: While house prices over the last decade have gone through the roof, the annual cost of owning a house has not."
According to the two B-school professors, "the annual cost of owning, not the price of the house itself, is what homebuyers should (and do) consider when contemplating a purchase."
In other words, forget about skyrocketing housing costs (the traditional method for determining whether a market is overheated or not) and, instead, focus on the annual cost of owning. As calculated by the two B-school professors, the annual cost of owning a house is "the net cash outflow required to own a house for a year - namely, the after-tax cost of financing the purchase price either by borrowing or through the lost risk-adjusted return on the equity tied up in the house, plus carrying costs such as maintenance and economic depreciation - less the expected depreciation on the property."
Now, we're not ones to question the math (although this mathematical definition did cause our heads to spin), especially since the two B-school professors had their results published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. But, doesn't all this re-defining the terms of the debate sound strangely like the logic used to defend the Internet stock boom?
When Internet companies failed to show any kind of earnings whatsoever, analysts talked about future expected earnings and discounted cash flows. When that logic failed to assuage investor fears, analysts talked up all kinds of funky earnings numbers, like EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, and Depreciation, and Amortization)? Or, as some Wall Street wags liked to joke, "earnings before all the bad stuff"? Remember all those claims about it "being different this time"? Remember how companies came up with all kinds of theories about "first mover advantage" in order to justify multi-million-dollar Super Bowl ad spots?
Thankfully, the New York Post reports that MBA students aren't falling for it anymore:
"In the first poll of its kind, MBAs say they'd rather buy stocks than residential houses because housing prices aren't based on realities the way office buildings are. The booming residential housing market also faces a big tumble, said the survey of more than 1,400 MBA graduates of Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business. MBAs overwhelmingly said they'd avoid buying houses as a growth investment over the next five years, with 76% giving it a thumbs down. Instead, 94% said they'd prefer to buy stocks for growth over the next five years."
"It's a shame that the center of the media industry has moved to Silicon Valley and nobody told New York :-) I should write Mayor Bloomberg a letter about that. It would point out that many Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Ebay, are in fact media companies. They are technology enabled media companies. They publish digital rather than paper pages but they carry content and advertising just like a newspaper or magazine paper page.
And our media industry is growing like gangbusters while New York's is not. Our media industry is hiring like crazy (Yahoo has 700 new positions to fill, Google a similar number) while New York's media industry continues to cut jobs and budgets..."
David Lidsky of Fast Company has some unkind words for the new Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal:
"Here's why the Journal's Saturday paper is dead on arrival: There are no surprises whatsoever. At least at this point, there's no evidence of a single fresh idea, or even the deft execution of a well-worn chestnut of an idea. It's a focus-grouped, advertiser-friendly confection with nothing that I can't get in hundreds of other venues. What the Journal seems to have fallen victim to is the kind of insular thinking that kills so many entrenched enterprises: It seems to believe that there's value in the information being delivered by the Wall Street Journal, as if that were enough to carry the day. The decided lack of splash here is also another tale of the downside of hype. If you can't live up to it, the backlash isn't going to be pretty."
According to Lidsky, the "Pursuits" section of the Weekend Edition was especially odious -- what he called "a juiced up version of Personal Journal that's basically a cliche of every entertainment or general-interest magazine's front of the book and every "weekend" section of a major-market daily newspaper."
Unfortunately for Mr. Lidsky, it appears that he doesn't take much of an interest in the financial markets, since there were more than a few new features that got my attention. In the "Money & Investing" section, there was a first-rate article on "New Tools to Hedge Your Home." In the "Pursuits" section, we agree that the article called "When Tough Guys Want Comfy Shoes" was a bit on the cheesy side, but there was also a book review of a new book about Google. The Money & Investing section also has a brand-new column ("Green Thumb") on matters of personal finance. There's also expanded coverage of Friday's financial markets performance and a new "Breaking Views" column that has insights about Wall Street inside dealings (this weekend, it was speculation as to whether Carl Icahn's takeover bid would impact Time Warner's stock price).
When you mention the South Bronx, probably the last thing you think of is telecom. IEEE Spectrum has a nice feature on Urban Telephone and Video, a telecom company based in the South Bronx that competes with Time Warner and Cablevision in offering cable TV, broadband Internet access, and Internet telephony services to New Yorkers:
"In an office building in the heart of the 'hood, on a bustling commercial thoroughfare lined with small grocery stores cheek by jowl with shops studded with large, hand-scrawled signs hawking the latest bargains on household goods and electronics, exists one of the city's original broadband franchises—and the industry's most unlikely success story. The company, Urban Communications Transport, which does business under the name Urban Telephone and Video, has been making a profit in an endeavor that has defeated not a few telecom industry giants..."
A bit of news from last week: according to the New York Post, Viacom's MTV Networks and Comcast are working on a joint venture that will create several new cable networks. An unnamed Comcast source says that the new offerings will include "several lifestyle channels — on topics such as cars and wealth — as well as video-on-demand and e-commerce." Reps for both MTV Networks and Comcast were tight-lipped about the move.
Jason Kottke points to the work of Ji Lee, who is in the process of pasting 50,000 empty speech bubble stickers over advertisements, signs and movie posters on the streets of Manhattan. People then fill them in with random quotes, and Lee returns to photograph the results.
In this advertisement for an art exhibit at MoMA, Matisse (lower left) appears to be engaged in an interactive conversation with Picasso (upper right corner): "The exhibit's over. Why is this poster still here, Pablo?"
Flickr has some great photos from Robert Smithson's Floating Island barge art exhibit, which set off a "frenzy of photoblogging not seen since The Gates back in February." The Floating Island is actually a 30'x90' man-made island towed by a tugboat around Manhattan. The Floating Island will be making its journey around Manhattan everyday until the 25th, so there's still time to snap a few digital pics. (Hat tip: Curbed)
Alan Meckler of Jupitermedia is none too pleased to find that many of the brilliant op-ed columnists of the New York Times are now hidden behind $49.95-per-year subscription walls:
"Readers know that I feel that the Times continues to make a big mistake by getting more restrictive with their free offerings. I guess they feel their purchase of about.com, a free site, gives them license to make the quality Times content an increasingly closed environment?"
Daily Kos also weighs in on the decision by the New York Times to put op-ed columnists like Paul Krugman behind bars (oops, walls):
"I'll be sad to lose Krugman. I also think the Times might be making a mistake here - not only will they be removing their op-ed columnists from the ever-growing "discussion" in the blogosphere and the online world in general, but Krugman's columns are almost always some of the site's most popular pieces. I'm sure they've crunched the numbers and have decided the subscription fees will outweigh the loss in traffic and ad revenue, but only time will tell."
This was only a matter of time: a market for cellphone pornography within the US. In Europe, after all, consumers spend tens of millions of dollars on cellphone porn. The New York Times provides details:
"With the advent of advanced cellular networks that deliver full-motion video from the Internet - and the latest wave of phones featuring larger screens with bright color - the pornography industry is eyeing the cellphone, like the videocassette recorder before it, as a lucrative new vehicle for distribution."
As might be imagined, some advocacy groups are already mobilizing their forces to fight any effort to make pornography available via phone. The FCC, too, is taking steps to keep the worst of the smutty material away from minors.
