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.
To celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Time Out New York recently created a number of Top 10 lists, including a list of the Top 10 trends that flamed out. Unfortunately, it looks like Internet culture took one on the chin, with Time Out New York throwing trends like day trading, Razor scooters, Segways, “Silicon Alley” and Kozmo into the trend dumpster.
Check out Sushi NYC: a neighborhood-by-neighborhood list of all the sushi restaurants in New York City. It's even user-friendly for mobile devices like the Palm. If you're counting, there are 27 sushi restaurants in Midtown East and another 26 in the East Village. The site also has a handy Sushi glossary.
In its "Best of NYC 2005" issue, the Village Voice handed out the "Best URL-Turned-Verb" award to the popular site Flavorpill: "Take a crowded going-on and an honest attendee and you'll learn, truth is, it was probably flavorpilled."
Is tech news really that scarce these days? NY1's Adam Balkin takes a closer look at new high-tech sewing machines that feature all kinds of interesting features and doo-dads - like the Brother-Innovis 4000D, which enables users to program over 80 different Disney designs, or the Singer Quantum Futura, which accepts photo scans of artwork.
For the price of two movie tickets and a bucket of popcorn, JetBlue will fly you from JFK to Boston
New Yorkers can now fly to Boston for the low-low, introductory price of $25 one-way, thanks to JetBlue. According to the New York Post, the new fare deal is meant to "trumpet the expansion of service from JFK to points around the country, including up to 10 new daily flights between The Big Apple and Beantown." The fares are good for the period November 8 - December 14, not including Thanksgiving.
Wall Street legend John Gutfreund has been a bad, bad boy
Wall Street legend John Gutfreund, "the poster boy for Wall Street largesse in the 1980s," is now facing a sexual harassment lawsuit by a former employee. Anyway, as the New York Post points out, anybody who dreamed of an investment banking job in the 1980s could cite chapter and verse of the bestseller Liar's Poker, in which Gutfreund supposedly offered a Salomon Brothers bond trader to play a hand of liar's poker for $1 million.
Martha Stewart knows just what to buy the prisoner on your Christmas shopping list
Maybe Martha thought this up while doing time in the Big House... Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Sony BMG are teaming up to offer a series of Martha Stewart-branded compilation albums for holidays and special occasions. (We're fairly confident that these albums won't include a cover of "Jailhouse Rock") According to Crain's New York, the first in the holiday series, “Martha Stewart Living Music: The Holiday Collection,” will be a three-disc box set that includes traditional, jazz and classical favories -- in addition to recipe cards, decorating tips and craft ideas.
If you've ever watched Seinfeld (or any other sit-com about New York), then you probably know a few words of Yiddish and didn't even know it. Here's a list of common Yiddish expressions and what they actually mean. "Schmoozing" is talking about nothing in particular, "oy" is a disapproving sigh, and "mentsh" means a decent person. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's head down to the Lower East Side for some bagels.
Co-founder of Blogger tempts fate with new subway logo design
Meg Hourihan, one of the co-founders of Blogger, has redesigned her personal blog to include a funky New York subway logo design. With the MTA cracking down on intellectual property recently (iPod subway maps, anyone?), we just hope that the new logo doesn't cause any problems. (Meg herself notes that she "may be taking the NYC transportation theme too far")
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").
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)
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."
The exotic foreign land otherwise known as Brooklyn
The New York Times takes a look at a wild, undiscovered travel destination in this week's edition of "36 hours" (a travel feature that appears every Friday)... Yeah, Brooklyn. Does that mean the gawking, fanny-pack crowd will now be emboldened to make the trip to Williamsburg and Fort Greene? Stay tuned.
In raving about the iPod Nano, New York Times personal tech guru David Pogue predicts that Apple will soon control more than 80% of the global marketplace for digital music players -- a feat that many on Wall Street didn't think was possible. One analyst cited by Pogue, in fact, earlier stated that, "Nobody can sustain an 80% market share in a consumer electronics business for more than two or three years. It's pretty much impossible." The iPod Nano could change all that: "To see one is to want one. If you hope to resist, lash your credit card to your wallet like Odysseus to the mast."
In today's Wall Street Journal review of the new Toulouse-Lautrec show in Chicago, New York art critic Karen Wilkin calls Montmartre the "Williamsburg of Paris..." Usually, it's the other way around, right? As in, "the Harvard of the West" or "the Venice of the North." Maybe Williamsburg really has arrived...
Overheard in New York consistently has the funniest snippets of conversation heard around the city. Maybe it's just silly Monday morning humor, but this one had me ROTFL:
College girl: Excuse me, sir. Which way is the river?
Man: There's two. (He walks away)
A new survey from Salary.com ranked the top 10 "sexy" jobs. No surprises that firefighters (FDNY rocks!) came in #1 or that jobs like lawyer, doctor and CEO also ranked highly on the Top 10 list. However, news reporters came in at a very impressive #3. As Paris Hilton would say, "That's hot."
The Citizen's Guide to Refusing New York Subway Searches - now available as a free PDF flyer. If you're stopped by the NYPD for a random bag search, stay cool, calm and collected -- even if you don't like what's happening, never raise your voice or escalate the hostility level.
Crain's New York courts the stoner crowd this week with a behind-the-scenes look at New York execs who like to smoke a little 420 after a hard day's work: "For many of these otherwise law-abiding citizens, taking a few tokes of their favorite illicit substance is simply their preferred way to decompress. Though they might conceal their after-hours smoking from their co-workers, they insist that, used in moderation, the evil weed doesn't have to hurt job performance."
Calling all font fanatics! You know, the type of person who isn't entirely pleased with the traditional Times Roman/Arial/Garamond selections in MS Office. Check out the FontHunt, a citywide "typographic scavenger hunt." It's time to get your font freak on. (Hat tip: Gothamist)
The New York Times is pushing the term Halli-blogger into broader use: the paper points to a recent article on Salon by Zachary Roth ("Beware of the Halli-Bloggers'"), which warns of potential loopholes in the campaign finance laws that would enable corporations such as Halliburton to finance political blogs.
Weblog publisher Jason Calacanis notices that uber-blogger Jeff Jarvis is rockin' out a new look over at BuzzMachine. (Check out the screen shot Jason captured for a hint of what Jarvis might have in mind for his popular citizen's media/politics/technology blog)
Alt Text has discovered a Web site for would-be assassins in New York City. Apparently, the splish-and-splash mayhem (via water soaker pistols) will kick off on July 25th on a street near you.
A new study from Helsinki concludes that large companies that are run by women tend to be more profitable than those run by men. There are a lot of statistical problems with the survey (say the men), but the numbers are nevertheless representative of the situation in the business world (say the women)...
New York Magazine polled 100 commuters outside of Grand Central for their take on the London terrorist bombings and what it all means for the Big Apple. Only 5% of New Yorkers said that they were now less likely to visit London and 62% said that they would be willing to work in the new Freedom Tower.
Sony's Wonder Technology Lab in midtown was named as one of the Top 10 free things to do in the city by Deborah Crawford of BellaOnline. In order to attract more visitors to the site, Sony is apparently calling the lab a "free technology and entertainment museum."
Fimoculous points out that blogger Jim Romenesko of the Poynter Institute is pulling down a very respectable $169,187 a year for news snippets and opinions about the media industry.
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.
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)
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.
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..."
The New York Times has the second interactive feature on the "Tribes of New York." This time, it's a look at the "sandhogs" who work underground digging the tunnels of New York City.
MetroChai experimenting with blogs for real-time updates
Online community MetroChai ("New York's site for mixing pleasure with business") is launching several new Blogger-powered blogs in order to provide real-time updates of new job and real estate listings. There's also an NYC Dating blog and an NYC Event blog.
"While we knew the website that promoted an undersea train/subway from Paris to New York was a hoax all along, Adrants reader Bruno points us to a story in LeJournalduNet which reveals the prankster to be a travel site called Voyages-sncf.com."
This is obviously the work of an obsessive-compulsive personality: 80 years of The New Yorker in an 8-DVD set. We're not just talking about a random cartoon here and there or a nice article or two: "The collection, titled "The Complete New Yorker," will consist of eight DVD's containing high-resolution digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the magazine from February 1925 through the 80th anniversary issue, published last February. Included on the discs will be "every cover, every piece of writing, every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement."
The Village Voice suggests some summer reading for cubicle dwellers everywhere: How to Be Idle, by Tom Hodgkinson, founder of British magazine The Idler. If you believe that "clocking in, being paid by the hour, and depending on a single employer for your wage" is an artifact of the Industrial Revolution, this book's for you.
The New York Daily News now has RSS feeds! Separate feeds are now available for business, local news and the front page, among others. (Hat tip: Micro Persuasion)
If you're flabby, you've got to slim down: MarketWatch has the details on the impending layoffs at the New York Times Co. About two-thirds of the 190 job cuts will come from The New York Times, with the remainder of the cuts coming from publications in the NYT's New England Media Group.
In this week's New York magazine, Huffington Post blogger Walter Cronkite inadvertently confuses "boggle" with "blog": "I admit that the boggling [sic] is fascinating, or so I gather. But I don't who the people are who are boggling. There's no editorial judgment. Although the marvelous thing about Arianna's is that I can write anything I want." That's the definition of mindboggling.
Because hunting was never intended to be a video game
An ABC affiliate in Portland, Oregon points out that New York lawmakers are looking to clamp down on Internet hunting: "Lawmakers plan to pass legislation that will bar anyone from creating or maintaining a Web site or hunting gallery in New York for remote control hunting through the Internet." Apparently, a Texas Web site plans to enable remote hunting via the Internet.
Gothamist has details on a new "Bloggers" sitcom supposedly in the works. BackStage recently had a casting ad for "young, attractive, comedic, and quirky actors, 20s-30s" to appear in an HBO/WB-style sitcom pilot.
The Village Voice reviews the Annotated New York Times
Julian Dibbell of the Village Voice explains why the Annotated New York Times -- despite having the appearance of a "graffitied storefront" with a "chaos of links" -- is actually a wonderful resource for understanding the many voices that contribute to a democracy.
The New York Times takes a closer look at grafedia, a "new and growing form of street art that brings together the wireless and physical worlds." Basically, if you see blue words written in a public place (e.g. curbs, streets, lightpoles, etc.) and underlined in blue to resemble a hyperlink, it's a good bet that it's grafedia.
Meet DataShare, the new high-tech crime-fighting tool of the New York Police Department. It's a master database that "aims to speed information on suspects and known criminals to cops, prosecutors and probation officers with an eye toward stopping crime before it happens." Not quite Philip K. Dick's Minority Report, but getting there...
Wired News profiles the Wooster Collective, a New York City-based Web site that showcases an array of graffiti and street art from around the world: "Artists and camera-happy passersby send in photos of their works and sightings, and site creators put them up in blog-style postings that ensure the pictures take center stage."
The Wall Street Journal reports that the 800-pound gorillas of the tech sector are ready to wage a bruising, nasty war for the right to control your living room... PC companies are ready to beat up on the consumer electronics companies while the telephone giants are lining up against the cable giants.
New York-Presbyterian Hospital has made two RSS feeds available -- "Health in the News" and "Hospital News." (Hat tip: Micro Persuasion) Look for more companies and organizations to experiment with RSS as a way to keep customers in the loop.
In Sunday's New York Times, James Fallows (a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly) provides a "Where are they now?" update on some cool gadgets & gizmos that have previously appeared in the paper, like Skype, Google Maps (now with satellite imagery), and mind-mapping software for the Mac.
Paul Boutin points to a Google zoom movie from Pat Di Justo that creates the sensation of blasting off into outer space from the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
The New York Times is justifiably famous for its slogan "All the news that's fit to print." Here's another suggestion, from an article about why the New York Times may need to start charging for online content: "All the news that fits, we print."
Mitch Ratcliffe nominates "The Long Tail" (coined by Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson) as the "most abused phrase of the year." People are over-simplifying the meaning of the term or abusing it in wrong-headed ways to explain just about any phenomenon, says Ratcliffe.
Yahoo announced Wednesday that it will soon begin giving users of its free Web e-mail service 1 gigabyte of storage -- the same amount offered by Google's Gmail service.
From Smart Mobs via PC Pro: "Google is inviting open source developers to swarm on its code..." If you know anything about perftools, coredumpers, sparsehashtables and goopy/functionals, you're golden.
Amazon is analyzing the text of books to find statistically improbable phrases -- by knowing which phrases are unique for any one book, the reader (or prospective reader) knows instantly what a book is about. With that in mind, Onfocus lists the SIPs for Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink: rapid cognition, intuitive repulsion, sip test, adaptive unconscious.
In today's New York Post, media columnist Keith Kelly notes that New York Times investigative business reporter Tim O'Brien has signed a six-figure contract with Warner Books to write an unauthorized biography of Donald Trump. The working title is "Trump World: The Art of Being the Donald."
If you think oil at $55 a barrel is bad, what about oil at $100 a barrel? The New York Daily News talks to some Wall Street analysts who think that scenario is not so far-fetched. If true, "New Yorkers can expect to be socked for items from gasoline and heating oil to rent and groceries."
Getting personal items back from the clutches of airport security
Ever had a personal item confiscated by an airport security screener? Now, there's a solution to those problems from ReturnKey Systems and ItemReturn.com: the two companies are "setting up automated kiosks near screening areas that will, for $6 to $22, send a restricted item home by mail." The kiosks are currently in five U.S. airports, including La Guardia and Newark Liberty.
In this week's "Circuits" section, The New York Times takes a look at how cell phones are changing the rules of social interaction and blurring the line between "efficiency" and "dependency." For one thing, nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore. But does that make us more efficient by freeing up room to memorize other more important details -- or does it have the insidious result of "dumbing people down"?
The strange death of the New York Sun's business section
FishBowlNY on the news that the New York Sun's business section is being scrapped after only two months: "Budgetary issues, we hear. (Doesn't Michael Steinhardt want to read about his friends and enemies? Isn't that why financiers put money into print media properties? It's certainly not the ROI.)"
Blogads is conducting a brief survey ("Blog Reader Demographics 2005") to learn more about typical blog readers. The goal, presumably, is to give advertisers as much information as possible about the types of people who read blogs. (Hat tip: NewYorkology)
More than a month after Curbed mentioned the possibility of a new Apple store on Fifth Avenue, the New York Times "breaks" the news about a new glass cube structure at the GM building that will lead visitors to an underground Apple Computer store.
The real news, says Curbed, is the prospect of a third Apple store somewhere in the Flatiron District: "Plans are on the table for a boutique Apple store (about one-tenth the size of the Soho outpost—the iPod Mini, as it were, of retail outposts.) at an as-yet undisclosed site in Flatiron."
The New York Post explains how the regulated are now the regulators: "The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission set up a hotline and e-mail address to field complaints about its 495 inspectors from brokers, investment advisers, and others subject to regular SEC exams."
Gawker continues to delight Fast Company with items like this: a hilarious memo from the New York Sun exhorting newspaper staffers to stop stealing food from the office refrigerator.
The MTA is considering putting flat-screen TVs in the New York subway, says the New York Daily News. Based on a similar plan already underway in Atlanta, straphangers would be able to tune into local television news broadcasts, one of three different music channels, or an MTA informational channel.
The most important paper in the history of digital computing
A sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage sold for $65,000 at the Origins of Cyberspace auction at Christie's on Wednesday. (By way of comparison, Christie's had posted an estimate of between $30,000 - $40,000 for the item.) So what do you get for $65,000? "The first separate edition, extremely rare, of the most important paper in the history of digital computing before modern times," according to the Christie's auction catalogue.
The New York Daily News has an exclusive on the proliferation of pre-paid porn cards that are being "peddled by bodegas and newsstands across the city - even to underage kids." The so-called PPP cards ("pre-paid porn") cost anywhere from $5 to $50 and have been widely available in the city for the past four months.
Internet phone service provider Fusion Telecommunications, based in Manhattan, recently raised $23.2 million in an IPO. According to the company's Web site, "Multinational corporations, government agencies, Internet service providers, cable operators and carriers with strategic opportunities - and challenges - in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean count on us to drive high-quality, cost-effective global solutions into the world's hardest to reach places-fast."
If you have anxiety about going into work on Mondays, you're not alone, says the Wall Street Journal. For many workers, the anxiety starts on Sunday night -- just as it did during the years of grade school and high school:
"People who suffer from the Sunday-night doldrums don't necessarily dislike work, but they sure don't like the thought of it. For many of the afflicted, the pre-Monday funk is yet another workplace echo of grade school. The only difference between this one and fire drills, cafeteria trays, bullies, teams and report cards (a.k.a. performance reviews) is that it happens every week, and yelling "Force field!" won't protect you."
The Paid Content empire establishes another outpost: the Digital Media Events Blog. A quick scan of upcoming events in NYC: the Digital Music Forum on March 2 and the Billboard Music & Money Symposium on March 3.
The New York Times has a mini-feature on OverheardinNewYork.com, which has been amusing New Yorkers with its "priceless gems you overhear on the street." The site has been so successful in diverting cubicle dwellers from their PCs, in fact, that it has spawned a spin-off: OverheardintheOffice.com.
According to Business Week, Donald Trump was the author of two of the seven best-selling business books of 2004 -- TRUMP: HOW TO GET RICH and TRUMP: THINK LIKE A BILLIONAIRE. It's all the reason we need to watch tonight's Apprentice.
Please turn ON your cellphones during the following performance
Smart Mobs has a quick synopsis of "Cellphones," a new off-off-Broadway rock musical playing at La MaMa, in which audience members get cellphone calls from the cast.
Verizon Wireless took out a splashy two-page ad in the front section of today's New York Times trumpeting the arrival of its VCAST service in the NYC metropolitan area.
The latest mini-scandal at the MTA: blueprints of the Atlantic Avenue subway station - complete with diagrams of the location of station air ducts, manholes and electrical systems - were allegedly found on a windblown street corner in Brooklyn. (Hat tip: NY1 News via Gothamist)
Joyce Wycoff of ThinkSmart is looking for a new phrase to replace the irksome cliche "Think Outside the Box" once and for all... (Hat tip: Fast Company)
There has to be a better phrase, but some of the new suggestions at Survey Monkey are, quite frankly, not that inspiring: "Crack the egg"? "Bounce the coin"? "Spark the gap"?
Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg, Staten Island will soon be home to its own gifted-and-talent magnet school for science & tech, along the lines of Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. Currently, Staten Island is the only borough without a specialized magnet high school that can attract kids from all over the city. (Hat tip: Gothamist)
The Park Slope Pavilion, one of Brooklyn's oldest movie theaters, will become the city's first theater with all-digital capability this spring and a "showcase for burgeoning digital technology."
As seen on Engadget: New York-based Wicked Wireless plans to offer "moantones" from adult entertainment star Jenna Jameson to Latin American mobile phone users. What's interesting is that Wicked views the new product offering as just another "consumer-centric brand," similar to its Warner Music Store and its Scooby Doo Mobile Club.
The blizzard of '05 is introducing us to a brand new weather lexicon. One of the local TV stations has been using the word bombogenisis, a real meteorological term to describe a "big, rapidly developing storm heading our way." That's a mouthful, though, so now us common folk will just refer to it as the bomb.
Business 2.0, via Josh Rubin's Cool Hunting, has a quick item about Brooklyn-based Neighborhoodies: "Neighborhoodies is the success story of a couple kids running a t-shirt business out of a basement apartment and 2 years later having a thriving 30 person company. As the name suggests, their t-shirts, hoodies and underwear shout out local pride. It's taking I Love NY to down to the street level, recognizing the individuality of different parts of town." Of course, the company has already been mentioned in the New York Times and Time Out New York and there's a retail store at the South Street Seaport.
From Rare Gallery in Chelsea: PAUSE, "a full-size representation of the Dukes of Hazzard '69 Dodge Charger crashing into the Unabomber's cabin -- two metaphors for lawlessness converging in time and space and providing at least one interpretation of today's geopolitical climate." Cool photos. (Hat tip: Josh Rubin's Cool Hunting)
The New York Times has an amusing look at how Google is cracking down on advertisers who use improper spelling, grammar and slang: "Taking the stance that unorthodox usage and punctuation and slang create a less straightforward searching experience, Google's AdWords division, which is responsible for the contextual ads that appear alongside search results, insists on standard English and punctilious punctuation."
Bloggers accepting money for product placements or positive PR raises the risk of a blogger payola scandal, or blogola, for short. (Hat tip: Buzz Machine)
In New York, your personal identity is worth about 30 bucks
When identity theft is an inside job, there's not much you can do about it. Crain's New York reports that a former help-desk worker at a Long Island maker of credit software products was sentenced to 14 years in prison for stealing 30,000 credit histories in "one of the largest identity-theft cases on record." The street value of one credit history is about $30, meaning the guy made close to $1 million, according to prosecutors in the case.
With the NYC subway photo ban looming, New York magazine is calling for submissions from photobloggers: "New York magazine would like to publish a selection of photos from everyday subway-riders. Use your digital camera to take shots of trains, passengers, stations, token-booth attendants, defaced ads, rats in the tracks, supermodels waiting for the downtown local -- whatever captures your fancy underground..." (Hat tip: Gothamist)
vloggercon 2005 will take place at the Parsons School of Design on Saturday, January 22. Don't worry about the velvet rope -- "Whoever wants to come is now officially invited." Oh, and all sessions will be video streamed on the Web.
For mobile office workers who find that it's more difficult to order from a barista at Starbucks than a wine sommelier at a fancy French restaurant: Starbucks Drinks Simplified. (Hat tip: Jason Kottke)
Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Blink", which examines the science of split-second decisions, will be one of the most talked-about books of the year, yet a New York Times book reviewer takes him to task for "naggingly bad grammar."
The NYPD's Auto Crime Division helped to break up a national car theft ring that "chopped up hot wheels and peddled the parts on eBay." A spokesperson from eBay, though, quickly pointed out that, "If you are a criminal, eBay is one of the worst places to fence stolen property because the sellers have to give information about themselves."
In the category of stupid neighbor tricks: a 38-year-old New Jersey father of three has been accused of pointing a high-powered laser device at two small aircraft near Teterboro Airport. For the past month or so, reliable news sources across the country have been reporting "similar incidents involving lasers... prompting warnings from terrorism watchdogs about the possibility of the devices being used to bring down planes." Whew. I guess we can put another crazy "terrorists are about to strike" plotline to rest.
Jason Kottke suggests that "The Gates" project in Central Park (think saffron-colored fabric draped all over the park during a two-week period in February) will be "the most photoblogged event ever." The $20 million public art project is an attempt to create "a visual golden river appearing and disappearing through the bare branches of the trees, highlighting the shapes of the footpaths."
The New York Times has an advance preview of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (January 6-9). With over 130,000 "techno-fashionistas" expected to attend, the event is a must-attend for any company making gadgets and gizmos.
Sirius Satellite Radio announced that it successfully broke through the 1 million subscriber mark in 2004, ending the year with 1.14 million subscribers. At the beginning of the year, the company boasted only 260,000 subscribers. The company's plans for 2005 are no less ambitious: to double its satellite radio audience to 2 million.
In order to discuss microcontent-related issues and VloggerCon 2005, Marc Canter will be hosting a dinner somewhere in NYC on January 21st -- probably Katz's Deli.
ClickZ reports that Fastclick could launch an acquisition bid for New York-based DoubleClick. On December 22, Fastclick filed for a $92 million initial public offering -- that's just 52 days after the company raised a monster $75 million round of VC financing.
If you join the NYC Photobloggers, you can take part in activities like the Vintage Subway Tea Party: depression-era suits, flapper gowns and tea all aboard the vintage New York subway trains rumbling through the city. (Hat tip: Jason Kottke)
Connecticut-based satellite broadcaster PanAmSat is preparing for a $1 billion IPO, according to the New York Post. Just four months ago, an investor consortium led by buyout specialist KKR acquired the company for $4.1 billion. Unnamed sources noted that "the proceeds from the offerings will be used to put tons of cash in the pockets of PanAmSat's current private equity owners."
Wall Street boutique Lazard has filed for a $850 million IPO, becoming "the last of the old-line Wall Street partnerships to sell its shares to the public." The House of Lazard traces its pedigree back to 1848.
Normally we avoid stories about precocious Manhattan kids and leave those kinds of things to Daily Candy or Gawker or whoever. But this story from the New York Times was just too good to pass up: "Computer-savvy children, with encouragement from the toy and apparel industries, are transforming the old-fashioned handwritten wish list into sophisticated computer presentations, complete with hyperlinks to favored Web sites and downloaded images of must-have items."
The mistake that cost Time Warner half a billion dollars
Crain's New York reports that Time Warner is set to pay $510 million to settle an investigation into accounting irregularities at AOL -- $210 million to the U.S. Justice Department and $300 million to the SEC.
From Crain's New York: Queens-based generic drugmaker Eon Labs received final approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market a generic version of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'s diabetes drug, Glucophage XR.
Wireless mergers a big hit for Wall Street investment bankers
Analysts may be mixed on the $35 billion Sprint-Nextel merger and the $41 billion Cingular-AT&T merger, but Wall Street investment bankers are decidedly bullish. Six banks -- Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lazard, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase -- had a piece of both deals, meaning a very good year-end bonus season indeed.
Donald Trump -- a bigger brand than Coke or Pepsi?
Fresh from his conquest of Mark Cuban and Richard Branson in the reality TV wars, New York billionaire Donald Trump is now convinced that Trump has become the most valuable brand in the world. "It's a bigger brand now than Pepsi Cola or Coca-Cola," he says.
Both Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio were added to the NASDAQ 100 index, further proof that the satellite radio revolution continues to gain force. Forbes.com notes that satellite radio listeners are attracted to "a broader spectrum of tunes than the somewhat limited top-40 of free radio... and satellite offers the ever-fascinating theater of extremist politics, round-the-clock sports--and no censorship of naughty words."
Speaking at John Jay College in Manhattan, Tom Ridge argued that additional anti-terrorist funding should go to New York. Interestingly, Ridge also discussed the role that colleges and universities can play in analyzing terrorist threats through the development and support of modern technology.
Crain's New York reports that, according to the latest data on CIO hiring plans for 1Q 2005, "metro-area senior technology executives are more pessimistic than their peers nationwide about the jobs picture."
Web-based presentations of the immigrant experience
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is currently accepting proposals for Web-based exhibits that will be produced through its Digital Artists in Residence Program (DARP). The exhibits must focus on the "presentation and interpretation" of the immigrant experience on Manhattan's Lower East Side. (Hat tip: reBlog)
News of the city's "pod people" has finally made its way to America's heartland. People in Minnesota will be waking up today and inventing new urban legends about MetroNaps (a 'space-age snooze station') and the pod people who emerge, surprisingly refreshed, from the Empire State Building.
David Pogue of the New York Times hints that TiVO may be "on a sliding slope": the company plans to add software that will make static ads appear on the TV screen whenever a user attempts to fast forward through commercials. It's just plain "icky," he says.
At Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds ("Instapundit") shares his views on the changing dynamics of public spaces in large urban centers. Traditional office towers will never go completely away -- but thanks to new technology such as Wi-Fi and a renewed emphasis on "interconnectivity," cities like New York could be witnessing the return of the "18th century coffeehouse."
For the mobile New Yorker: TCC Teleplex operates a growing number of Web-enabled payphones in Manhattan. In February, the New York Daily News described these Web phones as "streetside portals to cyberspace." Total cost: $1 for four minutes of Internet access. Plus, the phones have wireless capability so anyone within 300 feet can get access to high-speed Internet on a laptop. (Hat tip: NewYorkology)
Well, here's one sector of the New York economy that's poised for growth in 2005: private jet travel. CharterAuction.com, selected as a Rising Star Company for North America by Deloitte Technology in 2003, announced plans to open a New York office at the Westchester County Airport.
DoubleClick will discontinue its own Web metrics product, SiteAdvance, and encourage clients to migrate to Omniture's SiteCatalyst. According to MarketingVOX, "this move is completely unrelated to the company's recent hiring of an investment bank to seek suitors for certain divisions, or quite possibly the whole company."
