There’s A Change In The Air

One of the reasons I set out writing this blog about a year ago (granted I took a looong hiatus and l lost most posts in a server move) was to try to highlight and showcase the talent and the cools things they had going here on the east coast. I started to get a bit of a complex living here on the “wrong coast” for innovation. I got to meet and write about the New York startup SpiralFrog as well as MyMovieNetwork, and others. At the time, it seemed an inordinate amount of the startup activity was taking place more in the Northeast corridor, in places Like Boston and New York. I could not find the same climate around here in the DC area. But I think that things are starting to turn, and there truly is change in the air.

I was reminded of the special time which we are on the cusp of after reading Nick O’Neill’s post on the Social Times just the other day titled “Creating a Mini-Valley in DC“. I think he is dead on, 2008 will be a great year for the DC area and it startup/tech community. I will be happy and proud to be a part of it. I want to be able to get the word out about the great people doing great things here in the area. If you are one of those people, please contact me, I would love to hear about what you are working on. At the same time, I am trying to seize upon my idea and make a go at astartup as well, more an that to come so stay tuned. We have such great people out there already. I am sure we are all familiar with the trials and tribulations of Ann Bernard and her soon to launchstartup, WhyGoSolo. Nick’s recent launch party for Social Times gave Ann and her team, as well as some other local companies the venue to show what they have in store for us. It was an awesome time and there was a vibe that said to me good things are on their way. Nick has more events planned to help nurture the groundswell of activity in the area and I for one cannot wait for whats to come.

As you may have seen in my previous post, a few of us got together for a local DC Tweetup the other day for lunch. As we sat and talked about everything that we are working on, it only further confirmed to me that we are in store for great things. Andrew Wright (@batterista in Twitterspeak) is working an something special he hopes to release soon. Nick of course has great things going. It was really exciting for me to be there and feel the underlying passion in everyone for whatever it may be that they are working on.

So as we ring in our New Year, lets all make a resolution to get out there and continue to do the great things that were started in 2007 and work to make 2008 the year of the DC area startups and further foster that cool “Mini-Valley” tech vibe.

Have a safe and Happy New Year Everyone !

Is Your Employer Watching?

More and more we hear about people getting themselves into trouble by way of some online activity. Usually it revolves around some activity in real life that made its way through pictures onto the internet. Recently however, this view into our personal lives has begun to affect professional ones. The New York Times had an article titled “How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time” about how the private lives of employees are taking a toll on their employment status.
They had a funny, almost scary, note from the past. According to the story the Ford Motor Company

maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”

Today, they have one dude that tracks everyone on MySpace and Facebook. But seriously, should our offtime from our jobs effect our employment status ? Where is the line going to be drawn ? I mean everyone should be able to go out and blow off a little steam without getting fired. So what has happened ? The Internet and more importantly social networks. Our time away form work is now “documented” so to speak and put up for everyone to see. I am not saying it makes it right, that is just what has happened.

One prime example as to what can happen is a student from Millersville University in PA. According to the article

Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

Something I found ironic form the post was that according to a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project is that

Teenagers have the most sophisticated understanding of privacy controls on these sites, and they are far less likely than adults to permit their profiles to be visible to anyone and everyone.

Anyway, let it be a lesson to us all. No drinking and uploading … its the new drinking and dialing apparently.

Look, I’m Rich !!

I knew having this blog was going to bring me BIG things, but I didn’t think it would be this big.  I received this email last night

HELLO FRIEND,

PLEASE BEAR WITH ME FOR NOW AND DO NOT ASK MY NAME. WHAT I HAVE MAY BE OF
INTEREST TO YOU. IT IS A BUSINESS PROPOSAL THAT WILL BE BENEFICIAL TO YOU
AND I.

I LIVE IN LONDON , UNITED KINGDOM . I AM 53 YEARS OLD AND I HAVE BEEN
WORKING IN A BANK IN LONDON FOR THE PAST 17 YEARS WHERE I AM PRESENTLY AN
ACCOUNTS MANAGER. I WILL GIVE YOU MY FULL DETAILS ON YOUR REPLY TO THIS
LETTER. MY AIM OF CONTACTING YOU IS TO SOLICIT YOUR CO-OPERATION AND
ASSISTANCE BASED ON ONE OF THE ACCOUNTS UNDER MY MANAGEMENT CONTAINING
$18.5MILLION (EIGHTEEN MILLION & FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS) WHICH HAS
REMAINED DORMANT FOR THE LAST TWELVE YEARS.

THIS ACCOUNT WAS OWNED BY THE LATE MRS. EVELYN FIONA WEAVER AND FOLLOWING
MY INVESTIGATION, I FOUND OUT THAT SHE DIED ON MAY 1992 VIA A CAR CRASH IN
THE BAHAMAS AND SHE LEFT NO CHILDREN OR NEXT OF KIN.

I WILL INFORM YOU MORE ON HOW WE CAN GET THE MONEY IN HER ACCOUNT
TRANSFERED INTO YOUR ACCOUNT IF YOU AGREE TO CO-OPERATE WITH ME ON THIS ON
YOUR REPLY TO THIS MAIL.

I WILL ALSO GIVE YOU MORE PERSONAL DETAILS OF ME AND THE TRANSACTION ON
YOUR REPLY.
PLEASE TREAT THIS AS CONFIDENTIAL, URGENT AND OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE.

In the words of the funny guy Dace Chapelle, “I’m rich bitch”

Oh wait, so you think there is something fishy …. okay, I will look into it.

Can Twitter Support This Phenomena?

This post will probably be written by a lot of people in the wake of the last Twitter downtime today, but I have some thoughts so here it is. I was at the dentist waiting trying to figure out what was the culprit, the AT&T Edge network or Twitter itself.

First of all, there is not one mention of the downtime on the Twitter blog. At the very least, they should keep their users, paying or not, apprised of the situation. Even if it is after the fact.

UPDATE: I was wrong their was a post on their support site. HERE

That being said, we continue to see day in and day out how Twitter is going to revolutionize a lot of things. Anything from personal relationships to PR/Marketing, and all things in between. I have readily agreed, until now. We need to all start caveatting these predictions, and the caveat needs to be the pure fact that twitter may not be technically able to support this revolution. We recently saw a Techcrunch post on the amount of Twitter downtime and how it has grown. Below is the graph they used to examine the numbers.

As you can see, downtime continues to grow, and the user base grows in unison. There is no possible way users can use Twitter as a solid business tool with outages in the middle of the day. Until it becomes a viable 99999 web service, like a mission critical Oracle database, it can only be thought of as a novelty or a pastime that we are using for some benefit. And that may be fine for most of us. But there are people touting the possibilities, me being one of them until I thought better of it today, and it may not be a reality.

I am not even really too sure about the business model Twitter is following. I see no ads or real revenue source for them, so I am curious what there future plans may be. I did see they recently raised $5.4 million round of funding. When they started this idea, do you think they ever thought it would have enjoyed this success and used in so many different ways ?

UPDATE: Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks has reposted “Twitter Down Again — 10 Ways To Deal With Twitter’s 12-Hour Outage on Saturday” Kind of like “Break Glass In Case Of Emergency.

UPDATE2:  Allen Stern has another great post on Twitter and its “business model”, all good questions: Is Twiiter F’ed

Got My First Facebook Spam Email Today

Well I guess it was bound to happen to me and today it finally did. I checked my email this morning and found I had a new Facebook message. Here it is :

Shellie sent you a message.

Subject: hey, cool name. i’m Shellie

“hi there Jimmy, how’s it going? i wanted to chat with you, but they don’t have that here, whatever. if you’d like to, you can check out my other profile at http://snipurl.com/1sjvz my username’s spicygrl. just don’t mind my pics lol. umma anyway, hope to talk to you soon!”

The snipurl takes you to a site called Friend Jungle. I can only imagine what type of jungle it may be.

Needless to say, I have not been a huge fan of Facebook for a variety of reasons, but now I am even less so. This is the kind of crap I got on MySpace. Now that it has followed me to Facebook, I think we have crested the peak, so to speak. Facebook may be on the downturn of their 15 minute of fame. A lot of us went there to use it as a networking tool and establish professional relationships. This type of spam does not do a lot to help us meet our goals and expectations.

Apple Movie Rentals, Anyone Questioning the AppleTV Now ?

Earlier this year Apple released the AppleTV as what Steve Jobs called a hobby project. It was a pretty cool device and I was impressed with it. I saw it as a good move to finally bridge the gap from the computer into our living rooms. I bought one and can honestly say it has been awesome. I have moved my entire DVD collection over to iTunes and use the AppleTV th stream the content right to an LCD in the living room. Works great.

However, lately there has been a lot of press about the low numbers of the AppleTV sales and questioning whether it should join the scrap heap or not. Notice that we never really heard any news out of Apple. They just sat back and let the talk go on. What I think Apple has known, as I have thought from the the beginning, is that the AppleTV is the perfect (okay perfect is a strong word) platform for Apple to leverage content on to. Content like, oh say … an online movie rental. The AppleTV has simply been a placeholder if you will. It is almost like iTunes is a tool where Apple loses $$ most likely to drive hardware sales in the form of the iPod.

So now we have the news that Fox has signed a deal with Apple to rent movies through the iTunes store for $2.99 for a 30 day rental. See Apple is pretty smart, they have the platform in place, now they have the content to flow to it. I think it is a great move and will make the folks at NetFlix and Blockbuster shake in their shoes a bit. Netflix is worrying about the size of the envelopes and the Postal Service while Apple is geting ready to finally deliver the digital content we have been waiting for. If only it is HD, that would be the capper.

Om Malik has another take on it. He thinks

The rumor is being viewed by some as a way to revive the flagging Apple TV platform. The reality is that Apple needs to beef up its video offerings if it wants to continue the iPod cash machine humming. The best clue is the easy-to-rip-and-transfer-to-iPod capabilities that may be built into future FOX DVD offerings.

I agree with what he is saying, videos are in short supply on iTunes and if you see his first sentence about the reviving of AppleTV, I also agree. I don’t think this is about “reviving” the AppleTV. I doubt Apple has cared too much because as they have been working this rental deal, they have known they have the Ace in their back pocket, the Ace that allows an easy pipeline right from the iTunes store to the users tv. In other words the AppleTV. Amazon for instance has video rentals, but they don’t control the entire flow. They rely on other vendors and hardware. Apple will own the entire process, and with their track record of easy to use customer experiences it is bound to be a seamless intuitive process.

I am totally excited by this news. The ability to scan the iTunes rentals right form my tv and start the download and viewing will be awesome. I will definitely watch more movies. I can only hope they actually start to use the HDMI interface they built into the hardware and deliver the HD content we viewers are demanding.

DC Tweetup - Finally Meeting Those Faces

What started out last week as a possible lunch with a couple of us turned into a really nice afternoon, by the power of a couple of twitter meesages. We met up at Indique Heights in Chevy Chase and were treated to good company and great food. It was really nice to meet in person those little pictures from the Twitter window we see day in and day out. Everyone is doing cool stuff and it was nice to take some time out to sit and chat and get to know everyone a little better and see what is going on in their lives. Below is a list of who stopped by linked to their twitter pages so you can head over and follow them if you wish.

• @dcconcierge
• @shashib
• @marcbenton
• @batterista
• @scottstead
• @jablair
• @biznickman
• @jjgardner3
• @jeffhibbard

We site in these “social” networks so often and never get to actually see they people we are friends with and following, so this was a great step. I met some good like minded people and hopefully our relationships will continue to develop and grow.

Try to match the twitter names to the people, we should make it a game. It was funny when we all met up, we had to identify ourselves by our Twitter names …. maybe soon we will completely lose our full names and henceforth be referred to by our twitter names …..Thanks again everyone who came.

FohBoh, a Social Network for the Restaurant Industry

Well it seems that social networks are popping up everywhere. This morning I came across FohBoh (apparently this is restaurant lingo for FOH - Front of House & BOH - Back of House), a new social network for the restaurant industry.

According to their “about” page

FohBoh is about connection, communication and commerce. We facilitate and enable this to occur exclusively for employees, owners, operators, vendors, suppliers and service providers of the restaurant and hospitality industries worldwide.

Unlike other consumer or customer-centric social networks, we are for insiders. We are the restaurant industry social network and business exchange and we are passionate about our community.

The site has a lot of resources and while browsing through I saw many interesting items of note.

In the Blog Section there were posts ranging from

• Restaurant Internet Marketing - The Next Generation (aka Web 2.5?)

• Food Handling 101

There is a Forum Section with topics to include:

• Job Boards
• Looking for Capital
• Restaurant Operations

and everything in between.

They have Photos and Videos and a great Groups Section as well. It is a pretty cool idea and one I had not seen before. I know that through sites like Ning there are tons of niche social networks set up, but this seemed to really stand alone and provide a really good resource to those in the industry.

Evil Facebook Beacon Cartoon

On the heels of my earlier post of the perils of Facebook Beacon and deleting accounts, the gang over at Geek and Poke have outdone themselves !

Beware of Beacon! This is too damn funny.

Twitter Complex …

Those guys over at Geek and Poke have done another great Twitter cartoon. Check this one out

I know @newmediajim never has this issue !

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