The Gong Show

Darren Herman is starting a cool series of 8 person wine table salons to discuss various tech-geek subjects (these salons are appropriately named darrenSalon). I attended the first one last Tuesday, and the topic of conversation was Apple. It was a fruitful discussion. (I should be shot for that pun).

Seriously though, it was great. Darren’s post about the event provides good coverage of what we talked about and the key points, so rather than being an echo to his summary, I’ll just focus on the experience of participating.

I really appreciated a networking event that allowed the participants to have a real, substantial conversation. Too often, I go to networking events in New York at a bar where everyone sprays everyone else with business cards, and sometimes you get a quick couple minutes on people’s projects, but you never have a really meaningful in-depth conversation. darrenSalon’s are a great reaction/solution to that problem.

I’ll be curious to see how darrenSalon’s scale while keeping the attendee numbers low (8 felt just right). One solution is to do events more frequently, but I’m sure Darren would get tired quickly. Perhaps it won’t scale… perhaps that’s not the point, but I get the impression that Darren would like to see it grow, so I think it will be fun to watch from that perspective.

I think anyone can join (though I’m not certain), so if you like what you’re reading, sign up here.

Also, Darren did a summary podcast if you’re interested in hearing more details.

The New Yorker wrote a piece at the beginning of the month about the BoredAt network of anonymous message threads at Ivy League schools. I thought it was pretty interesting (I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the New Yorker managed to show me a web service I had never seen before). I didn’t think the service was blog-worthy at the time, but now I think it’s very relevant in the wake of the Kathy_Sierra_Mess(TM).

The New Yorker hits the nail on the head by comparing the BoredAt network to the bathroom wall (I wonder if women’s bathrooms are like men’s bathrooms in this respect…). There’s some entertainment value in the voyeurism of watching the thread update in real-time, but the anonymity leads to some pretty awful (often hateful) content.

danah boyd added her own two cents to the Kathy_Sierra_Mess(TM) conversation in a very personal way by talking about a similar traumatic experience she had with an anonymous message board at Brown called “rumor.” I was really sad reading her story, and I hate to think that crap like this perpetuates CompSci as a male-dominated discipline. Obviously, it’s not the only reason, but I’m sure the bigotry that comes with all that testosterone is a significant factor, which really sucks.

I wonder if the BoredAt network of sites has had any big controversies to deal with along these lines yet? If not, they will eventually.

Union Square Ventures hosted Matt Flannery of Kiva.org two nights ago. Kiva is a website that enables anyone online to engage in microfinancing of individuals in third-world countries.

Microfinance is obviously a hot topic in the wake of Dr. Yunus winning the Nobel Peace Prize for work on microfinance. It was a fruitful and entertaining night. I learned a ton about Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) and the infrastructure that needs to be built in order to support Microfinance in rural communities.

A few interesting gems from the night:

• There are approximately 10,000 MFIs, but Kiva can only work with MFIs that have internet access, which reduces the number of MFIs that Kiva can do business with to 300. In other words, this is still a significant digital divide.
• Kiva actually had interest rates on the site for awhile, so you could actually make money with Kiva… but they had to remove interest rates due to legal issues.
• The motivations behind someone investing in a person via Kiva are incredibly diverse. Some people use Kiva in the same way they use a charity, even though it is technically a loan. Others use Kiva because it is NOT charity, and it forces people to pull themselves up on their own without giving anything away. Others do it for novelty/entertainment value. Some people could be pessemisticly described as interested in creating a portfolio of people they own a stake in… driven by voyeurism. There are many other reasons too, and I find it really interesting that there can be so many diverse/conflicting motivations for the same action.

We at Union Square Ventures had no prior connection to Matt Flannery, but Art Chang of Tipping Point Partners had a connection to Kiva’s President and offered to organize the event. Thanks to Art for making this happen!

AdaptiveBlue is starting to pull back the curtain and let people peek at their developing long-term strategy. This post is only a teaser as to why I’m so excited about this company, but it’s an exciting start.

From the post:

BlueOrganizer is web-wide technology. It plugins into your daily experience and helps you enhance your browsing by “understanding” your context and connecting you to the right services based on your habits. In terms of sharing things, it means that BlueOrganizer does not bind you to any particular web sites, you can share things with friends and family anywhere, on your terms and on your turf.

A friend of mine gave me a brief tour of the ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) workspace at NYU yesterday. Wow… that place is candyland for geeks!

The whole space is buzzing with people working. It’s this big collective workspace where people are tapping away on laptops (primarily Macs), tinkering with interesting visualizations on big LCD screens, or stringing together electronics to make hardware mashups.

Some of the most popular inventions decorate the walls. My favorite (like many people who have toured before me) was the wooden mirror – depicted to the right. There’s a mini camera in the middle of all the wooden pixels and the pixels tilt to reflect more or less light as a visualization of the stream of information coming from the camera. It was really wild to see it working and watching it update in real-time.

When my time at USV is up, I would definitely consider attending ITP.

I went to a Fujiya Miyagi show at Barnard (Broadway & 116th) last night. Pretty entertaining night.

Escort opened. They’ve got an electronic funk vibe (much like Fujiya Miyagi), but much more upbeat. The highlight was the two female vocalists pounding out soulful vocals, competing for the lead.

Fujiya Miyagi only played for ~40 minutes, and that included a 7 minute encore jam session. They only played songs off the album (aside from the jam), but that’s fine because I really dig every song on the album. The hooks were addictive, especially the bassline hooks.

My favorite song of the night was Collarbone (see video). They really pumped up the energy for the live version, which was particularly noticable in the vocals. It really got the crowd moving in a quick paced indie-shoegaze-hip-bump.

Hype Machine Song Search for Fujiya Miyagi.

Here’s what I can only guess is a music video for their song Collarbone:

Does anyone know what happened to Sand Hill Slave? I wish I could read the archives, but the whole blog appears to have been deleted.

For those unfamiliar, here’s some old Valleywag coverage on Sand Hill Slave as an introduction. She was an admin for a nameless Sand Hill Road VC firm, and she recounted some unbelieveable and audacious stories about her experiences via her anonymous blog.

Dead 2.0 was another great (now defunct) anonymous blog, but I know what happened there: Dead was (sorta) outted. What happened to Sand Hill Slave? Book deal? Outted? Boredom? I’m curious…

I really enjoy the content in the New Yorker, but I hate the way they trash their own content with annoying ads.

On their site they use javascript moving float-over to call their readers to action. Yuck.

And their published (paper) content is no better. Last issue they had an 8 page mini comic book for Stacy’s Pita Chips stapled into the spine. This issue they have a plastic-and-cardboard “window” inserted for Lexus.
Double yuck.

This aggressive/gimmicky advertising makes the New Yorker look desperate to ressurect a dying business model. I hope they learn the lessons of new media soon, and find business models that aid their users instead of offending them.

Will Wright spoke on the concept of stories. It was a remarkable talk… it’s really criminal that I can’t find a solid replication/transcript of it that actually does Will Wright’s presentation justice.

Here’s a video of the complete talk (I can’t find an embed code! grrr….), including an introduction by Justin Hall, but the sound quality is very “boomy” so you have to strain a bit to hear it clearly.

This transcript seems to hit most of what Will said, but it doesn’t include the 50+ slides involved in the talk, which is a significant loss.

If someone has a better copy of this talk, please let me know.