Lee Semel

Today we’re launching the new nextNY blog. If you’re not familiar with nextNY, it’s a group that started as an informal gathering of young people in the NY technology and digital media community. It all began with a single announcement made by Charlie O’Donnell at a Meetup last year. Since then it’s grown to over 600 people, and we’ve had a lot of great events since then.

At one of these events, we talked about the future of the NY technology community, and proposed ways to help it grow. One of the issues raised was that NY companies and personalities just don’t have a very high profile. This blog is designed to help change that. It will cover NY technology, entrepreneurship, startups, digital media, events, personalities, companies, success stories, and bring together the leading voices of the industry.

How does the nextNY blog work?
Anthony from SquareSpace did a great job setting up our original blog, which was run by a team of authors from nextNY. Unfortunately, it garnered only a few posts per month. Maintaining a separate blog was just too much extra work. To really make an impact, we needed more content, updated more frequently.

The new blog is designed to make this happen, with minimal extra effort. In true “Web 2.0” fashion, this blog builds on user-generated content that’s already out there. It’s an aggregator, automatically pulling in posts from authors’ individual blogs.

Who can join?
Anyone who blogs about the technology and digital media industry in New York is welcome to join up and post their content. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a venture capitalist, programmer, designer, entrepreneur, or journalist, as long as you have an interest in the NY technology and digital media industry.

How do I join?
It’s simple.

• Send us the URL of your RSS feed.
• Wordpress users: Set up a ‘nextNY’ category in Wordpress, and apply it to any posts you want to appear on the nextNY blog.
• Blogger users: Use a “nextNY” label for any post you want to appear on the nextNY blog.

We’ve posted a nextNY Blog FAQ containing guidelines, content ideas, and other information. Let’s get started and help ensure NYC’s place in the future of technology and digital media.

Before making a purchase, I used to spend a lot of time looking for reviews. The problem is that reviews prepared by media outlets reflect the experience of a handful of reviewers, rather the accumulated experiences of actual customers.

Luckily, there are a couple of easy workarounds:

• Google “[name of product or company] sucks”. If more than a handful of links show up, it’s a good idea to move on! (This works best for smaller companies… bigger firms tend to have lots of disgruntled customers no matter what.)
• Call customer service. See if a customer service number even exists, how long they put you on hold, and whether you can understand the person on the other end.
• A lot of companies have user forums. Check them and see if they’re filled with complaints.
• Search for the company on blogs like Consumerist.com

Maybe there is a Web 2.0 business opportunity in using distributed data on the Internet to determine collective opinions.

What other unconventional methods do you use to make purchase decisions?

Yesterday I received an email from Stanley Go, a recruiter at Google.

I found your homepage online and see that you are an experienced software developer. From your site, I see that you created many pages from Homeland Security to banking sites. I am very impressed by your background and knowledge. Your skill set resonates so perfectly with the Google.com team that I felt compelled to ping you to see if you may be interested in opportunities with us. We are constantly seeking extraordinary developers and UNIX (Linux) experts to join our exciting team and growing organization.

Stanley obviously takes the time to learn about the people he’s contacting. He’s clearly read some of my past blog entries, even apologizing for the time one of my friends was blocked from Google AdWords.

In all my time in the tech industry, this is one of the only times I’ve ever received a personal letter from a recruiter.

So few companies make even a cursory attempt to personalize the recruitment process. Usually, what you get are bulk messages from recruiters, containing anonymous job listings from unidentified companies. If you’re hiring, this is not an effective way to market your job or your organization. As Seth Godin says, don’t treat your company as a commodity. And don’t treat your potential employees as commodities, either.

I’d encourage you to contact Stanley if you’re looking for a job at Google. So as not to pollute his email with spam by publishing it, contact me and I’ll send you his address.

Dan Putt, a friend of mine, talks about the myth of the great idea on his blog. This is something I can get stuck doing. He quotes management guru Jim Collins:

First, don’t obsess on finding the “great idea.” In fact, our research shows a somewhat negative correlation between pioneering a great idea and building a great company. Many of the greatest started with either no great idea or even failed ideas.

It’s better to find who you want to work with first, and then figure out what you are going to do. That said, I think it’s important to know yourself and know what areas you’d be passionate about, or at least your general areas of interest. I’d never get involved in a business dealing with, say, waste management, because I know I wouldn’t want to talk about or think about about garbage all day. But apparently, others are really into garbage:

Tom Szaky’s business plan is complete garbage. He buys garbage, feeds the garbage to worms, turns their “garbage” into plant fertilizer, and bottles it in more garbage. TerraCycle Plant Food is the world’s first consumer product where every part of packaging and product is waste — only the label on the bottle is new.

Well, if it works for him…

Lately, some of my favorite e-commerce sites are ones that let you buy products designed by their user community. Threadless is a well-known example that sells t-shirts, and I’ve lately discovered Thumbtack Press, which has a selection of cool prints from a variety of artists. I recently ordered some for my apartment.

The key to making sites selling user-designed products work is having a well-edited selection. This is especially important for any products related to style or design, such as fashion, art or home decorating. If you aren’t a design professional, it’s difficult to weed through the thousands of offerings available. As a customer, I’m relying on either the site’s owners, or the user community, to filter the selection and bubble up the best products. The ones that do this the best are the ones I’ll patronize.

This stands in contrast to sites like Cafe Press, which also offers a marketplace of user-generated designs, but doesn’t really filter or edit them, so there’s an unwieldy number of products to sift through. And it’s why I rarely bother with sites like shopping.com, which dumps thousands of offerings into what amounts to an online bargain bin.

So far, user-designed product sites have been limited to areas like t-shirts, art prints, and handmade goods — items that are cheap to manufacture. But it could be applied in many more areas. Lately, even gadgets are as much about style as functionality. How long until we see a site selling user-designed electronics?

Many new Web businesses are just old Unix commands ported to the Web. I think I’ll start up something based on rm -fr.

Last night NextNY had an event called NYCHub to talk about ideas for improving NY as a center for technology and entrepreneurship. Just to get down my initial thoughts, it seems that the challenges boil down to two main areas:

• Money: New York startups suffer from an extreme lack of funding options. Companies face a much higher hurdle here, and only those businesses with a proven business model that have already gained traction stand a chance. Creative, risky or visionary concepts that could succeed out west will not get funded here. Right now, onvestors simply do not take startups seriously. This is something that needs to change.
• Community & Culture: There need to be better ways to connect with other talented, entrepreneurial, and creative people. While there’s an abundance of talent, it’s very siloed, and people from one industry don’t interact with others. Aside from NextNY, there aren’t many great places to connect with people. Furthermore, there are fewer role models, success stories and mentors for up-and-comers to look up to. There’s a general lack of awareness of technology entrepreneurship as a viable life choice and as a pathway to success, compared to other big industries here, such as finance, fashion or advertising. Because of this lack of awareness, tech people are very risk-averse and prefer to work on Wall Street. It’s also difficult to get legal services, office space, or other resources for equity. These social and community aspects are definitely within the power of a group such as NextNY to change–whether through publicity, larger events that cross the silos of industry, having more networking events, and aggressively promoting NY success stories.

Nobody mentioned real estate as a problem, and significantly, nobody mentioned any problem connecting with clients/customers or making sales. An abundance of businesses to sell to is definitely one of NY’s advantages. Also, there are already a lot of people in NY developing innovative products and ideas, but they’re either below the radar, or exist within large business such as NYTimes Digital, R/GA, InterActiveCorp, Google, NBC, Goldman Sachs, Reuters and others.

I actually think this all comes down to mindset. Out west you if you’re doing something cool, new or creative, people might be interested. They may even want to help. Here everything is met with extreme skepticism. “What’s the point of doing that? What’s the business model? Why don’t you work on Wall Street like everyone else?”

Update, further thoughts:

• Having a vibrant tech community makes working at one individual startup much less risky. If the company you started or joined fails, there will be another one around to jump to.
• Many of New York’s key industries face competition due to new technology, especially television, newspapers, and media. NY businesses seem to have a ‘fat and happy’ attitude that they have the natural right to be at the top. But they’re going to need innovation here if they want to keep NY as a center for those businesses. There will be other Craigslists and YouTubes destroying other industries in the future, and the centers of those businesses will move out west if NY remains complacent.
• A lot of the participants at today’s meeting felt that technology was just a support function for their business, and could be entirely outsourced overseas. I think it works for some businesses, but not all See my thoughts on when offshore outsourcing works and when it fails. I’ve met with too many entrepreneurs whose whole businesses are being stalled because of the technology side. And the people they do find have the old-school ‘long project with waterfall process’ mentality, rather than a quick, agile, and creative development process. They’re getting average work, and not hitting the high notes.
• A few big successes can change help change the culture. The current boom was started practically by two companies, Google and YouTube.
• The film and TV industry in NY has the same kind of startup mentality as technology in the West Coast. People are willing to make creative bets on risky projects, because that’s how the whole industry works. And it’s easy to get people to work for you for free. What’s the business model of a TV show? The same as for most Web 2.0 companies–attract an audience and sell advertising. I think there is a good chance NY will be come a major center of online video content. (That’s why I’m involved in this business)
• New York has a large and vibrant interactive industry. Companies such as R/GA, Digitas, Grey, and Ruder Finn routinely execute technology projects for their clients. There’s a pool of high quality designers, usability experts, online marketing strategists, and programmers working on such projects. They have a clear idea of what companies want from working with them regularly. But there’s little connection between this industry and the tech industry itself. If the boom comes back to New York in full force, a lot of entrepreneurs will emerge from these companies.
• NY interactive firms are also a good channel for selling technology products to large companies, because these firms routinely recommend products and services to their clients. It sounds ridiculous that big companies ask their design firms to specify what technologies their intranets should use, to implement social networking on their sites, or to choose mobile marketing technology providers, but that’s what happens.