Enjoying the Kodak Zi8 - thanks Kodak

Last week, I was at the #140conf in LA and was handing out all sorts of swag from Knock Knock, my client who I am the Digital Director. As I was heading out, I had some remaining big pieces (our Complete Manual to the Things that Might Kill You, our Bottled Water Bag, etc.) and decided to give them to Chief Blogger from Kodak as well as her coworker, Tina.

As I was leaving, they grabbed me and surreptitiously handed me a Kodak bag which had a Kodak Zi8 camera within! All I was asked to do was to post up some videos for people to see. And so, to keep with the promise, I include the following video I shot with the camera. Tell me what you think!

Tech meet Press, Press meet Tech and What's a Product Manager?

Last night, the nexyNY Digital crowd got a chance to converse with members of the Fourth Estate (or me, depending on their poor fortune). Charlie O'Donnell put together the "Meet the Startups" touting "100 CEOs and founders of NY Tech Startups in one room". Since I was not representing a tech company this time around, I went as a stringer blogger to gather some info and names of new companies that deserve some visibility.

To start off with, I must thank all who spoke with me and gave me a short 30 second pitch - and will list them below. I also asked two questions, based on the recent discussion on tech companies and product managers in NYC brought up by Fred Wilson at the Clickable Cafe from a couple of weeks ago.

It was asserted that there is a dearth of "product managers" in New York City and a growth of this community (and skill set) would be a positive indicator of NY Tech growth. So, aside from meeting the founders - I asked about their tech staff and their "product management" staff.

Requisite Company Mentions
As promised, I wanted to mention the companies I met last night. All were excellent discussions - albeit incredibly fast...

• Market Publique - online market place for vintage clothing (must be at least 20 years old)
• MyItThings - online user-generated fashion magazine
• Mobile Commons - SMS/telephone advocacy tools
• UpSkil.com - a new career education site (cheaper but better than UoP)
• foursquare - mobile, location-based notification and community tool
• centrl - mobile, location- and social-network-based community tool
• boomerater - user-generated portal/magazine for baby-boomers into a number of vericals
• Funnel Scope - travel search engine with twitter API connection to converse with friends on trip decisions
• Asian in NY - a "craigslist for Asian community members" or a gumtree in the US for the Asian community
• Kidmondo - online baby journals
• cookstr - online receipes
• MeetingWave - faciliatating connecting in person with your contacts (Meetup meets LinkedIn)
• Cloud Contacts - scanning of your business cards into a single dataset
• Convos - one-stop group communication and management platform
• OMGPOP - online multi-player games for teens
• Unigo - online publisher using student-generated content on universities
• Gate Guru - iPhone app for information on airports (similar to SeatGuru for airplanes)
• SquareSpace - SaaS web CMS with extensive tools
• kgb_web - an upcoming "Pandora for Content" - recommendation engine for all forms of content (with many other incarnations)
• Instinctiv - a smart-phone music player with stronger recommendation tools by tracking your on-device actions (e.g. skip, fast-forward, etc)
• Stratus Security - API access management and billing toolset

Now, in the course of the discussions with these companies - there were a couple of observations I made:

• Over 80% of these companies would not be considered "tech companies" - specifically a company that is a tech product that is solving a business need. Rather, most of these companies were media or service companies that were startups - using tech as one of their differentiator. Most of these companies either outsourced or "had a tech guy" on their founding team.
  
• Of the other 20% of the companies, the product management work was being handled by the founder, the CEO (and or CTO) or (in the rare case of kgbweb) a separate Sr VP of Products.
• "Product management" was understood as "owning the product", but the strengths of the owner was the driving factor of what the responsibilities were of the PM.
• One person who discussed with me about his company also mentioned that as a former Product Manager of a major bank, he could not find "product management" jobs in NYC when he went looking.

Why the concern?
One of the comments Fred made at the Clickable event was the need for more product managers in NYC to help create startups. Being a former Valley guy (Silicon Valley, not SoCal!), I was a product manager for a number of companies and knew the community of members during my time there. PMs were the "CEOs" of their products - either by market or by channel. Their responsibility was to the P&L of their product line and responsible for:

• sales performance (how the sales team performed with direct authority over them),
  
• market penetration (what percentage of the market did they own)
• marketing message and communication (how did the market understand the product)
  
• product features and enhancements (to expand their market offering)
• product delivery and testing (working with engineering/production to deliver the product on time)
• customer acceptance and service (all about retention and up-to-the-minute status on product service)

Depending on the company, these responsibilities had different priorities based on internal resources. But, if you note the list above, these are also the responsibilities of a small business owner - just at a very different scale or vocabulary.

During Web 1.0 in the Valley, the strongest CEOs tended to be the PMs of other companies because they could easily generate the direction for these areas - not simply one person for each. By being strong in a number of these areas and being able to tie them together into a coherent product and company strategy is one of the keys to a successful company. The challenge: how do you make companies that need such product managers that are also (eventually) rewarded for being the CEOs of small startups in the future?

New York City needs a SupperHappyDevHouse!

This afternoon, as I returned to New Work City from watching the winners of the Yahoo! Open Hack Day, I was thinking - why is this one fo the first efforts to gather developers together in a community setting to do development? What happened to the semi-regular efforts that go on in other development groups?

I know of various tech meetups like NYCPython, NYC PHP Meetup, and other groups that connect here at NWC, but something I have been craving is a form of community that I saw happening in Silicon Valley in the way of SuperHappyDevHouse originally started at an old college friend's home, David Weekly (of pbwiki fame).

Long ago (34 events ago), Dave and some of his friends rented a house in the foothills along Highway 280 (about 10 miles north of Stanford). After causing a police action to occur at their home, they took a page out of the storied LAN house concept and began to take out their regular furniture and bring in long tables and set up chairs throughout the house. Then they'd set up wifi and power throughout (beefing up the power distro and the Internet connection) and invite a few hundred friends over to hack away at whatever they were doing.

Toward the end of the day, they would set up a screen and have the different developers who were working on projects, show off their wares to the other people in the event.

Granted, this was series of developer/testosterone driven events - but it gave this community of developers a chance to connect, socialize and perfect their skills (or skillz) through regular events.

At the Millenium Hotel today, I saw a glimpse of this here in NYC - where developers were amoungst their peers making a mark on their own work - after a night of hacking on the 8th floor of the hotel. Granted, Bre and the Makerbot (or Makerbox, I mistakenly call it at times) crowd might have been the rowdiest of the crew (with their new News Toast concept), the energy in this group was supportive and enthusiastic. Showing your warez to your peers after working with other peers - and getting applause for great work - this is the positive reinforcement that developers and creative types need to push through the tougher slog there is in being a minority within a larger community.

Much like how religions draw strength from regular gatherings and remembrance of teachings long ago, events like this can help foster strength, resilience and depth amongst the community to continue what is necessary here in New York - a skills-base of developers and creators who want to make things and continue to become successful.

We need this kind of effort - this kind of regular event. Not once a year, but once a month - like SHDH. Reading the post from Fred Wilson on how New York was getting cred for having google have it's second largest office in NYC and Microsoft having its large office here as well - this is not a measure of their contribution to the community of developers - this is a mark of their acknowledgment that media dollars are here in NYC - and developers here are often sales engineers, not originators of new solutions or services.

Yahoo's effort in doing Hack Day here (as well in other locations like Chicago, South Carolina and London) is about the outreach and connection to the communities. With their libraries (like YUI 3.0) and their new YQL service, they are engaging in a grassroots effort to build up the community. It is about lifting all boats, not just about the ones nearest Sunnyvale, that will increase marketshare and technology adoption.

I ring out a clarion call for others who wish to make this a common occurrence here in NYC - and would like to make another one happen in January 2010.

Anyone interested?

(Thanks to Chris Yeh and his team for putting in the investment and time into making this event so successful.)

Afterthoughts on Fred Wilson's presentation...

Sitting at New Work City, listening to the USTREAM of Fred's and Chris' presentation and enjoying the discussion on why New York is coming into its own.

I love Fred's topic of twelve factors that make New York a powerhouse. But I also loved the discussion of needing a "firewall" around the East Coast to maintain a place here in the region to avoid the leaps from the East Coast (read: Facebook, Cotweet, Napster, etc) to the West Coast.

NOTE: I want to focus that we are talking about software-based applications/community tools - primarily focused on media.

NY Talent/Staff Issues

There is always a knock on New York in terms of the availability of staff and/or talent - and the argument of google's second largest office is in Gotham (but their staff is for Ad Sales with an engineering staff to support them) and Microsoft's office (similar story with engineering support for their sales teams). But I think there is a problem that the path to building skilled software engineers (programmers) since the curriculum is often not geared for product development. This is why I speak of working on building a better curriculum program for building real product developers.

The real issue is that the MONEY is in the Valley - and here in NYC we have how many VCs and angel investors? I know the discussion is always about:

• Union Square Ventures
• DFJ Gotham
• Ascend Ventures
• NY Angels
• RRE
• FirstMark Capital
• First Round Capital
• Betaworks
• Zelkova Ventures (whoops!)
  

and then? I know there is a lot of funds in New York, but where are they - for this community?

The refrain I hear is after the first group listed here - there is not much more to go after. Oh yes, there are others - but how to find them...