Between 2005 and 2010 employment in New York’s high-tech sector grew by nearly 30%. Google alone has about 1,200 engineers in the city.
What To Stop Doing
Jim Collins, Best New Year’s Resolution?
Suppose you woke up tomorrow and received two phone calls. The first phone call tells you that you have inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second tells you that you have an incurable and terminal disease, and you have no more than 10 years to live. What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?
I had a subarachnoid aneurysm a few years ago, and at one point I was informed — erroneously — that my brain injury was inoperable. I had some time to reflect on that, and even after it was clear that surgery was, in fact, an option, the mortality stats on my condition were pretty harrowing, with at least 50% mortality, and given the severity of my situation, significantly higher.
Subarachnoid hemorrhage
I have changed a great deal since then. I started playing the guitar again, after about 20 years hiatus, for example. I’ve started writing music and poetry again. I drink a lot more champagne, too. Have to smell those roses.
But I still need to stop once in a while and ask: what should I stop doing?
This year, I intend to raise even greater barriers to long-distance travel, which is so costly in time and often so meager in payback.
I am involved in a foundational transition in my work, started last year. I am transitioning from a modality of acting as an advisor to companies (usually software start-ups), and investing more of my my work-related efforts into various, well-defined research initiatives, often working cooperatively with other researchers. I will be saying more about these initiatives later this week, with more specific announcements.
The book that I have been talking about for the past few months (formerly called Liquid City) will be sewn into the new research agenda, and will be rolling out in pieces this year, in a slightly reconsidered form, and a new title (in process).
I have recommitted myself to connecting with the community here, in Beacon NY, my adopted home, and I am working to get a food cooperative off the ground. Most critically, my family is buying and moving into a new place here in the next week, and in the next few months we will be putting in a garden, fixing up the place, and settling in. Going to dedicate a lot to that.
I am working in NYC from the Grind coworking space, and I hope to be an active and involved member of that community, and the tech and innovation community of NYC, as well. This will all be keeping me relatively close to NYC, more local than I have been in decades.
I still plan to do 12-15 conferences in distant places, but I intend to keep to that number as a max, and the rewards — on some level or another — have to be pretty high to get me to go.
Say yes to some things, and no to most others. But I am open to discuss new ideas with people. I will be starting open office hours in February, after the move is over.
(via underpaidgenius)
Software heavyweight moves headquarters to Silicon Alley - NY Daily News
New York City’s challenge to Silicon Valley’s high-tech dominance continues apace. By the time Mayor Bloomberg’s brainchild of an applied sciences campus takes root in 2013, the momentum may be too great to stop.
Latest case in point: Infor, the world’s third-largest creator of manufacturing software, is moving its headquarters from Atlanta to the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan — joining Google, Facebook, Twitter and other leading-edge firms in establishing a major presence in the city.
CEO Charles Phillips says the prospect of the new engineering campus — the prize Stanford, Cornell and others are fiercely competing for — was a big part of the reason behind the relocation.
Another example of New York as a multicultural, multi-scene high tech hotbed, competing against the monocultural Bay Area.
Mapping New York’s startup scene. Richard Florida has a great piece on why timing is right of NYC’s tech move as the new Silicon Valley.
- “In 2010, Silicon Valley accounted for the lion’s share of venture-capital investment by far:…” (stoweboyd.com)
(via underpaidgenius)
WATER WASTED:
More than 37,800 liters of water is lost via leakage every minute as it flows through New York State’s aqueducts into the city, according to IBM. The wall visualizes a calculation of that volume of water corresponding to the volume of the data wall. “Essentially we’re filling the wall with digital water,” IBM’s Lee Green, vice president of brand experience and strategic design, explains.
(via Sensors and the City: IBM Exhibit Visualizes Today’s Urban Problems—and Potential Solutions)
First Mover: Emily Bell
Emily Bell is the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism
AdWeek: How are you liking New York?
Emily Bell: If you go below 14th Street, it’s like Paris in the ‘20’s. There’s more digital media activity in New York now than anywhere else in the world.
Residents of the state of New York use Twitter some thirty percent more than the national average, and New York City, for per capita use, is considered the Twitter capital of the world.
The Chief Digital Officer for NYC discusses her hopes for the integration of digital platforms into city life and interactions with city government, while pointing out what NYC.gov has already accomplished.
I saw Sterne speak a few weeks ago in NYC at Activate NY, and she was very impressive. Her approach — opening up the city’s data to developers — is a really good start for open source governance.
via Twitter
Rosen: NYC has the intersection of the creative arts with technology, but overstating to say we’re the next Silicon Valley. #disrupt
I disagree with Jay. There is almost nothing standing in the way of NYC becoming the leading tech center of the world.
New York and New England: Tech partnerships already happening - Mass High Tech Business News
Interesting piece that makes an attempt to link Boston-to-NYC together in a tech corridor, analogous to Silicon Valley. I don’t think it works, perhaps because there are a bunch of states involved that don’t really work together on texch policy, taxation, etc.
And even though I am from Boston originally, I sort of threw up in my mouth at this characterization:
Still, there is a growing trend in the New York-New England corridor of taking advantage of what each city has to offer, and that means basically that the Greater Boston area has the brains and New York has the bodies – not in the sense of dumb bodies, but the trained content creators and media workers needed to produce product at a commercial scale.
“In Boston here, we crank out a gajillion engineers from really good institutions,” Pescatello said. And Ohanian pointed out that New York dominates in media creation. “Most of the media produced in the United States comes from a pretty small radius around mid-town New York,” he said.
Pescatello also pointed out another difference between the cities is in venture capital. “The VC sector in Boston is bigger and stronger in Boston than in New York,” he said.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
