Paul Graham made a comment at a conference last week that “NYC could not be a start-up hub because there are lots of rich people but no nerds. Result: no start-ups.”  This has been bothering me since I read the comments.

Well first of all, I think this is just plain wrong.  I am part of a group called NextNY (www.nextny.org) that has 140 people many of whom you would call nerds.  (I’m in it and so that is at least one nerd.)

Interestingly, I split my time between the 2 cities that Paul mentions (NYC and Pittsburgh.)

He is right about Pittsburgh, there is just fundamentally a lack of venture capital in the ‘burgh.  City leaders I have interacted with in Pittsburgh, seem content to whistle past the graveyard with statements like “well it is a great place to raise a family.”  Interestingly, he is also right about the number of nerds in Pittsburgh.  There has been great technology started created over the years in Pittsburgh from Lycos to FreeMarkets.  Yet, they don’t end up mature companies here.

However, NYC has great venture capital firms & great talent.  I believe it will be a great place for start-ups because:

1)      It also will continue to attack the best & brightest in the world.  The reason – it is a friendly place for the ‘creative class.’    (Full disclosure: I worked for a number of years with Richard at Carnegie Mellon University)

2)      Technology is more and more about media.  Media & advertising companies are based New York

Phil Gomes has a great article in iMedia Connection today.  It has 3 reasons why marketers should start using RSS today.  There is a great quote from Seth Godin on RSS:

    “It’s simple. You don’t get to decide how and when your prospects and customers will consume your content… they do!”

I agree with all 3 of Phil’s reasons that marketers should start syndicating their message via RSS (or atom).  As users begin to increase adoption, this will be their expectation.  They may not call it RSS, but syndicated content going to be what they expect & demand.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9606.asp

Jonathan Scchwartz, the leader (congratulations) of Sun Microsystems has an interesting post where he announces on his blog that the CTO of Sun (Greg Papadopoulos) is also going to be responsible for heading R&D.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=the_geeks_are_in_charge

What is great about Jonathan’s post is in addition to covering the change, he makes some observations about his perspectives on changes in the software business.   (This is typical of his blog posts, if you don’t subscribe (http://blogs.sun.com/roller/rss/jonathan) you should.)

The observation he noted was the increasing importance of technology differentiation in online businesses.   He was relaying a meeting with the COO of one of the leading online companies who relayed to him & Greg that

“it had become increasingly obvious that the next generation of differentiation on the web was going to come from technology innovation - not just good BD or branding.”

This is something that I hope is true.  We the advent of all the Web 2.0 that seem to be able to roll a product from concept, to public beta, to playa in less than 3 ½ months.  It seems like technology differentiation is almost becoming uninteresting.

However, I believe Jonathan has an interesting & very unique perspective on the software industry.  Full disclosure, I want to believe Jonathan - I was a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Industry Center and have been part of a technology start-up introducing disruptive technology in the software industry for the last 3 years.  We certainly couldn’t deliver something in 37-signals like speed, but I believe it is real innovation.   (For more on my firm visit – www.mspoke.com)

What do you think, is real differentiation coming from technology innovation or bd / branding / business model innovation?

Darren Herman has a review of some promising research from Forrester. It is clear marketing professionals do want to interact with these new channels:

http://darrenherman.typepad.com/darren_herman/2006/05/forrester_resea.html

The number I found the most surprising was the 28% planning to experiment with advertising in games. Great news for Darren and his firm.

Robert Scoble had 2 blog posts today about the Microsoft conference they put on for advertisers:

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/05/03/lunch-with-the-food-advertisers/

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/05/03/the-gulf-between-geeks-and-advertisers/

Robert attended and seems fired up. He is cautious about the cultural differences between advertising execs and computer geeks. I would point out while a good caution, this is also true for other media companies & account execs. Therefore, there should be simple solutions that can be borrowed to take care of the integration.

What is most encouraging is to see someone who is one of the public personas of Microsoft pointing out the massive value of new media. He says specifically, “Remember, the entire software industry is only about $40 billion, while the entire advertising industry is about 10x that.”

Robert Scoble featured a very cool tool time wasting application on his blog –Subservient Programmer.  (Think subservient chicken for a program manager.)

I certainly wasted a few minutes interacting with the app. What I found most interesting was reading through their tutorial - http://www.subservientprogrammer.com/howTo.aspx

We had some wonderful coverage in iMedia connection this morning.  We were featured in an article on 4 Ways to Make BT Better - http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9389.asp

I especially appreciate her comment at the end about taking the winds out of the spyware arguments.
#3 - Provide Control

After notice, we need to give consumers control. Right now, only one company is doing this well– mSpoke, out of Pittsburgh, PA, and they may be onto something.