City Planning

I am a bit of a nerd for good city planning, I guess that is one of the many reasons why I love NYC. This beautiful big city is probably this country's greatest example of city planning. From Central Park to the Brooklyn Bridge to Rockefeller Center to (my one of my favorite places) theHighline. Well now in Brooklyn the city is working on extending the Brooklyn Bridge Park on the pier south of the bridge. Below is a rendering of the design:

And this video was part of a segment on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show called Cityscapes where they have been looking at different aspects of NYC and how it has evolved.

These types of projects add to the greatness of the city and make it livable.

The music industry...

"Industry rule # 4080 record company people are shady, so kids watch your back 'cause I think they smoke crack. I don't doubt it look at how they act."

- A Tribe Called Quest, Check The Rhime (one of my favorite songs)

Now that I am tangentially working in the music industry I feel justified to comment on the industry as a whole. In the past week I have seen and heard some interesting things that are very telling on the state of the industry. John Mellencamp was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross and he said something interesting when he was questioned about letting Chevy use his song, out of context, as an anthem in their commercials. He said it was an experiment for him, which he was disappointed in mainly because of the way they used the song but he said he thought Chevy was a better record label than than any label he has dealt with because they delivered everything they promised. This is a sad statement on the way the labels treat the artists which ultimately translates to how they treat consumers.

The other interesting thing that I saw are kind of related. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails did this really interesting interview with Digg's Kevin Rose for a show Digg recently started called Digg Dialogg. The interview overall is pretty long but there are 2 questions (the first and the 3rd) that really get to the heart of the irrelevance of the major labels assuming you are not trying to be a huge pop star. Rezner offers up different ways for independent artists to make the labels obsolete.

NIN has offered up their music for free and experimented with lots of other distribution models. Now they are coming out with an iPhone app that looks very interesting if you are an NIN fan (see video below).

This seems like something an really smart way for a band to engage with their fans. This is something the labels should be doing on an aggregated basis for all their artists or better yet collectively create a singe app so that people can fully immerse themselves in their favorite music. But sadly I don't think the labels are even close to thinking along these lines.

Tracking via Social Media

Recently, a luddite friend of mine, who finds my frequent updated and posts on facebook a bit much, discovered my twitter feed and said:

"I always thought you were a little carried away with the Facebook updates...then I saw what you do on Twitter. Oh my."

It is my guess that he has recently discovered twitter based on what has been what has been in the news (here and here). My response to him was "Yeah I also use Qik, the share feature on google reader, and one or two other social tools. I like being social without the burden of actually interacting with people" but that is not the point of this post. In my new job one of my minor roles will be to help define how the company uses social tools and trying to track what is being said.

There are several ways to track what others are saying about you and any discussions going on. Search.twitter.com has a great feature called "trending topics" which lists out some of the top topics people are tweeting about. TwitterDeck is also a great tool to monitor all things twitter. Robert Scoble talks about how he uses Twitter in this Kyte video (it is a bit long and meandering but it will give you a good sense of how someone super connected keeps up):

I also recently learned about the rooms feature on FriendFeed which aggregates all feedback from several sources. I haven't started using this but will set it up tomorrow and see how it works.

Social media are allowing anyone to easily monitor and respond to anything that is being discussed about you. I wonder what this will do to public relations people I am sure the tech savvy ones will be able to pick up lots of new business, while the ones who ignore all the different tools available to the average person will suffer.

wow pretty awesome street art

Found via PSFK.

Newspapers

Mark Cuban posted an interesting idea for a way to save the newspapers from their slow collapse. The basic premise is that newspaper or for this matter any content provider would close their content to the general public but provide it to anyone who cable or satellite provider subscriber and they would. The cable companies would pay a nominal fee for this exclusive content. Overall, this is an interesting idea but I am not sure if it is really executable especially with the growing ubiquity of open wifi networks. Also, I am not sure if I want to give cable or satellite companies more power as what content they can or will provide. This week On The Media had a 3 good stories directly related to this topic that are definitely worth listening to:

The first is about a micro payment service called Kachingle that is trying to generate revenue for newspapers by having people willingly make a small payment for the content they consume. This sounds interesting but I am not really sure how many people would sign up for such a service or if they did sign up I am not sure how many people would refill their account:

The second story is about how comcast, the nations largest cable company, restricted what some of their subscribers were doing online under the guise of QOS:

And lastly, the third related story is a discussion about the ramifications of the demise of the newspaper industry and if it is worth saving:

Personally, I do think newspapers especially investigative journalism (on all levels local, national, and international) is very important and needs an outlet. It is debatable if newspapers are the appropriate venue for such journalism but that is, in my opinion, the only reason newspapers need to be saved. The biggest problem seems to be that the newspaper industry has been extremely slow to adopt to new technology and make necessary changes and modernizations in printing and distribution models in order to remain efficient and profitable.

40 Degree Day

The other day it was more like a 67 degree day and it reminded me of the scene above from my favorite show of all time, The Wire (if you are sensitive about street language don't watch the clip, if you already watched the clip and are sensitive about street language sorry about that and don't be so sensitive they are only words). If you have never watched it please do it is like reading a great novel all 5 seasons are absolutely thrilling. During the absolutely beautiful day I had lunch at the shake shack and then sat and enjoyed the a couple of hours of leisure time at the Madison Square Promenade, which has done wonders for the once crazy intersections of Broadway, 5th Ave, and 23rd Street. The video below was being shot while I was out there and I decided to take a timelapse photo series, which thanks to my new Mac Book was a 5 minute project to put together.

 

New Job

I accepted a job as Director of Customer Acquisition @ Dada Entertainment a online mobile content and music retail social network. I know there is a lot going on there but it is an interesting business model and the social aspect seems like a no brainer for music but I have not seen anyone doing this. I guess MS is doing something similar with Zune and their "welcome to the social" but I never really dug into it to really know what the social part of Zune was beyond sharing tracks from Zune to Zune.

I have done a bunch of customer acquisition work on the agency and client side and so this should be a fun job as it is in a small environment and with a cool product (see here for a better view into the product). They have also been keeping a company blog which gets periodically updated with top 10 tracks downloaded and major company announcements. During my many interviews there was a brief discussion about adding more to the blog which hopefully I will be able to help with. 

The new gig starts in 2 weeks on Monday March 2nd (unless my background check doesn't come out clean; insert Taliban joke here). In the mean time I will be reading more of stuff like this:

The Marketing During the Recession series of blog posts from TrendWatch. (they are up to #6 and while I think most of these rules seem pretty standard good business practices it is always good to focus on the fundamentals especially during tough economic times.

The Freemium Business Model several blog posts from Andrew Chen, a really smart and interesting blogger. Although, the freemium model doesn't directly apply it still gives a good view into how others are building and growing successful business online.

Also, Blog Maverick, Babbling VC (side note I went to HS with Paul we sat next to each other in AP Physics and Trig he was smart back then and is still smart), GigaOm, Scobleizer and Darren Herman have all had interesting posts about start-ups and business in rough economic times. 

I would imagine my poker and basketball consumption will decrease while my cookie consumption will probably remain constant hopefully I can increase my running and start doing some morning runs especially as the weather starts to get nicer.