new york Archive

When I visited Berlin for the first time, it was shocking just how much graffiti was all around the city. On buildings, on trains, everywhere – reminded me of the 1980s on the NYC subway. While I can’t say I am a fan, some of my friends have searched out graffiti installations in cities as they travel. Today a new mobile app is launching that will help make those searches easier.

Art.mapped is a mobile app for the Apple iPhone (coming soon to Android) that maps out street art, graffiti, public art and architecture. Founder Michael Stearne notes regarding Art.mapped, “(we) catalog(s) the locations of great graffiti, street art, public art, architecture and design. Great graffiti and street art goes away and art.mapped would like to help keep a record of these works and their locations over time.”

It’s a pretty neat idea to help you find art outside a typical museum – especially as you visit new cities. And you can help the app grow by sharing art that you find in your travels. I wonder how you report where you find subway graffiti since it’s a moving target.

The app is free and you can download Art.mapped in the Apple iTunes App Store.
Continue reading “Art.Mapped Helps You Find Street Art, Graffiti, Public Art and Architecture” »

Last April I reported that the New York City transit agency (that’s the MTA) launched a pilot program on the M16 and M34 bus lines which run up and down 34th street in Manhattan. The program is called BusTime and allows you to watch the buses move up and down 34th street online. You can also view estimated bus arrival times and get updates via text message.

It’s a really awesome technology because it could mean additional time at home and/or not waiting outside in the snow or rain for a bus that might be 20 minutes away. I would have loved BusTime on the horrible M50 route when I lived in Manhattan.

Today the MTA is launching the BusTime system on the first test line in Brooklyn, the B63. This line runs from Fort Hamilton to Cobble Hill. The B63 BusTime website still shows a “coming soon” message so I guess the arrival is late.

I can’t wait for the day that the BusTime system is available system-wide. Just imagine the fun watching the live map of all of the buses moving around the city!

When I attended a hearing at City Hall in NYC last year, the discussion was centered around how the city government can help tech startups grow and prosper in NYC. While I moved my startup out of NYC this summer, it’s still great to see progress on NYC growing as a place for technology. Most of the discussion revolved around creating “incubators” where startups can begin their life and grow until the point when they need their own larger office space.

Today NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s office has announced the upcoming launch of a new incubator in the Bronx located at the BankNote Building at 890 Garrison Avenue. The location appears to be a bit of a walk from the 6 train at Hunts Point Avenue.

Reading the announcement, the incubator feels more like an office sharing than a Y Combinator-style incubator. The space will hold bi-weekly networking events and the city has partnered with Baruch College to provide mentoring and other business support services.

Continue reading “Sunshine Suites Gets NYC Deal To Create Bronx Startup Incubator” »

Earlier this year the NYC transit authority (aka MTA) began embracing developers and has done a great job since in communicating and responding to web and mobile developers looking to build applications using data from the MTA. The MTA developer Google Group is active and I am sure we will see some great apps launching in the near future.

Now the New York State Senate is joining the developer community with their Developers Network.

The New York State Senate Developers Network offers a few options for getting involved:

• A discussion forum and mailing list
• Several hundred RSS feeds
• An API that offers information about Senators, committees, legislation, meetings and other Senate-related events.
• A Drupal project which pulls in information from the OpenLegislation content database.

There’s also a source code library available on GitHub. Great to see government embracing technology!

Update: The Foursquare team has posted a recap of what happened with the outage. Seems a lot of it revolves around the database provider they use – MongoDB.

Popular NY-based location-based service Foursquare is currently either down, servers are being upgraded or the service is over capacity depending on how you access the service. Twitter users are noting that they are unable to check in on their mobile devices and are receiving the “over capacity” error message. The Foursquare website shows the message below noting that they are currently upgrading the servers.

The Foursquare support Twitter account notes, “The servers are overloaded but we’re working on it! We will be back up ASAP. #caseofthemondays”.

I know when Twitter is down, we get on the Friendfeed bus. When Facebook is down, we take the train to MySpace. But where do we go when Foursquare is down?

Feel free to report in on how you are spending your time since you can’t currently accumulate badges for being the mayor of your favorite coffee shop or in at least one case, your BFFs car.

Update: 4:20pm Eastern - foursquare.com is still providing the message seen below.

Update 2 – We are hearing from many users (they want to remain anonymous) that they are staying at home until the service is restored. One user called us on our tips hotline noting that it just “isn’t worth going out if you can’t get a badge”.

Update 3: 7:45pm Eastern – Foursquare has been down over 6 hours now. I bought a pack of poster board and some felt – if you want a badge made, leave a comment with the type of badge you would like.

NY-based CB Insights (previously known as ChubbyBrain) has released their CB Insights Venture Capital Activity Report for Q1 2010. If you are new to Chubby Brain and their CB Insights service, checkout our video overview.  The ChubbyBrain team describes their service as, “Bloomberg for high value private companies”. The report is 32 pages in length and features lots of charts and graphs. If you are in the VC area or looking to raise funding, the report is a must read.

ChubbyBrain says the news overall is generally good with the number of total deals rising from 687 to 731. From the report, “Q1 ‘10 saw $5.9B invested across 731 deals, and the quarter’s performance was a marked increase over the year ago quarter which saw $3.9B invested across 483 deals.  As we talked about in our Q4 ’09 report, the psychology and sentiment of entrepreneurs and venture capital investors continues to improve, albeit cautiously.  While $5.9B remains far below quarterly levels seen before the ’08-’09 recession, there is some belief that the VC asset class has perhaps reset at a lower but ultimately more sustainable and healthier level.”

They also note that while the total number of angel deals remained pretty close to the prior quarter, total dollars raised dropped 21%. The report provides an overview and a look at several specific states including New York and California. NY-based firms raised $310 million in venture capital funding.

Here’s the total venture capital investment and deal volume by month:

Continue reading “2010 Q1 VC Investment – 5.9 Billion” »

We’ve covered NY-based Kaltura several times over the past couple of years. Kaltura describes their service as, “allow(ing) publishers of all sizes to easily, quickly, and cost effectively enhance their web site with video and interactive rich-media functionalities, including video management, searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising.”

Today Kaltura has announced the launch of the Kaltura Exchange marketplace. The marketplace is basically a platform to build apps and integrations on top of the Kaltura service. The company compares the Kaltura Marketplace to the Salesforce Force.com platform and the Apple iPhone/iPadd App Store.

Developers and other video services can build plugins, extensions and applications – both can be offered as free or paid options for users.

Some of the initial launch partners include: Adap.tv, Tremor Media, TubeMogul, PLYmedia, Artivision and MindTouch. Marketplace examples include a Google Analytics app and the TubeMogul premium paid syndication app.