NYC Archive

One of the hot trends as of late are the “daily deal” websites. A new NY-based service is providing the first daily deal aggregator. YipIt Perch pulls together deals from a variety of daily group buying services including Groupon, Adility, Lifebooker, TheDealist, Local Booking, ScoopSt and Living Social.

The YipIt Perch service is available in NYC, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Co-founder Vinicius Vacanti says more cities will be coming soon. The YipIt Perch service is delivered as an email each day for the city and selected areas of interest (e.g. food, fashion, etc.). After registering you can also see the deals on the YipIt website although I couldn’t find a way to browse the deals without registering first.

As the group buying services grow in popularity, we will see more aggregators like YipIt Perch. I assume the business model is to grab affiliate revenue on any purchases made at the group buying portals.
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Tonight at the IAC headquarters building in NYC, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winners of the Big Apps competition. Below is a list of the winners. We covered the Big Apps competition extensively here on CN so you may already be familiar with the winners. Congrats to the winners and to all of the developers who participated. It was simply awesome to see all of the creative ideas using the city’s data feeds.
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Last night at the NY Tech Meetup, SeeClickFix provided a demo of their service. The service is pretty simple in concept but has the chance to be very powerful in terms of actual value to communities around the country. SeeClickFix describes their service as, “report(ing) non-emergency issues and receive alerts in your neighborhood.”

My simple description of SeeClickFix is, “see something, report something.” If you see graffiti on a building, a pothole, street lights out of service, running hydrants, or even prostitution, you can easily use SeeClickFix to report the issue to the local government for handling. Many times the local government won’t know something is out of service or a condition needs to be corrected unless someone reports it. SeeClickFix makes the reporting process easy and adds a community layer. The more people that report the same issue, the likelyhood for a speedy fix rises.

SeeClickFix takes the reports and then sends them to the local government in the affected area. Mobile will be huge for SeeClickFix for instant reporting rather than trying to remember to report the issue later. There are SeeClickFix mobile apps for the iPhone, Blackberry and the Android version is coming soon.
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Darren Herman is a popular media personality in NYC. His blog looks at marketing and media. Darren has written several columns for CenterNetworks including a look at talent agents and a rant about the music business.  Just about a year ago, he launched a platforms fund under his Herman Blackbook angel group. The investments are to help developers build applications on some of the growing social and media platforms.

Darren also works at the The Media Kitchen and today he was promoted to Chief Digital Media Officer. In this newly created position, Darren’s primary responsibility will be to ensure that parent agency kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners is delivering thought leadership and best practices as they relate to digital media planning, buying, optimization and reporting, for all of kbs+p clients. Darren joined The Media Kitchen in October 2007 as a Group Media Director.

I’ve enjoyed my discussions with Darren and look forward to seeing what he creates for his clients in this new position. The digital media sector appears to be hotter today than at nearly any other time in the last ten years which should allow for some exciting campaigns and projects.

If you are a regular reader of CN, then you know I am a big fan of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable monthly meetup in NYC. We’ve covered the event several times including with Howard Morgan, Connectors Group and Fred Wilson. This month the group ran their first mentoring cycle and the results were very positive. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable is starting a new round of startup mentoring next week.

You can apply for the mentoring program here – either as a startup seeking mentorship or a mentor looking to help a startup.

The website also has a variety of helpful information about launching a startup and also a nifty Starting Out guide. The guide includes information on finding office space, a list of the NY-based venture capital firms, and other service providers based in NYC.

Centrl founder Murat Aktihanoglu is the organizer of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable group.

Have you ever been in your bathroom and wondered to yourself, “hmm, when I flush this toilet, where does everything go?” Well if the answer is YES, then there’s now a map for that. NYC-based Habitat Map has put together a variety of maps including the “Where does my toilet flush to” Google Maps mashup. Looks like I am serviced by the Bower Bay sewageshed.

Habitat Maps notes regarding the Toilet Flush map, “Every day, nine million New Yorkers discharge 1.5 billion gallons of liquid waste into their sewer system. Underground and out of sight their urine, feces, and food scraps combine with litter and pollution from the street. This nasty brew then navigates 6,000 miles of pipe…”

Habitat Map has created other interesting maps including Barge NYC Garbage and Solar Powered NYC. 

Boxee has just announced that this summer they will be launching the Boxee Payments platform. The announcement can be summed up as, “we plan to release a Payment Platform this summer where users will be able to make purchases with one click on the remote.” Today’s news comes just weeks after the company launched their Boxee Box at CES.

Boxee wants to make sure they balance users wanting to view content and producers wanting payment for their productions.

From the announcement, “The content partners we launch with will offer shows, movies and channels that were previously not available to Boxee users. The content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription. Content partners will have the flexibility to decide what they make available, whether it’s premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never make it on air.”

Boxee will take a fee for each transaction — while they don’t note the percentage, they do state it will be less than the 30% other app stores take.

I would totally use their platform if they allowed me to purchase television shows from the UK and Europe.

Boxee is currently looking for content partners for their initial launch of the Boxee Payments platform.

Update: I asked Magnify.net Community Manager Billy Linker for his thoughts on the Boxee announcement and he replied, “it’s great for @magnify (we have boxee app) Opens up another door for our channel owners to monetize content”.