Category: Tech news

It’s hard out here at Disrupt for gadget geeks, but we just got lucky. Merel Technologies is showing off a very cool multi-touch web table that uses gesture recognition, object recognition, and multi-user multi-touch to create a new way to interact with media and kiosk apps.

The best thing? It costs $3,200 for the 32-inch model and $4,200 for the 42-incher and they’re available now.

The table is made by Merel Technologies in New York and it uses a stacked multi-touch layer along with an LCD TV to display the interface. A built-in PC runs the whole thing and you can tear it down to create a coffee-table sized device. You can also customize colors.

Click through for our hands-on video.

Once television moved beyond the three major networks, there was a problem. With all the new channels and content, how could people find what to watch and when? That’s where services like TV Guide and eventually on-screen guides came in. There’s a similar problem right now on the web — only times a million. A new product being launched in closed beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Live Matrix, wants to be that TV Guide for the web.

Now, to be clear, there have been plenty of products that have attempted to be the TV Guide for the web as it relates to web video. But Live Matrix extends far beyond just video. It’s about anything taking place on the web. Audiocasts, auctions, chats, MMO games, etc. Live Matrix wants to organize it all. So far, they’re up to 80,000 scheduled events every week, and growing quickly.

The main page of Live Matrix is a site that shows you what live events are trending (and the ones that just ended and which ones are upcoming) as well as featured events. Again, these must be online events — anything taking place in the real world (without some kind of Internet stream) will not be included in Live Matrix.

The Live Matrix algorithm then looks over these events for things such as number of people who are concurrently watching to determine the popular ones. This, in turn, gives each event a rating, similar to a Nielsen rating for television.

And there’s a way to virtually “RSVP” for events through the service — sort of like a “check-in” for what you’re doing ont the web. These RSVPs are kept in a different area on the site that you can visit — Live Matrix thinks of this as a sort of “TiVo for the web.” Live Matrix isn’t recording anything, but they’ll send you to the archived event (assuming its archived) if you visit it after it’s over.

Naturally, there is search for all of this.

And there are also tools for publishers of content. This gives them access to special widgets, a solid way to promote your event on other sites — and a potential way to make money. Plus there are analytics that Live Matrix can provide.

Live Matrix is the brainchild of Sanjay Reddy and Nova Spivack. Reddy was working as the SVP of M&A at Gemstar TV Guide when it sold to Macrovision for $2.5 billion. Spivack, most recently, was the founder and CEO of Twine, the semantic search engine. In other words, the bring the best of both worlds for what’s needed here.

The company has gotten angel funding, but has been in stealth mode up until this point.

———-Q&A With The Judges—————-

Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo
Brad Garlinghouse, President, Consumer Applications Group, AOL
Tolman Geffs, Co-President, JEGI
Megumi Ikeda, SVP, Peacock Equity Fund
Shervin Pishevar, Founder & Chairman, SGN

Q: I think the TiVo for the web is the really interesting thing. How do you get closer to that?

A: I think that’s more of a feature than what we’re going for. All of this content is invisible right now, we’re shining a light on it. On TV, if you know what you want to watch, you’ll go there — otherwise you go to your guide. Over time, we’re going to be more of a predictor of what the audience will be. That should help with audience.

A: We have an API too to do other things.

Q: You said you’re doing so many things — I don’t get it, what are you?

A: We expect people are going to come to us through partners — that’s the goal. We’re talking to media companies.

Q: The team background is incredible — I would have put that first. The presentation was frustrating, the idea is good, but the presentation failed. Too many analogies.

A: Erick’s fault. He changed our pitch.

Q: I think Gemstar would have been the better way to put it. You need to improve your UI. Clicker has a good UI, be like that.

A: We do have what you’re talking about.

Q: The widget is the most interesting part, I think. But don’t make it too confusing with the technical stuff.

Q: This as an iPad app would rock.

Music startups are nothing new. But what if I told you that one of the guys involved in creating the song “Jai Ho” (otherwise known as the Slumdog Millionaire song) teamed up with one of the guys who helped make the audio in the iPhone to create a music startup? Would you be interested? Of course you would be.

That’s NoiseToys, a new startup by three Standford graduates (who just moved to New York). The main idea is to turn music listeners into music influencers. That is, to make music of a social experience in a more meaningful way than it has been up until now.

And how do they do that? By turning it into a game.

The game is called “HitMaker” — it’s an iPhone app. Basically, it turns you into a music executive looking for good, new music. Another way to look at it is that this is like fantasy sports — but for music. You find the music, and you own it. The key to help bolster a song is to promote it on your social sircle. If someone else decides they like the song you shared, you get credit for that.

You get 30-second previews of songs from iTunes if you don’t own it — and you can decide if the person who promoted it was right. ”Music is meant to be played,” is their tagline.

Co-founder Vivek Agarawal is the one who worked on “Jai Ho” (and other Bollywood music) in India following his graduation from Standard. Co-founder Mehul Trivedi, meanwhile, was busy working at Apple on the Core Audio working on OpenAL (the audio counterpart to OpenGL) used to drive audio in games on the iPhone. Co-founder Shalin Mantri has a less glamorous history, but it’s probably the most important work to what they’re doing now — for the past year, he’s been at Stanford doing experiments on social influence.

———-Q&A With The Judges—————-

Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo
Brad Garlinghouse, President, Consumer Applications Group, AOL
Tolman Geffs, Co-President, JEGI
Megumi Ikeda, SVP, Peacock Equity Fund
Shervin Pishevar, Founder & Chairman, SGN

Q: What’s the consumer benefit?

A: The friction on Facebook Walls is a one-way message, but to be social this has to be a conversation. It’s also a game, it’s fun. And you have a rank among your friends. You can see your score.

Q: The social gaming element is a good thing. I think you could push it further into the game field.

A: Yeah, the demo is a bit short, but there’s more in there. There’s a royalty system for example. There’s a stock element too. If you find someone new, you get them cheap, and you can make a lot of points in the game.

Q: Is the virtual currency tied to real currency?

A: It’s all virtual right now. There will be other virtual goods too, which you can convert this to virtual goods.

Q: You should have shown an iPad app. HSX has tried this before, but it burned money. Focus more on the game mechanics.

Q: You should decide what you should trying to be good at.

Frank Quattrone, the Godfather of tech investment banking, sat down in a fireside chat with Michael Arrington today at Disrupt. Quattrone is back in tech boutique M&A with his new investment advisory firm, Qatalyst Partners. Recently, he advised Palm on its $1.2 billion acquisition by HP and two years ago he worked for Google when it tried to cut a search deal with Yahoo.

The conversation ranged from Quattrone’s remembrance of a 25-year-old Steve Jobs coming in to talk to his Stanford business school class before Apple’s IPO to his early days at Morgan Stanley and his thoughts on the prospects for the tech IPO market ever opening up again. On the IPO market, he notes that the market is waiting for “category-defining, earthshaking companies” to file to go public, but hasn’t seen them yet. Investors are waiting for Facebook, Twitter, or Zynga to go public. And just how much could Facebook be worth? Quips Quattrone: “$18 Gazillion dollars.”

Below are my rough notes of the Q&A:

Arrington: You were involved with Apple’s acquisition of Next that brought Steve Jobs back Your advice was to do that deal or not do the deal?

Quattrone: Apple had lost their recipe for doing an operating system, which is like Coke losing their recipe for soft drinks

Arrington: Tell me about the early days.

Quattrone: I joined Morgan Stanley in 1977, when it was less than 1,000 employees, and was in one business, advising companies. When I was in my second year at Stanford Business School, a professor brought in Steve Jobs before they had an IPO. I thought I was a hotshot. But here he was the same age as me, 25, about to IPO for a few hundred million dollars. I basically scratched my head and asked how did he do that?

Steve Jobs did tell us how PCs were going to change the world. He had to sell his Volkswagon van for $800 to get Apple started, so it was very inspirational.

Arrington: You formed Qatalyst Partners in 2008 to counsel companies and the very first thing you did was advise Google. There was a Microsoft -Yahoo takeover bid.

Quattrone: Yahoo had proposed a very complex deal to Google. We explained to Google how much leverage they had in that situation, and that they could just do a search deal.

Arrington: Are there any other deals you have worked on last few years?

Quattrone. There was a bidding war for Data Domain that ended in an attractive sale of $2.4 billion to EMC.

Arrington: Do you ever forget how much money you are dealing with. You are tossing around $2.4 billion. What is that world like?

Quattrone: I did not start that way. At Morgan Stanley I was known as the guy who did small deals for small companies. The head of investment banking asked me why do you keep doing all of these small deals. What does Cisco do That was in 1990. For the first ten years it was a tough climb up a steep hill.

Arrington: How is the venture capital industry doing?

Quattrone: It Is not a pretty place to be unless you are one of the top ten firms with demand pull. It’s been a perfect storm. The last vintage of funds that have made any money for investors was 1998. That is not an asset class. Part of the problem is that it has become tougher and tougher to get companies public.

Arrington: Going public now takes ten years.

Quattrone: The bar has been set higher to go public.

For the VC market to produce above average returns you need there to be an IPO market. In the 1990s the venture community would get 50/50 liquidity from IPO and M&A. The IPO deals have the long tail, if you hold onto the stock they have a ride. If you lose those longtail returns you lose a lot of the returns.

Arringtone: John Doerr sees the third wave of disruption. The PC was the first, The internet was the second, and right now we are in the start. of third wave. He talks about mobile, social, and changes in commerce. Do you agree?

Quattrone: We do ride phases in this sector. A lot is happening at the convergence of mobile, social, local, and realtime. I first got Twitter when my daughter was in New Zealand and they had an earthquake. I entered the town and there were twelve posts. Twitter and people dealing with this realtime world have a huge advantage over the status quo.

Arrington: What is your Twitter account?

Quattrone: @Frankquattrone.

Arrington: What needs to happen for that to change, to get more IPOs?

Quattrone: I think the IPO market has been savaged by two different downturns. IPOs are more risky than average investments so when stocks are down, IPOs are down more. In my heydey at Morgan Stanley, when we were the leader, 80% of the deals were Robertson Stephens and other boutiques. The companies need to trust the boutiques.

The other thing is that mutual funds have grown by 200X over the last 30 or 40 years. A $1B mutual fund that is now managing a trillion dollars doesn’t care about an IPO.

There are probably 40 to 45 IPOs on file. They are not the category-defining, earthshaking companies the market wants to see. The market wants to see Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn, Skype. They want to see the companies that are changing the way we live.

Arrington: Twitter and Facebook and Zynga are changing the culture of the world. Does one of them have to go public first? Who is the standard bearer this time?

Quattrone: It could be any of them.

Arrington: Facebook could be, LInkedIn could be, Zynga could be?

Quattrone: Sure, Zynga is a whole new way to do social gaming.

Arrington: Yuri Milner said Facebook is an accelerator on top of the Internet. Have you ever played a Zynga game

Quattrone: I personally am not much of a gamer.

Arrington: What is the most secret thing you know?

Q: I hear Yahoo is preparing a hostile takeover for TechCrunch

A: The personal chemistry between me and the CEO is what sealed the deal. How is Carol doing?

Quattrone: I think she has done a great job. I harken back to when IBM lost its way and Lou Gerstner came in. Everyone bugged him about his strategy. Unless you got the fundamentals right . . .

Arrington: . . . plugging the holes in the dam

Q: yes, she knows

Do you think Facebook is a competitive threat to Google over the next ten years

Quattrone: Potentially, yeah. Look at how much time people are spending on Facebook. I think it was important that Zynga recently renewed that deal. Because developers are asking where can I make money?

Arrington: If Facebook were public, how big would it’s market cap be?

Quattrone: 18 Gazillion dollars. I have no idea, I don’t know what their revenues are.

Arrington: I bet you do know.

Well, this is interesting. As you probably know, Twitter yesterday made some changes to its Terms & Conditions, effectively banning third parties from inserting paid tweets into users’ timelines.

Further digging by Silicon Alley Insider and MediaMemo revealed that in addition, Twitter appears to also plan to start charging publishers and developers a cut of advertising revenue “where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale.”

If you’re interested in more details, Search Engine Land published a solid FAQ.

Hunch co-founder and investor Chris Dixon responded to the news (on Twitter, somewhat ironically) as follows:

Twitter is like a drunk guy with an uzi killing partners left and right. Expect investment in ecosystem to drop significantly.

Well it looks like the identity of the drunk guy’s very first victim is known: Twitter banner ad network Featured Users has apparently already put itself up for sale on Flippa.

There’s a chance that this is coincidental – the seller evidently doesn’t mention any of the above – but the timing suggests there’s a relation to yesterday’s announcements.

Featured Users, in a nutshell, is an ad network where Twitter users advertise their Twitter profiles on third-party Twitter applications and websites in order to gain exposure and ultimately, more followers. Developers and publishers can sign up and integrate ads into their website by including a simple line of JavaScript. Revenue is then split between the Featured Users ad network and the Twitter apps that serve the ads.

Whether Featured Users adheres to Twitter’s new T&C or not is not crystal clear, but even it does, it’s a dog. The service was only bringing in about $800 in net profits on a monthly basis, so you can imagine how interesting the business looks now that Twitter appears to be demanding publishers and developers for a cut of advertising revenue.

Unsurprisingly, there are no bids for FeaturedUsers.com yet.

Consumers are increasingly socializing their shopping decisions and product reviews on Facebook or Twitter as e-commerce intersects with social media. In fact, half of all online shoppers look on a social network site before making a purchase decision. Launched today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Compass Labs is a social e-commerce startup and ad network that aims to provide targeted advertising on social networks like Twitter and Facebook around what users intent to purchase.

So Compass Labs looks at Twitter streams and tries to determine when someone has an intent to purchase something, then it serves up related ads either through direct messages or through banner ads on third-party Twitter clients. So if you Tweet, “I’m looking for a Canon camera” it will reply in stream or on a banner with an ad from a camera retailer for that camera. Compass Labs uses natural language processing to parse out the Tweets that have serious intent versus just talking about a product generally. Campaigns can be set to target people at different parts of the purchasing cycle, from exploratory to ready to buy right now.

While there are a number of companies innovating around advertising within the Twitter stream, this may have be in jeopardy thanks to a revision of Twitter’s Terms of Service. Twitter says it will not be allowing any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. And the company plans to charge start-ups and publishers monetizing off of its platform. This new stipulation will surely effect Compass Labs (and a number of other startups that monetize off of Twitter via advertising)

Founded by Google and Yahoo veteran Dilip Venkatachari (he led Google’s mobile ad business), Compass Labs has raised $1.1 million in funding, with New Enterprise Associates participating.

The business model for Compass Labs is obviously based on an ad network model. The startup shares revenue with both third party clients and with advertisers.

Q&A
RS: Are you able to hook this in to other services besides Twitter?
DV: Yes, we can use our technology on other platforms.
JC: Would Seesmic integrate your service to show ads?
DV: Yes, we are an ad network. So Seesmic would use us. In terms of Facebook, we are focused on Twitter now but may expand to Facebook if they let us access the data.
JH: What are your CTRs?
DV: We found that our conversions was 50 percent higher than regular ad mechanisms, compared to CPA.
JH: What is proprietary in what you do?
DV: We have to be accurate in what we do. When we start scoring a consumer’s intent, we look at words and what words you use frequently on twitter, we look at the context of how many people are following you. We are trying to adjust the criteria.
RS: how would you deal with the Twitter resistance.
DV: What we are doing is serving users more relevent ads. Our ads are shown on a client.

Q&A Round 2

JC: At what time do you switch from CPM to CPA?
DV: We might focus on CPA for brands.
RS: What is the volume of supply?
DV: The Average intent is 42 to 72 hours.You need freshness of data on ongoing basis.
JH: Do you have a sense of the magnitude of the advertising model?
DV: There are about 50 million tweets published per day, with around on percent of Tweets showing intent. Several billion dollar market.

General Electric is crowdsourcing their next digital / social media ad blitz, Global executive Director, Advertising and Branding Judy Hu just announced on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

In the spirit of disruption, GE is bypassing the traditional agency model for marketing campaigns. The company has set up both a basic Google Moderator tool and a dedicated email inbox ([email protected]) in order to solicit ideas from anyone (including industry pros).

Got a great idea for an ad campaign? A creative concept for a killer contest? A truly innovative social media program? With your help, we can avoid the lame and embrace the awesome.

The idea is for people like you, our readers, to submit what you think are the best ideas on how to engage online audiences, being the monster company GE is. One thing to remember: this is also open to advertising industry professionals or startups, as a way to win GE’s business.

In other words, don’t forget to share your contact info.

Of course, there are some ground rules to take into account.

So there you have it: do you also think large companies tend to come up with lame online advertising and social media campaigns?

GE thinks if you’re such an expert, you should put your next clicks where your mouth is.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, AOL co-founder (and former CEO) Steve Case took the stage to talk with Michael Arrington. He was full of interesting things to say — especially since current AOL CEO Tim Armstrong was on the stage earlier and the two just celebrated AOL’s 25th anniversary. But the funniest little anecdote from Case involved Yahoo.

People may recall that there was talk that Yahoo would buy and/or merge with AOL two years ago as Yahoo was being pursued by Microsoft. But what you may not recall is that back in the 1990s, when AOL was at the height of its power, Case actually offered to buy Yahoo. Yahoo obviously didn’t accept the offer. But they may have if the offer were just a little higher, Case says.

So how much was the offer? $2 million. Why? Because Yahoo had just two employees at that point: Jerry Yang and David Filo. This price made sense to AOL since they had just bought the early search engine, WebCrawler, in 1995 for $1 million (because it had one employee — Brian Pinkerton).

Case said that he thinks if AOL had gone to $3 million, Yang and Filo would have sold. Instead, later that year, they raised their first major rounds of funding – totaling about $3 million from Sequoia. And the rest is history (both good and bad).

Microsoft is losing two high-profile executives. Both J. Allard, “Chief Experience Offer” and Entertainment and Device Division’s CTO, and Robbie Bach, President of Entertainment and Devices Division, are leaving the company per a Steve Ballmer email from this morning. These are the guys behind the Xbox, Zune, Project Natal, and the dead Courier project — so basically all of Microsoft’s hit entertainment projects from the last decade.

From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:01 AM
To: Microsoft – All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: Executive Leadership Transitions

After almost 22 years with the company, Robbie Bach has decided to retire from Microsoft. I have worked with Robbie during his entire tenure at Microsoft, and count him as both a friend and a great business partner and leader. Robbie has always had great timing, and is going out on a high note – this has been a phenomenal year for E&D overall, and with the coming launches of both Windows Phone 7 and “Project Natal,” the rest of the year looks stupendous as well. While we are announcing Robbie’s retirement today, he will remain here through the fall, ensuring we have a smooth transition.

It was almost exactly one year ago that Google released the first dev build of Chrome for Mac and Linux. At the time, even though they released it, they didn’t really want you to use it. It simply wasn’t stable. Now it is. And as such, it’s finally being formally released.

Google announced today that Chrome for Mac and Linux has caught up with the stable (and older) Windows build of the browser. As such, they’re ready to take both builds out of beta for the first time. And these new stable releases come with new features such as more advanced syncing (bookmarks, preferences, settings, etc). And it’s full of HTML5 tools like Geolocation APIs, App Cache, and web sockets. And access to the over 4,500 Chrome extensions.

One thing not included in these new stable release is the new built-in Flash Player. Google actually had to remove that from the dev channel recently because it was causing issues. Google promises that the integration will be ready by the time the final version of Flash 10.1 is released.

You can find the stable builds of Chrome for Mac and Linux here.

Also, in case you missed it, here’s the kick-ass Chrome speed-test video below.

We’re still here at the first TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. Up on stage right now is an interesting group of people discussing how brands can best engage with digital audiences in this day and age.

This is an overview of what Judy Hu, Global Executive Director of Advertising & Branding at GE, Brian Pokorny (CEO of dailybooth), Christopher ‘moot’ Poole of 4chan fame and Andrey Ternovskiy, who started Chatroulette, had to say about that.

Erick Schonfeld: Dailybooth and Chatroulette are somewhat similar. What is it about taking pictures or videos of themselves that is so compelling?

Andrey Ternovskiy: I like the fact that people can interact with one another, but I’m also interested to see what other people would broadcast, what they look like etc. I think this combination of seeing each other is attractive.

Erick Schonfeld: There’s an element of unpredictability there. But why are there so many shirtless guys on Chatroulette?

Andrey Ternovskiy: It grew into something uncontrollable alright. I just gave birth to Chatroulette and let it evolve the way it did. It was just an experiment.

Erick: what do you see as a natural evolution of communication?

Brian Pokorny: You saw the phenomenon originate on YouTube, and it evolved into a new type of communication channel – through photos. Dailybooth is really the first platform that captures this notion of pointing cameras at themselves and sharing them. Is it new media or new communication? I think it’s probably both.

Erick: A big part of 4chan is the diversity of content. What people are familiar with are the LOLcat pictures, the rick-rolling, etc. Why is that type of thing so popular on 4chan?

Christopher: the content turns over constantly. We get 800,000 uploads on 4chan a day, everything is anonymous. we let people jump on and start sharing and spreading ideas. it’s how memes are born, I guess. It’s very basic, I mean 4chan is not Web 2.0 at all. But it’s all about the simplicity of letting people share whatever they want.

Erick: Judy, what do you think about all this as a brand manager?

Judy Hu: well, we live by numbers, as a company. We’re not so much about putting ads next to men without shirts and pants on. But we do look at communities, and we realize that maybe we can find them in new places. But we’re largely a B2B company. Only 3% of our revenues comes from the consumer side. But we love to think about what we can do as an advertiser, e.g. on Dailybooth.

Erick: There is no advertising on Chatroulette, right?

Andrey: yes, a little, just to cover the costs.

Erick: should GE ever advertise on your site?

Andrey: if done properly, why not? But I want users to focus on the content. If we could put advertising in a way that doesn’t distract people from using the service, it would be doable.

Erick: Judy, so you’re clearly a B2B company. Why even bother doing a brand campaign on social media to reach people.

Judy: Brand building. We’re constantly reaching out to audiences, and in particular now to the younger demographic. Also, we’re all about innovation. We want to explore. Third, we also need to extend the brand, we want to make it iconic. We want to get our key messages across to everyone.

That’s why we’re today launching a crowd-sourcing effort to get ideas from the general community on how to do our next digital advertising campaign.

Erick: What would you do in Judy’s shoes, Christopher?

Christopher: I’ve been surprised by how many advertisers come up with half-assed campaigns. Many want to explore, but at the same time they’re terrified. Brands need to loosen up, and they need to realize that ads can simply pop up somewhere it may not seem appropriate to the brand marketer.

Erick: what’s the situation gonna be like in, say, 5 years? how’s the media experience going to change?

Brian: More distributed. Traditional media and advertising has always been very structured. On Dailybooth, we incite people to create their own communities. I think the users are going to define content creation and distribution in the future.

Erick: if you’d redesign 4chan right now, what would you do with it?

Christopher: the trend is real time, I guess. We can do more to make users ‘feel’ the experience of 4chan. There’s a trend of convergence.

Erick: what about video chat?

Andrey: I have some ideas that in the future people will be focused on communication over video, much more than before. I’m not a specialist on communities and social media, but I think things like webcams and microphones and the platforms like Skype we have now, will be used more. People will leave their houses much less than they do now.

Erick: is that a good or a bad thing?

Brian: I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive. You can connect to people on the other side of the world, using different media. It connects the world more than it disconnects.

Judy: I have to say I agree with Chris. The successful companies will be the ones that open their boundaries a bit, and get less restrictive.

Andrey: Video communication was undervalued in the past, in my opinion.

Today, TechCrunch Disrupt attendees were treated to a very special guest: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg addressed the audience of entrepreneurs, urging them to make their way to New York City to start their next venture. As he put it, “When you want to start a business, you don’t have any choice. This is where the best and the brightest are.”

Here’s a full video of Mayor Bloomberg’s talk (which was followed by a brief Q&A). My notes on the talk are below that.

I am the proud owner of a new iPad. It’s amazing. I told Steve Jobs the other day that if he can improve on this it will really be amazing. Before this morning’s conference I updated my Facebook page, sent a tweet, checked in on Foursquare, posted a personal on Craigstlist. (laughs)

Venture funding has increased by 19% in the city even as it went down in the rest of the country.

My company never could have been anywhere as successful if I started it anywhere else. If you want to compete in the big game and hae breadth of cultural possibilities this is the place to come.

20 years ago when Wall Street went into a tailspin, City Hall went into overdrive. When I started the business PCs did not exist, nor did the Internet when I started Bloomberg. We built our own hardware. I used to go up to Connecticut to be with our engineers I worked with and I would solder chips onto circuit boards. As PCs were developed we switched to PCs.

Our idea worked out pretty well, I don’t know who will create the thing big thing will be we do know it needs to be headquartered here.

We’re going to launch a media lab at a major university in our city later this year. We’re continuing to help IT firms find out about opportunities to do business with our city agencies.

Two announcements: first thanks to partnership with Firstmark Capital which is co-investing with our NYC entrepreneur fund will now be able to invest up to $22 million.

Also announcing first investment of $300k going to a mobile app provider MyCityWay.

MyCityWay – a year ago we launched a competition called NYC Big Apps. More than 100 submissions. My City Way put in NYC Way – puts everything New York right at your fingertips.

We liked what they did so much we not only listed them as a Big Apps winner, we also chose to invest in them. They have moved from NJ to NYC.

In NYC we understand innovation drives economic growth. We’re nuturing information technology. If you have an idea, or a product, or an app, NYC is the city for you. Business is better here. NYC has just become #1 tourist destination. It’s happening here. I can’t guarantee you will be succesful, but it’s an awful lot easier to attract the best and brightest, and to interface with other people. If you’re a smart people this is the happening city.

———————Q&A——————-

If you’re a world-class startup, why pick NYC?
Most immigrant friendly place in America. Gateway to the US. What is unique about NYC is that we live as a mixture, not a mosaic. Live together in a way that promotes understanding. People don’t have to forget where they came from.

Microsoft, Google, Reuters have few thousand people each in this city.

If you were starting today as an entrepreneur what would you do?
Something that wasn’t be done, or something that was only being done by big companies. Competing with big companies is much easier than small companies. Live expectancy of a company is relatively short. They become big, they develop infrastructure, and everything looks small in the bottom line so they don’t do it. And that’s when the next big thing comes along.

Your company was about disruption. Today’s media companies are being disrupted by the Internet. What’s your advice to the media?
I’m a big fan of quality media. I think that the problem is not, is it distributed via truck or fiber. The question is it something that you need> I would argue an awful lot of the media has gone away what the public wants to receive. Examples: The Economist keeps growing, it’s probably the most expensive general interest magazine that I know of. There are companies that sell what people want. An awful lot of companies got away from that. It’s not the technology. The magazines that are in trouble are in trouble because they are writing the same thing as everyone else does. They aren’t germane to people’s lives anymore.

Tax incentive programs for tech companies?

Basically, no. We have the fund, we have incubators. But NYC we tax people. We make this the safest big city in the country. Our streets are cleaner, safer. We support our cultural institutions. Rather than tax breaks we’re investing our money in making this city a better place for people to live so that when you want to start a business, you don’t have any choice. This is where the best and the brightest are.

More discussion:

• SFGate
• ZDNet
• Village Voice
• The Next Web

Just a couple of days after PaidContent ran a story about freelance news site True/Slant reportedly being in M&A talks, Forbes Media announced today that it has agreed “in principle” to buy the company.

True/Slant founder and CEO Lewis Dvorkin will be joining Forbes to lead all editorial areas at Forbes as Chief Product Officer effective June 1.

It isn’t much of a surprise for Forbes specifically to make that move. Dvorkin has after all been consulting with Forbes in April. Also, he was Executive Editor of the Forbes magazine from December 1996 to April 2000.

He was previously Page One Editor of The Wall Street Journal, a Senior Editor at Newsweek, and an editor at The New York Times. He’s also former Senior Vice President, Programming at AOL.

Furthermore, Forbes invested in True/Slant back in August 2008 together with Fuse Capital (the company raised a total of $3 million).

The terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

It’s no secret that AOL is aggressively building out its content strategy. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong says that the company now employs 4,000 journalists, 3,500 of which are part-time or freelance. As of last October, the company employed roughly 3,000 journalists.

That’s pretty decent growth in a matter of six months. Of course, AOL has launched a number of content initiatives, including buying hyperlocal news site Patch and launching content machine Seed.com. Armstrong says that AOL is really “taking local to a local level.” Patch is now in 53 markets in 5 states, including Connecticut and California. And it’s been reported that AOL will pour $50 million into Patch this year and plans to roll out the model to “hundreds” of communities in the future.

We know that Armstrong is not only bullish on niche content but is also looking for AOL to become a content powerhouse. But Armstrong said today that he’s not interested on creating a “content farm.” He believes the future of AOL’s content strategy is in quality news. Hyper local is clearly a part of this strategy,

Looks like Netflix has decided to go with Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM for all upcoming Netflix-ready devices. If all goes according to plan you shouldn’t even notice the DRM being there, but we all know how well DRM has worked in the past.