Ben Berkowitz2013-05-19T09:08:27-04:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=ben-berkowitzCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Ben BerkowitzGood old fashioned elbow grease.Warren Buffett Tells Men To 'Get Onboard,' Boost Women In Businesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-02T07:45:30-04:002013-05-07T11:59:17-04:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/
Buffett - whose conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway was recently described as the least diverse big company in America - took to the pages of Fortune magazine to argue that not only was helping women do well in the workplace the ethical thing to do, it was also in a man's self-interest.
"Fellow males, get onboard. The closer that America comes to fully employing the talents of all its citizens, the greater its output of goods and services will be," Buffett wrote.
The question of women and their success in business became a hot-button topic earlier this year after Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote "Lean In", a book challenging male leaders to mentor more women.
Buffett's essay expands upon the theme.
"Too many women continue to impose limitations on themselves, talking themselves out of achieving their potential," Buffett wrote. As an example he cited Katharine Graham, the late Washington Post CEO who he said never conquered her self-doubt.
He also made the industrial case for boosting women in the workplace, noting their productivity was being underutilized.
"If obvious benefits flow from helping the male component of the workforce achieve its potential, why in the world wouldn't you want to include its counterpart?" he asked.
The essay comes just two days before Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting, where the company will ask investors to elect New York investor Meryl Witmer to the board, making her the third woman of 13 board members.
Berkshire moved to add Witmer to the board in early March, around the same time that Calvert Investments released a report on diversity practices among S&P 100 companies. Calvert said Buffett's conglomerate ranked lowest among the group.
Berkshire has not commented to date on the report.
]]>Michael Dell Back In The Spotlight With Rumors Of A Buyouttag:reuters.com,0000:newsml_BRE90D18H:20864316012013-01-15T10:43:49-05:002013-03-17T05:12:01-04:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/By Ben Berkowitz (Reuters) - Michael Dell gave up day-to-day control of the computer company that bears his name once, an experiment that went poorly and ended relatively quickly - but he may be willing to try it again in another bid to reverse the company's fortunes. Dell Inc is in talks with private-equity firms about possibly going private, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters, confirming a Bloomberg News report. It was not clear how many firms might be involved, or how much of the company Michael Dell might own after a deal, relative to the 14 percent he controls now. It is also not a new idea; he told an investor conference in June 2010 he had considered it before. But were he to pull the trigger, the billionaire's company can focus on reversing its fortunes by focusing on higher margin corporate IT and services - borrowing a page from IBM. That's no small task for a company that built its name on bespoke computers but whose star has waned, and now wants to go up against larger rivals like Hewlett Packard and IBM. "The company essentially has to re-make itself by de-focusing on hardware and re-focusing on software and services. This would give the company more time to effect this turn-around," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Maxim Group. But "the last tech buyout of a similar scope was Freescale, which did not turn out so well." Michael Dell started the company in 1984 out of his college dorm room with $1,000, and led it to the top of the PC industry. The TV ad slogan "Dude, you're getting a Dell" become one of the best-known catchphrases of the early 2000s. The company's early successes made him wealthy, enough to start a firm called MSD Capital that employs 80 people in three cities investing his money in everything from stocks to real estate. Forbes ranks him among the world's 50 richest billionaires, with an estimated fortune of nearly $16 billion. But much of his success is still tied to the company he founded, and from which he has not been able to step away. The first time he handed over the reins was in 2004, when long-time lieutenant Kevin Rollins took over as CEO. The company was on top of its game when Rollins stepped in, but sales and customer service slipped in the ensuing three years, and there was a general sense of relief among investors when Dell reasserted control in January 2007. "There's been no turnaround and the bottom line is Michael was the one who built the company," Needham & Co analyst Charles Wolf said at the time. A STAR IS BORN In the six years since Michael Dell resumed his leadership, market share has dipped even further and so has the stock. Dell, which derives more than half its revenue from sales of plain-vanilla PCs and servers - has steadily ceded market share to HP and Lenovo, and is struggling along with the rest of the industry with declining PC demand. Even with Monday's surge, Dell Inc shares are still down 49 percent from when he resumed leadership. (Though to be sure, HP's stock has fallen further, down 58 percent). During that time the market changed dramatically, and Dell's once-iconic built-to-order PCs have lost favor as consumers and even businesses move toward tablets and smartphones, a market where Dell has taken tentative and unsuccessful steps. That slide was magnified by Dell's brash confidence, which sometimes got him in trouble with peers, most famously the late Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs. When Jobs returned to lead the company he started in 1997, Dell famously suggested he'd be best off shutting the company down and returning the cash to shareholders. Nine years later, Jobs had the last laugh when Apple's market capitalization surpassed Dell's. Even with its recent slide, Apple remains more than 20 times bigger than the former PC industry darling. Should Dell now choose to go private, much will hinge on the willingness of future partners to support his potentially costly turnaround effort. "While there are reasons for Michael Dell to work with PE investors to take the company private, the risks of executing on its transition strategy could go up in such a scenario unless the PE investors are open to continue injecting capital to support the company's strategic goals," Mizuho Securities analyst Abhey Lamba wrote on Monday. (Reporting By Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Bernard Orr)]]>Volunteers, Local Governments and FEMA Use the Internet to Fight Back the Effects of Sandytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20766172012-11-05T10:27:36-05:002013-01-05T05:12:01-05:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/
Having heard about the platform from an article in the WSJ last month written by Steven Berlin Johnson a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, John K. Phoebus, reached out to ask for help with the software to enable volunteers to get involved in the cleanup effort. In a thank you letter to Mr Johnson Crisfield writes of the impact the social web on Crisfield, MD
"Mr. Johnson,
I want to thank you for an article you wrote back in September. You wrote about SeeClickFix, a startup that lets people report potholes to their town government.
Monday, Crisfield, Maryland was hit harder than any other community in Maryland by Hurricane Sandy. Swift boat rescue teams had to go by boat house to house to rescue people from flooding worse than I've ever seen in my lifetime. As word of the devastation spread, we were fortunate that, through social media, so many people learned of the devastation that the hurricane brought to our town and offered to help.
As offers to help came pouring in, I realized that our municipal and county governments wouldn't be able to harness the energy of volunteers because they were so busy providing basic services to their citizens. The chamber of commerce, in cooperation with the City of Crisfield, took on the task of organizing these volunteers. I offered to lead the effort as a chamber member and, as I did, I remembered the article you wrote about SeeClickFix.
On a whim, in the middle of the night/early morning on Wednesday, I emailed the CEO, after a quick online search and told him about our town. I will forward to you the email I sent when I can find it. The same day, I heard back and they offered to set us up with a free service to let us use this app to identify and report damage from Hurricane Sandy that our volunteers can help fix.
Today at 1 p.m. we had the first meeting of volunteers, who downloaded the app, and spread out through town. In a few hours, we had made it through half of the town, identifying 85 issues. Tomorrow, we delve into the hardest hit area of town and will probably triple that number.
I'm thanking you because, if it hadn't been for your article, I wouldn't have heard of SeeClickFix and we wouldn't have had such success in using their generous offer to organize the volunteers in our town. If you're interested, you can read about our efforts at this website, which we put together to organize the effort or look for the Crisfield, Maryland facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/crisfieldmd
If we didn't have this app, we wouldn't have been able to harness this energy so effectively. Instead of a bunch of people in the back office organizing things, everyone is out on the street clearing debris out of homes and getting trees off of cars and homes."
Since writing the letter Crisfield is now using SeeClickFix to alert FEMA to what they are calling "white towel homes" or homes that are in need of assistance. FEMA has asked residents to put a towel on the door if they need help and the volunteers are just starting to document those homes with SeeClickFix. John sent us an email 5 minutes ago to update us on today's events,
"FEMA is on the ground here, but we have not yet been declared a disaster. They now have us using your tool to log "white flag" houses as part of their preliminary damage assessment. (They actually want all of Somerset County on here, but I'm working with what I have)
If you look at our Issues dashboard we now have "white flag" house as a category and are using the app to find people who need food and shelter."
Hurricane Sandy is serving as a reminder that the Internet, and specifically open platforms designed to connect people and resolve problems, can help government expand the act of governance to its citizens and organizational partners in the community.
Cross-posted from SeeClickFix.]]>How to Use Modern Crowdsourcing Apps to Keep an Eye on the Original Crowdsourcing Apptag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10805772011-11-07T16:52:18-05:002012-01-07T05:12:01-05:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/bugs and terms of service.
With the birth of Government 2.0, specific reporting applications like Ushahidi.com and SeeClickFix.com, along with the use of Twitter and Facebook as a constant source of feedback for governments, citizen engagement in the form of public feedback can be measured in realtime every day of the year. Some of this reporting energy has even been harnessed and channeled towards the goal of citizens solving these problems on their own, with the apps mentioned above and others intentionally designed for this purpose like neighborgoods.net and changeby.us.
Between the Arab Spring, The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, it certainly feels like civic participation is more virile than it has ever been in my lifetime. While there are many new opportunities for participation, voting on election day still remains the best way to hold our elected officials accountable. The voting booth app still remains the most important in our democracy and the effectiveness and integrity of that app is vital.
Not surprisingly, many of the apps and platforms mentioned above have been used in past years as the feedback loop and added layer of accountability for the voting app. In recent years, the ante has been upped when it comes to our civic responsibility. We are not only encouraged to vote but to speak up when the voting process does not work. I wanted to document a few of the tools and cases where they have been used for checking on the functionality of voting machines and violations of voter's rights and laws.
Ushahidi has proven to be a valuable tool for monitoring elections all over the world. The genesis of Ushahidi lies in election monitoring in Kenya where it was used to document violence and corruption around elections. The use of Ushahidi for monitoring elections has become so popular that there were 5 different deployments in the most recent Egyptian elections. For those who do not know Ushahidi, it is an open source platform that can be deployed as an individual instance by a local developer or remote developer looking to help in a crisis. Instructions on how to deploy Ushahidi can be found here: blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/08/09/announcing-ushahidi-v2-1-tunis/
Twitter Vote Report is another example of crowdsourcing at the voting booth. In this instance, Tweeters use common hashtags and Tweet structures to rate the quality of the voting experience. Twittervotereport.com then aggregates all of that data in one place so others can lend a hand with solving some of the problems reported.
Most recently, the Journal Register Company has decided to use SeeClickFix to track voting booth problems. Journal Register Company owns 20 daily newspapers in the United States, as well as over 100 weeklies. All of those papers have websites that already use SeeClickFix to help connect citizens to their government through requests for service, so it was a natural transition to create a vote related election day map. The idea came from @ivanlajara at JRC's Kingston Daily Freeman. Users can use the same SeeClickFix mobile applications and web interfaces for reporting vote issues. Bloggers and local news web editor's can display that data with vote related keywords and keyword filters excluding the pothole reports and other civic feedback measures that are typical of SCF on the other 364 days. Instructions for how to do this can be found here. You can use SeeClickFix anywhere in the world to post a problem at the polls.
I'd be interested to hear about your own examples of crowdsourcing apps at the polls. The above examples are those that I am personally invested in, familiar with or were easily googleable. Please fill in the blanks on the post above and, of course, speak up through one of these channels when you see something wrong on election day.]]>Start-up Weekend: Put Your Time Where Your Mouth Istag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10704862011-11-02T15:47:58-04:002012-01-02T05:12:01-05:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/start-up weekend. She has an idea for a mobile application that will tie in with a previously developed local mapping resource. Her question was around the feasibility of building the project in one weekend and if it should be a native app.
The app that she is looking to build can easily be built in a weekend by a junior web developer thanks to the Google Maps API. It does not need to be a native mobile app thanks to Javascript, Google Maps v3 and html5. It's that same API that I was able to create a proof of concept and arguably "minimum viable product" version of SeeClickFix. Really, my co-founders, Kam and Jeff, created the MVP but I got pretty close with amateur developer skills. Our use of that API and the growth of SeeClickFix has but us in the thankful but sometimes uncomfortable position of being one of the 0.35% of platforms (those with more than 25K map loads/day) that will have to pay Google for their API service come January. (A blog on dependance on open API's coming soon.)
In the email there were questions about the business viability of the product and I wanted to address that question more thoroughly here. Spoiler: I do not answer those questions.
Start-up weekend is about sitting down and putting your time (at least one weekend) where your mouth is. It's about doing the same thing that the SeeClickFix founders and so many like us did when they launched their ideas. Start-up weekend is a great place for those with a hunch to create the test. Do you have a hunch that your idea might improve someone else's life or fill the demand of a business or organization? No business plan or financial modeling will tell you 100% if you're right so why not build it? Why not do it at start-up weekend?
SeeClickFix was only a thought four years ago this Thanksgiving. Today it is in the top 1% of websites making use of the Google Maps API. We had a hunch that we would scale. We didn't know for sure if it would have a revenue model or if we even wanted to quit our day jobs and make a business of it. We did know that SeeClickFix would solve a problem that least one of the co-founders was having. In about four hours we had a product that allowed our friends to express similar frustrations. In three months, with four co-founders, all with other day jobs, we had a minimum viable project for others to use that proved our hunch correct.
Since the launch of SCF we've had many more hunches about what would be useful. We are constantly reminding ourselves to not be over certain of our hunches without testing. We try to remind ourselves to "release early and often" and learn from where we were right or wrong...just like an experiment. None of this is ground breaking for those in start-ups but it may be for those attending a start-up weekend for the first time. This process is relatively unfamiliar to the traditional business world.
My thoughts for start-up weekenders and potential start-up weekenders:
1) This is not a business competition. This is a science experiment.
2) Don't overthink things. Worry about solving one problem, no matter how simple.
3) If you're having fun, and you like your team and others find what you've built useful, set a recurring meeting time to work on the project every weekend.
4) We are arguably in one of the greatest periods of innovation in history. The number of possibilities for creation has increased exponentially in the past 15 years and you should be a part of it. Your great grandparents would be jealous and your great grand children may be too.
Find out about start-up weekends near you.]]>AIG Offers To Buy Back $15.7 Billion In Mortgage-Backed Securities From Fedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2011-03-11T07:20:02-05:002011-05-25T18:40:24-04:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/
(Reuters) - American International Group (AIG.N) offered on Thursday to buy back, for $15.7 billion cash, mortgage-backed securities the U.S. government took off the bailed-out insurer's hands during the financial crisis.
The announcement came as a surprise, though AIG -- which nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008 partly because of the securities -- said in a regulatory filing it has been preparing to make the offer for at least a year.
The company said it has set aside the cash to pay for the deal and will still have "strong liquidity reserves" after it closes.
AIG will pay for the residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) with cash from its insurance subsidiaries, which will then hold the securities in their investment portfolios, a person familiar with the situation said on condition of anonymity.
AIG and the Fed have been in talks for "many months" about the deal, the person said. Given the insurance units' needs to invest their capital, the source said the RMBS were an "attractive investment" at their current levels.
The securities have actually increased in value since, giving AIG the opportunity to profitably pay back the government and regain them for its own portfolios.
The source said AIG is hopeful the Fed will accept the offer soon, and that the company will have the cash to fund the offer ready as soon as next week.
REDUCING AID
AIG, which is 92 percent owned by the government, said the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will make a profit of about $1.5 billion on its residual equity interest in Maiden Lane II, the entity that holds the securities, if it accepts the offer.
AIG said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the total outstanding assistance to it will be reduced by about $13 billion, to some $26 billion in total, if its offer is accepted.
That $26 billion figure has three parts: the government's interest in a vehicle that holds shares in insurer AIA Group (1299.HK), a different Maiden Lane vehicle that holds interests in collateralized debt obligations and an undrawn line of credit.
Maiden Lane II was formed in December 2008 and took over about $20.5 billion of residential mortgage-backed securities in a bid to ease liquidity pressure on AIG due to its securities lending program.
"At the proposed purchase price, the Maiden Lane II securities have an attractive risk/return profile to AIG," the company said in its offer letter. The source said AIG would split the securities roughly proportionally between life insurer SunAmerica and property insurer Chartis.
AIG shares rose to $37.45 in after-hours trading from a $36.48 close.
At current levels, the Treasury stands to make a profit of nearly $13 billion on AIG shares. People familiar with the plans have said the Treasury is likely to start selling off its stake in May.
The source said Thursday that the Fed deal would help AIG convince potential investors that its insurance businesses had solid opportunities to grow their investment income.
(Additional reporting by Paritosh Bansal; Editing by Tim Dobbyn, Gary Hill)
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.]]>Warren Buffett: 'My Trigger Finger Is Itchy'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/thenewswire//2.8286332011-02-26T12:04:07-05:002011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/
Warren Buffett is looking for acquisitions as an outlet to deploy his $38 billion cash pile, the legendary investor said in his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway Inc shareholders on Saturday.
Buffett gave an aggressive earnings forecast for Berkshire's collection of businesses, said the company would engage in record capital spending and forecast a recovery in the housing market would start within a year.
Foremost, though, was his acknowledgment of the need for Berkshire to expand its non-insurance businesses, a broad collection that most prominently includes the railroad Burlington Northern and the electric utility MidAmerican.
"Our elephant gun has been reloaded, and my trigger finger is itchy," Buffett said. The letter was released just before 8 a.m. EST Saturday, as it is in most years -- and many large investors say they get up early that day to read it the moment it comes online.
The so-called "Oracle of Omaha" said Berkshire will need "more major acquisitions" -- with an italicized emphasis on major -- to meet its goal.
One long-time Berkshire investor described the letter as "punchy" and "confidently American," among other things.
"I would say as an investor, I think it's a very upbeat letter, it's one that celebrates his courage on behalf of investors of going into the marketplace when the world was most fearful," said Tom Russo, a partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who is one of the 15 largest holders of Berkshire Class A shares.
Copyright 2010 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.]]>Next Generation Democracy: Open Web Platforms, Local Activists and the US Coastguardtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7809352010-11-09T17:33:07-05:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/Next Generation Democracy -- What the Open Source Revolution Means for Power Politics and Change, written by Jared Duval, was released today by Bloomsbury.
(Full disclosure for this review: Jared has become a friend since he first interviewed us for the SeeClickFix chapter in the book. He also now lives in New Haven. Both are likely to bias my opinions.)
Guilty of dedicating little time to reading, I expected to vainly consume only one chapter. However on a recent flight to Toronto I failed to only scope the index for references to SeeClickFix and finished Next Generation Democracy before touching down. Next Generation Democracy chronicles distributed and open movements and organizations that are reshaping the face of democracy. Through the stories of ordinary people who have made instrumental impact on the world, Jared links the similarities in effecting change back to the principles of the open source software movement.
The forward by Tim O'Reilly reads, "now is the time for government to reinvent itself, to take the old idea of government 'for the people, by the people and of the people' to a new level."
This is the story of people who are helping government to think of itself in a new light. This is the story of government as a partner with its citizens and as a platform for participation. This is the story of government as an enabler. Most importantly, this is not the story of the government that sits solely inside city hall, this is the story of the government that sits in the collective actions of all of us and sparks the average citizen to speak up and enable their neighbors to do the same.
Malcom Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker a few weeks back that, "Social media can't provide what social change has always required."
I understand the point that a tweet about global warming is a sorry substitution for tying one's self to a tree. However, Gladwell misses a point which Mr Duval clearly recognizes:
that first tweet about global warming is a much easier on-ramp for the average citizen. Those that will tie themselves to trees and show up to City Hall for town meetings are not less likely to do so. In many cases social web platforms can enable those that tie themselves to trees to get many more to do the same. In the same way that a few check-ins on Foursquare can lead to a swarm, organizers can get those to rally in real life. Between 40,000 and 100,000 people still attended the Copenhagen Summit and gave cause for 968 arrests.
Its not the individual tweet that creates a revolution, but the trending hashtags of thousands of tweets that provides awareness to many who would not have been previously aware. Social Media personalizes our new global consciousness through the voices of our friends. The platforms teach us that leveraging users and citizens will only make the platform/democracy stronger. The read/write principles of the web platform are what's fundamentally changing the way we organize and effect change.
From the evolution of Linux to the distributed mechanisms of the US Coastguard, Next Generation Democracy shows us how being more inclusive in our decision making and providing easier access to governance can reshape democracy for the 21st century. As a perfect debunking of "Why the revolution will not be tweeted." Jared tells the Story of SeeClickFix users, who met online and formed a block watch off-line to improve the real space around them.
For a more detailed review of Next Generation Democracy by Yasmin Fodil, click here.
And to purchase the book: click here
]]>The Great Urban Hack -- Not so Lazy Sundaytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7799642010-11-06T16:35:50-04:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Ben Berkowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-berkowitz/SeeClickFix and I sat down on a Sunday for a fixed four hour jam session to create a prototype of a web platform for reporting civic concerns. Today 50-plus journos, entrepreneurs and geeks are working under similar time constraints for the social benefit of New Yorkers. The challenge: "Get people from the City together to builds things for the people of the City." No boundaries except for a 24-hour work period to create socially valuable tools for New Yorkers.
The Great Urban Hack is the product of Hacks and Hackers NYC, organized by Jenny 8 Lee, Chrys Wu and Al Shaw. The group is for "hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories."
The greatest resource, willing and able "wetware", will be augmented by API's provided by YouTube, Bit.ly, SeeClickFix and others. A number of these platforms kindly provided human API support for the Hacks and Hackers. NYC311 employees, MTA employees and Manhattan Bureau President's employees were also on hand to listen and provide assistance to their API's and projects as well.
Here's the nearly complete list of ideas and projects that were formulating 6 hours into Day 1:
Taxi use visualization
Data pulled from a FOIA request by Aaron Glazer of NYC T&LC for another app (FareShare) will be used to visualize the use of Taxis in NYC in a beautiful and consumable form.
Out of Context Chat
Why chat in your own words when you could use quotes from famous New Yorkers. Starting with an aggregation of quotes from Seinfeld Characters the users of this chat platform will be able to only communicate with quotable words of local celebrities.
Who's My Landlord
This is journalism driven data based on a story titled Who's My Landlord which identified the shell game that some NYC landlords use to hide from tenant accountability. This web platform will unite neighbors around common building concerns and inform them of who is accountable. The SeeClickFix API will be used to alert landlords to the concerns while various property databases are being scraped to create a list of those accountable.
Community Map
Check into your favorite public art pieces and create a network of like minded public artists in the process. Jeff Larson and Dato Mio are building foursquare for public art.
Hacking Subways
Imagine the dark windows of subway cars lit with L.E.D's of beautiful imagery. Powered by the trains these displays will animate for passengers as the train travels and slow to a halt when the train stops. Minah Kim and Yeonju Shaw got the idea from an app they were thinking of creating for one of their daughters. The idea is a child could blow into the phone and animate a pinwheel, as example, on the screen. Imagine 100's of pinwheels hustling through the dark underground of NYC. Accelerometers have never gone this fast. In the afternoon Jules from MTA showed up and as I write is engaged in a pitch on the idea.
Dot Muncher
Pacman I.R.L. A location based app that allows users to play the ghosts or the man in the built environment by themselves or with other mobile users of the platform.
Buy Your Values
Want to align your retail and food consumption with your political values? Buy Your Values is scraping publicly available data to tell you which business owners have contributed to which political parties.
Rat Map(Now Roach Map)
Using NYC 311 health violation data Data the Rat Map crew is using maps to predict rat infestations and, potentially, other annoying communities in New York such as bed bugs.
Social Collage
Utilizing Yahoo and Twitter's API the group creating Social Collage are building a tool that will visualize your interests in a collage of imagery. The formation of groups of profiles or communities will coalesce into a mash-up of user interests displayed as one Social Collage.
5W Dashboard
A new way to consume stories through visualization. Taking traditional prose out of Who/What/Where/When/Why 5w seeks to make all of these elements visual through maps, timelines and imagery. Malik, Ida and Jay were scheming their platform and looking for geeks to build it.
Speak Up NYC
Though not a "day-of project" Speak Up NY is a web platform that is the brain child of the Manhattan Bureau President's office. Noel Hidalgo, of NYState Senate and @noneck fame suggested Shaan Khan present Speak Up NY at the event and the problems they are looking to solve with their platform. Shaan is currently getting a crash course in drupal from Noneck and looking for assistance to build a community platform that will help neighbors find nearby community groups and locally valuable data as well as their elected officials. The platform will also seek to create a local q&a for neighbors. Anyone who wants to volunteer to create this platform should contact skhan@manhattanbp.org.
As a side note: On a day when so many Journalists were choosing to be entrepreneurial I decided I'd sneak into the journo void. I have to say that playing the role of listener and documenter was an amazing way to talk to nearly everyone in the room. The great thing about a room full of people who are building for the commons is that no one is scared to share, and in a space housed by the tagline, "Think Make Share", why should they be?
It would be great if participants could provide links to their outcomes in the trailing comments.
