NextNY

Last night I attended NextNY Its an informal gathering of New York (Internet) entrepreneurs. Every one is invited to share their opinion and to facilitate this the speakers are spread randomly across the room. Speakers last night included:

Fred Wilson, VC - Union Square Ventures
Catherine Levene, SVP Product Strategy and GM Content Network, TheFind.com, Former VP, Product, Business Development and Strategy, NYT Digital
Chris Fralic, First Round Capital
Niki Scevak, CEO, Homethinking
Tina Sharkey, SVP Instant Messaging & Social Media, AOL
Zia Daniell Wigder, VP and Research Director, JupiterResearch & Founder and Director, 12 Hours of Dialogue
Robin Chan, Associate Director, Entertainment Programming, Verizon Wireless

And one guy who just heard that he was nominated by Time magazine as one of the top 25 entrepreneurs under 25. He specialises in Ingame advertising. If someone knows his name, let me know.

It was great to see all these people discussing different subjects and due to the impressive speakers list, they where viewed from all angles.

Below you find an excerpt of my notes.

Succes in social media is all about Ego and Echo. Ego are the systems where you can get an expert status, personal diggs, top stories, expert status ect. And echo. Echo is all about reach.

AOL number one reason to buy companies is not feature but the teams. These small teams can often solve problems quicker then AOL themselves. The biggest problems for AOL are scalability and stability. Second reason are features that are complementary to the current AOL platform. Third reason is sold out reach in the AOL portefeuillio or high value. Meaning they will buy sites that have the same reach as AOL when the advertising stock for the current network is out of stock. By high value they mean the quality of reach. If you are reaching a lot of high profile people that’s high value reach. Funny enough Michael Arrington's Techcrunch was mentioned at least 15 times. It seems to me that they think Michael it too commercial.

On the subject of open api's: The conclusion, although not supported by me, it that open api and better mash ups are the next big thing. On a personal note, I think this is bull shit, because it will bring down the value of information to zero. It will be in GUI or how you can manipulate the date that will give any value. But that’s me.

On the subject of the next bubble. Yes but a different kind of bubble "the people bubble" Meaning that you need less people and capital for a start-up. And the supply of people is bigger then the need, hence the wages ect will go down and only the strong will survive. Key drivers are: developers supply, open platforms, and the eastern country's. A funny example is: pubsub.com. There is no one working there any more for a few weeks but they leave the service humming

Social networks are the next evolution in the pillars of internet. The others are: browsers, mail, seach.

On a funny note. A call out was made to settle the calender discussion once and for all. SO PLEASE PICK ONE CALLENDER AP. and get over it.