Central Park

The Top Transit System In The World Suffers For Lack Of Tech

The MTA seeks high-tech solutions for its bus and subway crisis ‘A dire need’ for new products to fix subway delays and move buses through congested streets

New York’s subways and buses are in crisis. As it copes with cascading delays, traffic congestion, and declines in ridership, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is seeking salvation from an unlikely source: the tech sector. On Wednesday, the MTA announced the creation of “the nation’s first Transit Tech Lab,” an accelerator designed to vet new high-tech products designed to help improve the nation’s largest public transit system.

The number one solution is Hyperloop. Speed up the construction of the Boston-NYC-DC Hyperloop. One megacity 100 million strong is waiting in the wings. The NYC-DC stretch will be a 30 minute swing, city center to city center. Which means If it takes you 20-30 minutes to get to the city center, you are within reasonable commute distance. All sorts of small residential towns will flourish within that 30 minute strike distance from the DC, Baltimore, Philly, and NYC city centers.

But for NYC that one track will not be enough. NYC needs to go axial with Hyperloop. You know how roads fan out diagonally from the Eiffel Tower in Paris? Something similar needs to happen to NYC with Hyperloop. With Penn Station as the hub, a bunch of 10-15 minute rides need to be carved out. Where I live in right now - Middletown, NY - is a sweet 10 minute Hyperloop distance from Penn Station. What that means is all shorter distances simply don't make economic sense. To that add 15 minutes to get to the train station both ways, and that is a healthy 45 minute commute to and from work. Such Middletowns need to be located in all directions from Penn Station.

You have to rethink real estate. The sector is ripe for disruption. The wooden frame house is the horse carriage. It's time now for the motor car: factory made metal frame homes that bring the costs down 50%.

And then you can hope to tackle the internal congestion. With this radial Hyperloop solution, you will also have solved the housing crisis. Houses are too artificially expensive. Everyone who has a job deserves to be able to buy a house. How do you do that? By bringing the price on the houses down. Manufactured homes have made vast improvements. They offer better designs than conventional houses, are far stronger (try hurricane, fire, earthquake proof ... bring it on, Sandy!) and are on average half the price of similar sized wooden frame houses. And you can set them up by cutting few trees. Heck, you could have tree houses.

You want the rural, rustic lifestyle of trees all around you, but you also want the advantage of having 10 million people congregated on one island. The knowledge economy, the service economy is the future. The soft skills will be in vogue as robots and AI relentlessly eat into the hard skills of hammering nails.

One 100 million strong megacity will also free up large chunks of land across the country. America should plant itself an Amazon forest. The top contributing country to global warming should take the lead on planting some trees.

Once you get the big picture correct and start making moves towards it, you can then come to fixing the trains and buses. Big Data is no substitute for fixing traffic signals, and orchestrating fewer cars on the streets, but Big Data can go a long way. Who says city governments can't invest in tech startups? A few good moves and the city debt is paid for.

Data is the new oil. The city could charge for the data it collects.

WiFi all across the Subway would turn the trains into the place where people go to have meetings. It will also help serve ads. I am for keeping the ticket prices down. The subway cab is where New Yorkers meet each other. 100 maybe thousand times truer than Central Park.

Google's Waymo car service is custom made for NYC. It is already active in Phoenix. Ends up if you don't need drivers cab rides are super cheap. And self driving cars don't need parking space, they automatically do car pooling. One person in a four seater car is the traffic congestion problem that is for lack of intelligence. Artifical Intelligence, that is.

https://t.co/ohesjbuN77

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 16, 2018

@mta @rachelhaot @TransitTechLab The Top Transit System In The World Suffers For Lack Of Tech https://t.co/jZWBPFfuhc

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 16, 2018

Here is Cuomo's full remarks on the subway crisis today while talking about Penn Station/Moynihan Train Hall: pic.twitter.com/cSA8DvDmw3

— Dan Rivoli (@danrivoli) September 6, 2018

#Countries Are Dead, So It's Time to Think Differently. #Cities are the most fundamental structure of social organization empires come and go, nations crumble all the time, [but] the city’s always there. https://t.co/ryY5Oo06Wk @ozy @J_Watkins1 #geopolitics #connectography

— Parag Khanna (@paragkhanna) October 16, 2018

@alon_levy This is impressive. https://t.co/LR36FP0MJP I hope it is implemented.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 16, 2018

Cities Can Be Much Larger

whoa. https://t.co/ieicwjVFFr (ht @pmarca) pic.twitter.com/FoLZjwnsV1

— Michael Irvine (@Mjirv) January 12, 2016

If you have bullet trains and hyperloops connecting to Penn Station, can New York City be much much larger? The affordable housing issue kind of goes away with that.

Urbanization is one of the solutions to climate change. More people living in big cities is a good idea from the environmental viewpoint.

The Ultimate Megacity: 100 Million People

San Francisco's Fog Over Growth

the advantages of agglomeration. Put lots of highly skilled, highly productive, highly innovative people together in the same place and the economic gains are huge. ...... on the whole it’s fair to say that San Francisco hasn’t exactly embraced the role of boomtown. There are voter-imposed limits on office construction, new housing developments usually face protests and litigation, and local politics boasts a strong contingent of “progressives” whose main goal seems to be keeping the city from changing. ..... homeowners favor zoning ordinances and other growth restrictions because they keep house prices up. ...... 65 percent of the city’s housing units are rentals, and 75 percent of those are subject to rent control. Most of the San Franciscans who oppose new development do so apparently not to maximize the value of their property but to minimize the odds that they will be forced out of their apartments or otherwise priced out of the city. ....... growth restrictions restrict growth not just locally but on a national level .......

lowering the regulatory constraints on new housing in just San Francisco, San Jose and New York to the level of the median city would lift U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent

....... land-use regulations were also driving up inequality and reducing economic mobility

Reading Up On FourSquare

Foursquare's Valuation Is Getting Chopped in Half

Once the heir apparent to Facebook and Twitter, the location app is raising a "down" funding round after years of slow growth.

If ever there was a startup that seemed like a can't-miss bet to build the next billion-dollar app, it was Foursquare. From the beginning, it was social, local, and mobile, that holy trinity of totem words parodied on Silicon Valley for being a mandatory part of every pitch deck. Its launch at SxSW in 2009 set the bar for a buzzy debut. It had the backing of blue-chip VC firms like Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz; a pedigreed founder, Dennis Crowley, who had sold his previous startup to Google; and the love of early-adopter types and journalists, the same constituencies that helped make Slack a breakout hit. ...... Foursquare will take between $20 million and $40 million at a valuation of $250 million, a haircut of more than 50 percent from the one attached to its last round of funding, in December 2013. ...... Down rounds are typically punishing for founders, reducing both the value and the size of their stakes in concert. Frequently, doing one triggers "anti-dilution" mechanisms designed to protect early investors by carving up founders' equity still more. ....... Foursquare's move primes it for an acquisition, with Microsoft, current investor, and Apple being the most likely buyers. ..... grew steadily, and now claims 55 million users, several obstacles prevented it from attaining the kind of mass popularity enjoyed by Instagram or Twitter. ...... Expecting users to "check in" everywhere they went turned out to be asking too much of them, but making check-ins an automatic process raised privacy concerns. ...... while it never escaped its early-adopter niche, Foursquare did manage to amass an enviable trove of location data.

Foursquare's location data is way more powerful than people realize

The technology that makes Crowley’s magic trick possible is a computer brain the company has been building since the early days of the iPhone called Pilgrim. According to Crowley, Pilgrim “is the thing” that separates Foursquare from not just competitors like Yelp but every other app in the App Store. And now he wants it powering every other app on your phone. .......

Foursquare is in a period of crucial transition. Since basically inventing the location check-in concept on mobile phones in 2009, the app has slowly faded into relative obscurity.

...... To date, Foursquare has raised over $120 million dollars in venture capital and reportedly turned down acquisition offers from the likes of Facebook and Yahoo. ..... A feature like Trending this Week, which collects aggregated and anonymized foot traffic data from Foursquare’s users, wouldn’t have been possible without Pilgrim. “We have this real pulse of a city now,” Foursquare head of engineering Andrew Hogue told Tech Insider in a recent interview. "We know where people are going.” ....... Since Pilgrim went online in early 2014, the company has started “finding interesting things to do with the data” it collects, Crowley says. It already licenses data to Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others to enhance their location features (Foursquare used to power location tagging in Instagram before it was replaced by Facebook’s own tool.) In the last year, Foursquare has started offering business analytics with its foot traffic data, which Crowley describes as “an incredibly lucrative market." ........ banks that give small business loans pay Foursquare to know if a business actually exists and isn’t a scam. .....

In September, Foursquare accurately predicted Apple would sell 13 million iPhones during the iPhone 6S opening weekend based on its foot traffic data around Apple stores.

....... “We had all these people from financial institutions saying, ‘What data do you have that we don’t have?’” Crowley says. The answer is Pilgrim. ...... “We have this superpower,” he tells me from across a conference room table in Foursquare’s New York City headquarters. "We have this awesome thing that we built, and it only lives in two apps — Foursquare and Swarm." ...... It’s an engine that runs in the background and records every time a phone with Foursquare or Swarm installed stops moving. When it stops moving, Pilgrim tries to figure out where exactly you are, if you’ve been there before, or if there’s anything going on in the area you might be interested in, like a happy hour at an oyster bar. It has to decide if you're stopped at a traffic light, walking down the street, or entering a coffee shop. Pilgrim makes these decisions millions of times per day. ..........

The biggest misconception, he says, that still exists about Foursquare is that it’s reliant on manual check-ins. Pilgrim has made it possible to check in without taking your phone out of your pocket. And Foursquare knows more about where its users are going than ever before.

........ "Can you make a game that’s different if you’re playing it in a coffee shop versus if you’re playing it in a bookstore or a bus station?” Crowley asks. "Can your exercise app be different if you went to a burger place for dinner yesterday or if you’ve been going to salad places for the last three weeks? Can the app that you use to hail a car be different if it can recognize that you’re in an unfamiliar city?" ........ Crowley says that it's this hyper-contextualized, location-aware approach that makes Foursquare different from competitors like Yelp, which still feels very much like a digital phonebook. ..... With Pilgrim, Crowley thinks Foursquare has technology that’s applicable in nearly any app. ..... "If we fast forward five years into the future, this is how apps talk to you,” he says. "The app will recognize when it’s time to tell you something about the world and it will wake up and tell you that.”

Foursquare has an amazing 'superpower' called Pilgrim that could finally let it take over your phone

Foursquare accurately predicted iPhone sales by analyzing foot traffic to Apple stores around the country.

Foursquare’s Value Will Be Cut by More Than Half in a New Funding Round

Foursquare is close to finalizing a funding round that will value the company at about $250 million — less than half of what investors thought the company was worth two years ago. .... at least one new investor will participate in this round; previous investors include DFJ Growth, Microsoft, Silver Lake Partners, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. ........

In 2013, Foursquare raised $35 million in a round that valued the company at about $650 million.

..... a “down round,” which will reduce the value of stakes held by previous investors, as well as employees with equity. ...... last summer Crowley said the company had 50 million active users. ..... Crowley has also spent the past few years talking up the company’s data assets, accumulated via its users’ travels. That data could theoretically be valuable to a big platform company like Microsoft, which has already invested in Foursquare, or Twitter, which is already using Foursquare to power its location function. And if Foursquare forges ahead as a standalone company, it will try using that data to build up new revenue streams.

7 tech giants most likely to buy Foursquare

With word that Foursquare is reportedly raising another down round of financing, it seems logical to bet that the company is reaching some kind of end game.

..... We can assume its attempt to monetize all its location data hasn’t progressed very well, so profitability is likely a fantasy. And its IPO dreams probably died long ago. ..... Foursquare “has also talked to potential buyers” and that a deal might happen in place of a new round. ...... Microsoft uses Foursquare to power some of its location features. Microsoft has to be right at the top of any acquisition talks. ...... in the case of Google, there’s a bit of a delicious twist. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley sold his previous location-based startup, Dodgeball, to Google in 2005. Google shut it down in 2009, and Foursquare was, in part, an attempt to show Google what an opportunity it had bungled. ....... If Facebook did make a play, it would really be for the employees. ...... The main debate around Mayer is how long she will be sticking around. And as for Yahoo, many investors would like to see it sold for parts. Even if Mayer wanted Foursquare, it seems unlikely the board would let her spend any more money on an acquisition that might create a little buzz but do nothing to enhance the bottom line. ...... Back in October, Apple Maps started pulling in Foursquare data. ... Buying Foursquare for less than $500 million would seem reasonable for a company that shelled out $3 billion to buy Beats. ...... Amazon buying Foursquare would probably make about as much sense as Jeff Bezos buying a newspaper. ...... Twitter probably has the shallowest pockets of the group.

Foursquare CEO Crowley: “We Do Location Better Than Anybody Else”

Company has evolved from a social "check-in" app to a location intelligence platform for enterprises.

Foursquare has come a long way from its early days as a social “check-in” app. Along the way, the company repositioned its app as a Yelp competitor; now the company is substantially focused on

“place insights” and “location intelligence” for enterprises

. ....... Earlier this year, Foursquare introduced its advertising platform, “Pinpoint.” Foursquare works directly with advertisers and makes media buys through exchanges (on both the desktop and mobile) and then measures offline actions (e.g., store visits) after ad exposures. This model is radically different from selling ads to local restaurants and bars — even check-in ads to brands — which is where the company began. ...... banks can use the data to determine business credit-worthiness based on foot traffic patterns. ..... Foursquare’s data is much more accurate than its competitors’ because the company has first-party data from 50+ million global users, whereas most of the location data many of Foursquare’s mobile marketing “location intelligence” platform competitors rely on comes from ad calls, which are often inaccurate. ...... “Everyone is drafting off someone else’s data,” except Foursquare. ..... the company disregards and discards “about 80 percent of the location data” it sees from exchanges because of inaccuracy and poor quality. ..... Crowley asserts that many mobile marketing companies are unable to disambiguate business locations in malls or areas of high population density (e.g., urban centers). “We’ve spent years figuring out where people are; and we can do this quickly at a high degree of precision and speed.”

Foursquare Raising Round To Capitalize On Data Business

The current investment environment has led many startups to pack on the pounds to prepare for leaner days potentially ahead. At this juncture, the rewards of getting the money you need to grow outweigh the optics of a decrease in valuation. ..... the fact that Foursquare — once one of New York’s hottest startups — is raising another financing round at a lower valuation than its previous one is significant. Down rounds tend to show both a more conservative interest in the company’s core business, and potentially slowing growth for the startup.

Foursquare, essentially, has to find a new way to impress investors with strong growth — which requires some rejiggering.

........ This isn’t the first “down round” for Foursquare. The team raised capital at a reported $650 million valuation in 2013, beneath the $760 million price tag it had in 2012. In total, the company has raised $162 million in venture financing and debt. ...... For the most part, the split appears to have been unsuccessful. ...... its Pinpoint mobile advertising service ...... it has more than 55 million people registered for its service, with more than 2 million businesses claiming locations. It has more than 170 employees based in New York, San Francisco and London ...... If it wants to spin up the data side of its business into a full-fledged empire, it’s going to take cash to craft sales teams, build products and, yes, pave runway enough to get it flying. ....... over 40% of its total revenue comes from powering other platforms’ location services. ...... Foursquare’s data contributing to the Bing platform’s location and context layers on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. ...... any company that wants to translate GPS coordinates into an actual venue could pay Foursquare for its data. ...... Foursquare’s data could power hyperlocal advertising or marketing pointing to businesses just a few feet away. Search results, news feeds, and more could be personalized through an understanding of location. ....... As Foursquare spent its time splitting its app in two, other social networks replaced Foursquare, by making it easier to share what you’re doing in the moment. Foursquare originally powered Instagram’s location engine, but Facebook eventually made the shift to handling that itself, with locations essentially ending up a feature — not a separate application. It also removed its playful Mayor feature, and later had to re-add it to appease its user base in June this year. .......

All this distills down to a missed opportunity for Foursquare, which found itself experimenting with new kinds of social networking tools while new networks slowly chipped away at its user base. While the company was certainly experimenting, it apparently was not enough as the app slowly lost popularity. So, inevitably, Foursquare had to find a new way to show the company is valuable and get financing to grow — even if it has to shave off its valuation in the process.

Former FourSquare COO Evan Cohen Checks Into Lyft As New Director Of East Coast Operations

Cohen left his position as chief operations officer at Foursquare in June of 2014. He was one of a number of executives to exit the company over the past year and a half and did so shortly after Foursquare split its product asunder and launched the check-in app Swarm. ...... Cohen brings more than 20 years of operations experience to Lyft, according to a company blog post out today. He was the VP of strategy and operations for the social networking site Bebo (and then AOL after the acquisition) prior to his position at Foursquare. ...... Lyft recently announced it had a projected $1 billion gross run rate and said it was growing by 20 percent month-over-month – including a reported “triple market share” growth in New York City.

Foursquare dives deeper into data with new ad platform

When Foursquare decided to split its apps a year ago, followers of the location-based service scratched their collective heads. ...... A year later, with revenue growing at triple-digit growth, the privately held company knows it made the "absolutely right decision," Crowley says. ...... The split was necessitated by Pilgrim, technology introduced in August 2013 that makes it possible to "check-in" to a location without taking a smartphone out of one's pocket. The functionality was made possible when 6-year-old Foursquare passed 6 billion check-ins, allowing Foursquare software to determine the exact shapes of more than 60 million venues. ...... Pinpoint, a social-advertising platform unfurled in April 2015, took things even more forward. The platform combines Foursquare's location-intelligence technology tracking 7 billion check-ins and 55 million customers with GPS information from apps and publishers to sketch an accurate digital portrait of consumer behavior — from how often they frequent a store to affinity for certain brands. Samsung, Coors, AT&T, Jaquar Land Rover and FedEx are among Foursquare's business partners. ..... Pinpoint is available through both of Foursquare's apps, as well as 100 million other mobile users in the U.S. with non-Foursquare apps. ....... "Foursquare was ahead of its time (with location-based services), but Yelp and others came along and stole its thunder," says Hyoun Park, chief research officer at Blue Hill Research. "It has found a new niche with the combination of location and data analytics." ...... Foursquare used such an approach to accurately predict initial sales of iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, as well as revenue from Black Friday and all-day breakfast sales at a select McDonald's.

FourSquare: What Has Become Of You

English: Dennis Crowley in Foursquare's New York office, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

English: Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of the social networking site Foursquare, delivering a briefing on "How Companies and Small Business are Using Social Media and Mobile Platforms to Bolster Business". (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I just read about FourSquare yesterday after a long gap. It popped up somewhere because it seems to have had a major haircut. Dennis The Person was not exactly known for haircuts. It is having to raise money at a seriously lower valuation, and it is even seeking to sell itself. It did not have to be this way. At one point it refused to be sold at a billion. I believe Yahoo came knocking.

Location is almost as central to the mobile lifestyle as the search box was to the web when it emerged. At some point I guess FourSquare stopped growing. Granted location has become much more crowded. But there is something to be said of the first mover advantage.

Location is multi-dimensional. FourSquare has hardly gone into the more interesting dimensions. Hardly.

I never have doubted Dennis Crowley was by and large the dominant person behind the idea. He is more the guy who discovered the location space. Naveen was a sidekick. And I have actually spent more in person time with Dennis than Naveen (primarily one long dinner). I have spent more in person time with Crowley's now wife than Naveen. She and I both moved to NYC from the same state! Believe it or not. I guess the Indian thing can be stretched a little too much. One thing that struck me a few years after I moved to NYC was, I was not meeting swarms of Indians I expected to meet. I guess I was going to events strictly following my interests, as opposed to going to Indian evens, and so I was only meeting a few here and there.

Dennis is this charismatic, visionary guy. The cheerleader who gets the big picture. The glue who keeps the team together. The face that the media can hang onto. As in, he does not mind attention. He does not crave it, but he does not mind it. He has that down to earth thing down. Almost like a suave politician.

FourSquare was supposed to put New York City on the map. The tech map.

I am on record at this blog saying Naveen parting ways with FourSquare was a mistake. Not because he was equal to Dennis in contribution, I never thought that. But it's a DNA thing. Sometimes later round VCs can mess up a bit. You don't mess something up just because it's delicate. DNA is delicate. Don't put your fork to it.

You can argue it's the market, it's not Dennis, it's not FourSquare. But the market always swings. Always. We all know that.

FourSquare needs to add a layer to the location space. And rejuvenate itself. I don't know why, but I believe I could help. The new layer has to feel like a new dimension, a dimension that none of the copycats have gone into.

Related articles

• Former FourSquare COO Evan Cohen Checks Into Lyft As New Director Of East Coast Operations
• Facebook 'Professional Services' Takes on Yelp
• Facebook is making it easier to find nearby events
• How to build a local sales machine with Foursquare's David Greenberger

David Rose's Unicorn

I've found my first unicorn...in Hawaii! pic.twitter.com/OLiSgzgfAc

— David S. Rose (@davidsrose) November 5, 2015

@davidsrose @davidhornik I emailed you one on 10/23, you did not respond.

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) November 6, 2015

@Jason I'd like to become a @sequoia Scout, https://t.co/P5RPigtt7D can you please clue me in? Thx. https://t.co/bVgcUHYDPR

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) November 14, 2015

Giant Tech Companies Should Give Money To Individuals And Local Governments

Silicon Valley (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Big tech companies like Google should pay money to individuals whose data they cash on, and to governments in whose jurisdictions they make money in. It should be sane amounts and sane percentages, but it can't be zero.

Empire of the geeks

Silicon Valley should be celebrated. But its insularity risks a backlash .... THE English have Silicon Fen and Silicon Roundabout, the Scots have Silicon Glen. Berlin boasts Silicon Allee, New York Silicon Alley. But the brain of the tech world is the ecosystem in and around San Francisco. ...... Airbnb, a seven-year-old firm that helps people turn their homes into hotels, operates in 34,000 towns and cities around the world. ..... American capitalism has a new hub in the west. Wall Street used to be the place to seek fortunes and make deals; now it is increasingly the Valley.

The area’s tech companies are worth over $3 trillion

...... The enormous, disruptive creativity of Silicon Valley is unlike anything since the genius of the great 19th-century inventors. Its triumph is to be celebrated. ....... insularity. The geeks live in a bubble that seals off their empire from the world they are doing so much to change. ..... Many denizens of the Valley believe that tech is the solution to all ills and that government is just an annoyance that still lacks an algorithm.

Silicon rally

Related articles

• How New York really compares with Silicon Valley
• Independent Tech Coding Schools Are Helping Silicon Valley With Its Race Problem
• The On-demand Economy Takes Workers for a Ride
• San Francisco Supervisors balk at harder limits for Airbnb
• The Confessions of a San Francisco Lefty: The city's devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain - its famed progressive politics.

Hello

Happy 4th

Video 1
Video 2
Video 3

Video 4
Video 5
Video 6

Photo Album

Hyperloops And Self Driving Cars

They don't stand at cross purposes. Hyperloops are for long distances, and self driving cars are inside the city transportation, so you need neither drivers nor parking space. The two compliment each other.

With the Hyperloop, you skip that whole thing about building roads. They seem to need such little land, that maybe you don't even need to do land acquisition.

So you take 45 minutes to go from LA to NYC, and then you hop out and get into a self driving car, and it takes another 45 minutes to get to your home in The Bronx. The Hyperloop is going to make the self driving car look antique.

Related articles

• Elon Musk's Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secured in California
• Mosquito, shoebox, and an ingenious apartment design
• This Chelsea Parking Garage Can Be Your "Serene" New Home For $9 Million
• Enter SpaceX's Hyperloop pod design contest for fame, glory, bragging rights
• SpaceX Wants To See Your Hyperloop Pod Design Ideas
• Hyperloop Dreams May Become Concrete
• Tesla's Ultra-Speed Transportation System 'Hyperloop' Could Offer 700 mph Rides for Free!

Times Square

Photo Album 1
Photo Album 2
Photo Album 3