The Bigness Of New York City

New York City is big, like really big. Take the metro region into account, and it is perhaps the biggest city in the world.

Philadelphia was the first big American city I lived in for a few months. I was with a dot com. I would walk to work every morning, a 40 minute walk from U Penn near where I lived, near the movie theater. When I hit downtown, I'd look up. The buildings looked so mesmerizingly tall.

I was in Philadelphia for an event in January for a few hours. The city felt like a small town.

New York City
26 Best Cities
World FoodSpotting Day 2011: January 15: Photos

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Nothing Without You

(Via Kavisolo)

Tech Consulting With Style

@paloaltotechcom Saw your ad, would like to help remotely.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyParamendra Bhagat
paramendra

@paramendra do u have any samples of your work. We are seriously considering working with u on what will likely be a life changing thingless than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyPaloAltoTechCompany
paloaltotechcom

The Mind Of An Entrepreneur

Bon Iver: Calgary

(Via Soraya Darabi)

Rocky Agrawal's Take On GroupOn

Image via CrunchBaseRocky's premise that the whole daily deals business is crap, well, I don't buy into that. I am at the other end of the spectrum on that thinking. I think they are onto something cutting edge.

What Fascinates Me About GroupOn
My Web Diagram

Unless Google would be willing to employ thousands of salespeople, Google and others can not compete with GroupOn, but in employing those salespeople Google will have veered from its core so far that that stretch might end up hurting its core businesses. Google is better off doing smart cars and wind farms in the vast oceans and monorails.

Android's Tablet Share

Image via CrunchBaseAndroid used to be in sorry shape while the iPhone was raging, but there were people, myself included, who thought it was only a matter of time. And now the two platforms are neck and neck, Android might even have a lead, a growing lead.

Music Places

Recently I have taken to listening to a whole bunch of music on Tumblr.

The Music Tag On Tumblr

Some great places to go for music are these, in no particular order.

HypeMachine
Last.fm
Pandora
World Singles Chart
Shuffler
Soundtracking
Spotify
ViddyJam
Song Of The Day
SoundCloud

Two Hall of Famers would be Soraya Darabi and Fred Wilson, people who stand out in the NY tech ecosystem regardless, but I don't think that is accidental, great thinking in tech seems to go hand in hand with voracious consumption of good music. So listen: listen. They have great taste. They are both addicted to music.

Me: Top Internet Week Influencer?

Top #iwny influencers >> @OurManinSH @nwjerseyliz @paramendra @ramonray @cometgonegreen http://bit.ly/mfiujgless than a minute ago via Seesmic Favorite Retweet ReplySynthesio
Synthesio

Wow! RT @Synthesio: Top #iwny influencers >> @OurManinSH @nwjerseyliz @paramendra @ramonray @cometgonegreen http://bit.ly/mfiujgless than a minute ago via Echofon Favorite Retweet ReplyHaley Gonella
cometgonegreen

Internet Week: Final Day: June 13
Robin Hood: My German Nickname

Path + Instagram + Color

Image by jdlasica via FlickrMark Zuckerberg is obviously the man to watch. The guy wants nothing less than to own the decade. I am not sure the decade can be owned by any one person, but I have no doubts he will be one of the people who will.

TechCrunch: Exposed: Facebook’s Secret iPhone Photo Sharing App (Which Looks Amazing): Path meets Instagram meets Color meets (Path’s new side project) With — with a few cool twists. And obviously, it’s built entirely on top of Facebook’s massive social graph.

Behold: Facebook’s Secret Photo Sharing App Facebook, which is by far the largest photo service on the Internet with close to 100 billion photos, to make their own dedicated photo app. ..... Facebook’s focus on mobile photos going forward is very clear. ..... Given their talk of commitment to HTML5, Facebook likely wants to make an app that is as portable as possible. That is, while it may be built first for iOS, it can easily be ported to Android and other platforms with the HTML5 elements in place. ........ Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was once approached by Mark Zuckerberg about working at Facebook way back in 2004 ...... Systrom declined the invitation, and now Zuckerberg is a Instagram user ....... the location elements, likes and comments, multi-picture mode, filters, multi-user albums, face-tagging, and more

What's Up With Pictures?

This is Mark Zuckerberg showing Bill Gates tendencies.

Bloomberg On Immigration

Image via WikipediaI am a living martyr to the cause. The immigration laws in this country are so fucked up, it's not even funny. We might as well bring back Jim Crow to take race relations to new Tea Party heights.

Ugh, Immigration (4)

I understand racism. I understand the need to keep people away from your dinner table. But that is not what is going on. The current immigration laws in this country are designed to keep food away from the American tables.

Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC

For the past few years I have been flapping my wings on the beach like one of those birds that became victims to some oil spill while lesser tech entrepreneurs have swam into the ocean depths, flown into the sky. How much window shopping can you do? I wear the glorious title of tech consultant.

Independent For Bloomberg

The immigration bureaucracy in this country moves at Third World speeds. They had me disappear the precise day the national primary ended in 2008. They feared I might miss the message. Fuck the machine. We are the machine now. My guy is in the White House. When they released me six months later, they gave me a court date in Chicago. They still feared I might miss the message. A change of venue for something like that is automatic, but they would not grant me that. In June 2009 they gave me a court date for June 2011. That too has been postponed. If they give me a new court date for 2013, I am going to think there is a Tea Party conspiracy going on.

Apple Going After Google's Cloud? Facebook Going After Apple With HTML5

Image via CrunchBaseJust yesterday I was reading this post and found myself shaking my head.

TechCrunch: “It Just Works.”: Apple is now going all-in with their cloud strategy. But they’re not doing it by simply tacking on cloud storage to their existing arsenal of products. They’re attempting to redefine what the “cloud” is..... With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic. ....... Amazon, has essentially turned it into one giant server/hard drive that anyone can use for a fee ...... Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works. ...... You’re working on a document in Pages on your iPad, you move over to Pages on your Mac, and there it is. It even remembers where you were last editing. You download a song to your iPhone, you pick up your iPad, there it is. ....... With iPad/iPhone and now OS X Lion, you don’t save documents anymore. They save automatically — but an easier way to think about it is that they just exist, as is, in realtime on all your devices. ....... Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there. ...... Chrome OS is perhaps the closest thing to Apple’s iCloud vision. When you boot up a Chromebook and enter your password, everything appears. Again, like magic. ...... this is the point where we may really start to see some truly fundamental differences between Google and Apple after the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. ........ Apple has rethought and rewritten their apps — including their desktop apps — from the ground up to be woven with iCloud fabric that a user won’t see. ..... And Apple doesn’t believe that Google can match them even if they wanted to because they don’t have complete control of their ecosystem in the same way that Apple does. ...... Apple is now more clearly than ever betting that will not be web software, but native software backed invisibly by the web.

Steve Jobs is a living legend, and rightly so. At one point I compared him to Mozart, although it was an impulsive move on my part, I would not do it again. But I have some fundamental philosophical differences with the guy. I am not big on native software and that is why I think HTML5 is such good news.