naveen: the last pay phone. all across downtown, all day and night, i saw people waiting around in line to use the pay phones on various street corners. i think somehow i’d trained my mind to ignore them, because before yesterday, i wouldn’t have been able to tell you where the last pay phone i saw was, let alone whether one worked. i seem to remember always keeping around a quarter in a bag or a jacket somewhere in case of an emergency where i found myself stranded and i had to call home. (it still takes 25¢ to make a call, right?*) standing there on the corner last night, looking at this girl on the phone, blinded by the high beams of the truck behind us, i couldn’t help but smile. here are two technologies supposedly on their way out (landlines and fossil fuel), but when all the “new” stuff can’t support us, we’re back to square one. what will happen in a future where both are truly extinct, instead of just endangered? * and, omg, remember the pay phones in ‘the matrix’?! As someone who used a pay phone many times over the past few days (its $2.00/minute for calls outside of NYC, by the way), I can relate, and felt the same sense of strangeness. When the lady at the Bowery Hotel kindly told me to shove off and find a pay phone, I stared back with a blank look of confusion. Now, I can actually SEE the booths as I walk through the streets, but as quickly as I became aware of their existence, now that my iPhone has batteries and service again they’ll blend back into the landscape of New York, useful no more. Strange how that works.
Pop-upView Separately

naveen:

the last pay phone.

all across downtown, all day and night, i saw people waiting around in line to use the pay phones on various street corners. i think somehow i’d trained my mind to ignore them, because before yesterday, i wouldn’t have been able to tell you where the last pay phone i saw was, let alone whether one worked. i seem to remember always keeping around a quarter in a bag or a jacket somewhere in case of an emergency where i found myself stranded and i had to call home. (it still takes 25¢ to make a call, right?*)

standing there on the corner last night, looking at this girl on the phone, blinded by the high beams of the truck behind us, i couldn’t help but smile. here are two technologies supposedly on their way out (landlines and fossil fuel), but when all the “new” stuff can’t support us, we’re back to square one. what will happen in a future where both are truly extinct, instead of just endangered?

* and, omg, remember the pay phones in ‘the matrix’?!

As someone who used a pay phone many times over the past few days (its $2.00/minute for calls outside of NYC, by the way), I can relate, and felt the same sense of strangeness. When the lady at the Bowery Hotel kindly told me to shove off and find a pay phone, I stared back with a blank look of confusion. Now, I can actually SEE the booths as I walk through the streets, but as quickly as I became aware of their existence, now that my iPhone has batteries and service again they’ll blend back into the landscape of New York, useful no more. Strange how that works.

Chicago—a city that is brooding, practical and reluctantly beautiful; Los Angeles—a city that views creativity as a birthright, is immensely vast, decidedly impractical and equally messy and marvelous; and New York—a city of paradoxes, hulking but chock full of intimate corners, timeless but achingly current, polished but decaying, worldly yet oddly provincial, all crashing together in perfect cacophony (or is it harmony?).
From the History page on Intelligentsia Coffee’s website.

Tech Startup Pizza Night

7pm on Monday, December 19th @ Olio (3 Greenwich Ave, New York, NY)

I don’t go to enough meetups, and the startup I run isn’t a tech company, but still, love these nights and always meet super interesting people. My buddies Emil and Gabriel are setting it up, plenty of pizza and conversation. They did this event last month and it sounded like a huge success, so hopefully we get a repeat on that one.

They’re trying out a “theme” for these nights now (this one is “Meet Your Designer”), so we’ll see how it goes. As a founder with very little design talent on our side, it could be extremely valuable for me if some designers showed up…but it might be better to keep things general in the future.

Taxi Medallions

This little piece of tin is now selling for $1M. On NPR this morning they had a story about a cab driver who had purchased a taxi medallion—which gives you the right to pick up fares and drive a proper taxi in New York City—for $215,000 in 2003. He says he can resell it today for $700,000, and two medallions just went for a cool million each. They analysed the returns since 1980, and they were nearly 1000%. As a reference, gold has appreciated only 181% in the same period. That’s crazy. There’s a publicly-traded company called Medallion Financial that loans money to cabbies for these medallions. That’s a tricky business, because most cab drivers are immigrants with no credit history, not-so-great income, and likely without citizenship. So you’ve got risky loans backed by an asset that is assumed to keep appreciating wildly without fail. Sound familiar?

I was thinking about this in the context of business in general, and how attractive these little “no-fail” get-rich niches are (in fact, Medallion Financial’s motto is “from niches to riches”). People get infatuated with this sort of instrument…it’s hard not to. You look at how things are going, the fact that the only time medallion prices went down was after 9/11, and you get excited. It’s the same with any “sure thing” prospect…when you think you can’t lose, you forget about the downside, which is dangerous not only because you’re not calculating risk properly, but you’re not seeing the whole picture, which will screw with anyone’s decision-making process, no matter what. And of course optimism is necessary to do great things, but there’s a difference between optimism and delusion. The latter got us where we are right now, and will be the catalyst for the next bubble/crash cycle as well.

Red Hook - Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition

This space down at the southern tip of Red Hook is spectacular. It’s a little community of artists’ studios, industrial parks (printing houses and design shops), retail (Fairway Market) and apartments. It sits right on the water, looks directly out to the Statue of Liberty, and is generally awesome. To be an “artist” there would be amazing, all of the west-facing studios open up to the water with old stable doors. In Manhattan I forget about these types of self-contained communities, which go way beyond a neighborhood or simple building…they really help to engender a togetherness you often miss in the claustrophobic streets of Manhattan. If I had the money, I would have rented one of the studios right then, just to have a little place to get work done and escape the city. You can even take the water taxi directly to the piers off the back of the development. Really, really cool. 

BWAC

The Blended Model

I love the Saturdays Surf NYC shop, even though I’ve only visited once. They’ve done an incredible job of transitioning their superior taste and curated community into the destination for surfers in NYC, and more than that, they’ve created a real brand around it. This mixed model of community, retail, brand and tastemaker is very interesting. I suspect Partners & Spade is sort of after this same thing (though with advertising and fashion, not surfing), but I don’t know enough about them…either way, it seems to be an underserved trend. Leveraging the physical location into one-part store, one-part hangout, one-part community and one-part brand advertisement is quite brilliant, and it’s so well executed. I think more small brands should employ this model, starting small and local, and building out from there, using the people and places and events around them to build up both a following and credibility. If your shop sells boards, sell them the best boards, but also sell your own line of surfwear, and then go do a collaboration with a big brand (J.Crew) whose customers like to pretend they surf. If you sell surfing gear, host premiers for surf movies, meetups, and outings. I imagine they do all that, and if they don’t they should. Build a brand around the activities you serve and enhance, and go from there. It doesn’t hurt to have a kickass design aesthetic too.

The Chef’s Table

I had dinner at my favorite restaurant in New York on Saturday, and was sat at my favorite seat in the house: the Chef’s Table. I hadn’t been to Joseph Leonard in several months, and while the scene had gone considerably downhill since we moved away from our old apartment across the street, it still felt like home. But only once we sat down, all the way in the back squeezed against a part bar/part order-up area, facing the impossibly small kitchen. We (my girlfriend and I) both eased a sigh of comfort as we sat down because of what was going on in front of us: we were given access to the back-end, to the guts.

That’s where the connection is for me, in the guts of a product or service. The simple act of opening that up is so incredibly trust-building, it’s hard to not fall in love with whatever the end product may be. It’s not necessarily the prettiest composition, but that’s the point. It’s authentic, it’s chefs yelling at cooks yelling at waiters yelling at busboys. It’s the process of making things so delicious you look on in awe at the efficiency and craft of these crazed cooks. It’s not only compelling, it’s comforting. Here is a business so confident in its product, they WANT you to see how it’s made. Every business should strive to achieve this level of connection with its customers. Because it’s impossible not to fall in love with a product that way.

The wired underground project will begin on Tuesday at four stations in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where subscribers to the AT&T and T-Mobile networks will be able to talk away on station platforms, transportation officials said.  The pilot program will introduce cellphone reception to the C-E platforms at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, and three other stations along West 14th Street: the A, C, E and L platforms at Eighth Avenue; the F, M and L platforms at Avenue of the Americas; and the Seventh Avenue station that serves the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines. [NY Times] Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.
View Separately

The wired underground project will begin on Tuesday at four stations in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where subscribers to the AT&T and T-Mobile networks will be able to talk away on station platforms, transportation officials said. 

The pilot program will introduce cellphone reception to the C-E platforms at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, and three other stations along West 14th Street: the A, C, E and L platforms at Eighth Avenue; the F, M and L platforms at Avenue of the Americas; and the Seventh Avenue station that serves the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines. [NY Times]

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

Update - Rent the Runway Addresses Scaling Issue

Well it looks like Rent the Runway is actually doing more than I gave them credit for with regard to the scaling issue I was whining about a few days ago. They’ve hired a pretty heavy-hitting engineer from Google to run Engineering for them, and he seems genuinely excited to tackle the very obvious scaling problem RTR is currently undergoing. He definitely addresses that the operations side of things is really the difference between this company being a small startup forever and becoming a “billion dollar business.” Looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Oh, he was on We Are NY Tech today.

This is the page you’re brought to when you click “menu” on Scarpetta’s Yelp listing. It’s a single menu item, with ingredients and recipes listed. How is this helpful? This view, by the way, is in-browser…on my iPhone, it’s impossible to read. Once you eventually FIND the menu button, its a PDF, which is all over the place size-wise, opens a new window, and is buggy. How is this a good experience? It says the site was built by “Loft2Creative,” who seem to have a whole bunch of clients for some reason. I’ve never found a restaurant website that I like. It usually begins auto-playing some awful muzak, has some sort of confusing flash intro, a carousel of food item images, and uber-small font on the navigation, which is usually placed in the most illogical location possible. Why are restaurants paying these mini-agencies so much money to come up with such a crappy design? Don’t they know what 99% of their visitors are wanting out of their site? Menu, and possibly location/contact info. They can get the latter from Yelp, but the menu issue still hasn’t been solved. MenuPages is still light years away from being useful, or at least integrated into enough services. Why can’t the restaurant retain that visitor by making their site useful? We need a OnePager App for restaurants, badly. I’m not sure why that doesn’t exist yet. Maybe it does, but if so, it’s definitely not being used enough. There just needs to be a quick and dirty way to hack together (without any programming experience) a site that has a menu—with a slick mobile interface—a location, a little branding, and sure, some photos to make the owner feel like the “ambience” is properly conveyed. That’s probably the problem with all these sites, is that the owner gets in his/her own way by wanting to exude the “philosophical qualities” of their establishment…which is always a fast-lane to a crappy UX. I ended up eating at Cookshop last night because we could actually read the menu slightly easier than Scarpetta, so it’s not just aesthetics that are a factor here, this is real business.
Pop-upView Separately

This is the page you’re brought to when you click “menu” on Scarpetta’s Yelp listing. It’s a single menu item, with ingredients and recipes listed. How is this helpful? This view, by the way, is in-browser…on my iPhone, it’s impossible to read. Once you eventually FIND the menu button, its a PDF, which is all over the place size-wise, opens a new window, and is buggy. How is this a good experience? It says the site was built by “Loft2Creative,” who seem to have a whole bunch of clients for some reason.

I’ve never found a restaurant website that I like. It usually begins auto-playing some awful muzak, has some sort of confusing flash intro, a carousel of food item images, and uber-small font on the navigation, which is usually placed in the most illogical location possible. Why are restaurants paying these mini-agencies so much money to come up with such a crappy design? Don’t they know what 99% of their visitors are wanting out of their site? Menu, and possibly location/contact info. They can get the latter from Yelp, but the menu issue still hasn’t been solved. MenuPages is still light years away from being useful, or at least integrated into enough services. Why can’t the restaurant retain that visitor by making their site useful?

We need a OnePager App for restaurants, badly. I’m not sure why that doesn’t exist yet. Maybe it does, but if so, it’s definitely not being used enough. There just needs to be a quick and dirty way to hack together (without any programming experience) a site that has a menu—with a slick mobile interface—a location, a little branding, and sure, some photos to make the owner feel like the “ambience” is properly conveyed. That’s probably the problem with all these sites, is that the owner gets in his/her own way by wanting to exude the “philosophical qualities” of their establishment…which is always a fast-lane to a crappy UX. I ended up eating at Cookshop last night because we could actually read the menu slightly easier than Scarpetta, so it’s not just aesthetics that are a factor here, this is real business.

Couldn’t be more proud of Timo Weiland, it was absolutely surreal watching those fashion types fall all over themselves with every piece that walked itself down the runway. It’s been a lesson in the art of the Hustle watching Timo go from investment banker to fashion mini-mogul in under 3 years. His determination led to a perfect business/design partner (in Alan Eckstein, who is awesome), unbelievable taste, development, attitude, hard work, and now, despite extreme odds: SUCCESS.
Pop-upView Separately

Couldn’t be more proud of Timo Weiland, it was absolutely surreal watching those fashion types fall all over themselves with every piece that walked itself down the runway. It’s been a lesson in the art of the Hustle watching Timo go from investment banker to fashion mini-mogul in under 3 years. His determination led to a perfect business/design partner (in Alan Eckstein, who is awesome), unbelievable taste, development, attitude, hard work, and now, despite extreme odds: SUCCESS.