By Gary Sharma 1/28 8:30am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

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Best Tech Events This Week (Lemonade Heroes Yacht Party, DreamIt Health Road Show, Decoded Fashion Hackathon, Startup City, Digital Dumbo, Brooklyn Tech Meetup)

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day to all ye community managers out there! You guys ‘n gals are on the front lines engaging with customers every day, putting out fires, making your customers smile, fostering conversation. Community is important and you guys are making it happen. Stay awesome! To celebrate, bitly is organizing a breakfast this Friday and later this month is the Community Manager UNconference.

My buddy Eyal and the good folks at WIN are organizing a must-attend conference later this month on February 21: Funding the Best in Global Innovation. Read More

By Gary Sharma 11/26/12 9:30am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

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Best Tech Events This Week (Mashable Media Summit, BI Ignition, Dwolla Derby Jackpot Party, Sanitation Hackathon, TechDrinkup)

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

A couple of months ago, while attending the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to chat with a ton of upcoming startups, and I noticed a surprisingly higher-than-usual number of enterprise-focused companies. Yesterday Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson wrote an interesting post highlighting how the consumer web might be entering a stage of maturation as the action shifts from the desktop to mobile, where it’s becoming increasingly harder to reach scale. 500 Startups’ Dave McClure has an excellent rebuttal post on the topic. Read More

By Gary Sharma 7/23/12 11:15am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

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Best Tech Events This Week (Smash Summit, DreamIt Tech Olympics, Social Retail Summit, Queens Tech Meetup, Digital Dumbo, Fashion 2.0)

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

So you all probably know about the High Line. But have you heard about the LowLine? Cofounders Dan Barasch and James Ramsey are aiming to convert an abandoned trolley terminal beneath Delancey Street into an extraordinary subterranean public park. That’s right–it’s an economic revitalization opportunity.

But it’s more than that. It also represents cutting-edge design and a new generation of green technology and  lies at the heart of a broader global discussion about the potential of remnant urban infrastructure and the need for cities to reinvent the meaning of space–above and below ground.

So go check it out, get involved and if you’re living it up in the Hamptons these days, make it out to their Cocktail Fundraiser at Water Mill on August 4, organized by Mo Koyfman of Spark Capital and others.

Don’t forget to sign the Declaration of Internet Freedom, either–that is, if you haven’t already done so. It’s being signed by all of us folks who believe that a free and open Internet can bring about a better world!

And now let’s see whats going down in the Alley this week… Read More

By Gary Sharma 5/29/12 9:00am

Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!

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Best Tech Events This Week (Entrepreneurs Roundtable, Digital Dumbo dd:Impact, BMWi Future Mobility, Women 2.0 Founder Friday)

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and a chance to catch your breath after all the craziness of the past few weeks!

In case you missed it, here are my highlights blog posts for Internet Week (nerd proms, rooftop parties, Will Arnett DJ’ing, Michael Stipe sightings) and The Webby Awards (Steve Jobs tribute, Richard Dreyfuss, Bjork, Patton Oswalt, cat memes).

The Annual User Experience Awards #UXAwards is coming up soon on June 12. It’ll showcase great user experience in digital products and services. An all-star jury including Union Square Ventures, Google, AOL, Razorfish, Huffington Post, Creative Good, UPA and IXDA and followed by a cocktail reception. Get your tickets now.

And now let’s see whats going down in the world of Silicon Alley tech this week… Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 4/04/12 3:41pm

Office Space

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Has Digital Dumbo Reached Maximum Capacity? Techies Drive Down Vacancy Rates for Office Space

At an industry breakfast yesterday, the commercial real estate brokers at Cushman & Wakefield announced that New York City has reached a tipping point: For the first time since 1999, the information and media sector (including technology) beat out financial services terms of office leasing.

In the first quarter of 2012, information and media accounted for 27.8 percent of office leasing by square footage, compared to the financial sector’s 26.3 percent. “New York is not just a financial town anymore,” Cushman’s managing director Ken McCarthy told the Real Deal.

You don’t have to tell Dumbo. Yesterday, the Brooklyn Paper reported that commercial vacancy rates in the neighborhood are down to 2 percent, prompting city planners to try to make Downtown more appealing to Brooklyn’s creative class. “Everyone in the tech industry wants to be in DUMBO,” said the paper. And here we thought the ideal spot was spitting distance from Union Square Ventures. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 11/09/11 3:56pm

Digital Dumbo

(Two Trees)

Oh So Digital! Web Dev Shops Flock to Dumbo

Dumbo—the quasi-acronym for “Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass”—is the former manufacturing neighborhood in Brooklyn that’s recently taken on the nickname “Silicon Beach,” and it continues to rack up digital cred. Despite slim pickings for good restaurants and coffee shops, the sleepy neighborhood is looking more and more like a sliver of the Bay Area nestled within the better borough. Trailblazers Etsy, Huge LLC and Wireless Generation have expanded their leases and new tenants are signing on, including Armchair Studio, LLC, a graphic design, communications and computer programming company and Type/Code LLC, an interaction design and development company.  Read More

By Gary Sharma 10/24/11 6:00am

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Goooood Morning, Silicon Alley! Gary Sharma’s Picks for the Week of Oct. 24: Dress Like Gary For Halloween Edition

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (a.k.a. “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder of GarysGuide, mentor at ER Accelerator and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Spoiler Alert!
Walter Isaacson’s long-awaited bio about Steve Jobs comes out today. But if I know u folks well, y’all just want a quick ‘n dirty review to be able to hold ur own in any water cooler conversation this week, no? So here goes … (deep breath) … “Jobs wanted to wage thermonuclear war on Android, was obsessed with Autobiography Of A Yogi (read it every year, only book on his iPad), almost licensed Mac OS to Compaq (but had second thoughts about giving away the ‘crown jewels’), was deeply influenced by Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, wanted to revolutionize the textbook industry next, thought he had finally cracked what an Apple television would be like, was 50-50 on whether God exists and hated on-off power switches.” Phewwww. There u have it. You’re welcome.

The ‘Gary’ Halloween Costume
So yeah, Halloween is right around the corner and u know what means … a whole buncha tech+Halloween flavored shindigs all over town. Now I know u folks are busy figuring out ur perfect outfit–maybe dressing up as ur favorite startup founder or VC or as a Tech Bubble or a Signed Termsheet or ur favorite Social Networking App or a Fail Whale or an Angry Bird or a Siri-enabled iPhone or whatever. But here’s the dealio … I better not catch u dressed up in a black suit, white shirt & red tie with a giant ‘fro and 70s style mutton chop sideburns, ‘k? Oh, who am I kidding? No one is pimping for the ‘Gary’ Halloween costume to take off this year more than me!

Deals & Discounts
As always, a bunch of tasty deals and discounts for my peeps including classes at GA, the Raise Cache fashion extravaganza, Silicon Valley Human Rights conf, Dave McClure’s Warm Gun conf and more.

And now, lets journey into the heart of the Silicon Alley beast to see whats creakin’ this week… Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 5/18/11 3:22pm

The Start-Up Rundown

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Start-Up News: Disrupt, the Rapture and a Few Good Launches

This week in New York tech news and associated items:

DISRUPT APPROACHETH. The TechCrunch mega-conference starts with a hackathon at Pier 94 on May 21, which anyone who has walked through Times Square in the last three days knows is the Rapture. Actual “conference” conference starts Monday and ends with an afterparty Wednesday. Here’s the agenda. Lots of NYC celebs–Arianna, Moot, Kevin Ryan, Fred Wilson, Kickstarter, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc., plus Californians Ron Conway, Paul Graham, Ashton, Sequoia Capital–doing fireside chats and things. Read More