Before we kick in a new year of post, I want to take a quick look back at things I covered on 2011 as I still believe many of those represent important trends and inform some of my thinking.

I kicked off the year with the usual prediction list (and closed it out with a review) and was surprised by how many of the themes I highlighted ended up making their way through other entries.

I had set a goal for myself to do a post a week and decide to create a framework that allowed me to do so efficiently. My process is to capture simple ideas in a backlog and then dig through them once a week, sometimes tying the story to a recent development. Every Friday night or Saturday, I then crank out a post that covers that top in as broad a way as I could.

I write mostly for myself, as a way to get a better sense of my own thinking on a topic and then get feedback on how wrong (or occasionally, right) I am. This allows me to refine the strategy behind Keepskor and get a better sense of where our industry is heading.

While I never set a narrative for what is being covered on TNL.net, one seems to emerge when I look at the work I produced over the last year.

An emerging New York

I kicked off the year by making a bold prediction about a re-emerging and re-invigorated New York technology scene.  A year later, I feel ever more strongly about the things I highlighted in that series of posts: New York has emerged as a major player and I suspect that, within a generation or two, New York has a chance to displace the valley as the center of the US tech industry (note that the longer view is something I articulated later in the year but has been a dominant theme on this site for a decade).

The series created quite a stir when it came out and was one of the most trafficked group of entries this year (in fact, it still gets a decent amount of traffic a year later.)

If you’re on the East coast, you no longer have to relocate south of San Francisco to make it. New York provides an environment that rivals San Francisco and has a few extra advantages I had not covered in that series. For example, being halfway between London and the Valley, New York is the perfect place to manage a business that is not solely aimed at the US.

Myth-busting in startup land

This feeling from the ground, as I started re-entering the startup world, got me in the direction of thinking about the broader trends relating to startups. I a series about startup myths, I debunked the ideas that startups are risky, expensive, idea-based, smooth rides where everyone makes money.

My reason for doing this series of post was to archive thoughts on this that I could send to people when they brought up those myths (and as someone who spend too much time on Wall St., I’ve been exposed to quite a few of those people.)

Financial Markets

Using some of the skills I did pick up on Wall St., I’ve been trying to make sense of the financial markets and get a better understanding of the overall economic picture. This first led me to analyze whether internet valuations were getting over-inflated (they weren’t.)

As internet companies started testing the IPO waters again, I checked to see if LinkedIn was overvalued and highlighted some concerns around the GroupOn offering and later in the year, I started thinking writing more about digital currency.

The Internet War

The concept of digital currency is but one of the hot flashpoint between the current world and the internet one. Over the past year, we’ve seen increased activity from hacker groups and the rise of the internet as a political philosophy. Calling for an end to apathy on the part of our industry when it comes to policy making, I tried to make the case for the creation of a new set of definitions and protocols to control the internet of the future.

This is in reaction to an increasing privatization of large parts of the web, balkanizing the open web,  as companies try to monetize their user base to return value to their investors or counter suspected threats by new entrants. Along the way, those companies are redefining identity ownership through surprising terms of service agreements.

A resurgent Microsoft

Meanwhile, another story that has made its way through my narrative has been a massive comeback: Over the last few years, Microsoft has become a symbol of technology decline. But 2011 has shown us a resurgent company, first in its agreement with Nokia, which will bear fruits in 2012; then with the bets its placing on the web as a core component of the next version of Windows; and then through the success of its revolutionary Kinect device.

Microsoft’s bet on the web as the core of Windows is a smart one. HTML5 is enjoying wider support and new technologies like WebGL are bringing the web to new levels, levels that could be matching native apps soon. I will probably write more about these trends in 2012.

Internet and TV Colliding

Another item I have covered extensively in 2011 is the merging of television and the internet. Last year, I looked at where 2010 box office winners were streaming, how available popular TV shows were, and whether there was a delay in availability.I also looked into why live TV streams were not available online, explaining how some of the missing pieces of the puzzle could fit together. This provided readers with a stronger understanding of where the market stood. At the time, the results showed that availability was getting better but still had a long way to go.

I will start revisiting a lot of this information next week to gauge how much progress has been made in making movies and TV shows available on the internet.

My interest in this as a trend is that it provides us with a better view into whether internet TV is ready for primetime as a new internet channel (Netflix getting into the content production business was a major event in that direction, opening the door for other internet companies to offer something on that third screen… and for a few players to become new gatekeepers if we are not careful.)

I suspect this collision is part of the reason we have seen the entertainment industry rally behind SOPA, as it has seen first the music and now the book industry getting impacted in radical ways as media increasingly become mobile and can be consumed on phones and tablets.

Other trends

However, I was surprised that I had not spent more time covering some other trends I’m seeing emerging.

My archives did not include any mentions of bitcoin, though I think that virtual currencies are one of the hot topics currently sitting below the surface. While I am not convinced that bitcoin is the one that will win in the future, I do believe that we will see increasing traffic in that arena soon.

I also strongly believe that a new manufacturing age is upon us. The revolution behind 3D printing, 3D scanning and more customized and micro-produced materials is something that we will see on the edge this year and probably in the mainstream by end of year or early next year. This will have a substantial impact on our economy in the long run and I will keep an eye on it.

Conclusion

While I have deliberately chosen not to focus my writing on a narrow area, it appears there are broad topics that I return to on a regular basis. The intersection of media, technology, business and politics are part of the broad trends I follow around here and generally form the core of what I write about. My friend Anil defines his own writing as being about culture and I believe that broadly, he and I write about some of the same things.

Over the next year, I will revisit a lot of the work I did in 2011 as I wanted to establish a few foundational posts from a trending standpoint. But as we become more public about Keepskor, I will also write about some of the things that led to its creation and some of the thinking behind it. As someone who spent a lot of time dealing a dual life as blogger and Wall Streeter, I haven’t really said much about what I’m working on but I’m sure that readers will be interested as it taps into some of the trends highlighted above and a few that I haven’t talked about yet.

2012 is going to be a very exciting year and I will try to have a body of work at the end of it that matches what I’ve accomplished in 2011.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011: The year that was. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The industrial age: An abbreviated history

The industrial movement initially was born out of a need to integrate several capabilities into a single streamlined model in order to gain efficiencies. Those efficiencies resulted in goods being produced on a more massive scale at a substantially smaller cost and heralded an era of widespread availability of goods to a larger segment of the population. As a result, things that had once been available to only rich people (basic things like soap, shampoo and running water) became available to the masses, improving everyone’s living standards and creating a lot of the world we live in today.

As time went on, however, the rise of the publicly traded corporation and the demand for increasing returns on investments lead to increasing consolidation into larger and larger conglomerates. In the search for improved efficiencies, those conglomerates worked hard to first figuring out how to get more out of their existing production lines. Eventually, the leadership of many of these organizations came to the conclusion that they could not improve efficiency any further on the existing model and found that the salary people who worked for them were the only portion of the system that had not been optimized.

Searching for ways to optimize salaries, large corporations moved their production overseas, where workers in less developed countries could manufacture goods at a cheaper rate than those in more developed economies. In order to effectively manage this new approach, companies had to define new approaches and methods to creating and manufacturing goods, giving rise to a new portion of the economy focused on offering services around small portion of that value chain. Eventually, a lot of manufacturing ended up in the hands of manufacturing specialists: companies that did not necessarily take part in the development of new ideas and products or in the marketing, sales, and distribution of those goods but provided an optimized way to manufacture goods.

The near death of the artisans

Prior to the industrial revolution, most goods were manufactured by artisans (or craftsmen) who focused on producing goods manually and generally offered them within a limited geographical range. Because labor was primarily manual, artisanal goods were not mass produced: their scarcity also meant that the produced goods were generally more expensive and not traditionally available to all.

With the rise of industrialization, many artisans disappeared, as their craft became automated and they were unable (or unwilling) to produce goods at ever decreasing costs and in ever increasing amounts.

Some, however, thrived by focusing on smaller and more high-end markets, in niches where goods could not be mass produced. Artisanal work increasingly got praised for its uniqueness and the thought that has gone into its design.

In more recent times, this has meant that artisanal work has been seen as more exclusive because of its scarcity. However, along the way, an interesting phenomenon happened.

The new artisans

Caught in the gap between mass produced offerings of the industrial age and one-offs presented by artisans sat a whole class of potential products that could not previously be made available to people. Those products were the kind of offerings that could appeal to a small portion of the public but may not be appealing to enough people to warrant the interest of large corporations.

At the same time, fewer large entities became interested in taking risks because doing so could potentially end up in failure, thus lowering the returns they made to their investors. This risk-wariness has allowed start-ups to thrive as smaller enterprises concerned themselves with innovating and either failed, grew large, or were gobbled up by the larger players.

Up until the end of the last century, however, most new startups focused on services or offerings like software that required low upfront capital requirements. The manufacturing and delivery of physical goods was still something that was best left to large corporations.

With the rise of contract manufacturing and increasing access to networked resources across the internet, the cost of developing, manufacturing, marketing, and delivering goods has dropped substantially, making it possible to create and distribute an increasing amounts of goods to small er and smaller markets.

The new artisan supply chain

Simplifying the traditional approach to building and selling ones, one can organize things as follows:

• Individual or team comes up with idea
• Individual or team builds and test prototype(s)
• Prototype is tested in the market to assess if there is demand for it
• If there is demand, money is raised to build final product
• Product gets manufactured
• Product gets shipped to warehouse or distributor
• Product gets sold
• Product is shipped to buyer

In this model, a large amount of money is required to manufacture and store the product. In more recent time, the concept of just-in-time manufacturing has lowered those cost but there is still some costs associated with it.

The new artisan model, however, turns the whole process on its head:

• Individual or team comes up with idea (same)
• Individual or team builds and test prototype(s) (same)
• Individual or team does pricing research to assess how much it needs to sell product for
• Prototype is shown in online video to assess if people are interested
• Kickstarter campaign is kicked off to sell product BEFORE it is manufactured
• If Kickstarter campaign is successful, product is manufactured and send directly to buyer

 NY DiY

What’s been amazing to me is that a lot of this revolution seems to be emerging out of New York. Kickstarter is based in lower Manhattan. Etsy, which provides storefront and a marketplace for craft-makers is based in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Adafruit provides inexpensive electronic components to manufacture new gadgets and is based in mid-town Manhattan. Buglabs offers a modular set of electronic components to build complex electronic goods out of a lower Manhattan space. And Makerbot industries offers inexpensive 3-D printers from a space in Brooklyn.

It appears as if the next industrial revolution infrastructure will be coming out of the most unlikely of places: New York city. Now all that is needed is for a marketplace for contract manufacturers to bid on turning prototypes into real products and the whole value chain will be completed. And that appears to be another software problem that could be solved by a New Yorker.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The New Artisans. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The rise of New York to prominence is, first and foremost, due to a series of happy accidents. While the technology world was long dominated by hardware and algorithms, the current phase (often referred to as “the social web”) is all about people.

In order to full back those assumptions, I’ve created five lenses, each with its own post:

1. Monocultures have negative impact. Polycultures take longer to create powerful organisms but inherently build ones that are more adaptable.
2. Living in a city is inherently a social experience. Living in a car-driven society isn’t.
3. Everyone poaches techies — the New York tech scene was born of those people that can’t be poached and found ways to attract like-minds.
4. Don’t look at adversity as something that can be overcome with brute force, deal with it as a normal condition and you will find innovative workarounds.
5. Businesses are ultimately about money so to continue fostering success, valley startup might do well to act a little more like New York ones if they want to build sustainable futures.

A historical setting

The New York dotcom scene of the 1990s was vibrant but ultimately flawed. Its own hubris killed it (and I should know as I was one of those people) and along with it killed the chance of New York displacing Silicon Valley as the epicenter of the technology world. A decade after its implosion, New York is being given a new chance to pick up the mantle, along with some distinct advantages this time around.

With many veterans still being part of the scene, it seems the lessons of the past have not been forgotten so the challenge to Silicon Valley’s supremacy will be substantially stronger than it has been in the past. I hope this series will give both groups chances to think about the different issues facing their own environment and work on dealing with those.

At the end of the day, if both Silicon Valley and New York were to emerge stronger than they are today, this conflict could leave the US more prepared for the next set of challenges that will push both coast to pull together and fight against the rise of cities in foreign locale to try to take the leadership away from the USA. If you are reading this, you probably have a dog in that fight and it is up to you, as well as everyone else in the field, to ensure that this competition ends up turning each location into the best it can be.

Note: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business. Please read the whole series before making snarky comments (once you have, you’re free to make those comments).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title New York to displace Silicon Valley. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

New York startups tend to be more focused on building stable businesses. If they happen to revolutionize the world, great, but it is not a pre-requisite. Valley startup want to create value by changing the world.

Business first, party later

I was sitting on the board of advisor for a technology conference a few years ago. The conference had been successful with valley people so they were considering bringing it to New York. In the first advisory meeting, which covered some of the difference between New York and the valley, someone said “here in New York, we are more focused on revenue lines.”

A discussion ensued as to why that was. What came out is that, to be cool in New York, having a startup isn’t enough. When the social metric in the city elite is largely based on commercial success (even going back to its founding days, New York has always been a largely capitalistic city, looking at the almighty dollar as an indicator of status), acceptance arises out of business success. When your internet startup is set side by side with Wall Street businesses or large corporations, you better have your story straight about how you too will soon turn into a member of the big guys club.

So New York startup tend to be very focused from the get-go on revenue models, client acquisitions, return on investment, and other things that many in the valley see as things to worry about in the future.

The concept of business viability is so deeply engrained among members of the New York tech community thatbusiness questions had to be banned at the NY Tech meetup, the monthly tech demo fest. Many have wondered why such questions were booed and the truth is that they used to dominate early meetup, turning the focus away from the original concept of demo-ing interesting new tech.

It’s a problem few have in Silicon Valley. Outside of discussions when raising funding, a lot of valley startups can go through an evolutionary track that goes from founding a company to launching a product and being acquired without having to worry about building a business (this can be reserved to the acquirer to figure out). A typical example is the response the founders of Quora, the current valley shiny object, recently gave to a question about business model (emphasis is mine):

It’s hard to plan ahead too far on the internet because things change so quickly, but there’s a good chance that advertising will end up as some component of our business. There are a lot of other options, too, but our focus as a company is on building Quora as a product, and our costs are low enough now that we can afford to delay worrying about monetization until later.

While Quora may become a huge standalone business, such statements only increases its chances of being acquired rather than becoming a long terms concern. And that’s part of the challenge for many silicon valley startups: they are built to sell, not build to run.

Takeaway: Businesses are ultimately about money so to continue fostering success, valley startup might do well to act a little more like New York ones if they want to build sustainable futures.

Update: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Silicon Valley vs. New York: Business. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

There has been a lot of writing about the talent shortage in the Valley now that large companies like Google and Facebook have gone into a talent arm race, prompting some to think that this could be the beginning of a new bubble.

New Yorkers used to talent wars

Bubble or not, the New York tech scene has been used to technical talent being poached. Because there are other dominant forces in the city, New York startups have often fought the talent wars at a monetary disadvantage. Wall Street can attract some of the most talented mathematical minds with interesting problems and extremely high salaries. The media and advertising world has been appealing to creative types and people who enjoy being close to the spotlight.

The New York tech scene was born of those people who felt that there was more to life than working for a large company, making gobs of money, or hanging out with famous people. People in the New York tech scene tend to be people that view the tech field as attractive for its own sake, a place where one can build an interesting business. So talent wars have always been part of the make-up, just another business problem to solve.

By comparison, the valley had it easy as it was seen as the place to go if you are a techie, always replinishing its engine with fresh new talent and the supply always was roughly equivalent to the demand for new talent, leaving the system mostly properly balanced.

Now that larger actors like Google and Facebook have gone into hyper-hiring, demand in the valley has been exceeding supply, reaching a level that is probably no different than the one people in the tech field in New York are used to. But for people in the valley, this is a new dynamic to adapt to; for people in the city, it’s business as usual.

There is also a virtuous circle to the rise of New York turning it into an ever more attractive place for members of the tech field. As Fred Wilson recently pointed out:

If you are a 22 year old man or woman just starting out in life, would you rather live in suburbia and work on a campus or would you rather live in Williamsburg and work in Flatiron?

So the more successful the city becomes as a tech center, the more attractive it becomes to people who want to help it become more successful as a tech center. The quality of life element is going to be an important challenge the valley will have to change if they want to survive the New York onslaught.

New York, however, will have to continue, as Fred points out, its effort to foster local talent straight in college. While it is OK to import talent from the schools along the rest of the northern corridor, other cities could try to stop that migration. It is up to New York’s academic circles to start developing the next version of Stanford locally if they want the current growth to be sustainable.

Takeaway: Everyone poaches techies — the New York tech scene was born of those people that can’t be poached and found ways to attract like-minds.

Update: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Silicon Valley vs. New York: Talent. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

In order to fully understand the concept of people at the center, you must immerse yourself in the subject. You must meet people outside of your own circle, outside of your own economic sphere, outside of your industry. And you can’t do that if you’re living in an area with a single dominant industry, commuting largely via personal car and interacting primarily, either at work or after work, with people in your own industry.

Social vs. Algorithms

Another win area for New York in the social game is that expertise in social is something that is forced on every one living in the city. Because it is a very dense environment, New York forces a natural social dance on a daily basis. The minute a New York resident steps out of his/her apartment, the social dance start, with careful silent negotiations for things like where to place yourself on the curb, to how to manage getting in and sharing seating arrangement in subways and buses. These quiet negotiations happen hundreds of times before some gets to work. As a friend of mine wryly remarked once “no wonder New Yorkers are intense; The negotiations required to just getting to the office is a almost full time job.”

So social interaction patterns get ingrained in New York just by living there and become second nature. By comparison, people in Silicon Valley tend to commute by car (no, I’m not discounting people taking the train or bus but it seems to be a minority). Some people decide to commute with friends from work or other startup but the net net is that the social interactions with total strangers and different socio-economic groups are not forced on them. So they have to go an analyze wider social patterns instead of living them, something that can be more of a challenge.

If you look at it in historic terms, the technology field was traditionally dominated by algorithms. Hardware and software solutions in the past meant that people were not as essential to success in technology. As the web became more social, cultural anthropology has become more essential. It is no wonder that none of the major new players in the tech field has come out of the Valley in the last 5 years (Flickr was born in Canada, Skype in Europe, Facebook in Boston, Twitter and Zynga in San Francisco (According to Wikipedia, SF is not part of Silicon Valley), Groupon in Chicago,  and Foursquare and bit.ly came from New York).

This is not to discount the value of algorithmic approaches. Companies that are depending on heavy maths and engineering will continue to thrive in the valley (I’m thinking of companies like Google, Netflix, and Apple, for example) but those will have to reach out to talent in the cities if they want to thrive in the social web (interestingly enough, it seems that Facebook and Google have now started to realize this as they are poaching New York startupsor expanding their physical footprint in the city in an attempt to get social DNA flowing back into their companies)

Takeaway: Living in a city is inherently a social experience. Living in a car-driven society isn’t.

Update: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Silicon Valley vs. New York: Social vs. Algorithms. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

In order to fully understand the concept of people at the center, you must immerse yourself in the subject. You must meet people outside of your own circle, outside of your own economic sphere, outside of your industry. And you can’t do that if you’re living in an area with a single dominant industry, commuting largely via personal car and interacting primarily, either at work or after work, with people in your own industry.

Monoculture vs. Polyculture

The first challenge Silicon Valley will have to overcome in order to retain its supremacy is that it will need to diversify beyond technology.

New York doesn’t have that problem because technology has never been its primary industry (and probably never will be as New York seems to abhor the ideas of a single culture or group being dominant. Sure, Wall Street has had some power in the city but so has the media space, and the fashion industry, and the horse-drawn carriage industry. But each of those industries eventually found itself confronted with some setback, eroding its power base further (in historical terms, the power of Wall Street started eroding in the 1960s, with the fight over the creation of the World Trade Center, and while it has seen ups and downs over the last 50 years, it is no longer the dominant force in New York).

The existence of multiple industries in New York has forced the New York technology field to think about building products that are attractive to people outside of the technology field. As a result, a large part of the tech field has been blindsided by the success of products like meetup, etsy, and and gilt because they were not solutions based on heavy algorithms but based on input outside of technology.

As Brady Forrest recently pointed out, one of the great think about New York is that “it’s never about technology only, it’s always tech and something else”. And that something else is something that would be very hard to reproduce for the valley. The cross-germination that happens here will, as evolution has always told us, bring up new models and new businesses that could not possibly sprout out of a mono-cultural system.

Another aspect of this is that there seems to be an inherent pendulum in the technology world, moving from times of great innovations that arise out of innovation for innovation’s sake, great feats of engineering which arise with no pre-existing use for them. When the pendulum is on that side, the Valley shines. For example, there was no pre-existing use for semiconductors when engineers at Fairchild Semi came up with them. The Fairchild leadership failed to see this opportunity and left it to others to mine. This was typical valley-like world-changing type of innovation that New York-type leaders failed to see.

However, the pendulum often has to swing from that space where radical technological innovation happens to a place where business integration (and eventually business innovation) arises. When the pendulum switches to that end, having companies that mix expertise in the technological field sitting side by side with expertise in a specific business field helps create the new generation of companies.

We are now in that second part of the cycle and New York has the lead because of its overlap with many other industries. For the valley, this can be a dangerous time unless it finds the next big radical algorithmic-based technical change. For New York, it is an opportunistic time as it can foster the creation of some startups that are working on that next set of radical innovations while at the same time mine the expertise inherent to its position as a dominant commercial center.

Takeaway: Monocultures have negative impact. Polycultures take longer to create powerful organisms but inherently build ones that are more adaptable.

Update: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top position in the tech world, displacing Silicon Valley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Culture Part 1, Culture Part 2, Talent, Adversity, Business

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Valley vs. New York: Culture. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It’s been 9 years since my city was struck to its core and the world gasped with shock and horror. At ground zero, this year, we can finally see something else than a giant hole, helping cover up some of the wounds of the past.

9 years is both a long and a short time.

A lot has happened since both on a personal and wider level. In the past 9 years, I got married, became a dad, and came close to death. Meanwhile the US has gone through a presidential change, two wars, and a substantial financial crisis.

On the other hand, some things haven’t changed: I still believe in the good of people and in inclusive behavior; at a larger level, fear of gays and muslims still seems to capture a large part of the national dialogue.

A Year in Intolerance

This year has seen France dictate how muslim women should dress (there is a deep irony in the French government dictating how the veil should not be worn while they denounce the behavior of islamic countries dictating how it should).

This year, people outside of New York have been telling New Yorkers how inclusive they should not be, because muslims are considering putting a community center in downtown Manhattan (for reference, the concept of the “ground zero mosque” is flawed in two ways: it’s neither at ground zero nor is it a mosque).

This year, a pastor in Florida (why is it always Florida?) pushed himself to the center of a national debate by suggesting Americans should burn the Koran (because we all know that burning religious items (Bibles, Korans, Crosses) has done so well for inclusion in the South).

All this behavior seems to be pushing the country in a direction that is counter to what the founding fathers had intended: We are to be a United country, not a divided one.

A Suggestion for Inclusion

As a mean to commemorate today, Patriot day (not to be confused with Patriots’ day) was created. The creation of a special day to commemorate these events is admirable but much of the commemoration seems to be about loss and go directly against the optimism that generally defines what the United States stand for. I understand that the need to honor the fallen patriot is a very strong one but I think that without a meaning beyond loss, today’s commemoration misses an opportunity.

And so I’d like to suggest a few things: For starter, we could change the “Patriot Day” commemoration to a “United We Stand Day” commemoration (or “United Day” if people want something shorter). This would first remove the possible confusion with Patriots’ Day. And it would go towards sending a message of unification and inclusion.

The day would include a commemoration of the fallen on 9/11 but also inject a deeper meaning into the day by suggesting that people look to what “different” people bring to our country. It would show how Patrick Henry’s words still sit at the core of who we are. And it would bring back the memory of the most amazing part of what happened shortly after 9/11: people helping people, without care for creed or color.

I could see Christian Churches or Jewish Temples reading from the Koran, Islamic Mosques reading from the Bible or the Torah, and families of all religions getting more acquainted with the other religions. I could see churches, temples, and mosques opening doors to all on that day, highlighting inclusion above all.

I could see people volunteering to help others. People working together to help fix up schools, playgrounds, and parks and most of the country focused on fixing up the United States, working side by side on day where racial tensions might disappear.

Christians, muslims, jews; black, white, hispanic, asian; straight or gay; None of those distinctions would matter on United Day. What would matter is that we are all part of the same country and are all working towards a common goal to create “a more perfect union.”

Is it an impossible dream? Maybe but maybe not. In our house today, that will be the focus. The way I look at it is fairly simple: If two guys can get thousands of people to follow Talk like a Pirate Day, why can’t I try to do the same with United Day.

And so I unilaterally declare today to be United Day, a day not only of remembrance but of action towards more inclusive behavior.

Words of Inclusion

Many people have argued that 9/11 was an attack on the Christian foundation of this country and have used this as a basis for the exclusive behavior when it comes to Islam. Yet, the new testament itself preaches inclusion. One of the few things I remember from the time when I went through Jesuit school in France was the teaching of tolerance and inclusion. Jesus Christ often admonished his followers to “turn the other cheek” when struck by their enemy. But few parts of the Bible make the point as clearly to me as the allegory of the sheeps and the goats (Matthew 25:31–46):

³¹“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory.
³²All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
³³He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
³⁴“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.
³⁵For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,
³⁶I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.‘
³⁷“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?
³⁸When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?
³⁹When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?‘
⁴⁰“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.‘
⁴¹“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
⁴²For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
⁴³I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.‘
⁴⁴“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?‘
⁴⁵“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Previous Years

People say that rituals help us cope with loss. For me, the ritual that has helped me make days like today more bearable has been to write, on a yearly basis, about that day. So, for new readers, here are the previous entries specific to this date, dating to the day after 9/11:

• 2001: The Day After
• 2002: In Memoriam
• 2003: Two Years
• 2004: Year 3 — Rebirth
• 2005: 9/11 at 4
• 2006: 5 years
• 2007: 6 observations about 9/11
• 2008: 7
• 2009: Waiting

In Memoriam

In memoriam to the ones I knew: Carlos Dominguez, Mark Ellis, Melissa Vin cent, Michael DiPasquale, Cyn thia Giugliano, Jeremy Glick, David Halderman, Steve Weinberg, Gerard Jean Baptiste, Tom McCann, David Vera.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Nine. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

But this year is also a little different. Kubler-Ross no longer applies as most of us have cycled through all the stages by now. But, with the passage of time, it is possible to start getting an historical perspective and draw parallels to other times. Doing so might remind of us of Georges Santayana’s edict:

Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.

Cruel month

September does not seem kind on New York. While most of us will spend time remember the events that, for my generation, marked the end of innocence and forced us to grow up, there have been other disasters both past and recent that have befallen Gotham.

A few generations ago, on September 16, 1920, one of the deadliest acts of terrorism on American soil targeted Wall Street: 38 people died and 400 were injured on that day, thanks in part to the poor timing of the perpetrators, who detonated their explosives shortly before the lunch hour. In the next 24 hours, in an act of defiance to the terrorists of the time, the bodies were removed, the street was cleaned up, and the stock market reopened the next day, kicking off an era of continued speculation known as the roaring twenties, a run that would end a bit over 9 years later.

The crash of 1929, which is often seen as the start of the great depression, did not actually happen in September but it is interesting to note that the beginning of the decline started in September with the stock market reaching its peak on September 3rd, 1929, followed by a 17% decline for that month. In other words, the speculative bubble brought on by increasingly complex financial instruments (margin positions came of age in the 1920s) for the time and speculation in the real estate market (the 1920s also marked the age of the skyscrapers, with such towers as the 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler building rising above the city).

Last year, in the first weeks of September, a bubble brought together by increasingly complex financial instruments (Credit Default Swaps) and increasing speculation around the real estate market, similarly brought the world economy to the brink of financial disaster. In those short weeks, the US government had to bail out Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG; Lehman Brothers went under, eventually bought out in bankruptcy court by Barclay’s. Wachovia, Merryl Lynch, and Washington Mutual all ended up being gobbled up by other banks; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley changed their legal status to allow them better government protection; Similar economic activity quickly spread to the rest of the world, almost pushing some countries to go bankrupt (eg. Iceland).

The still on-going economic destruction arising out of that catastrophic month will continue to have a toll not necessarily calculated in human lives lost on a single day, as we did on 9/11, but it is very possible that the toll it will take on all our lives (and potentially on some lives lost) will be a strong and as long.

Parallels?

After the towers fell, on 9/11, and after the world had managed to cripple his operation, Osama Bin Laden swore to bring the US to its knees economically. And yet, it was the recklessness of our own people that almost became the tool of our own demise.

To say that 9/11 scarred us is to ignore a deeper, and somewhat more uncomfortable truth: much like the terrorist attack of 1920, the attack of 2001 did not stop us from becoming agents of our own financial demise. And while many of us will still grieve today and remember the friends and family members we have lost, the rest of the nation will look to this as an aberration, asking people why they have not moved on yet.

The answer, sadly, is that we, New Yorkers, we, the survivors of 9/11, we, the ones who lived through those horrible events and can still tell their tales, have yet to receive what we were promised. Sure, one will point to the fact that there is, finally, after 8 long years, a foundation for new buildings at ground zero, the truth is that there is still a hole in our skyline and a hole in our hearts.

We may or may not have liked the towers before 9/11 but we are still missing them. And so, as a sign of healing, the nation had promised us that it would never forget and that it would build new towers, maybe even higher and more magnificent, as a defiant sign that America does not give, America does not give-up and that terrorists may tear down our buildings but they could not tear down our optimism nor could they destroy our ability at turning adversity into triumph. The new towers rising above ground zero were supposed to be our phoenix, rising ever more beautifully out of the horrors of that day.

8 long years later, we are still waiting.

Scraping the sky

In the olden days, things were different: 90 percent the New York subway system was built, using private funds, in 4 years; the Woolworth Tower: 3 years; the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street: 2 years; and let’s not the city icon, which was built after the wall street crash.

Between its excavation starting on January 22, 1930 and ribbon cutting ceremony on May 1, 1931, the iconic Empire State Building was built in a mere 13 months, helping lift the spirits of New Yorkers as it showed that financial crashes may devastate us but that we, New Yorkers, we, symbols of American power, can still build amazing thing amazingly quickly. In a way, the Empire State helped lift the spirit of an earlier generation when it needed it most and that is what I would have liked to see happen at ground zero.

Sure, many people will say that the rules are different now, that workers’ protection and union powers slows things down. The argument might hold water if it weren’t for what happened over the rest of New York: The Time-Warner center was built in under 3 years. Same for the New York Times building; The Bank of America tower: 5 years, injuring more people in the process than were injured during the Empire State Building’s construction.

3 major skyscrapers since 9/11/2001, none of which is at ground zero. So why can’t we get a single tower over ground zero?

In 1931, a shinning beacon of hope rose above the city when the city needed it most. After eight years, WE are still waiting for ours.

In Memoriam

Carlos Dominguez, Mark Ellis, Melissa Vincent, Michael DiPasquale, Cynthia Giugliano, Jeremy Glick, David Halderman, Steve Weinberg, Gerard Jean Baptiste, Tom McCann, David Vera.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Waiting. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Valley: Detroit for Technology

The claim center around the fact that New York is not keeping up with technology because the technology industry in New York is not moving as fast as it is in the silicon valley. And so, I’d fully grant that it’s true. In fact, New York is also not keeping up with the car industry because Detroit seems to be doing a better job of that and has been since the 1940s. Sure, it has a tower named the Chrysler building but let’s face it, Detroit is producing many more cars than New York. In fact, Detroit’s impact on the car industry is much larger than that of New York.

Reading the previous paragraph, you might be thinking that it’s a very silly analogy. And it is there not only for effect but also to point out that any comparison of New York to the Valley is based on a flawed assumption. The assumption is that such comparison can have merit. For the last 40 years, Silicon Valley has been a single industry area: the technology industry. Most major technology innovations have come from the valley (with the exception of software licensing, which came from a place a bit north of that: Seattle).

So, as New York is not and will never be the leader in the car industry, nor will it ever be a leader in the technology field. I’m just hoping that the valley will never suffer the same fate as the epicenter of the car industry is feeling right now. Being based on a single industry, in the long, is a pretty scary concept and the lack of diversity can sometimes be fatal.

New York: Diverse by choice?

Interestingly, it is New York’s diversity is part of what has made it more resilient than most cities in the United States and the increase of one industry over another is what generally hurts it. The rise of the financial world as a substantial employer in New York has hurt the tax base and lowered the employment opportunities in the city. The bubble and subsequent explosion of the real estate market in the late 1980s and early 1990s did the same thing to the city, lowering property values to the point where real estate was cheap enough for 20somethings like myself and others to think about starting new companies, giving rise to what came to be known as Silicon Alley.

Embedded in New York’s success is the abandonment of industries: New York could have been the nation’s capital but Madison, a quintessential New Yorker sent the US government further south in exchange for control of the economy. New York could have been the center of the movie industry (most of the early movies were made in New York) but that title went to Los Angeles, where real estate was cheap. New York was, for a few decade, the center of the advertising world but the title ended up getting shared with Chicago and London.

The truth is that New York creates industries, takes a portion of them, and lets others become single industry towns:

• US Government: Started in New York, now in DC
• Oil: Consolidated in New York (Rockefeller), now centered around Houston
• Steel: Consolidated in New York (Carnegie), now centered around Pittsburgh
• Media: Started in New York, Movies (and some TV) now in Los Angeles, Radio diffused, print
• Advertising: Started in New York, now shared with Chicago and others

The result is that each brings something new, including new tensions and conflicts as one industry tries to dominate the others or establish a place of prominence for the heart of New Yorkers. However, in each case, they end up being put back in their place and shown that diversity is what makes New York what it is and that rule from a single industry would hurt the very fabric of what made it one of the truly global centers.

The exception: Money

But New York understands that two things make the world go round: Money and influence. Ever since the political leadership was taken out of town, New York has defined itself as a city based on commerce (one could argue that even before the revolution, New York was always about commerce, something that becomes evident when you realize that the dutch sided with the British when they realized that it could hurt their economic interest to not do so and did so again during the revolutionary war when it became clear that war could be profitable business).

Due to both geographical advantage and the foresight of its administrators, New York became the first port in the country and, in the process, became the place where trading and financial management were done. The country came to New York for money and New York dispensed its money to the country. During the robber barons era, this lead to New York helping consolidate industries and create monopolies. When those were dismantled, New York held on to the financing aspects of those industries, even if the other portions went away. Through that, it gained control.

So while the valley is leading in tech, the financial aspects relating to financing all those technology efforts are still based in New York. Yes, most of the tech VCs are sitting on Sand Hills but the truth is that their funds are generally funded outside the valley. Of course, it makes no more sense to argue that the valley is behind New York on funding technology than it does to argue that New York is behind the valley on tech innovation. Each has developed a long history and set of capabilities around one area so such comparisons are moot.

The crash and what next?

With the rise of increasingly complex financial instruments in the last few years, it is true that a lot of programmers ended up being hired by Wall Street. However, the other thing that is true is that such phenomenon has been a hallmark of Wall Street since the 1980s. Yet, a portion of the Internet industry did grow in New York in the 1990s. And to be honest, a similar phenomenon happened in the most current (aka Web 2.0) cycle.

The big difference is in the way Internet people in New York and Silicon Valley comport themselves. Because New York is so diverse, our local media is not as focused on what happens in the tech scene as the local media is when it comes to the valley. And because our tech scene is generally quieter, it also tends to be more insular than the valley scene: people who innovate on financial applications in the Internet space may not necessarily rub shoulders with people who innovate in the media space relating to the internet or people who innovate in the commercial space on the Internet.

In fact, the closest thing to a center, as far as the Internet crowd is concerned in New York, is the New York Tech Meetup, which meets once a month, as it has done for many years now. Each month, 5–10 local start-ups get  a chance to showcase their wares. Small companies like Etsy, delicious, fotolog, kickapps, or thumbplay (and many others) have all demoed at an event organized using technology provided by local company Meetup.

But truth be told, none of them really advertises their affiliation with New York that much because, to a large extent, that affiliation is insignificant. They do not define themselves based on WHERE they are but rather based on WHAT they do.

And, almost more importantly, none of those companies were created by people from the financial industry. The techies in the financial world are happy in their sphere and few actually cross path with those in the internet space. Different groups, different industries, different people.

So will the collapse of many Wall street firms mean the beginning of an exodus from the financial tech community towards startups? I doubt it: there is little cultural fit, and there are still ample opportunities on either side. People who are naturally drawn to finance-related type of computing will find positions in that field, even if its remains more competitive; and people who are looking to launch start ups will continue to do so.

New York will continue to have a tech community that is smaller than Silicon Valley’s and, truth be told, that’s just fine. Because each have advantages and disadvantages but ultimately, each can serve as the host to the next big thing, no matter whether they are based on El Camino Real or on the L line.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Silicon Valley vs. New York — a silly comparison. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.