| Date | Title | Description |
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| Oct 20, 2011 | My Back Pages | For many years, I have been a reader of this blog. I’m excited, and humbled, by the opportunity to now be a contributor and to announce here that I have joined Union Square Ventures.
In early 2007, when I joined up with John Borthwick and ... |
| Sep 30, 2011 | Google CIO and others talk DevOps and “Disaster Porn” at Surge | Photograph by Rupert Colley reader comments 19 with 19 posters participating, including story author
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Google CIO Ben Fried bared his soul to systems and software engineers a... |
| Mar 4, 2011 | Confirmed: AOL's Patch Buys Hyperlocal News Site Outside.In | AOL’s Patch has acquired hyperlocal news aggregator Outside.In, we’ve confirmed with Patch’s president Warren Webster. It’s unclear what the terms of the deal are but Business Insider reported earlier that the acquisition is valued at less ... |
| Mar 4, 2011 | Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven’t Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out? | Neighborhood news aggregator Outside.in has been acquired by AOL, according to multiple reports this morning. Apparently it’s being bought for less than the big pile of money that high-profile investors put into it, back when hopes were hig... |
| Nov 1, 2010 | Everyblock Launches Hyperlocal News Firehose API | Hyperlocal news aggregator Everyblock announced today that it is releasing a firehose API to integrate its data into large partner sites. Everyblock brings together real time and near real-time public records like 911 calls, restaurant heal... |
| Sep 2, 2010 | Coworking Spaces | I've never been much of a fan of incubators. Some have made the model work. My favorite of the bunch is Betaworks, based here in NYC. Betaworks is more than an incubator, but they have shown that they can make the incubation model work with... |
| Jun 3, 2010 | Fwix Expands Its Geo Index Via Local Widgets And A Broader API | Up until now, fwix has stuck to indexing and serving up hyperlocal news from neighborhood blogs and news sites. Its main competitor in that respect is Outside.in. But fwix is moving beyond local news to create a broader geo index via publis... |
| Apr 27, 2010 | Hiring | Last week I told Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in, that I have a greater appreciation for the hard hiring work all of you entrepreneurs do right now.
Yesterday all of the investment professionals in our firm sat in a conference room for se... |
| Apr 24, 2010 | The Tribune Company Finds An Audience For Homegrown Hyperlocal News Site ChicagoNow | As AOL pours $50 million into its hyperlocal news site Patch.com to expand its sites around the country, smaller competitors are maintaining confidence that their platforms can survive AOL’s aggressive content strategy. Outside.In CEO Mark ... |
| Mar 26, 2010 | The Day EveryBlock Came to Town | A fight just broke out down the street from my house. Yesterday, a dog in my neighborhood had one of its legs amputated. That’s the kind of news I like to know and so I’m very excited that MSNBC’s hyper-local news aggregator EveryBlock has ... |
| Dec 11, 2009 | Looking For Software Engineers | I posted about our portfolio company Outside.in earlier this week. In the past month, they've closed a big new financing, secured an important strategic partnership with CNN, and they continue to ramp their hyperlocal content network, which... |
| Dec 8, 2009 | Hyperlocal Goes Mainstream: CNN teams up with Outside.in | I've been interested in the hyperlocal blogging movement since I started blogging. Once you have your own printing press, you start thinking about what you might write about the place you live. And I've written about school sports, little l... |
| Dec 7, 2009 | CNN Backs Outside.in to Power News From Your Neighborhood | Outside.in is a hyper-local news aggregator and when they say hyper-local they mean it – the site captures news, blog posts and other resources right down to the neighborhood level. The company announced tonight that it’s raised a nice roun... |
| Nov 30, 2009 | SMSONE: Micro-Local News From India To Make Silicon Valley Jealous | Of the hundreds of companies I meet in any given country, I only write about a handful. Sometimes it’s the ones that seem to be copying a US idea, but in reality are building their company in a completely unique—and frequently more profitab... |
| Oct 25, 2009 | Is Blog Reading Mainstream? | I was reading Technorati's State Of The Blogosphere report yesterday. It has a lot of data on bloggers but not so much on readers. And I'm more curious about readers than bloggers.
I believe that blog reading has gone completely mainstream ... |
| Sep 21, 2009 | Urban Architects | Image via Wikipedia
Jack Dorsey, who came up with the initial idea for Twitter and co-founded the company often talks about his fascination with cities, mass transit, and bike messengers. He says it was this fascination that led to the insp... |
| Sep 1, 2009 | Foursquare | We recently wrote about our search for native mobile applications, which we defined as applications that simply were not possible previously (as opposed to making something that already exists online accessible via mobile). We have also lon... |
| Aug 17, 2009 | MSNBC Picks Up Hyperlocal News Aggregator EveryBlock | Even though they haven’t really found a big audience yet, hyperlocal news sites are becoming a hot commodity. In June, AOL bought Patch for $7 million, and today MSNBC acquired EveryBlock. EveryBlock was previously funded by a grant from th... |
| Jul 29, 2009 | Making The Web Smarter | Our “six words to live by on the Internet” are open, global, mobile, social, playful, and intelligent. It has been suggested that we add instant and I think that we may want to do that. But since we put this list together as a firm, I don’t... |
| Jun 26, 2009 | Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media | If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and... |
| Jun 17, 2009 | MLB.com’s iPhone App Could Be a Model For Media Saving Itself | MLB.com’s already wildly successful iPhone app will begin streaming live video of baseball games today. Baseball fans are excited, but there’s plenty of reason for even non-sports fans to pay attention to the way the application works. With... |
| Jun 16, 2009 | Layar Could Be the Future of “Augmented Reality” (Video) | I’ve long fantasized about being able to walk down city streets and get information on my phone about area demographics, histories of buildings I see and block-by-block news. A new Android app being talked about today makes that fantasy fee... |
| Jun 11, 2009 | PaperG: The right local ad solution for struggling newspapers? | Wily entrepreneurs know that a crisis is just an opportunity in disguise. While the downturn has forced many local businesses to move their advertising dollars online, no one has come up with an efficient way to display ads from small adver... |
| May 5, 2009 | Use The Public Channel For Better Customer Service | One of Mike Bloomberg's greatest achievements is the creation of the 311 service here in New York City. These 311 services operate in many large cities in the US and Canada. The first one was in Baltimore in the mid 90s.
Apparently Bloomber... |
| Apr 6, 2009 | Take the paper out of the newsstand? | Google is today's newsstand, so why would News Corp's Rupert Murdoch not want to be on it?
The discussion in the tech/media blogs this weekend is Rupert Murdoch's comment:
“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked th... |
| Apr 5, 2009 | You Can't Take The Paper Out Of The Newstand | The discussion in the tech/media blogs this weekend is Rupert Murdoch's comment:
“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, sai... |
| Mar 16, 2009 | The deep Web and the future of finding things | The discovery landscape
Wize Deep Web
A recent article in the New York Times about the “Deep Web” got us thinking about the future of finding things. At Wize, we hold a few things dear when it comes to search and discovery. They are differe... |
| Mar 13, 2009 | Hyperlocal and SXSW | I've never been to SXSW. That's a confession of sorts given how big of a deal SXSW has become among the digerati and twitterati. But it always seems to conflict with my kid's spring break and family is first always with no exceptions. And t... |
| Jan 10, 2009 | Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment | There was an exchange between RickG and me in the comments to the "A Focus Group Of One" post I did on thursday.
Rick said the following:
First, you don’t report. You opine. That’s fine and I very much like
reading the site, but i... |
| Dec 8, 2008 | The Invention Of Air | Back when we were deciding to make the investment in outside.in, I had a chat with founder Steven Johnson. He had a book he wanted to write and wanted to run the company and write the book at the same time. That didn’t make sense to me. I a... |
| Dec 1, 2008 | Outsource To Your Readers | I read Maureen Dowd’s piece yesterday on a website that is covering local news in Pasadena California using stringers in India and I thought the whole idea was really nutty. How is it possible that people living half way across the world co... |
| Nov 25, 2008 | Making Twitter Smarter | Soren and Howard have been busy building out stocktwits and today they sent me a link to a firefox extension that makes twitter a bit smarter. When you add the stocktwits extension to firefox, a stock tweet will look like this:
Those ticker... |
| Nov 17, 2008 | Joe the plumber's landing page | How ReachLocal, Yodle and Clickable can help the plumbers of the world
Last month I attended the New Business Models For News Summit and found myself running the "revenue" breakout group. We talked quite a bit about generating rev... |
| Nov 16, 2008 | Joe The Plumber's Landing Page | Last month I attended the New Business Models For News Summit and found myself running the "revenue" breakout group. We talked quite a bit about generating revenue from local merchants. There are a bunch of companies working on th... |
| Nov 11, 2008 | Looking For a "Geo-CTO" | Our portfolio company outside.in announced on their blog yesterday that traffic is up 400% ytd and scaling, performance, and reliability are becoming key concerns for them. And so they also announced they are looking for a CTO who can help ... |
| Oct 14, 2008 | First look: Firefox 3.1 beta 1 officially released | reader comments with 0 posters participating
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Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.1 beta release, an important development milestone for the popula... |
| Oct 9, 2008 | Capital Efficiency Finds Its Moment | My partner Albert calculated early last year that it takes about 1/10th the hardware, software, bandwidth, storage, and other expenses to build a web service compared to what it took in the 99/2000 time period. That was just as services lik... |
| Sep 25, 2008 | Blog Map Live On AVC | I don’t blog frequently about local news and events, but I do occasionally. When I do, outside.in captures the post and geo-tags it and puts it into their radar service. Radar is a facebook style news feed for neighborhood and local informa... |
| Sep 19, 2008 | It's Time To Open Up The Feeds To Marketers | I wrote a post a week or two ago where I talked about the increasing importance of feeds as an interface to social media and media and information in general. I don’t really mean "rss feeds" when I say feeds, although reading this... |
| Sep 15, 2008 | Zemanta | We’ve invested in a number of blogging related applications and services; Adaptive Blue, Delicious, Disqus, FeedBurner, Outside.in, Twitter, and Tumblr. We’ve been attracted to this sector for a number of reason; because an increasing amoun... |
| Sep 7, 2008 | The "Feedization" Of The Web (continued) | Back in March 2006 I wrote a post about the "feedization of the web UI" where I observed that I was seeing more and more web UIs that reminded me of the news feeds that are common in the financial markets. I predicted that we’d se... |
| Aug 31, 2008 | Web Services That Cater To Both The Publisher And The Reader | I’ve been noticing a trend lately that certain web services are starting to cater to both the publisher and the reader. And I think this is an important direction for a host of reasons.
You have to build a service with the user/reader in mi... |
| Aug 13, 2008 | Fire Eagle - Where's The Mobile App? | I love the concept of Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle. As Mark Josephson of outside.in said to me the other day:
Fire Eagle is a location wallet
It’s a web service that you can tell where you are at all times and manage what web services get to use ... |
| Aug 12, 2008 | Yahoo Fire Eagle Launches Geo-Location Platform To The Public | Today at Yahoo’s Brickhouse, a team of developers, press, and Yahoo execs including co-founder David Filo converged for the release of Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s geo-location platform. Fire Eagle allows allows developers to include positional data... |
| Aug 10, 2008 | Blogging In The 'Burbs | Many readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of "placeblogging" or "hyperlocal". I believe that the future of community newspapers will be found on the web where residents will blog about local issues that matter ... |
| Jul 14, 2008 | Geo Analytics | Our portfolio company outside.in provides a service of the same name that tells you what is going on in your neighborhood (if you live in the US). The way they do this is they pull in all kinds of local content, including blogs, and they ta... |
| Jun 19, 2008 | Huffington Post To Take on Local Newspapers | Last night at Guardian News & Media’s internal Future of Journalism conference, Arianna Huffington revealed that her Huffington Post property is planning to expand into local news. Initially, the site will launch an edited news aggregat... |
| Jun 18, 2008 | Outside.in launches Radar | Outside.in launched its new "radar" user interface yesterday and had their single largest day in the company’s history in traffic and new registered users. Here are three screenshots of the radar UI (because I can’t get the whole ... |
| Jun 4, 2008 | Hyperlocal Has To Be Peer Produced | The WSJ has a story today about the Washington Post’s struggles with its effort to build a local internet property called LoudonExtra.com.
I have been interested in "hyperlocal" for years and have blogged about this topic quite a ... |
| May 20, 2008 | Outside.in Steps It Up | Most companies grow in steps. They operate at one level for a while, make good progress, then take a step up, and start operating at a new level.
In the past month, our portfolio company has stepped it up on a number of levels. First and f... |
| May 20, 2008 | A Flood Of News From Outside.in | Outside.in announced not one but three big pieces of news today:
A new CEO
A round of financing (their first real round)
And a new service (called Radar)
Techcrunch and Alley Insider have the news, but I like my post on the USV blog even be... |
| May 19, 2008 | A $3 Million Round And A New CEO For Outside.in | Local news and blog site Outside.in has raised $3 million in a series A financing. Investors include Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, the New York City Investment Fund. That brings the total raised so far to $5.4 million, ... |
| May 13, 2008 | ITP Spring Show | NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) has been pumping out amazing people into the NYC tech scene (and the worldwide tech scene) for almost 20 years now. I think ITP is one of the things that makes NY’s tech/web community what ... |
| Feb 3, 2008 | Place Detection In Comments | outside.in launched discussions (aka comments) quietly last week but they did something in the process that I think is even more important. They’ve built a place detection system and the first place they are using it is in their discussions... |
| Jan 30, 2008 | A Robin Hood Story In The Village | Greenwich Village is legendary in NYC for its ability to fight overdevelopment and maintain a "village" feel in the midst of one of the largest cities in the world. Pier 40, at Houston Street and the Hudson River, is the latest ba... |
| Jan 24, 2008 | Pier 40 Rally On Sunday | I’ve been blogging about Pier 40 since last spring.
For those who don’t know Pier 40 is in the Hudson River Park at Houston Street and is a 15 acre, 1.2mm square foot structure that currently houses downtown manhattan’s largest soccer and b... |
| Jan 24, 2008 | Rethinking The Local Paper | This is my local newspaper, called The Villager. If you live in Greenwich Village, NYC, you probably read The Villager. But there are several problems with The Villager (which was voted NY State’s "Best Community Newspaper").
Firs... |
| Jan 23, 2008 | EveryBlock Launches as Local News Aggregator for SF, NYC, and Chicago | EveryBlock launches today as a geographically-filtered news and data aggregation service for San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago. The site attempts to answer one deceptively simple question: “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” For ... |
| Dec 6, 2007 | I Told You So | One of the things I love to do is play roving reporter from time to time on this blog.
I have this notion that if everyone (or at least a lot more people than we have now) had blogs and did this, then we could have a different kind of newsp... |
| Nov 29, 2007 | The Data GPS | For several years, I’ve been kind of obsessed by the idea of a software and data-based GPS. I was introduced to the idea by Cyril Houri, a NYC-based entrepreneur who build a service called Navizon that works on Blackberries, iPhones, and a ... |
| Nov 20, 2007 | The Rise Of Hyperlocal Information | If you walk into any
suburban Starbucks these days, you won’t see people’s faces, instead you’ll see laptops.
Moms and dads increasingly work from home; broadband took over the US and wireless is
about to do the same. Digital cameras and ce... |
| Nov 7, 2007 | The New Outside.in | Our portfolio company Outside.in launched a new version of their service this week. There are a bunch of new ways to navigate aound your neighborhood to see what’s going on. John Geraci, co-founder and head of product, outlines them in this... |
| Oct 14, 2007 | Smalltown, a small local site, acquires tinier Local2Me | Despite the meltdown and slow death of a local community news site BackFence, the local market continues to draw interest.
Last week, the hyperlocal news and blog site, Outside.in, raised a $1.5 million second round of funding and a month a... |
| Oct 9, 2007 | Outside.in takes $1.5M more in funding | Outside.in, a local news and blogging site, has taken $1.5 million more in funding, bringing its lifetime total to $2.4 million.
Users of the site can write stories, comments, blog posts or reviews of locations in their neighborhood, as wel... |
| Sep 25, 2007 | How To Get Attention From Your VC | I had a funny exchange with Steven Johnson, founder and CEO of our portfolio company outside.in last week. He saw my post about the email address book rankings in Xobni and wanted to know where he ranked. It turned out he was #29 which is p... |
| Sep 20, 2007 | Looking For A Killer Sys Admin | Outside.in, a Union Square Ventures portfolio company, is growing rapidly and needs someone to focus on the scaling issues. Here’s the job description.
Outside.in is looking for a system administrator to help us manage our growing collectio... |
| Sep 15, 2007 | Searching Outside.in | In a case of better late than never, outside.in has added search. It’s on the upper right on the home page.
It really opens up the service. So much of the value of outside.in is buried beneath the start page. My favorite part of outside.in ... |
| Sep 12, 2007 | American Towns, your online “public square” | Updated:
You may have never hard of American Towns, a company building an online “public square” for every town in the United States.
It has received a $3.3 million round of capital to realize that goal.
The financing comes from Idearc Medi... |
| Aug 2, 2007 | Part-Time Placeblogging | I like to invest in the services we use and I like the use the services we invest in. I find it’s better to start out as a user and become an investor.
So when I started using outside.in, I wanted to get the posts I was doing about places i... |
| Jun 30, 2007 | Neighborhood News | I just added the outside.in neighborhood news widget to this blog. It’s on the right sidebar above my books widget. It’s focused on news about the Union Square/Flatiron district. It looks like this:
If you are a placeblogger and want to sho... |
| May 30, 2007 | Buzzmaps | In my post this morning about Outside.in, I promised a link to a cool map that Steven Johnson showed in his keynote yesterday.
This map shows how blog posts about local brooklyn issues have evolved over the past year. I think it’s very cool... |
| May 30, 2007 | Where Tags and Blogmaps | Steven Johnson, founder and CEO of outside.in did the closing keynote for the first day of Where 2.0 yesterday evening. He started by talking about cholera and his book on the subject called The Ghost Map.
From cholera and Doctor John Snow’... |
| May 29, 2007 | Getting On The Inside of Outside.in | Steven Johnson, founder and CEO of Outside.in wrote a post last night titled "A Call For Help" in which he talks about the challenges of being an author and a founder at the same time. I knew Steven was going to need some help bui... |
| Apr 30, 2007 | An Apple Store In My Backyard! | I found this on outside.in this morning.
Confirming AppleInsider‘s preliminary investigations, a New York Post journalist has found that Apple will indeed rent out a high-profile space at 401 W. 14th Street, a recently upscaled building at ... |
| Apr 30, 2007 | USV Portfolio In The Times | Not one, but two, of our portfolio companies were featured in today’s New York Times business section.
TargetSpot was featured in the advertising column.
And outside.in got some coverage (but no link!) for their "most blogged neighborh... |
| Apr 23, 2007 | Most "Bloggy" Neighborhoods | Outside.in (a USV portfolio company) has published the 10 most "bloggy" neighborhoods in the US.
Check it out, maybe your neighborhood is one of them.
When you are at outside.in, you’ll notice their new look which launched today.
... |
| Apr 13, 2007 | Patent Monkey: Cingular Cell Phone Geo-Finder Services | . While there are many other players with location based technologies in this field, the fact that a carrier like Cingular has some innovations and is looking to add value to its new Apple relationship holds a bit of promise.
With the growi... |
| Apr 3, 2007 | The dirt on Amazon, Steve Jobs, Topix, Fatdoor, MySpace, VC tax and more | Here’s the latest action:
Amazon’s odd and scary patent — First, Amazon rolled out a product called Mechancial Turk (image left), where people do tasks for you that a machine couldn’t perform. Strange name, we thought, but nicely couched in... |
| Apr 2, 2007 | Patent Monkey: Geographic Cell Messaging with SquareLoop | This week, start up SquareLoop won 1st prize at CTIA for its geocasting technology beating out Lucent-Alcatel’s GMS. The company started out in 2005 when it received the rights to patented technologies from tech transfer organization, MITRE... |
| Mar 15, 2007 | Local News | I heard that there was a shooting in the village last night. So I went to outside.in and found out the details. What a mess.
While at outside.in, I also found out that The Coffee Shop, my favorite breakfast place was closed for health viola... |
| Feb 28, 2007 | Will Outside.in nail the community Web site? Maybe | Updated with full list of names of angel investors
How do you build the perfect local community Web site — with news, events, comments and more?
If you manage to, it will be a grand slam. It becomes the talk of the town, people spend more t... |
| Feb 28, 2007 | Citysearch snaps up Insider Pages in local search race | Citysearch, the division of IAC focuses on local reviews of restaurants and other services, has acquired the struggling local review start-up, Insider Pages.
The purchase (amount undisclosed) comes at a time of increasing competition in the... |
| Feb 27, 2007 | Outside.in Gets Cash for Geocoding the Blogosphere | After developing their product on their own for six months, New York based Outside.in received financing from angels and three venture firms: Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, and Village Ventures. Fred Wilson of Union Squa... |
| Feb 27, 2007 | Outside.in | If you look at the previous post, at the bottom of the post in the "flare" is a link to other stories about the neighborhood around "rat row". It looks like this:
Outside.in is a service that takes in posts about places,... |
| Feb 23, 2007 | Outside.in | One form of media that hasn’t yet been well executed on the Internet is local media. Yes, local search is available, and Google’s offering in this area has become very good recently. Local classifieds are also all over the Internet, particu... |
| Jan 23, 2007 | Placeblogging With Flare | Frequent readers of this blog may have noticed a new flare underneath my posts over the past week.
The flare I am talking about is the one on the right, the outside.in flare. I took this screenshot from the bottom of my Wincing The Night Aw... |
| Jan 8, 2007 | Placeblogging (aka Hyperlocal) | the neighborhood
Originally uploaded by dinanyc.
I wrote a post about hyperlocal content almost two years ago, comparing Backfence to the 101 effort in North Carolina. I said this about hyperlocal content (now called placeblogging) at that ... |