David Kluskiewicz

Public Farm One proves that urban landscapes are not completely unfarmable. In fact, with just recycled materials and some solar panels, the Work Architecture Company has created a sustainable farm with 51 varieties of plants. Oh, and it’s in Long Island City (Queens, NY).

The constant rise in food prices is proving that suburban living is unsustainable. With the average piece of food travelling 1,500 miles to get to our plate, alternatives like this are going to sprout up everywhere.

Source: Cool Hunting

This is the second time I’ve ventured down to NYC for Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring show. And again, it was an inspiration.

What’s so unique about this show is how it highlights the importance of art in technology. Not art as in fine arts, though quite a number of the projects display that talent as well, but artistic expression. Many of them gave people creative outlets: the ability to generate poetry, the ability to paint with small movements and the ability to generate visual art and video from your dance moves.

As we try to transmit bigger and bigger ideas, databases aren’t going to matter quite as much. As this show proved, sight and sound can convey millions of nuanced bits of information in a single second, much quicker than the narrative we’re used to.

Check out the projects, here.

Stock market indices have been a staple of business news for decades. They summarize countless economic factors into single data points, ones that command almost as much attention as the weather forecast. They generate enough conversation to keep millions of investors engaged, whether they understand the underlying factors or not. Now that generations have renewed interest in the economy from following the big indices (NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ), I think it’s time that we begin observing small indices (yet to be formed) too. They’re more interesting and they often have a much bigger impact on our lives.

There are two reasons to index small, local markets. First, they would give us a better idea of how our local communities’ economies work. Do we help new businesses grow? Which ones thrive here? Which ones prosper? Second, they would help increase investments in local communities. Typically, only angel investors and venture capitalists can tolerate risks associated with early stage companies. But if that risk is spread out, just as it is with a 401k, those early stage investments become far more accessible, providing more capital and a chance for smaller investors to enjoy a big reward. Local investment is particularly valuable because those companies are likely to become your clients, employers and neighbors. The localization of investment provides an excellent opportunity to become involved with the economy that will have the greatest impact on your wealth and quality of life.

State tech councils fostering innovation and bootstrapping early stage businesses are beginning to collect all the information needed to create small indices - maybe even exchanges. This kind of local investment could open the doors to a real innovation economy.

“What you can never outsource, is responsibility.” These were the sage words of Soren Lund, marketing director at LEGO on the In Business podcast from the BBC. Their exodus from Connecticut wasn’t good for the local economy, but their ability to focus their business strategy on something that customers are willing to pay, even in a flat world, is something we can learn from.

Jason Calacanis posted the full audio of his conversation with “On the Media” host Brook Gladstone. It provided an amazing insight into the inner workings of the media and suggested that people’s intelligence has eclipsed the narrow formats that news has adopted. They’ve outgrown them.

I accept that the radio or the newspaper has space limitations (i.e. as much as advertisers, subscribers or sponsors are willing to pay for) and that editing will be necessary. But what was revealed in this interview was that too many nuances are getting lost. There’s useful detail, passion, insight, etc. in the source - the original conversation. It might be impractical to publish all of this, but when it’s a topic that is important to you, having it available enables much more productive conversations. Active listening instead of passive consumption. Individuals are taking control of their own PR and that’s a good thing.

Organizing all this source data is a huge undertaking, but at least the low cost of storage is helping people get started on archiving their “public” interactions and putting them together as a coherent body of work.

Like the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto argued that people are too smart to mindlessly consume advertising, Calacanis proves that they’re also too smart to mindlessly consume news. Moving away from the “Gotcha” moment is going to infuse new life into the media.

The world described in Carl Schramm’s book, The Entrepreneurial Imperative, will be terrifying to every middle manager you know. Schramm points out how the current cycle of status quo management has gone on too long. Droves of people flocked to investing, operations and professional services to support a waning base of companies and organizations. But, there’s been a corresponding loss in creativity - not creativity as in art, but creativity as in innovation.

Cycles of innovation and management are natural, but right now America seems to be entrenched in a managerial cycle. The danger in this, Schramm suggests, is that managerial cultures lose their appetite for risk and pass that on to their children. One of the most telling signs of this is the precipitous decline in children’s interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Fortunately, America still reveres the entrepreneur in the garage. And, as long as he’s genuine and honest, the community supports him, even if his business is one of the 9 out of 10 that don’t make it. This, Schramm says, is a big part of what we should teach in schools - cycles of innovation and failure. Comfort with these may soon become more of an asset than perfect test scores.

The structure of our economy predisposes us to lots of little mistakes. In the span of a lifetime, only the most traumatic events get noticed: bankruptcy, a windfall, a capital purchase. Every financial transaction is a little investment, but with shortening time horizons we’re losing sight of aggregate impacts to our world.

Recent activity in responsible investing and the attribution of hard environmental costs to common businesses (e.g. How much fuel was burned to get that tomato to your local grocery store?) leads me to believe that delayed gratification is needed to stave off social and environmental damage caused by businesses.

As long as equity can be traded seconds after its acquired, there is little incentive a) for managers to make long-term decisions and b) for investors to scrutinize all risks. A better model for investment that would address the current ignorance of long-term business impact is a low liquidity stock, one that can’t be traded for 18 months to 2 years. This poses a large amount of risk, but fair markets should compensate for that risk.

Although the risk is much higher, it forces companies to factor in expected costs for environment and social impact. Policy makers are already seeking ways to pay for these problems either through taxes or litigation. If those concerns are baked into the next generation of businesses, there might be some big opportunities to improve the environment without building up a new layer of service agencies and cleanup grants.

What should the media section of a web site provide? Most are simply a list of press releases. Although every company should have its official releases cataloged for the media and the public, there are many third-party sources that are worth including. Organizations should at least be scanning these sources anyway. Why not organize them and share them with the world?

PR Squared blogger Todd Defren created a solid example of how social media and a few interesting pieces of syndicated information can turn a media page into a rich experience.

With the rise of social media, there are at least a half dozen web sites whose primary purpose is to persistently index pages related to search terms. Want to know what bloggers are saying about your organization or its executives? Set up a search in Technorati. Want to know who’s bookmarking your site’s pages? Set up a del.icio.us search.

There’s also little reason to spend precious time writing executive bios. They probably have a LinkedIn profile, so if they’re current, why not point the media or the public there? It only illustrates more connections.

Defren’s mock up includes all the necessary components to provide information to a site visitor. It won’t work for a lot of companies who want to tightly control their image. But for those whose reputation precedes them (and who aren’t afraid of a little variation in their image) this model press room provides more than enough third party validation and interesting fodder to start a conversation.

What can our state do with unprecedented capacity to transfer data?

Connecticut has one of the world’s fastest fiber optic networks. With speeds of 10 gigabits per second, the Connecticut Education Network boasts upload and download times 1,000 times faster than the average home broadband network. Provided a user’s computer has the processing power, this can provide access to high-resolution media and…. not sure.
The $40 million installation brought capacity to the state, but the plans for utilizing it are still unclear. Access is available only to public education institutions in the state, many of which don’t have the infrastructure to connect to it. To date, no major curriculum initiatives are underway either.
What could we do with our network? A lot. A contest held in 2000 by the National Laboratory for Applied Networks (now defunct) recognized the work of several engineering teams who pushed the 1 Gigabit/sec limit. Their work centered on access to large data sets, especially ones that included high resolution images. Other entrants suggested that very fast networks permitted grid computing, harnessing the power of multiple machines simultaneously to perform extremely complex calculations. Whether these demanding applications would be useful in Connecticut’s public school’s remains to be seen.

State supported early-stage funding is tough. Even though the payoff could net new jobs (and new income tax revenue) many states find it hard to take the risk. After all, they’re gambling with taxpayer money.

Kentucky has found a good way to mitigate some of this risk and still stay in the game to attract and retain its young innovators. They follow the Fed and assume that if a company qualifies for a Small Business Loan, it won’t burn the state’s cash.
Technology & Innovation - Funding| The Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development