Media

• No recovery in sight for New York's non-profit sector (City Limits)

• George Parker: "Social Media Won’t Save Madison Avenue!" (PSFK)

• What city education data should be opened up? (Gotham Schools)

• Report: Only 10 percent of NYC area venture capital has gone to NYC startups (Chubby Brain)

• Need an affordable attorney? Try this virtual law firm. (Crain's)

• Check out which cities' and states' Web sites got top honors in the 2009 Best of the Web awards (Government Technology)

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A scene from SXSW Interactive 2009.

Next year's SXSW Festival, Austin's annual week long, booze-fueled convergence of music, film and digital events, is still a ways off (March 12-21). But there's been a lot of online chatter lately about the techie part of the festival, SXSW Interactive, which takes place March 12-16.

Chances are you've come across some Tweets from people asking you to vote for their SXSW panels. You can do so at the SXSW 2010 Panel Picker site, a Web application that lets you browse panel proposals and help decide which ones are worthy of inclusion in the festival. You can browse the Interactive proposals here, but we've rounded up a few below that are either relevant to, or are being proposed by people from, New York. If there are other New Yorkey ones, let us know by tweeting them using the #nyfi hash tag. (Voting closes on Sept. 4.)

Read the proposals after the jump:

Flickr via edans

Andrew Rasiej.

In our new series, we send our questionnaire about the future of New York City to notable New Yorkers and post their responses. To start off, we spoke to Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum and our partner in the New York Future Initiative.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing New York City right now?

To compete and remain relevant in the 21st century with other major cities around the world is its biggest challenge. Updating its antiquated infrastructure, continuing to attract talented citizens, connecting them to each other and the world, investing in new industries, becoming green, and creating a new generation of enlightened political leadership. These are just a few examples where we are woefully behind other cities.

Can you suggest a few innovative, outside-of-the-box ideas for improving daily life in this city?

Here are a few:

Flickr via Ed Yourdon

• Public co-working is on the move in New York.

• The Daily News took an in-depth look at the cycling/pedestrian/driver debate.

• Baratunde Thurston talked about the future of...

• Ground broke on the East River Waterfront Esplanade.

• Urban backyard farming is taking hold in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.

• Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey talks New York City.

• The future of the hyperlocal

• There's a new Web site that tracks city candidates' positions on transit issues.

• We caught up with Janette Sadik-Khan at a bike-sharing demo in Union Square.

• Steve Cohen says it's time to find funds for city infrastructure.

Dorsey, at left.

I have an item in this week's Observer about Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

It focuses on his visit to New York last week to meet with various V.C.s and tech C.E.O.s and engineers (and Mayor Bloomberg) to get a feel for whether he wants base the new company he's launching here instead of on the West Coast. He also told us that a personal relocation to the city is in the works.

A little down the line, as Mr. Dorsey irons out the plans for his new venture, he'll be contributing some blog posts to NYFi. But in the meantime, here's a transcript of some of the conversation we had last Thursday, August 13, at The Standard Hotel. In it, he shares his thoughts about the ways city governments and agencies can use Twitter most effectively.

The interview starts after the jump:

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Michael Bloomberg made a splash this week when he posted items on Twitter throughout the day on Tuesday, ostensibly himself.

Twitter is a wildly successful enterprise, but turning a profit isn’t been something the creators have figured out how to do yet. So, today, I asked Bloomberg, who founded a pretty successful media company of his own, if he had any suggestions for how Twitter can generate revenue.

After some laughter from my colleagues in the press corps, Bloomberg said, “I think that’s going to be the great challenge.”

“All of these new social networking--new ways of communicating--have yet to find a new business model that really works and they tend to be replaced by something else,” Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg said that Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter with whom he met earlier this week, has some ideas about how to generate revenue from the site. “Whether they’ll work or not, I don’t know.”

Bloomberg went on to say “We also get trapped into thinking that the world is coming to an end with old ways of communicating, and I’m still a believer in a lot of the old ways.” He also said, “Newspapers and magazines aren’t going to go away. The challenge for them is to stay relevant.”

Noted.

Video after the jump:

Susan Lyne, the chief executive of Gilt Groupe, a members-only, luxury designer sale Web site, noticed something curious about the 20-somethings who were clicking their afternoons away at gilt.com: They were torturing themselves, drooling over deeply discounted outfits and accessories from high-end brands during the 36-hour “flash sales,” and watching as $3,175 ostrich feather jackets from Alessandro Dell’Acqua went for just $618, or as a silk, strapless Oscar de la Renta red-carpet-ready number that was slashed down to $2,398 disappeared. They weren’t buying. They were window shopping, from the cubicle.

“What we discovered was that, one, even though we discount significantly on the brands we carry on Gilt [up to 70 percent], it’s still expensive for them,” Ms. Lyne explained. “A $200 or $150 dress is still a big purchase for them. They say, ‘I love looking at the stuff but it doesn’t really fit my lifestyle. I don’t have a place to wear those clothes.’”

So on Wednesday, Aug. 12, Gilt Groupe is launching a new site: Gilt Fuse, another private sale destination geared toward 20- and 30-year-olds on a budget—the kind of gals who shop at J.Crew and Saks Fifth Avenue on the same day and maybe swing by the thrift store for a gently used vintage dress. It’ll be the Barneys CO-OP of private fashion sale Web sites.

During Gilt Fuse’s first couple of weeks, they’ll offer frocks and stock from familiar brands including BCBG, Modern Amusement, Chelsea Dagger, Juicy Couture, Laundry, Guy Laroche and C&C, among “maybe less distributed but very cool brands,” Ms. Lyne said.

>>READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON OBSERVER.COM

Last week we started paying attention to a newish social media site called Groupable, a free online community that connects grassroots organizations and groups with potential corporate and local sponsors.

The site, which is based in New York, was launched in a private alpha testing phase last summer and opened to the public in beta back in January.

"We saw that it was very difficult for small groups who can't afford to hire a full-time sales person to be able to connect wih sponsors," said Gerrit Hall, 28, of Park Slope, who created the site with Groupable's C.E.O., Nate Brochin, 45, of Millburn, N.J.

The methodology behind Groupable seems simple enough (even if the way it’s explained on the site is a bit hard to follow): group or sponsor registers; group searches for and connects with sponsor, or vice versa, based on common goals and interests; sponsorship is made.

So far, an array of New York City groups have registered, ranging from civic non-profits, to arts organizations, to underwater photographers. Even the New York Tech Meetup is on there, although it seems like its profile has been inactive since it was created back in August of last year. At least one political candidate is using the service, Mark Winston Griffith, who is running in the 36th District (Crown Heights/Bed Stuy) City Council race.

But does it actually work?

Got a genius idea for a product? How about a tofu press? An iPhone holster to perch on bike handlebars? A fashionable sling for broken limbs called an “Ouch Pouch?” Ben Kaufman, a 22-year-old entrepreneur and college dropout, wants you to dish out $99 and put it in his hands, or shall we say, Web site, along with an entire community of nitpickers to mold your product from scratch to store shelf.

On June 2, Mr. Kaufman launched the Web site of his new company, quirky, a “social product development company.” On the site, users can sign up for free and get involved in every step of the product-building process—from choosing a design to giving it a snappy name, even figuring out a marketing strategy.

“We don’t make any decisions internally without consulting the community,” Mr. Kaufman told the Observer from his brick-walled office on Avenue B during a sunny afternoon before the launch of his site. Mr. Kaufman has a round, baby face with flushed cheeks, and was dressed in a black T-shirt and Converse sneakers. He talks fast.

Mr. Kaufman explained that users with their own product ideas can submit a rough proposal for $99. Other users of the site vote up or down ideas and designs based on different criteria (from its “cool” factor to its “timely” entrance into the market). A winner is picked every week and Mr. Kaufman and his team draw up prototype dratfs in 3-D images, consult with their contacts in manufacturing shops, and figure out a price for the product. Meanwhile, the community of quirky users choose everything else, down to the color and packaging for the product before it hits the shelves—er—online store.

If a product doesn't get past the initial voting process, users who submitted the proposal don't get their $99 back, but can keep all of the crowd-sourcing data that the quirky community provided.

>>READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON OBSERVER.COM