February 2009 Archive

This morning, I got down to New Work City (a coworking space I am a co-founder of) and met with the Mayor of New Work City, Tony Bacigalupo and headed to 160 Varick Street - home of a new incubator that was being spearheaded by NYU-Poly, the NYC Economic Development Corporation and other interested parties (including the real estate developer Trinity, which is one of the oldest real estate developers in the City).

I joined Tony at the space because we were part of the effort that helped bring together a bunch of other space providers (think Regus but different) that had come together to offer the City an alternative to building incubators, without first considering what some entrepreneurial space developers had already formed for small businesses in NYC. The coalition (known as Coalition of Space Providers) came together and is currently made up of providers from:

• eEmerge from SL Green Properties
• TechSpace
• Sunshine Suites
• nutopia
• New Work City
• GreenDesk
• Work Space Offices from Edison Properties

Check out the press releases and articles on the efforts:

• EDC Website News
• Press Release
• WSJ: Bloomberg To Help Ex-Wall Street Execs Start New Firms
• CNN: $45 million to help laid-off Wall Streeters
• AP: NYC launches program to encourage entrepreneurs

You will see more about the COSP and their efforts at http://www.bootupnyc.com.

This morning I watched This Week on ABC as I always do on Sunday mornings, and while I was getting annoyed at the standard back-and-forth about the Repug point-of-view (”We love tax cuts, let the free market sort it out. And Dems never saw a program they did not like.”) and the Democratic point-of-view (”Tax cuts do not fund roads. Tax cuts do not put firemen to work. Tax cuts are bad.”), what really blew my mind was what seemed to be a complete lack of understanding of what the world of technology actually is. And then, Rep. Barney Frank did something that blew my mind, as if transparency being requested was going to hurt the bedrock of democracy.

In the last few minutes of the segment, Eric begins to discuss placing information about the spending “on websites” - and that, if the government was able to track where the money was spent, that the arguments of who was right or wrong would be clarified by seeing what happens with the spending.

In the midst of Eric making this remark, Sen. Jim DeMint, [R-SC] says “You’re assuming we can track this money…” and Rep. Barney Frank [D-MA] suggested that Congress was going to put all of the spending on the web (I assume by the fact that the HR-1 requires these actions to be visible through their Transparency provisions at www.recovery.gov and the Inspector General appointment). But what stuck in my craw was this exchange (transcript from ABCNews):
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