In the digital age, the future no longer matters. All we have is now, says media theorist Doug Rushkoff, author of the newly released “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.”

In it, Rushkoff explores what he calls “presentism,” a concept evolving around  “everything is real-time, always-on, pervasive, and constant.” While invigorating, this concept also presents challenges — from investors expecting a quick return to the inability for startups to scale to their true potential to consumers becoming wary of permanency to altering how startup culture is formed.

We caught up with Rushkoff to discuss presentism and how this emphasis on the now can affect entrepreneurs and startups.

PandoDaily: What the hell is presentism?

Doug Rushkoff: Presentism is what comes after futurism. The future is so passé – a fad of the 90s, when we were all leaning into the millennium, speculating on the infinite possibilities of our dotcom economy. Then, at the turn of the millennium all this seemed to change. People became less interested in what their investments might be worth someday, and instead started to care about what they’re actually worth right now. The sequence of economic crashes helped that along. Individuals couldn’t refinance their way towards owning homes, and neither could businesses expand as a way to stay on the right side of their debt structure.

Presentism is also a result of the pervasiveness of digital technology. Everything is “now.” Each moment is a new decision point more than it is part of some journey through time. In digital media, we are participating in a real-time event, not being taken along some linear path.

During a recent presentation, you discussed “living in a real-time, instantaneous, simultaneous, always-on, timeless, goalless, post linear time.” How does that relate to startups and entrepreneurs?

In the biggest sense, business changes from a future-oriented plan to a present-oriented process. People want to earn money not by investing, but by trading. They were disappointed that Facebook “failed” because they bought the stock in the morning and earned no profit by afternoon. This is a tough environment in which to focus on long-term competence or goals. What real-time means for startups is that “lean” doesn’t require austerity, so much as doing everything on the Atkins diet. No starch, no filler, all protein and fat, all kinetic energy, no potential energy. No hard drive, all RAM. The business process is the end in itself.

Doesn’t austerity mean the same thing? 

I see austerity as doing with less, period. It’s a tightening of the belt across the board. Just cut down the power to the computer. The leanness I’m suggesting is more about changing the diet, not just reducing consumption. It’s not a matter of cutting the budget or expending less energy than expending it on certain kinds of things. It’s not cutting down on power to the computer — it’s moving resources from the hard drive to RAM.

For a startup, it would mean learning how to be in a constant development cycle where feedback and results are one and the same. We invite larger groups in to be beta testers and treat them as employees. We use the product ourselves so that we know what’s working whether or not we do a user test. The time lag between product development and user feedback goes away, since user feedback is product development.

As you mentioned, investors don’t have the patience for long-term investments, they want to see a profit by the end of day. Do you think this is why a lot of products fail and/or why “featurish” products come to market?

The impatience certainly doesn’t help build sustainable companies. The organic timing of a market or a product development cycle takes back seat to the very external and artificial time frames of angel capital or B series investors. Most angels want to see their return as early as the three-year point and this forces companies to pivot and abandon a potentially great product just to create the illusion of momentum.

The other thing I see a lot that is extremely “present shock” is when startups go “meta” on their own ideas, as a way of appearing more infinitely scalable. So the company that does something decides it is no longer in the business of doing that thing, but providing the platform through which other people and companies can do that thing.

I’m sure there’s a few cases where this is a legitimate development path. But more often than not, it’s because the company can’t succeed doing the thing they really do – at least not fast enough for the folks who invested in them. So they “go meta” on the original prospect as a way of transcending the clock they were on and beating time.

You claim that kids are turning away from Facebook, because they don’t want to deal with the ramifications of what they post, and instead are turning to apps like Snapchat to live in the now. What proof do you have? 

So far, it’s more anecdotal than hard data. I have been doing talks at high schools and colleges about Facebook, and over the past few months when I talk to them about Facebook, the vast majority says it’s not where they put their attention now. I’ve asked for a show of hands three or four times now, and the majority say that Facebook is for older people – that it’s “too slow” and too “permanent.” So this observation is still very new for me, and while it’s consistent with some of what I was talking about in “Present Shock,” it’s something I’ll be doing some real research on as I move forward, because it’s a great example of a response to “Present Shock.”

I understand the importance of culture and how it takes time to cultivate. But in the startup community, time is a problem, and it is a pretty transient ecosystem. How do you implement culture in this current state?

You don’t start a culture from scratch. I think the culture for a startup begins in the group being served – the proposed customer base – more than the group inventing the answer. You can eventually create the kind of slowed-down tide pool from which a company culture can emerge. To do so you have to protect it, not so much with walls as with competence. Whatever your org. chart, at the center of a growing company live the most competent members. In the transient ecosystem this team becomes the constant. They need to be treated as the heart of the company. This team then becomes the thing that people in the company want to be a part of and that prospective employees from outside the company clamor to join.

You say that past companies’ worth and value was based on time. If you were around 15 years, you were able to build a product, a reputation, a culture, and investors funded it realizing it may take awhile to see a return. Today, how are startups valued?

Putting it bluntly, most people funding startups are really not that smart. They are funding other people’s projects, because they have no ideas of their own. And 90 percent of the money out there is stupid money, just trying to get in on the deals identified but the smart people. So while there are folks like Fred Wilson and Alan Patricof being brilliant, thousands of angels use a shotgun approach, simply attempting to get access to deal flow and hoping that every tenth or every hundredth investment pays off.

To win under such conditions means that successes have to happen on the order of Pinterest or Facebook. So startups are valued *only* for their ability to scale. A company that ends up making 10 million bucks a year, steadily, is worthless in their eyes unless it’s a candidate for acquisition. But it’s the investors who are trapped in the industrial economy. They are the ones in present shock because they have no concept of a sustainable, steady state business success. They can only understand the big payoff, and can’t understand ongoing dividends.

If a culture speeds up, can it ever slow down again? If not, where do you see all this heading in the years to come?

“Present Shock” isn’t about speeding up. It’s about moving into the present. It’s a kind of timelessness. We are becoming an a-historical society, with no sense of story, no sense of goals. We’re going from a world where we find meaning over time to one where we do it in the moment. It’s a digital society, where everything is a sample or a duration. And it’s not a question of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. It just is. And we’ve likely got a century or even a few like this ahead of us.

Where I see this going is that we begin with some wobble — the kinds of initial reactions to a presentist, real-time world. But slowly, over time, we become more mature in our ability to deal with this new temporal environment. We get steady-state marketplaces, peer-to-peer exchange using non-debt-based currencies. We get people behaving ethically even without the threat of a vengeful God. Doing it because it makes more sense in the present. We could even get startups no longer thinking of themselves primarily as the start of something else, but as real businesses doing real things right now. No exit strategy in sight, because there’s nowhere else to go.

[This interview has been edited and condensed.]

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.

Emoticons are stupid. They’re sappy, and won’t go away, like wet leaves on the bottom of your shoe. Yet they’re indispensable for asynchronous communication. That’s because sarcasm does not translate well to email, texting, or comments at the end of news stories. As silly as it may sound emoticons are not just for high school girls or young lovers. They have their own digital linguistic category called “visual messaging.” They are important for conveying attitudes that can be easily misinterpreted in a way that plain text can’t.  No need for me to insert a smiley face here, because I’m serious.

Now one company is looking to take this whole visual messaging phenomenon – it calls it “emoji and meme style communication” – a bit further by integrating social news content into its app.

Today, Lango, formerly Zlango, released a hybrid app available on both Android and iOS that allows integration of visual components by means of text or sharing through social media networks. While there are already apps out there that either do both or a slight variation of one, Lango is the first US app that generates images from news content.

Users of Lango’s text function, known as “spark,” use emoticons as opposed to text to express meaning. Nothing new there. What is innovative, however, is the curation and the dizzying array of content. Instead of scouring through thousands of emoticons to find the perfect one, its “essence engine” enables auto-suggestion, providing five options. So, if you text, “Want to get some coffee?” a user can choose a coffee icon instead of the text.  In terms of context, on a bi-weekly basis Lango will generate emoticons pertaining to news content. When Kate Middleton has her baby, Lango could produce an emoticon with a baby wearing a crown.

The other component of Lango’s hybrid model is called “flair,” which enables users to create meme style images – choose a background to lay under the emoticon, add some text, and post on Facebook and Twitter. The news content will again come into play. Imagine how many memes a user could generate for, let’s say, Lindsay Lohan’s next stint in jail or another bizarre Charlie Sheen meltdown.

The business model is freemium. Lango provides users 1200 “coins” off the bat to purchase premium emoticon packs (like Gangamo Style), along with the social news content. If you want more of these special emoticons, it will set you back $.99 for a pack.

While the freemium model has been a go-to way to suck people in, get them addicted, and charge for the extras, I’m not sure how hooked people will get on purchasing emoticons. Even if Lango can get users to pony up for the premium emoticon packs, it has been widely reported the number of free-to-paid conversion rate is as low as 1 percent. To have any real chance of success, Lango needs to reach millions. But with a whole slew of emoticon apps already dominating the social text market in the Apple and Android, store, it’s hard to see how it can achieve that.

Perhaps that’s why Lango is also considering an advertising model that allows companies to bid on certain emoticons. If I text, “Want to get some coffee?” Starbucks could bid on branding the coffee icon.

You’d think a product like this would rely on the chance of some of its emoticons going viral, attracting ever greater numbers of users. But if a user wants his friends to see her or his emoticons they must also sign up for an app. That drastically drags down the rate it can spread.

It’s also a matter of time before big players, treating emoticons as mere add ons to existing products, step in, especially if there is some cash to be made through advertising models. Facebook, for example, is reportedly in talks with a Pixar illustrator to create high-end emoticons for its social network.

Lango has raised $25 million since its inception in 2007 from the likes of Benchmark and DAG Ventures.  Good luck to them. 

[Image courtesy willlaren on flickr.]

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.

What do Gloria Steinem, Yoko Ono, and Lauren Bush have in common (besides the fact they are women)?

If you said they’re all jewelry designers, give yourself a pat on the back.

Surprised? Don’t be. They, and others, have been seduced by the idea behind New York-based startup Maiden Nation, which launched in November. The company seeks to empower women by providing a platform for them to earn an income through ethical fashion – either by partnering with a designer for charity or having their products sold directly to customers. This “trade not aid” mission enables the socially conscious, curated commerce site to showcase unknown designers, be it artisans in Peru or a local New York artist, thus giving these women exposure to a much wider audience.

The current charitable collection comes with the touchy-feely tagline: “Without imagination, nothing is possible. Nations may be bound by necessity but they are founded on dreams.” Jewelry created in collaboration between celebrities and artisans from Kenya to Guatemala are showcased and run anywhere from $20 to $3,400. Maiden Nation takes a sliver of the retail price but all other proceeds are reinvested into various women’s entrepreneurship projects, with some jewelry pieces going to a particular designer charity.  For example, money generated from Yoko Ono’s “Imagine Peace” bracelet goes to the Rainbow House in Japan, an organization to help victims of the 2011 tsunami.

Charities have long relied on the power of celebrities to help drive donations. Like my colleague Michael Carney mentioned in his recent post about Milk & Honey, the strategy of spotlighting a celebrity’s charity is a win-win for both the famous and the company – the companies get the added publicity, and the famous folks look good while backing something they believe in.

While the celebrities draw attention, the small percentage Maiden Nation receives from these sales won’t pay the bills, though. As a result, the startup has been planning an commerce component in the form of an international marketplace. It will provide a global audience for artisans and obscure local designers by purchasing jewelry and apparel and selling directly to the consumer.

The idea of combining commerce with charity is not new. Product Red has joined forces with several companies, including Gap, to develop product lines, the proceeds earmarked for the Global Fund which help fund programs, treatment and care programs that address AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Toms Shoes claims to give a pair of shoes to a child in need with every purchase. Warby Parker has the same “one for one” model but for eyewear. For Maiden Nation, it’s not about giving a tangible item or monetary donation to someone in need. It’s about empowering women in rural areas to help them earn a living as artisans and reach a global market.

Maiden Nation was founded in 2012 by artist Willa Shalit, daughter of the famously moustached film critic Gene Shalit, co-owner of New York City Web design firm Studioe9 Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown, and social entrepreneur Juliana Um. Their collective vision gelled after the devastating 2010 earthquake. While Americans had good intentions – donating food, sending clothing, and getting big corporations involved through artisan skill development – their charitable giving often didn’t make it to those in need. Food ended up peddled on the black market, donated clothes were sold at street stands, and corporates skill training did little to improve lives.

Sometimes other forces were at work. A couple of years ago Brown organized a group of women to collect plastic bottles from the garbage-infested streets of Port-au-Prince. Once they collected enough, the bottles were sliced and paper mached with recycled newspapers to create bracelets for big-name retailers. Then Hurricane Tomas hit, and the group missed the shipping deadline by two weeks. Some US companies rejected the shipment, as it was a one-off, and the bracelets were useless. The women artisans were depending on future orders, which never came to feed their families. Brown says she never wanted to see the sad look on those women’s faces again. So through the Clinton Foundation she teamed up with Shalit and Um to form Maiden Nation.

This social conscious ecommerce model isn’t easy to pull off. Logistics can be a nightmare. Maiden Nation isn’t dealing with a factory in China producing thousands of goods a day; the startup is engaged with small groups of people living all over the world, mostly in rural areas. Transporting a chunk of jewelry from Afghanistan to New York can be a nightmare. Not only must they tackle the issues pertaining to importing they must deal with longer timelines, communication barriers, and design discrepancies. They also run into the classic retail difficulties with inventory control and ensuring strong enough demand to keep their business afloat.

Of course, there is the option of allowing these groups and local designers to offer their handmade goods on sites like eBay, Etsy, and Amazon, but being shoved between a cheap trinket ring and a cubic zirconia tennis bracelet may not be the best way for a brand that is based on charity to thrive.

In some ways, with Maiden Nation there’s more at stake than just a business. If it’s successful, though, it could offer these poor women a passport to their own success.

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.

Kickstarter has received a lot of attention over the past few days after backing Inocente, a short documentary that took home an Oscar. But Inocente isn’t the only successful creative project to arise from the crowdfunding platform. While there is no magic equation for how to be successful on Kickstarter, it doesn’t hurt the campaign to have a plan of attack, an engaging campaign, and tons of friends to do a huge PR blitz on the campaign.

Here are five others:

Amanda Palmer and The Grand Theft Orchestra

If you measure success in terms of how much impact Kickstarter pledges had on a creative project, the award would most likely go to Amanda Palmer and The Grand Theft Orchestra. Once Palmer decided to part ways with a major music label, she took to Kickstarter to get her record off the ground. Not only did she seek funding to produce the album but also create “song-inspired album art,” which involved thirty artists. The campaign offered pledgers nifty rewards like a signed art book, limited edition vinyl, and tickets to see the art at galleries around the globle. After receiving over $1.1 million in pledges, Palmer’s album debuted at number 10 on the Billboard top 200 list back in September.

Oceanic Versus

Paola Prestina also has Kickstarter to thank. The composer launched a campaign for Oceanic Versus, an opera focused on Italian culture through four different story lines. While Carnegie Hall originally commissioned the work it was the $10,000 in Kickstarter pledges the campaign provided the opportunity for the opera to be shown at the Kennedy Center. Named one of the top 100 composers under 40 by NPR, Pristina enticed people to pledge by offering CDs and prints.

Cards Against Humanity

Then there is 2011’s Cards Against Humanity, a card game based on points, where one person asks an awkward question from a black pile of cards and the others provide their best response from the white cards they are holding. It has that Apples to Apples board game vibe but much more R-Rated. For example, a black card may have the question, “What do old people smell like?” and you must choose the best answer from the white cards you hold in your hand—“women in yogurt commercials,” “Dick Cheney,” or “oversized lollipops.” It didn’t take much to get people interested in the campaign, as Cards Against Humanity only offered three prizes, the best one being personalized black and white cards. But apparently this was all the company needed.

While it only received $15,000, which was almost 300 percent higher than its original goal of $4,000, the founders are still feeling the ramifications of its success. I have tried forever to get my hands on a pack of these cards, Amazon keeps telling me its number one game is sold out. I also give this founders props for the release of an extended version this past December, which nabbed the founders an additional $70,000 in profits, all of which they donated to the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

The Order of the Stick Reprint

Since 2003, creator Rich Burlew had been sketching stick figures for his webcomic book series The Order of the Stick. As of 2005, Burlew made the decision to offer the series in a paper format. He soon ran into the problem of keeping the older versions on shelves and didn’t have the funds to print additional comics. Last February, with a goal of $57,750 Burlew took to Kickstarter to try to get one of his books reprinted, The Order of the Stick: War and XPs. By offering pledgers magnets, custom crayon drawings, and coloring books, the campaign ended up receiving $1.2 million from nearly 15,000 backers.

Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster

Not everyone is obsessed with iPhone game apps, as one Kickstarter project saw a ton of success from a board game. Remember those things? Game developer Mike McVey took to the crowdfunding site for his two player strategy game, one with actual figurines to paint, hoping to grab $20,000. After successfully employing additional add-ons for meeting pledges and unlocking special packages, upgrades, and videos for goals met, the Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster ended up raising more than $950,000.

And while these projects are the most talked about creative projects, there is a host of other people who would have never made it without Kickstarter.

As I wrote recently, the interactive puzzle fiction book The Maze of Games has attracted current pledges topping $110,000 with 16 days left. Web comic website Penny Arcade begged folks to support their site, instead of depending on ads, and people came out in droves pledging over $528,000. And even a local theater located in Barrington Illinois felt the love from the Kickstarter community after it scored $175,000 to save it from going under.

Image Courtesy of Flickr

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.

New York University is in the midst of its annual NYU Entrepreneurs Competition. Over eight months, teams comprised of students from across the university compete for $200,000 in prize money spread across three tracks – new, social, and technology ventures. The competition has been ongoing since 1999, with one notable previous winner being Pinterest (when it was known as Tote).

One of those behind the competition is Frank Rimalovski, Managing Director of NYU’s Innovation Venture Fund, a fund in the process of raising $20 million, which he uses to back startups created by students, faculty, and staff. In addition to this annual competition, Rimalovski is preparing for another big event: NYU’s Entrepreneurs Festival, which takes place on March 1 and 2. This  “kick ass party” (as Rimalovski calls it) will include talks from Jack Dorsey from Twitter and Square, Herb Kelleher from Southwest airlines, and New York City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne (who will be interviewed by our own Adam Penenberg), as well as others.

I chatted with Rimalovski last week to find out more about ways NYU (my alma mater) is seeking to create a more entrepreneurial culture – and why.

(This interview was edited for clarity and space.)

PandoDaily: You’ve worked in Silicon Valley and in New York at various technology companies before transitioning into founding your own VC firm, New Venture Partners. Why then make the jump to to the educational side?

Frank Rimalovski: When the opportunity came knocking at NYU, I was particularly intrigued, because it was naturally leveraging what I have already done but just switching it from the corporate to university context. On a personal level, I had a desire to be a more integral part of New York City. I had this thought back in 2009. It was during this time New York was kind of exploding, but our model [at New Venture Partners] of focusing on corporate spinouts took me all over the world and less in New York. There was a huge BBQ in my backyard, and I wasn’t invited to the party. Now, I am standing at the grill. The third reason was to really build something, to scratch that entrepreneurial itch of my own.

Tell me about the upcoming Entrepreneurs Festival.

The festival grew out of this realization that there is a richer history of entrepreneurs and startups at NYU that most people I talked to didn’t know about. [It’s] a really well kept secret inside and outside university. It dawned on me that we needed to celebrate this in a big way. It wasn’t just about putting a list of names on a website. It was actually creating some physical manifestation where people could connect, stories could be shared, and hopefully inspire people to learn from their experiences and lessons along the way.

Why does a college need a venture fund?

I think the need for a venture fund is somewhat university specific. I would say Stanford might not need a venture fund, because [it is] tightly interwoven and integrated with the venture capital community in Silicon Valley. Every university needs a robust startup ecosystem that helps empower or enable entrepreneurs across the university to go from an idea to impact and marketplace. The fund is one piece of that puzzle, and to some level it is the last piece. Often before things become investable they need to validate their concept in the marketplace, build a prototype, have a team, and some concept of a business model before people are going to invest. We have invested a lot of time in the last few years to try and build out that ecosystem to help entrepreneurs help themselves. That naturally feeds the fund. Absent the rest of the ecosystem, the fund wouldn’t necessarily have enough impact.

Does NYU need a fund to compete with Stanford and other universities that may be better integrated with their tech communities?

I do think it makes more sense for NYU, and I think it made more sense three years ago before the startup community matured and became richer and more complex. Back then, the ties that NYU had with the startup community were tenuous. My team tries to help build those bridges. Above and beyond just making investments, we try to bring experienced entrepreneurs and investors into the ecosystem we are building, whether serving as entrepreneur in residence, mentors, or being judges in venture competitions. We have learned a few tricks from our colleagues at colleges like MIT and Duke and try to adapt our needs to our environment. We are fortunate being in New York, as we have this thriving ecosystem on top of it.

When evaluating investments, what do you look for?

It’s often that the technology and the idea are one piece of the puzzle, but it’s only one piece of the complicated multi-variant equation. We are also looking for a team that has the drive, but also the ability to build and execute on that. We look for people that know how to be very customer driven, have some deep level of customer discovery or need. The people that have a grounded sense of what it is going to take to take it forward and have shown, the entrepreneurial grit or drive, the ability to make due with their resources they have at their disposable. The ones that make excuses — “We don’t have this… We don’t have that…” — are making excuses. Real entrepreneurs somehow figure out how to make it work. Also, investors are going to want to see that you can attract the team to build it, they you can actually build it, and there is some customer that gives a damn about it. There is an upward and to the right trend that we look for in investments, but also in people.

Are you seeing certain trends in the entrepreneurs?

In the technology venture competition this year, seven of the ten semi-finalists have some health care or life science to them, and there are not drugs. There are a couple of medical devices, a bunch of healthcare IT projects, a couple of services. We are starting to see, maybe it is a little bit of a shift, to people solving what I would call “more interesting and meaningful problems.” So, maybe the social venture competition is not the sole domain of do-gooders. How many more social networks and fashion startups do we need?

What do you say to people who claim entrepreneurship can’t be taught?

I don’t agree with that as a flat out statement, but there is something to it at the same time. I don’t think you can teach someone how to be an entrepreneur, but you can refine and hone their skills and support them. I would agree you can’t learn entrepreneurship from a textbook. Can you get it through practical application augmented by a classroom? I would say, to some extent. Some people were born to be something; it doesn’t mean you can’t make them better at it.

What kind of bumps in the road have you seen?

The sheer size of NYU is daunting, and it is spread across three main campuses in New York. Related to that, the cultures are different in some of the schools. In some regards, it is challenging to get the word out, because everyone is overloaded with email these days. We use email, Twitter, and Facebook, but there is no substitution for making eye contact and pressing the flesh. So getting out and presenting to clubs, classes, orientations, faculty staff meetings or town halls, this is a big place to do all that. Also, in a place where 25 percent of students churn every year, we are never done. It is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. When you are done painting one end, the other side is starting to rust.

Looking ahead, where do you hope NYU is going to end up, relating to funding, services, and the program itself in the next couple years?

More and better. There is a lot more that we want to do, we want to create a physical entrepreneurship space where students from journalism, business, engineering, and IT can come together and connect, collaborate, and intermingle with the startup community. [Having] a VC office and lawyer hours is an important piece. Than there are other programs – I won’t go into specifics right now ­– that can help support a broader swath of the community. Ultimately that serves to drive both entrepreneurial behavior, thinking and activity, get more technology and innovations to market and at some level, becomes a magnet to attracting the best and brightest students and faculty to NYU. You can never be too good.

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.

Game designer Mike Selinker had a dream back in 1995—to bring his puzzle solving fantasy adventure, a book called The Maze of Games, to market.

It was, he believed, a story that Narnia fanatics would eat up. After being snatched by a frightening gatekeeper, two siblings, Samuel and Collleen Quiace, scramble around late-19th century England trying to escape. The twist was that readers held the key to Samuel and Colleen making it home safely by completing puzzles to move the adventure forward.

No one he knew thought he could sell it, so Selinker put his manuscript in the proverbial drawer for eighteen years. Then he decided to try Kickstarter.

Four and half hours after his campaign launched, he met his campaign goal of $16,000, and to date has attracted 1,600 backers and raised more than $100,000. In the world of Kickstarter, with 24 days to go Selinker is on track to have one of the most successful book projects ever.

More and more authors are turning to Kickstarter. With self-publishing exploding and traditional book publishers scaling back their lists and advances, many have been scrambling to find ways to fund their own work. So it’s not surprising that they turn to services like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and the like.

Canadian writer Ryan North’s choose-your-own-adventure-book is the most funded publishing project ever with $580,905, fantasy artist Larry Elmore scored $299,914, and best selling author Seth Godin raked in $287,342.

Not everyone succeeds, of course. In one high-profile failure, a book about Kickstarter failed to garner enough support on Kickstarter.

Seliker, co-founder of Lone Shark Games and a games contributor to Wired, knew that for his leather bound book to succeed, he had to do it right. It took months of meticulous planning – from developing the tiered pledge prize list to incorporating a maze within the campaign to developing the Conundrucopia, a supplement in the back of the book featuring other famous puzzlemakers. He believed he had thought of everything, until a friend asked about how he was going to reach the tipping point, a strategy to get 10 percent of his project in the first three hours.

In Kickstarter getting a percentage of your project funded as quickly as possible ups your chances successfully funding it. Quickly Selinker put together a limited edition puzzle book for the first 100 backers and pushed it this through Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. In the first three minutes he had met his tipping point.

It worked. “It was a huge success out of the gate,” he says. “We blew away all our expectations, but we also blew away all of our plans.”

These plans included scrambling to keep backers interested. So Selinker created a strategy for updates. He developed badges and a sharing mechanism so that puzzle fanatics could brag about their successes on Facebook and the like. And while he’s selling a physical book he also developed an e-book version for the iPad, produced by Puzzazz for a $20 pledge it is all yours.

Even though Selinker can chalk up this campaign as a victory, he still has a long road of head of him to get the book in the hands of hard-core gamers. He has promised to deliver by Christmas and does not want to as part of the 84 percent of Kickstarter projects delivered late. Yet, because of rewrites, creating additional puzzles, adding the Conundrucopia, he only has 50 percent of the book done.

And because funding was seven times more than he had anticipated Selinker has to adjust his strategy for production, such as changing his printing strategy.

Of course, that’s a good problem to have.

Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.

Two stories caught my eye this week relating to social media and law enforcement. One was pertaining to police pleading with the public not to use Twitter during the mountain cabin stand off with the ex-cop cum alleged cop-murderer Christopher Dorner, for fear that the updates put the lives of officers in jeopardy. The other was about Brooklyn Deputy Inspector Joseph Gulotta using social media to track down gang members and confiscate guns. This strategy has helped his precinct nab more guns than any other in the city. But it also got Gulotta on the radar of criminals, who ordered a hit on him.

While law enforcement is lagging behind in social media (largely because of cultural inertia and puny budgets that don’t allow investing in add-on tools) it plays a pivotal role in expediting investigations through online monitoring techniques. Yet, even as social media looks to provide an extra set of eyes for police officers, it can be a double-edged sword due to privacy concerns.

Unless investigators can convince a judge to issue a subpoena to social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others – and these businesses comply – law enforcement officials must follow the same privacy policies as everyone else when it comes to checking out what people are doing and saying online.

Depending on the budget, police officers’ usage of social media may be a simple as looking for suspicious activity in their neighborhood by searching for keywords relevant to the area – gang names, organized crime groups, hotspots for illegal activity. And it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes’ eye for detail to track down loudmouthed criminals, who seem to take great pride in showing off their new Smith & Wessons on Instagram, bragging to friends on Facebook about their latest initiation jump, or hopping on Twitter to divulge details of the latest place they looted. Sometimes geolocation apps also work against them.

If the agency had adequate funding, the opportunity to invest in technology add-ons, tools similar to what businesses use for tracking consumer behavior, could provide further support for the investigation. Unlike businesses, however, law enforcement can’t legally track anyone and everyone. The target of the search must be part of on an ongoing investigation, according to guidelines laid out by the Criminal Intelligence Systems Operating Policies.

Bright Planet, a company that has partnered with the CIA, has recently launched a local-level social-media monitoring tool focused on Twitter. For a few hundred dollars a month, it provides tweet tracking, geolocation service, real time feeds, and other features. Unfortunately, for the company it has been challenging for the service to gain traction, as the company is “selling an implied need, not an explicit need.”

While these are run of the mill tactics employed by agencies throughout the US, the technology of facial recognition layered on top of social media networks creates a bit of a gray area over the privacy vs. safety argument. The matter has less to do with surveillance of a suspect in the real world and more to do with bystanders’ data being pulled into police databases, creating a digital shadow. With more than 9 billion photos uploaded on Facebook every month, linking offline identity to online is not difficult. Currently, the guidelines for dealing with storage and destroying, are self-regulated to respect privacy policy, but coming from an industry that has self-proclaimed itself “behind the times,” I remain wary.

Even as the law enforcement agents I interviewed, Lieutenant Nathan Steele and Constable Scott Mills, discussed how social media makes their lives easier, they still experience the ramifications of online life. Just like us, their public information is readily available and for people who want to harm them, social media privacy settings are a necessity.

Some police officers also experience other forms of revenge. One cop, who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said certain online organizations, like Anonymous, have targeted law enforcement officials and committed acts of identity theft and releasing of financial information. He provided the infamous tale of Lieutenant John Pike, the police officer who went way overboard during UC Davis protests, spraying individuals with pepper spray. Anonymous responded by releasing his cell number, email, and home address.

“We have no problem targeting police and releasing their information even if it puts them at risk, because we want them to experience just a taste of the brutality and misery they serve us on an everyday basis,” Anonymous said in a YouTube video after the UC Davis incident.

Fortunately for law enforcement agents local seminars, along with larger conferences from organizations like SMILE, or Social Media the Internet and Law Enforcement address protective actions officers should take to ensure their privacy. It is pretty basic — put a generic picture on social media, keep personal and professional life separate, setting strict privacy settings

Yet, Nathan Steele, an instructor teaching ethics of technology to law enforcement, pointed out, he often sees police officers whipping out their phones in the middle of class to wiping clean any personal information they posted across various social media platforms.

In the world of law enforcement, social media has shifted the paradigm for how information is relayed. Law enforcement will have to do better at catching up.

Until then, cops will have to rely on the mere stupidity of criminals.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman for PandoDaily]

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.

Personally, I would rather floss my teeth with a Swiss army knife than figure out my personal finances. That’s probably not surprising. Not many jump for joy when we’re budgeting everyday expenses, strategizing investment opportunities, watching our 401Ks plummet, or choosing a retirement fund. But this unwillingness to grapple with personal finance turns out to be a real problem. According to a MassMutual survey only 26 percent of females feel comfortable dealing with finances, yet these same women are on track to be the family breadwinners in the next 15 years.

Vying to be part of the solution, DailyWorth, a money management site targeted to women, looked to address this problem with this week’s soft launch of its redesigned finance site.

While other sites like Suze Orman or Ms.Money are strictly targeted towards helping women manage money or provide a service for a fee, DailyWorth’s site goes one step further, by being a personal finance site but also writing about more general issues like paying kids for grades and getting the best return on investment for your designer bag. As long as there’s a money angle, the content is fluid.

The site launched five verticals with a focus on wealth creation: plan, earn, spend, learn, and live. Each is segmented into smaller sectors, like investment and tech, and provides women “news you can use” pieces, along with personal tales and financial lessons from women. The goal is simple – provide resources and information to help make the world of finance less frightening for women. DailyWorth’s founder, Amanda Steinberg, says she doesn’t just want to help women manage money but also to inspire “a new breed of ambitious women.”

Founded in 2009, DailyWorth arose from Steinberg’s own frustrations. When she was in her 20s, Steinberg says she earned $200,000 as a Web engineer but still couldn’t afford her mortgage. She was living way above her means and needed to rein in her finances. Kiplinger and Money didn’t speak her language; she found “both boring and irrelevant to her life” and looked to create a niche in the finance sector focused on women.

Originally, DailyWorth’s business model was based on daily emails to subscribers providing tips, trends, and insights, while also providing an online presence of archived information. DailyWorth acquired subscribers at low cost and sold sponsored content and sponsorships to advertisers. It was the Daily Candy of finance. But after 15 percent month over month growth and achieving her goal of 500,000 subscribers Steinberg wondered what to do next.

“Listening to readers and advertisers, I realized email is great in terms of establishing a business but it was really time for us to expand,” she says.

While it generates revenue through the traditional, and sometimes looked down upon, route of online ads, the site has also partnered with Fidelity and Schwab for sponsored posts in conjunction with offering women e-learning classes at $99 for four-week Facebook sessions taught by big guns like MoneyZen’s Manish Thakor and money expert Carmen Wong Ulrich.

Backed by friends and family money and two rounds of financing from investors like Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, DailyWorth has raised over $3 million and will soon close its fourth round. Steinberg wouldn’t disclose revenue but acknowledges that DailyWorth is not profitable.

While DailyWorth provides useful services and insightful articles (like how one woman survived bankruptcy), the support stories, advice content, and “me too” ethos of its community probably won’t help me with my mountain of debt, which I accumulated from paying for graduate school. For that, I’ll need a miracle, which, unfortunately, DailyWorth doesn’t offer.

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.

Last night, at a monthly New York Tech Meet-up, Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of Citia, a kind of Cliff’s Notes publisher for “high-velocity reading,” took the stage to talk about storytelling. This might appear an odd topic for the purveyor of a service for the ADD crowd that promises to “shorten and spotlight an author’s big ideas” by reorganizing books on to “virtual index cards,” with the idea to make reading “faster,” “easier,” and “more efficient.”

Before 900 tech enthusiasts, Holliday unveiled the Leap Motion Controller, which let her use hand gestures to guide her through the on screen entertainment. And who was the entertainer providing this entertainment? Why, somewhat past-his-prime rapper cum business mogul Snoop Dogg, who, Holliday claims, was looking for a way to not only engage with fans but also “monetize his brand.”

The genius of Citia is that it gets how our own web experiences have been changing our view of story. If you look at your own story, when you get down to it you are all bits and descriptive fragments that are spread across the Web and over Facebook and Twitter. There are times in the public sphere that who you are – or, more precisely, how others view you –  comes down to a “like” you clicked on Facebook or a “retweet” of a friend’s gross joke on Twitter. Perhaps you left a comment on an article or somehow you’re tagged in a friend’s photo so the world will now knows you wore a morosely ratty sweater in college. There’s your incomplete LinkedIn profile, a blog post from 2011, your abandoned Pinterest page – all of these pieces say something about you. Put web and social fragments together and you have a person’s partial life story.

Let’s get back to Snoop Dogg. If you wanted to know more about him, where would you start? You might Google his name, then head to his Wikipedia entry. Head over to Youtube to watch him perform at the 1994 MTV Video Awards then maybe stream some of his music over Spotify. Check out what he tweeted yesterday, scour pictures on his Facebook page, mosey on over to Pinterest, where Snoop offers categories like “my ish” (products with his name of them), “Fliccs” (appears to be profile photos) and “shit I like” (no explanation necessary). If you hunger for even more Snoop you could go old school and read a bunch of articles.

Being a celebrity/brand requires managing multiple platforms, and so does being a fan. It means accepting new forms of storytelling where the reader chooses his own path through a story. Brands (like Beyonce and Procter & Gamble) have to let go. The information is out there. The best strategy is to put it all together so that it offers the brand’s most positive reflection.

This is how Citia works: Through its app it offers a template that resembles a 3D flashcard on which content creators put text, photos, videos, voiceovers, and what have you. It kind of sounds like DVD extras – material not good enough to make it in the original package. Where some see detritus Snoop Dogg sees revenue. You want to join Snoop’s clubhouse of friends? That will cost you. He’ll throw in behind-the-scenes pictures of his tour on one virtual card, a video interview on another, and get you a sampling of his latest song. Also, in a pull advertising strategy, users have the option to flip over the card to purchase the latest product Snoop Dogg is hawking. If people want to skip the ads, they just keep on trucking through the cards. Besides having access to this content, users also have the capability of sharing it across social media channels.

As Holliday stood onstage, she used motion control hardware from Leap Motion to flick, flip, and stack Snoop’s soon-to-be launched app (its official release is during SXSW).

As with the other presenters like How About We and Shelby.tv, people sat in silent as she provided her best impression of Tom Cruise in Minority Report, her hands grabbing at the screen, twirling around the various features, maximizing the text, pushing the button to play the video. Once the demo was complete, the crowd let out loud claps, people whispered next to each other, and Holliday moved up to the event upstairs where people praised her innovation.

Last night’s unveiling was a big shift from what Citia originally set out to do, which was help people ingest books faster. She developed the original concept after being unable to find the time to finish a great non-fiction read — she didn’t have 10 hours to devote. She figured she wasn’t alone and devised a plan for “deconstructing and reconstructing” books. So, instead of 500 pages of dense reading, the main concepts were organized into a stack of virtual cards, allowing people to have control of what they read and how they read it — simply called non-linear format. The 10 hours of reading turned into one.

Citia’s success is by no means assured. “The challenge is they are really creating a new thing and this is a little cumbersome for the licensing operations for publishers,” Mike Shatzkin, a book publishing consultant who once counted Citia a client. And if fans can access troves of material online already, can Citia’s celebrities count on being able to entice them to pay something for access to more?

Holliday hopes so. She has been bootstrapping the business with the proceeds from the sale of her previous company, MBS (now Digitas Health inside Publicis), “moving money from one nest egg to another,” and plans to look for outside financing.

Besides providing one-offs for bigger companies, she is hoping to one day create a template anyone can use — be it a blogger or a huge international company.

At least, that’s Citia’s story so far. It could change, though.

Andrea Huspeni

Andrea Huspeni is a recent graduate student of NYU studying business and economic reporting, Andrea oversees the ticker and writes about subjects pertaining to the New York tech scene. She love covering tech, startups, entrepreneurs, and anything that brings innovation and thought provoking ideas to the world. Prior to becoming a journalist, she was involved in marketing in corporate settings and owned an ecommerce store.