F*ck You. Pay Me.

And more great advise from Jessica Hische on the dark art of pricing.

NYC - Aiming to be THE Digital City

New York City’s first chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne’s primary task is to assess city government’s digital strategy. She and her team spent the first 90 days compiling a report, and the result is the Road Map for the Digital City, a 60-page dossier on the city’s digital reach, what the team plans to achieve and how to get there.

Mashable recently spoke with Sterne about the Roadmap and what she plans to implement in New York.

The first area of emphasis is information access, which addresses the digital divide. One of the more obvious actions is to simply provide free wireless access in more public places. This process has already begun, with three parks receiving wireless Internet last week, and 17 more across all five boroughs due in 2011. The city also plans to experiment with wireless connections on the subway, starting with six stations. But Sterne acknowledges that it’s not so simple. “People have asked in the past, ‘Who’s your target user?’ And the truth is, it needs to be accessible to every single New Yorker. There is no target, it’s everyone.”

This is why the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT), the city’s IT agency, is administering a federally awarded Broadband Technology Opportunities Program grant for high-speed Internet access and training. Through this grant, the city will introduce broadband connectivity to 18,000 sixth-graders from low-income households, both in the home and at school. This will provide not only the requisite hardware but also training, and it stands to benefit not only the students but also their families. Sterne estimates some 40,000 New Yorkers would be positively affected by this initiative.

In addition, the BTOP grant provides funding for high-speed connectivity in public spaces such as libraries and recreation centers, as well as training facilities for senior citizens.

Tim O’Reilly is responsible for the idea of “government as a platform,” and Sterne embraces this philosophy. “I think there’s just huge potential to re-imagine the information and services that cities provide in a digital capacity,” she says.

“We can help to create ecosystems the same way that the Facebook and the Twitter APIs have created entire ecosystems of tools and products and experiences that are deeply integrated. Every municipal government and different types of public services has the same potential, which is that you can open up — through an API — the information and services that the city provides. Then you can allow everyone to engage with the city on their own terms.”

The goal is to launch a set of APIs called NYC Platform, which will include data that is relevant and useful to New Yorkers. In addition to opening up the 350 data sets contained in the NYC DataMine, the city plans to launch a pilot 311 API. The purpose of this will be to make data from 311 — the city’s non-emergency information service — available to developers for integration into products, such as apps. Additionally, this pilot API will be given both “Read” and “Write” capabilities, making use of the data a two-way experience for citizens.

To source the information contained in the Roadmap, Sterne says that the city drew on some 4,000 points of engagement, both within city government and through citizens. One of the takeaways was that plenty of people are already engaging digitally with New York City government. In fact, over the next two years, the city expects that unique traffic to nyc.gov (currently 33 million yearly) will soon overtake that of people physically visiting Central Park (35 million yearly). Reflecting this, the city aims to make digital public spaces welcoming and useful.

Redesigning nyc.gov is one of the biggest challenges the city will face, Sterne says. “It’s a much more complicated endeavor than just relaunching a website because there are so many players involved. We have to remember that it hooks into backend systems and databases that support critical city processes, so it’s a lot more involved than a typical [website] redesign,” she says.

To help solve the user experience issue, the city will host its first hackathon this summer at the entrepreneurial coworking space General Assembly. There will be an application process open to teams who want to participate in this event geared toward making nyc.gov more accessible and navigable.

The city will continue to use social media to engage with citizens and visitors. It’s launched @nycgov on Twitter to provide the most essential information to New Yorkers. A glimpse shows it primarily curates information from the city’s other accounts such as @311NYC, @NYC_DOT (Department of Transportation) and even @NYCASP (a Twitter feed dedicated to Alternate Side Parking Rules). Many of these presences were already vibrant, taken on by community managers throughout the various city agencies. But NYC Digital recognizes that more can be done with social media, which is why they’ve created SMART, the Social Media Advisory and Research Taskforce. The committee’s 10 members are helping to develop strategy for social media, as well as managing the city’s existing presence on various platforms.

In addition to Facebook and Twitter, the city will introduce partnerships with New York City based startups Foursquare and Tumblr. They will launch an official Foursquare badge to reward people for visiting public spaces, and an official government Tumblr that focuses on telling New York City stories.

The final aspect of the city’s digital initiatives is to support digital industry. New York City is already a center of this industry, with a thriving startup scene and plenty of investors. The New York City Economic Development Corporation is leading this effort by encouraging a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. NYC BigApps is just one example of the ways NYCEDC supports innovative technology. It’s a competition that allows developers to access the NYC DataMine and then build public apps based on that data. One example was DontEat.at, a popular app that integrates with Foursquare and sends you a text message when you check in to a place that scored poorly on its health inspection.

In addition to providing incentives for innovation, the city plans to attract engineering talent and encourage them to join city startups. DOITT’s Speedy Procurement and Rapid Contracts (SPARK) program is geared toward offering different rules for smaller development projects in order to get independent developers or firms involved. “We’re giving an opportunity to support our growing startups. What this allows for is an opportunity to make it easier for those companies to engage and work with the city and get contracts from the city,” says Sterne.

NYCEDC also provides affordable workspaces for entrepreneurs and startups at Hive at 55 and Varick Street Incubator. More such spaces are coming in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The report also indicates the the Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment will create a digital media incubator complete with a media events and conference center.

Obviously, there is a lot to be done, and Sterne says there would be another report issued in a year, including a progress update. For now, she’s impressed with how much work has been done already. “New York City government has been pursuing digital initiatives for a very long time, and we’re probably one of the leaders in the world in terms of digital engagement. This is really just about taking account of everything we’ve done, and looking forward in a comprehensive, holistic way.”

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Howard Rheingold on collaboration (and commons)

American dream is about equality, not wealth

he battle between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans over raising the debt ceiling has escalated into more than a fight over the budget and taxes. It has become a battle over who speaks for the American dream -- those who want the wealthy to pay a greater share of the nation's taxes or those who want to cut entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare.

A look back in time provides a view of the American dream that ought to encourage liberals.

The famed historian James Truslow Adams, in his 1931 study "The Epic of America," is credited with popularizing the term "American dream." But Adams' dream had little to do with the now-popular idea of "striking it rich" and achieving fabulous wealth. Adams' version of the American dream was a modest one. It was a shared dream in which men and women attain "the fullest stature of which they are capable" without trampling one another.

Adams was opposed to a system that, as he put it, "steadily increases the gulf between the ordinary man and the super-rich," and in this view Adams was not just speaking for himself. He was describing the egalitarian core at the center of the historic American dream.

In the 17th century, we see this modest version of the American dream most clearly in the "city upon a hill" sermon (a favorite of Ronald Reagan) that John Winthrop, one of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's early governors, gave as the Puritans were on the way to the New World. For Winthrop, it was crucial for the Puritans to remember that theirs was a collective enterprise in which they would succeed or fail by virtue of being "knit together" as one people. Sharing and sacrifice were prerequisites, in Winthrop's mind, for becoming a city on a hill that would serve as an example for others.

"We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities," Winthrop insisted.

More than a century later Thomas Jefferson found himself reaching a similar conclusion while serving as minister to France. In a 1785 letter to his friend James Madison, Jefferson expressed his horror at the inequality of life in pre-revolutionary France and then went on to discuss how America could avoid Europe's fate.

"The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on," Jefferson wrote Madison, and then with the vastness of America in mind, he observed, "It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land."

Almost a century later, with passage of the Homestead Act looming, President-elect Abraham Lincoln expressed similar thoughts. "I have to say that in so far as the government lands can be disposed of, I am in favor of cutting up the wild lands into parcels, so that every poor man may have a home," Lincoln told a cheering Ohio audience.

On July 4, 1861, in a special message to Congress, Lincoln went even further in describing the government's obligation to its most vulnerable citizens. In an address devoted to justifying the Union cause, Lincoln defended the idea of "government whose leading object is, to elevate the conditions of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all -- to afford all, an unfettered start." It was this view of government that in Lincoln's mind made the Civil War a "people's contest."

Nearly 75 years later, with unemployment at 25 percent, President Franklin Roosevelt advanced a similar description of government. In his 1933 inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke of the need for the country to move as an army "willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline," and over the next 12 years, Roosevelt never backed away from that idea.

Campaigning for the presidency in 1936, he assured voters, "Your government is still on the same side of the street with the good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side," and in his triumphant second inaugural, Roosevelt made it clear what being a good Samaritan meant in the middle of the Great Depression. "The test of our progress," he proclaimed, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

World War II only heightened Roosevelt's egalitarian beliefs. In his first fireside chat after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told the nation "ahead there lies sacrifice for all of us," and in his 1942 State of the Union address, he spelled out what sacrifice now meant. "War costs money," Roosevelt reminded Congress and the nation. "That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other nonessentials."

For Roosevelt, the notion of carrying on a war while simultaneously cutting taxes was unthinkable and unpatriotic.

Whose vision of the American dream will prevail in the budget battle between Obama and congressional Republicans is far from clear. Both sides, who are still "far apart," as the president put it, may end up compromising their beliefs to get an agreement.

But in the meantime we should have no doubt about the American dream. For four centuries, it has rested on the idea that government should do all it can to narrow the divide between those at the top and those at the bottom of society.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Nicolaus Mills.

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Zynga's cloud computing advantage

Zynga was created in 2007 with the idea that “play — like search, share and shop — would become one of the core activities on the internet.”

Just 5 years later, the company has about 150 million monthly unique users in 166 countries, and has just filed for what could become one of the most important IPOs of 2011.

There's little doubt that Zynga is one of the fastest and most interesting growth stories on the Internet, and it may be interesting to analyze how the company succeeded in supporting its customers' strong demand while keeping a flexible and cost conscious architecture.

The answer, predictably, is cloud computing. Here is how Zynga describes its infrastructure in its IPO filing:

Our games run on a complex distributed system, or what is commonly known as cloud computing. We own, operate and maintain elements of this system, but significant elements of this system are operated by third parties that we do not control and which would require significant time to replace. We expect this dependence on third parties to continue. In particular, a significant majority of our game traffic is hosted by Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, or AWS, which service uses multiple locations.

We have invested extensively in developing proprietary technology to support the growth of our business. We have created a scalable cloud-based server and network infrastructure that enables us to deliver games to millions of players simultaneously with high levels of performance and reliability.

Our physical network infrastructure utilizes a mixture of our own datacenters and public cloud datacenters linked with high-speed networking. We utilize commodity hardware, and our architecture is designed for high availability and fault tolerance while accommodating the demands of social game play.

We have developed our architecture to work effectively in a flexible cloud environment that has a high degree of elasticity. For example, our automatic provisioning tools have enabled us to add up to 1,000 servers in a 24-hour period in response to game demand.

We intend to invest in and use more of our own infrastructure going forward, which we believe will provide us with an even better cost profile and position us to further drive operating leverage.

Derrick Harris, at GigaOM, has an interesting commentary on Zynga's approach to the cloud:

Zynga has been touting its Z Cloud infrastructure for more than a year, which reverses the conventional approach to hybrid cloud computing. Whereas many analysts initially assumed companies would use private clouds as a gateway to public clouds, Zynga uses Amazon EC2 as a staging ground before ultimately moving games onto private cloud resources. Essentially, Amazon’s cloud lets Zynga scale elastically and determine average traffic load and other metrics, so that it can optimize its internal infrastructure for each game’s specific needs.

The goal of this strategy is efficiency: Zynga doesn’t have to invest in more resources than necessary upfront, nor does it have to worry about underprovisioning resources or otherwise inadequately configuring them when it brings games onto its private cloud. In many cases, private clouds can cost less than public clouds for applications with fairly stable usage patterns, and they help companies meet various requirements around security and compliance. Zynga uses Cloud.com for its private cloud infrastructure, as well as RightScale as a management layer that makes for a uniform experience in terms of managing both public and private resources.

Zynga's architecture is also build about close proximity to its main partner, Facebook.

According to peeringDB, Zynga's main peering points in the US are located in several Equinix (EQIX) data centers on the East and West Coast of the USA (Ashburn and S. Jose/Sunnyvale, respectively).

According to industry sources, and as reported by Data Center Knowledge, Zynga is also leasing wholesale data center space from Digital Realty (DLR) and Dupont Fabros Technology (DFT).

Here is a slide taken from Equinix's latest analyst meeting, which underlines the importance/need of being part of the right “ecosystem,” a win-win situation for all participants:

(Click chart to enlarge)

Zynga was also the subject of an interesting mention, during Equinix's analyst meeting, made by Pete Ferris, the company's Chief Sales Officer.

Since the beginning, Zynga had very clear that, in order to succeed in its effort to “sell virtual pigs” to customers, it needed to reach the widest audience possible and make the gaming experience as pleasant as possible - in other words, supporting strong growth (reaching the largest possible number of lurkers) was key to the potential success of the company.

In order to make it possible, Zynga had to look for the right partners, infrastructure providers like Equinix and Amazon that had the financial strength to keep growing their data center resources and support the company's potential strong growth requirements. In Equinix's case, Zynga's main partner was just a cross connect away, and the facilities also offered the largest number of US networks and ISPs to connect to, with the added opportunity to reach the most important Asian (on the West Coast) and European (on the East Coast) providers. Networking and growth problems solved, with just one provider.

Zynga is a very interesting success story on its own, but it may also be analyzed to support the investing theory that there are some key infrastructure providers to these stories (both very successful or not) that will keep benefiting from the growth of the Internet.

These companies will also, most probably, be able to use their “first mover” advantage to strengthen their leadership, as they leverage their magnetic influence in the market to become the “place to be” for most new start ups, among which you'll probably find the next Zynga, but that will all contribute to these providers' revenues and profits.

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4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Humanity and technology continue to co-evolve at an ever increasing pace, leaving traditional institutions (and mindsets) calcified and out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, where everything is increasingly connected and the nature of collaboration, business and work are all being reshaped. In turn, our ideas about society, culture, geographic boundaries and governance are being forced to adapt to a new reality.

While some fear the loss of control associated with these shifts, others are exhilarated by the new forms of connectivity and commerce that they imply. Transactions and interactions are growing faster and more frictionless, giving birth to what I call a “superfluid” economy.

Business will not return to usual. So let’s discuss 4 key concepts to help us better understand the shifts that are underway:

1. Quantifying and mapping everything

Technological acceleration isn’t just a phrase. Whether looked at through the lens of the Law of Accelerating Returns or the trend described as Moore’s Law, computing capabilities continue to increase exponentially. Our devices are becoming smaller yet more powerful. Cost continues to drop.

This may lead to technologies becoming so tiny that they simply fade into the background experience of our lives.

So what? What is the purpose of faster, more powerful technology? What are we trying to accomplish?

Think about it this way: The whole of human history has been spent trying to understand ourselves, our environment and what it all means. Whereas a guru might advise “Know thyself,” a technologist might suggest “Quantify thyself.”

Technology tackles the challenge of self knowledge through the pursuit of full-systems quantification - creating a simulation and map of everything.

This is already happening all around us at the individual level. Our location is being tracked by our mobile devices. Our preferences, buying behaviors and social connections are being tracked online. Our providers and 3rd party agencies are tracking our financial histories and medical records.

The aggregated information forms a digital profile of who we are and what we care about. This information can be helpful in creating personalized recommendations for products and services. It also makes governmental surveillance or manipulation that much easier. On the other hand, making previously invisible information transparent means it can be quantified and measured, so economic value can be tied to it.

On a larger scale, we’re seeing how data can be converted to become a useful tool for crisis mapping and visualizing real-time information. Supply chains can be mapped to help us assess the carbon footprint of the products we purchase. There’s even an initiative to map the real-time statistics of the entire planet, dubbed the Earth Dashboard.

The big picture is that the more information we’re able see, the more effective we can be at making intelligent decisions that have positive effects on our lives and our environment.

2. Everyone has access to the internet

One of the effects of cheaper, web-enabled devices is that we’re moving towards getting the world online. Half a billion people worldwide accessed the mobile internet in 2009, and that number is estimated to double over the next 5 years. A recent forecast by In-Stat projects close to a billion smart phones will be shipped worldwide by 2015.

In countries and emerging markets with low or no connectivity, the financial and infrastructural challenges of laying down cables will be leapfrogged as these places transition directly to a wireless web via mobile devices.

In addition, the ‘unbanked’ are being brought into financial inclusion through innovative services like M-PESA that enable the transfer of money via mobile phones. So within a few short years, we may see billions more people connected to the internet and capable of participating in economic transactions.

For those that are already connected, the move to mobile is making the distinction between being online and offline disappear. It’s estimated that about 788 million people will access the Web solely through their mobile device by 2015, meaning the web will simply go with us wherever we go.

Add in mobile augmented reality (Layar, Wikitude, Acrossair), which provides an information layer onto our immediate environment, along with near-field communication technologies, which enable contextual information to be sent to you based on your location, and we have an extremely empowering tool literally at our fingertips at all times.

3. Self-organizing expands

How we feel about things, how we organize collective action and how we exchange value with others are central themes to social, political and economic life. Each of these areas is now being expressed online in more robust and granular ways.

Comments, Facebook likes, recommendations, and reviews all contribute to the growing layer of social metrics that reveal general perception around brands, people, events, issues and topics of interest. Not only could this alter the way democracy works by gathering real-time sentiment and developing positive feedback loops for improving civil society, it also shifts the way people make decisions about purchases or lifestyle behaviors. Businesses are finding that customer engagement is becoming a more collaborative and co-creative experience – a partnership instead of just one-way communication and pushing a sale.

The ability to express sentiment and then self-organize around shared interests or common causes also has far-reaching implications for how the world operates.

As we’ve seen in the recent uprisings in the Middle East, networking tools can empower people to unite and organize collective action. In less disruptive scenarios, they enable businesses to form new partnerships, organizations to share resources or individuals to collaborate on a project at the neighborhood level.

4. Peer-to-peer exchange changes the future of money

All of these tools offering ways for people to connect, quantify, collaborate, and take action add up to new infrastructures for building trust and exchanging value at every level. You can explore Collaborative Consumption to see the hundreds of peer-to-peer marketplaces that are springing up around the world, or check out The Mesh Directory to see how businesses are leveraging social networks and resource sharing to up their efficiency.

As money and exchange increasingly go digital, our assumptions about what “currency” means are also being challenged. Facebook Credits, for example, are Facebook’s internal virtual currency used to purchase digital goods within their game ecosystem. There are already apps being developed to reward potential customers with discounts and free merchandise in exchange for playing social games and brands are rewarding users with Credits to perform certain actions on their behalf.

On the fringes of society exists the complementary currency market – a range of mechanisms that allow for peer-to-peer value exchange through mutual credit systems like LETS or via decentralized currencies like Bitcoin. When the tools are in place to allow individuals or groups within a local area to easily exchange value without using traditional/centralized currency, it’s reasonable to expect a serious challenge to the ingrained public perception of money.

How to be “superfluid”

We live in a vast series of interconnected and nested systems, each affecting how the others operate. The shifts we’re seeing aren’t siloed or isolated, but rather systemic changes that have been happening throughout evolutionary history. They’re now happening at an accelerated rate, which means we have to adapt by finding ways to stay resilient and agile in a constantly changing environment.

Those finding success are adopting a “both/and” approach, rather than a black and white “either/or” solution. It is not necessary to abandon every time-tested practice and jump headfirst into something radically new. But, it is wise to integrate new approaches as a sort of hybrid “coopetition” – going from push to pull, defining a new capitalism, and welcoming “social” as a 21st century strategy.

The future we aspire to consists of business practices and ethics that are not zero-sum, meaning that cooperation and trust can lead to benefits for all. Unused or mis-allocated resources are channeled to unmet needs. Wealth is not just a number on a financial statement, but rather a celebration of sustainable and resilient communities, a clean environment and an educated and informed society.

It is our choice to enable such a future or not. In the end, we’re all in this together.

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