One of the more glittery events in the consumer magazine business has its plug pulled for this year. The Magazine Publishers Association has canceled its annual American Magazine Conference.
Given that Hachette, AMI and New York all pulled out of the MPA recently, and given that tens of thousands of people got axed in the magazine business last year, this might be a bad time to be planning a big-ticket shindig. Maybe by the time the AMC season comes around this fall, all the remaining publishers can just have lunch in a phone booth somewhere in midtown…
Not all Lego constructions have to be complicated
Very cute. Minimalist Legos about New York.
https://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/i-lego-ny/
More and more, I love the NYTimes’s blogs. Great writing and imagination, in a form and format that’s not right for print but perfect for online.
Chasing Deuces
Did you know the Federal Reserve issues a $2 bill? Of course you did. (Steve Wozniak sure does.) That puts you one up on the guy I just talked to at local WaMu branch.
I need to buy a bunch of dueces; never mind why. First stop was a Citibank branch, where I was told they didn’t have any. But if I wanted to order some, I’d need to get a “brick” of them, costing $2000. Umm, no.
So I went across the street to WaMu. I told the guy that I wanted to buy some $2 bills. He told me they only sold them in rolls of 25. No no no. Two. Dollar. Bills. Not a roll of dollar coins (although that would be interesting on another day). Bills. Currency. Two Dollars.
Gawking OKed by Top NY Court
In a development sure to annoy natives citywide, New York State’s highest court says it’s OK for pedestrians to stand obliviously in the middle of busy intersections and force people to walk around them.
From the NYTimes:
[Judge Carmen Beatrice Ciparek] later added: “Something more than a mere inconvenience of
pedestrians is required to support the charge. Otherwise, any person
who happens to stop on a sidewalk — whether to greet another, to seek
directions or simply to regain one’s bearings — would be subject to
prosecution under this statute.”
pedestrians is required to support the charge. Otherwise, any person
who happens to stop on a sidewalk — whether to greet another, to seek
directions or simply to regain one’s bearings — would be subject to
prosecution under this statute.”
And the problem with that is…..?
Tesla Wins! Tesla Wins!
Infrastructurum Longa, Vita Brevis.
Forgive the piggish Latin. The geekier among you know that although Thomas Edison gets all the credit for the light bulb and municipal power and all that — Consolidated Edison, anyone? — he actually came out the loser on a big standards war: AC vs DC. Edison was a big proponent of direct current. It was Nicola Tesla (and his backer George Westinghouse) who invented alternating current, which allowed electricity to be delivered over distances unimaginable by DC fans.
But by the time AC’s superiority was demonstrated — in spite of some nasty competitive shenanigans by Edison — there was a fair amount of DC infrastructure in place. For about 100 years in New York. a small but stubborn set of clients demanded and got DC from Con Ed. (It was true in Boston, too; less than 15 years ago, I worked in a large-ish downtown building whose elevators ran on DC.)
Finally, ConEd pulled the plug on DC, closing the last direct current generator in the city. If a building wants DC, they’ll have to put a rectifier on site. From the NYTimes:
The direct current conversion in Lower Manhattan started in 1928, and an engineer then predicted that it would take 45 years, according to Mr. Cunningham. “An optimistic prediction since we still have it now,” he said.
The man who is cutting the link today at 10 East 40th Street is Fred Simms, a 52-year veteran of the company. Why him?
“He’s our closest link to Thomas Edison,” joked Bob McGee, a Con Ed spokesman.
The moral: make your technology infrastructure choices carefully. It may take a while to undo them.
Meckler buys Mediabistro
It was no secret that the media trade site mediabistro.com was for sale, and the asking price of $25 million was reported so widely that it was easily believable. But yesterday’s word that the buyer (for $20 million now and maybe $3 million maybe later) was Alan Meckler and Jupitermedia was, well, pretty surprising.
Alan’s a legit internet pioneer and visionary. He parlayed a print newsletter about library IT systems into the Internet World magazine and tradeshows — one of the most successful expos of any kind in the world. He sold them at the peak, keeping the internet.com domain, then got into the stock photo and imagery business, where he’s now one of the world’s most successful purveyors of art. Alan’s been quite forthright and pleased about the crazy-high profit margins in the stock art business, but his recent business activity shows a continuing affection for tech and the trade show business.
Then he went and shelled out $23 million for mediabistro — big money for a site that pulls 50,000 unique visitors a month. The online consensus is that he’s lost his mind.
I worked for Alan and I’ve competed with Alan. I like the guy. But Alan has never spent a nickel more on anything than he absolutely had to. I don’t know what he saw in mediabistro that was worth that kind of money. I’m sure he likes the busy job board and the likelihood that a trade show or industry association could coalesce around the site. I’m certain he likes the seminar business. I doubt that he cares about the buzz that mediabistro’s blogs work so hard to generate, with the probably exception of TVNewser, which is a must-read in that business and probably drives tons of traffic.
Alan’s careful but not shy about posting on his blog (by the way, one of the first CEO blogs), and he’s been silent about the purchase as of this writing. I’d like to know what he’s thinking….
Five Guys Comes to New York
People in and around mid-Atlantic states and Southeast. apparently know all about the Five Guys hamburger chain. But unlike the storied west coast In-n-Out restaurants that its fans fetishize, I’ve never picked up much buzz about Five Guys, though lord knows I’ve gone out of my way for an In-n-Out double-double. The chain just opened its second New York store, at 138 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights (there’s apparently another in College Point, Queens — who knew?); it won’t stay a secret up here for long. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to call Five Guys the East Coast In-n-Out.
It tough to judge a restaurant’s operation in its first week. When I checked it out earlier today, there about five times as many workers as were strictly necessary to serve customers. Because of all the training — and some of the trainees looked like they’d never seen a kitchen before — food was a little slow coming out. (At least, it had better have been slower than usual; tomorrow’s July 4 and there’ll be about a quarter million people walking past the place’s front door.) But when the food arrived, it proved to be well worth the wait.
First, the fries. Freshly cut, skinny, skin-on, fried in peanut oil. There was about 1000 pound of fresh potatoes, packed in 50 pound bags, stacked in the dining room. The burger patties are thin, about four inches in diameter; the standard burger is a double stack. Also fresh; they claim to not use frozen meat, and it tastes it. There’s no “secret sauce,” the way there is at In-n-Out, but there’s a full range of condiments as well as A-1 and hot sauce. No condiment bar; they prepare the burgers to spec.
There will probably be some traffic flow problems at this particular store. You order at the front (two registers) and pick up at the back, where the place narrows. That’s where the drinks fountain is, too, so there will almost certainly be a lot of pushing as people wait for their food and then fill their soda cups, then have to push their way back to the front of the place. There are 16 seats at tables and about the same number at counters along the front window and east wall.
Five Guys is up nine steps from the street. It’s worth the climb. The place is across the street from Grand Canyon, a neighborhood hamburger-based diner that’s been there since 1983. I love Grand Canyon and all things being equal, I’d rather support neighborhood businesses. But Five Guys is awfully good stuff, and my days at Grand Canyon may be numbered.
If you’re not in Brooklyn or Queens, take heart: the web site says they’re coming to Levittown on Long Island soon, and are already in the Albany area in Niskayuna and Glenmont, with Rensselaer coming.
It Pays to Advertise
From today’s NYPost:
Police arrested a Manhattan subway flasher after one of his grossed-out victims gave officers an Internet address that was emblazoned on the back of his jacket – and busted him when they found X-rated pictures of him on the site.
The paper tastefully doesn’t give the URL. One wonders if it was on MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, as is the Post.
The Big Apple Cube
Sometimes it seems like Apple never forgets. Remember the Cube — a beautiful but flawed Mac, grey encased in clear plastic the stood about 10 inches on a side? Writ large, that’s kind of what Apple’s built in one of New York City’s most public spaces: Fifth Avenue and 58th Street.
The Fifth Avenue store, which opens tomorrow at 6pm and will never close, sits under GM Plaza, across the street from Bergdorf Goodman, the Plaza Hotel and Central Park and steps away from FAO Schwartz. The entrance is marked by a dramtic 32-foot-cube of glass that encases the Apple logo. A 32-step glass spiral staircase winds its way down a round glass elevator one level down.
The number 32 appears weirdly throughout. The cube is 32 feet on each side. There are 32 steps down. Of course, 32 is 2 to the 5th power — and Opening Day is the fifth anniversary of the first Apple store’s debut, and the store itself is on Fifth Avenue. Good thing it’s not on 7th; a 128-foot glass cube might be a tough engineering problem.
The natural light that pours down warms the 10,000 square foot selling area. Ron Johnson, Apple’s SVP of Retail, says there are 100 Macs and 300 staffers available for customer use. The Genius Bar is 45 feet long, and they’ve hird 96 full-time "Geni-i." There’s a new iPod bar to provide support for iPod users and a "Studio" to help "creatives" with questions about their hardware and software. The plaza above is now WiFi-ed; I didn’t check to see how far into Central Park the signal carried.
Oh — and this is the first Apple store to be open 24/7/365. "Open today, forever," Johnson said. And yes, there will be Geniuses at the Bar all night long.
Unusual candor from the MTA
When the MTA screws up the subways in lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn suffers, too — sometimes to the point where you just Can’t Get There From Here. East Side trains run on the West Side, West Side trains run on the East side, and mysterious trains like the J appear more or less randomly on unexpected platforms.
Everyone who’s been suffering with the diversion of the Lex during the overnights and weekends will appreciate this sign, posted yesterday in the Brooklyn Borough Hall station.
"New Lost Av" indeed.