The May Report: 9/25/2010: Melanie Adcock on GrubHub; Tom Bennett on The Rahm Emanuel Pu***cat Theory, Parts I and II; Raymond Reinhardt on the Mobile Visionary Roundtable; Tarkus Murphy on how Nanotechnology finds the Information Superglacier(TM): RIP Infotonics – Hello Smart System Technologies & Commercialization Center; Ron May comes dangerously close to one of his good old fashioned stream of consciousness rants

The May Report September 25th, 2010

Editor and publisher: ron@themayreport.com, ronaldmay@aol.com, www.themayreport.com , 773-525-3944.

Assistant editor: Melanie Adcock, iPHONE: 312-259-0610, melanie_adcock@msn.com

If you missed an article, go here: www.tmronline.com/A55951/tmrarticles.nsf/vwFullNewsletter

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_________________________________
TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Scoop section:

– Mike Evans from GrubHub speaks about GrubHub’s journey as a lean start-up, by Melanie Adcock
– Tuesday, September 28: TIF panel and forum
– midVenturesLAUNCH Hackathon starts Today- Saturday- 9:00 AM @ a new Chicago startup incubator!
September 27th – 28th Groupon, ChaCha, Reddit, SitterCity Founders to Headline midVenturesLAUNCH Conference
– Raymond Reinhardt on the Mobile Visionary Roundtable at the ITA, Wednesday, September 22nd
– Chris Rollyson’s photos from the MIT-EF event
– Facebook has outage for 2.5 hours on Sept. 23, 2010
– David Flint: Chicago Area Event Listings – Compete or Collaborate?
– Tarkus Murphy: Nanotechnology finds the Information Superglacier(TM): RIP Infotonics – Hello Smart System Technologies & Commercialization Center
– Tom R. Bennett: The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory
– Bennett gets comments on his theory
– Tom R. Bennett: The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory, Part II
– Carol Marin’s article confirming parts of Tom Bennett’s theory
– Melanie Adcock: Snarky Comments about Jesse Jackson’s “Social Acquaintance,” as it relates to Social Media
– Sheila Cull: Link to her blog
– Briefly noted, by Ron May

[Editor's note: May here. I am having great trouble getting the right formatting in this report and I give up. it should be ten point Arial. And Tom Bennett's article should not be in bold. Much of this report is twelve point type, unfortunately.]

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________________________________
The Scoop section:
________________________
Mike Evans from GrubHub speaks about GrubHub’s journey as a lean start-up, by Melanie Adcock

Subject: Mike Evans speaks about GrubHub’s journey as a lean start-up
Date: 9/24/2010 12:37:38 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: melanie_adcock@msn.com
To: ronaldmay@aol.com

Lean Start up Circle Sept. 23, 2010, Illinois Technology Association, Chicago

Mike Evans from GrubHub speaks about GrubHub’s journey as a lean start-up.

Join this MeetUp Group www.meetup.com/Chicago-Lean-Startup-Circle

The Lean Start Up Circle was held at the ITA and had their biggest crowd to date with 120 people in attendance of which approximately 12 were women.

Pathfinder sponsored the event www.pathf.com They have a couple of iPad Apps launching next week at the upcoming midVenturesLAUNCH event which will feature 40 start ups, an estimated 2,000 attendees, a presentation by Groupon, and will be covered by the Sun Times and Forbes. Microsoft just confirmed today that they will sponsor the midVentures event.

The main speaker and cause of the big crowd was Mike Evans, Co-founder of GrubHub. I met and spoke briefly with Mike during the networking segment prior to his presentation. He has a kind demeanor, an unpretentious appearance, and is as smart as a whip. He says now that he has enough people to help him with getting things done he has time to think. He thinks all the time about his company now whereas in the beginning he was heavily focused on programming. I like people who think.

Mike’s presentation was a no-nonsense down to earth account of what created his company. He was clearly at ease in front of the crowd and he delivered a lot of great insight. To give you some background here is a description of GrubHub and the milestones they’ve celebrated in recent years.

GrubHub Company Description:

www.crunchbase.com/company/grubhub

GrubHub

GrubHub is a free delivery search engine. It’s quite simple: users in enter their address to find all of the restaurants that deliver food to their location. People can easily order online or over the phone. The company has a customer service team operating 7 days a week, and there’s always someone watching every online order that goes through to make sure people get exactly what they ordered.

On GrubHub.com, people can browse and compare menus options and prices, view delivery hours, read reviews placed by other GrubHub users, and take advantage of coupons. People can also store favorite menus, record past orders, write reviews, and even leave notes for delivery drivers on how to access their building.

GrubHub.com was founded in 2004 by Chicago-based software engineers Matt Maloney and Mike Evans. The venture-backed company has grown rapidly, and works with over 4,000 restaurants for online ordering. GrubHub.com shows menus from over 13,000 restaurants in Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Oakland, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Boulder. The company plans to continue launching in more new cities.

Co-founders Maloney and Evans got the idea while working on Apartments.com – a search engine for apartments. They often ordered food for delivery but got tired of the same-old; they thought there should to be an online service listing of various restaurants that delivered but were shocked to find none.

GrubHub provides free advertising to all restaurants that deliver in their areas of operation, and restaurants pay on a per order basis to be sorted closer to the top of the search results.

MenuPix and FoodieBytes are both similar services to GrubHub.com.

* Milestones

* edit GrubHub added Steve Sanger as VP, Business Development. (8/30/10)

* Posted 9/17/10 at 6:32am

* GrubHub – GrubHub named one of Inc.’s 500 fastest growing private companies. (8/24/10) 3

* Posted 8/24/10 at 2:39pm via inc.com

* GrubHub – GrubHub named in Lead411′s Hottest Companies in the Midwest list (7/21/10) 4

* Posted 8/2/10 at 11:21am via lead411.com

* GrubHub received $2M in Series B funding. (3/23/09)

* Posted 3/23/09 at 10:03am via techcrunch.com

* GrubHub received $1.1M in Series A funding. (11/1/07)

* Posted 12/8/07 at 10:09pm via pehub.com

* GrubHub added Michael Evans as Co-Founder.

* Posted 12/28/07 at 1:23am

* GrubHub added Matt Maloney as Co-Founder.

* Posted 12/28/07 at 1:23am

My notes from Mike Evan’s presentation:

GrubHub’s initial idea of lead generation for restaurants evolved and now brings in 70 million in delivery orders per year. Mike believes in walking in through the back door and finding a happy medium between a start up business plan and making it up as you go along. GrubHub went through 2 rounds of funding in 07 and 08 which enabled them to expand both times into new geographic areas.

They build a single product and focused on the economics of one customer, the cost of acquisition, the cost of retention and the lifetime value of a customer.

There are 4 Steps he’s followed in order of decreasing difficulty:

1) Left out on purpose until the end of the presentation
2) Make $1
3) Make $2
4) Make one million dollars

First you make a product and sell it to make $1. You might spend a lot more than that to make the $1 but that is okay. Next, make another dollar from the same customer. This is harder to do but creating repeat business is the key to success. It costs a lot less to sell to people you’ve already sold to.

He suggests the minimum viable product that solves a problem that someone is willing to pay for to start with to make your first dollar.

The true motivation came to program and code the GrubHub tool was during a Chicago winter while he was taking the 151 bus home on a winter night. It was cold, everything was covered in salt and he was not cooking. Hunger motivated him to write the site, but until it started making money he considered himself in hobby territory.

A company founder’s time isn’t free. In fact it’s your scarcest resource. Assign a value to your time and assume an hourly rate.

When you make your second dollar your customer has to pay again. Remarketing to old customers is important and being able to improve the product you already have. Think about the lifetime of the customer vs. one sale. If the first sale is $25 and it repeats 6 times you can spend $10 to get that customer and still earn money. The additional cost of getting them to come back is 10-15% of the initial cost of acquisition.

Making a million dollars is easier when you get customers to repeat. Hiring good people is also very critical for getting your product to scale. The most important kinds of people handle product, marketing, and sales. Pay less cash and more equity.

All salespeople secretly want to be a sales manager and so few people get to do it. They hired a VP of sales first. Next they hired a Consumer Marketing Director and focused on SEO where they had the lowest cost of acquisition and Facebook outreach. Facebook outreach is not free because a Founder’s time is not free. At 90 hours per week time is your scarcest resource. They hired the right people to scale their business, found they’d sold a million dollars in food orders and then they got insurance and an office. Your time is worth it.

1) In the list above is to quit your job and let hunger be the real motivator.

Mike advises to pitch to investors and let them tell you what they think to help you improve.

My notes from the Q -n- A section of the presentation:

Not all salespeople make great sales managers. You have to hire for both a good player and a good coach in the same person. It’s not fair to give someone the responsibility if they can’t handle it. You need to have upfront expectations for the person you hire for sales.

He and his partner built a Board of Advisors one person on their board was Chuck Templeton from OpenTable. He helped mentor them and give ideas.

Their pricing model is one where the restaurants decide how much they want to pay.

They have a 2-sided network model consisting of restaurants and consumers. Which to build up first, he constantly works on that question. They seed restaurants as part of their launch strategy which works well.

Mike thinks when pitching to an investor the 1 vs 2 page presentation is not as important as familiarity, building up a relationship, and being coachable. Get a second meeting with them instead of trying to sell them and trust will build with your investor over time. The evolution of understanding each other is important. Relationships matter more than material. Tech Cocktail and Midventures are both great places to pitch your business and show it off. Their first investor was Forbes because they won a Business Plan competition at the U of C.

They choose SEO on Facebook over SEM. 85% of their traffic comes from the organic results which gives them lasting value. SEM is easier, but it is harder to build a long term competitive advantage with SEM.

Hire people who want to solve problems for real customers to create a great team. Advisors helped them interview the right people. They create an environment where people can be successful.

If you don’t want funding, don’t take it. Only .1% of small businesses take funding anyway. They went their first 3 years without any funding. They wanted to scale, grow larger and learn from it. Bootstrapping the company helped ensure a round of funding but it did not improve the valuation of the company.

The next big thing for them is becoming a transaction engine for Restaurants. They do 10 million yearly in food orders on their iPhone app alone. Their company has over 100% growth every year and they have had 600% in mobile app growth in the last year. 300,000 restaurants accept delivery orders.

They have a group of advisors to help restaurants with best practices so they will be the best restaurants for the consumers. It’s free and only 2 restaurants have not appreciated this help.

His personal opinion is everyone should have stock in the company 10-20% should be the total option for employees. You can’t make a promise on what you think it will be worth because it’s all speculative value. Find people who are risk tolerant and adjust over time their equity in the company.

Mike says they should have thought about their target demographics in the beginning more and he also wishes he’d appreciated some of the people who helped him out in the very beginning more.

Viacom was servicing ads for the CTA a few years back and he saw a Chicago Jazz Fest ad up on a subway train several months after the event. He realized they never take the ads down. So he bought 2 weeks worth of ads and they lasted 2 months.

One out of a thousand customers will have a problem. He thinks the resolution of the problem has to be exponentially better than the problem.

He says everyone keeps asking him about Groupon’s strategy and if he’s going to adopt it. While he has a lot of respect for Groupon and what they have done, his strategy keeps working so they will keep using it.

A few people I spoke with:

*Eduardo Fernandez runs Improffice and his title is Google Apps Hacker. He just hired a marketing person to help them with their marketing plan named Fransciso. Last year it seemed everyone in marketing was out of work as these jobs were the first to get cut in a recession. It was hopeful and refreshing to see a brand new company hiring marketing staff.

*Nate Jenkins has a new company called ipromote4u.com. He helps entertainers promote themselves through television by using tools like Deisel Beat.

*Peter Harkins is a geek, he said. He makes gaming software for Dungeons and Dragons players and other things. He is a one-person start up. I think geeks are pretty terrific. Best of luck.

*I saw Jason Goodrich and Andy Angelos talking. Andy co-organizes Social Dev Camp with Tim Courtney. Jason and Andy were both friendly. Andy said things are going well with him and he teasingly mentioned something about winning a thumb wrestling contest a few years back. That sounds interesting. Please send footage of that to The May Report. Glad he is doing well and in good spirits & humor after Social Dev Camp this year.

*Rishi Roongta is a fairly new hire over at newworldvc. He seems to like what he is doing over there. Prior to that Rishi worked at Bain & Company. I spoke with some of his old colleagues that he was there with from Bain: David Wald and Matthew Ziegler, both Senior Associate Consultants. They have both been at Bain for 3 years or more. Prior to that they were college students. I asked them how they got to have “Senior,” in their title with only 3 years out of college. They said that there is such high turnover in their industry that if you are there that long you are senior. If you are there 5 years you are a dinosaur. Bain and Company gives strategic advice to large companies about their business strategy.

*Rafiq Ahmed, Founder of Demibooks was networking a lot. His company makes interactive book apps for the iPad.

Here is his bio from his website:

demibooks.com/about-us/

Rafiq Ahmed

Rafiq is back to where he always knew he’d end up: telling stories in new and innovative ways. A veteran of the first internet boom and bust cycle, Rafiq bridges the worlds of product management, software engineering and user centered design innovation. Beginning his career at PriceWaterhouse Coopers, Rafiq went on to build strategic consumer products for clients in telecom, high tech, media/entertainment and financial services at hard hitting digital agencies such as Sapient. Later he ran his own startup advisory services firm, and at startup EssTec, successfully combined the talents of wireless application engineers with a creative media studio in Los Angeles.

Prior to founding Demibooks, Rafiq designed user experiences for mobile products and services at Motorola. Spanning a range of mobile platforms, his work included the patent published design of the industry’s first socially connected phonebook, now available on Motorola’s Android smartphones featuring MOTOBLUR™. Rafiq studied Information Systems and received an MBA from Virginia Tech. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from WV Wesleyan College, and is currently based in Chicago.

Some rumors I heard:

I’m a skeptic. You should all know this about me. I am saying this because something strange has started to happen. Tonight people started giving me their business cards and trying to tell me rumors because I write for The May Report. I’m starting to see how it is now. It’s so easy at first blush to think Midwestern tech rumors originate in The May Report, but no. It comes from our very own tech community. It turns out, a lot of business people use gossip to get ahead. Everyone wants to get ahead, right? I can only pray my delicate nervous system will survive. I can present what I’ve heard, but the real work begins when you separate the swill and the puff and try to get down to legitimacy. When I hear a rumor I usually look askance and narrow my eyes in an expression of meh, yeah right.

Rumor has it that Edward Domain, newcomer who writes for Crain’s Chicago Business and Flyovergeeks.com is being chased by a couple of organizations who would like to give him funding. I will say that I recently saw on Ed’s Facebook page that he was getting his picture taken by a professional photographer for something or another. I don’t know if that is related.

I did see Ed at the event and can confirm as fact based on my observations that he was wearing glasses with black frames instead of contact lenses. He says he is doing some event called Rock the Recession Dec. 10 and they have someone important from the Israeli government speaking. He is doing well and we talked about how pretty his girlfriend looks in his pictures on Facebook.

Someone who was supposed to attend who didn’t:

Raymond Reinhardt was not at the Chicago Lean Startup Circle! tonight. I wonder what his “emergency assignment,” was that he mentions below? I hope for Raymond’s sake it is something good. Maybe if someone starts a rumor about Raymond similar to those positive rumors going around about Edward Domain some good luck will rub off? One can only remain optimistic and hopeful about these things. I heard a rumor that if the entire Midwestern tech scene puts their noses to the grindstone we will kick Silicon Valley’s butt. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. All gossip aside, c’mon everybody, let’s get some real work done.

-Melanie

——————————————————————————–

Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 19:12:10 -0500
Subject: Sorry Melanie
From: raymond.reinhardt@gmail.com
To: melanie_adcock@msn.com

Unfortunately i will not be there tonight. I had an emergency assignment come my way.

It will still be a very interesting meeting.

–
Raymond Reinhardt, Co-Founder and CEO
Cuddlephish Entertainment, Inc.
Cuddlephish | 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor | Chicago, IL 60606
+1.312.957.8579 | raymond@cuddlephish.com

Cuddlephish: Inspire. Innovate. Venture out…

Melanie Adcock
iPHONE: 312-259-0610
DROID: 312-833-1825
E-Mail: melanie_adcock@msn.com
Facebook Fan Page: bit.ly/MelanieAdcockFacebookFanPage
Bio: bit.ly/MelanieAdcockARC
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/melanieadcock
Twitter: twitter.com/melanie_adcock
Facebook Profile: www.facebook.com/melanie.a.adcock
________________________________________
Tuesday, September 28: TIF panel and forum

Subject: REMINDER: TIF Panel Discussion & Forum
Date: 9/24/2010 11:48:44 A.M. Central Daylight Time
From: emiller@bettergov.org
To: ronaldmay@aol.com

TIFs 101 PANEL DISCUSSION & FORUM
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
6 p.m. – 8 p.m.

DePaul University
Lincoln Park Campus
Student Center
2250 N. Sheffield Ave.
Room 220

RSVP to Emily Miller
emiller@bettergov.org
312-821-9034
______________________________________
midVenturesLAUNCH Hackathon starts Today- Saturday- 9:00 AM @ a new Chicago startup incubator!
September 27th – 28th Groupon, ChaCha, Reddit, SitterCity Founders to Headline midVenturesLAUNCH Conference

Subject: Re: Ron May Email
Date: 9/25/2010 7:25:06 A.M. Central Daylight Time
From: gdomoracki@gmail.com
To: RONALDMAY@aol.com

midVenturesLAUNCH Hackathon starts Today- Saturday- 9:00 AM @ a new Chicago startup incubator!

September 27th – 28th Groupon, ChaCha, Reddit, SitterCity Founders to Headline midVenturesLAUNCH Conference

More than 100 startup companies and thousands of participants will explore the future of technology and innovation in the Midwest. See when and where here: midventureslaunch.com/

midVenturesLAUNCH will feature a keynote from Groupon co-founder Brad Keywell on building a startup company in the Midwest. In addition, Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit and Scott A. Jones, founder of ChaCha, will discuss the accelerated growth and exits of their previous tech startups. midVenturesLAUNCH has partnered with live streaming site Ustream to carry all keynote addresses live on the internet.

Overall, midVenturesLAUNCH includes more than 60 speakers and judges, including the founders of OpenTable, OkCupid and Feedburner. Through three tracks: COMPETE, LAUNCH and mVDEMO, more than 100 startups and established companies will demo their products and services at the conference, with 35 early-stage companies competing for more than $150,000 in cash and prizes. Genevieve Thiers, founder of SitterCity and winner of the 2010 CEC Momentum Award will award the prizes Tuesday evening. Additionally, over 15 companies will be launching and demoing new products on-stage including Windows Phone, ChaCha, Twilio, Hipmunk, and Tribune Interactive.

More than 50 hours of programming will include a 36-hour hackathon for web and mobile developers; 12 innovation workshops focused on key themes for startups including Social Media, Greentech/Cleantech, Mobile, Business/Legal, Gov 2.0/OpenGov, Biotech/Life Sciences, Agile Development and Health 2.0; and more than 20 new product launches on-stage.

“We’ve brought the best and brightest minds to Chicago for a new kind of event for the Midwest,” stated Jonathan Pasky, co-founder of midVenturesLAUNCH. “We have the founders of Silicon Valley tech startups and experts from over 15 states and six countries participating. We’ll have thousands of industry leaders, investors, media and entrepreneurs all in one space talking technology entrepreneurship.”

midVenturesLAUNCH also features an invite-only VIP Cocktail Reception for selected influencers and a Startup CEO Mentoring Workshop on September 27, a VC/Investor Breakfast hosted by Illinois Ventures on September 28, and two nights of drinks, music and networking at the official midVenturesLAUNCH after parties.

Conference passes are $50. Register to attend at
www.midventureslaunch.com and follow conference updates through Twitter: @midventures and #mVLAUNCH. For sponsor, press and other inquiries, please contact the midVenturesLAUNCH team at launch@midventures.com.

About midVentures

midVentures is a technology and venture consulting firm providing enterprise web development and incubator services to high-growth technology startups and ideas. More information about midVentures can be found at www.midventures.com.
______________________________________
Raymond Reinhardt on the Mobile Visionary Roundtable at the ITA, Wednesday, September 22nd

Subject: FW: Today’s Mobile Visionary Roundtable Event
Date: 9/23/2010 2:19:56 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: melanie_adcock@msn.com
To: ronaldmay@aol.com

Thanks, Raymond!!! -Melanie

——————————————————————————–
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:00:21 -0500
Subject: Re: Today’s Mobile Visionary Roundtable Event?
From: raymond.reinhardt@gmail.com
To: melanie_adcock@msn.com
CC: kmcgorisk@sbcglobal.net

Melanie – thanks for your interest in the success of our event.

After a well deserved summer break we started the 2010 to 2011 Mobile Visionary Roundtable series with an awesome presentation by Alex Bratton that included dozens of real world examples beyond the typical “playful” Apps. These examples included significant opportunities in medical, logistics, agriculture and other ingenious business model innovations.

“Yesterday’s ITA Mobile Visionary Roundtable was a big success. The “visionary” Chicago area event drew nearly 30 attendees, some traveling in from as far as Waterford, Wisconsin to participate.

Lextech Global Services’ CEO Alex Bratton presented, “Prepare for Mobility or Be Crushed By It,” his take on the troubling disconnect between consumer demand for mobility and businesses’ preparedness to deliver.

After the presentation, attendees participated in an engaging conversation about mobile app adoption, and then a lively debate about whether or not the Wired Magazine article’s assertion that “The Web is Dead” is accurate.”

www.lextech.com/

Also, Fred Hoch, President of the Illinois Technology Association, provided a warm welcome to the Technexus attendees and presented more details on the ITA Fall Challenge. This exciting initiative is well under way at area Chicago schools.

This is an impressive program which is identifying hundreds of top students and challenging area companies to sponsor and hire from this talent pool.

Many people talk about being like Silicon Valley. This program is a significant step in the retention of the superior talent that already exist as a product of Illinois.

I believe this will be a model for others to emulate.

You can find more information about this proactive initiative here:

www.illinoistech.org/page.aspx/Fall_Challenge

Keith McGorisk was in attendance and talked briefly about the progress of Mobile App Ex. They are well underway building a very effective event and inviting area companies to actively participate.

I believe it would be very hard to find as many qualified mobility-oriented companies as you will at this event planned for Navy Pier June 2011.

www.mobileappex.com/

Next months speaker Jonathan Ozeran was also in attendance and actively participating in the roundtable discussion. He will be our October guest speaker. Here is a short bio:

Jonathan is currently Manager / Product Innovation for Tribune Interactive where he focuses on mobile products & applications for Tribune Company’s media properties (e.g. Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, KTLA-TV) as well as external customers and advertising partners. Leading the newly created unit named “Apptivate.Me”, Jonathan and his team is working with some of the biggest brands and media entities to deliver mobile solutions and best-in-class user experiences across platforms.

Jonathan has exceptional hands-on mobility experience and he will be presenting and demoing real world apps and novel business model innovations.

We invite your readers that are interested in the advances of mobile technology to come meet Jonathan Wednesday October 20, 2010 from 8:30 to 10:30:

www.illinoistech.org/roundtable.aspx

Thanks again Melanie for your continued interest and tireless followup. You have been doing a great job showcasing new events an initiatives.

Keep up the great work!

Raymond

Raymond Reinhardt, Co-Founder and CEO
Cuddlephish: Discover. Inspire. Innovate. Venture out…

www.linkedin.com/in/rreinhardt/

###

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Melanie Adcock wrote:

Hey Raymond, How was your event this morning? I would have gone but I have a full time day job and couldn’t get over there. Could you send something to us about the speakers at this event, number of attendees, etc. I’ll see you tomorrow at the Grub Hub thing. -Melanie

Subject: Note from Chris Rollyson
Date: 9/24/2010 1:10:02 A.M. Central Daylight Time
From: melanie_adcock@msn.com
To: ronaldmay@aol.com

Ron, Chris said you asked him for his coverage from the recent MIT Enterprise Forum event. Here is a link to the photos he took of the event. www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=178508&id=622710869 along with the note he sent me on Facebook.

Christopher S. Rollyson Melanie, hey, missed you 2night at #smcchicago – but Ron was there.. he wanted my “coverage” of mitef but seemed confused when it was on facebook.. I made a photo album with notes/captions

11 minutes ago · UnlikeLike · 1 personYou like this..

Melanie A. Adcock I was at the Lean Start up Circle Meet Up event at the ITA. The founder of Grub Hub spoke and it was really good. I so wish I could have gone to both because I heard the Chicago Social Media Club event was also pretty good.

a few seconds ago · LikeUnlike

Subject: Facebook has outage for 2.5 hours on Sept. 23, 2010
Date: 9/24/2010 1:06:22 A.M. Central Daylight Time
From: melanie_adcock@msn.com
To: ronaldmay@aol.com

Ron, Today Facebook was down for a whopping 2.5 hours. It was a strain for many who use Facebook as a way to communicate. I was surprised when it wouldn’t come up on my computer and must have hit refresh on my web browser more than 20 times. I then tried to access Facebook on the Iphone 4 and the Droid X smart phones. That’s when I knew it was Facebook itself that was down. Service came back up first on my Droid X, then the iPhone4, then the laptop. Interesting that it took longer to restore access to my computer. Here is the Facebook note written about this incident by Robert Johnson, Facebooks’ Director of Software Engineering since 2006. -Melanie

www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=431441338919&id=9445547199

More Details on Today’s Outage
.by Robert Johnson on Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 7:29pm.Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.

The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.

The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.

Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.

To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.

The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful – we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.

This got the site back up and running today, and for now we’ve turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We’re exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.

We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.
.Share
550 people like this.
__________________________________

David Flint: Chicago Area Event Listings – Compete or Collaborate?

Subject: Chicago Area Event Listings – Compete or Collaborate?
Date: 9/23/2010 10:57:41 A.M. Central Daylight Time
From: David@TechVenue.com
To: ron@themayreport.com
CC: ronaldmay@aol.com

Hi Ron,

Congrats on the upcoming re-launch. I know I’ve asked this question before – but no clear answer yet… “What have you decided to do with event listings – compete or collaborate with other long-standing local calendars and listings?” As you already know, we always try to collaborate (1-way or 2-way) regarding event content via iCal, RSS, Google Calendar or other feeds & embedded solutions we can provide from our calendar systems at TechVenue.com .

Here are a few examples of our Chicago area calendars that organizations use to promote their event offerings:

Chicago Business Technology Events Calendar

calendars.techvenue.com/cgi-bin/techvenue.pl?CalendarName=USMidwest

Northern Illinois Job Club/Career Calendar

calendars.techvenue.com/cgi-bin/techvenue.pl?CalendarName=NIJC

Once again, thanks for your consideration. Be well.

–

Cheers,

David Flint, MPA
Founder, TechVenue.com
Since 1998, Your Venue for Business Technology Events and Networking
Email: David@TechVenue.com
Phone: (312) 772-5631
Twitter: TechVenue
___________________________________________
Tarkus Murphy: Nanotechnology finds the Information Superglacier(TM): RIP Infotonics – Hello Smart System Technologies & Commercialization Center

Subject: Nanotechnology finds the Information Superglacier(TM): RIP Infotonics – Hello Smart System Technologies & Commercialization Center
Date: 9/23/2010 3:25:18 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: tarkus@ripco.com
To: ron@themayreport.com, RONALDMAY@aol.com
CC: tarkus@ripco.com

Ron,

You may recall that I was working on an Electronic Health Records (EHR) / Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE) company; a fiber optic device manufacturer and a few telecommunications companies (security / public safety / Homeland Security / Defense) all using the Axcess Ontario Network connections at Infotonics. The development below and some anticipated development from the NY energy companies owned by Iberdola have some immediate benefit for each of the companies, but it may move some of the companies into new buildings on the “campus.”

There are a lot of “musical chair” issues with respect to State agencies and management, so I’ll close with the Smart System Technologies & Commercialization Center news release. Our Canandaigua Center of Excellence gets a new name a shift in Finger Lakes Regional to State prominence and a formal shift from a NYSTAR Center of Excellence to a NYS Empire State Development Center of Excellence.

For us it means a shift in temporary and permanent office locations, but does not cause a shift away from some of the business development activities underway. One of our clients will benefit from some structural and electrical modifications. I think the more significant shift is that we had the opportunity to be the big dog in 2009 and we’ve gone from the big dog to the “tip of the tail of a much bigger dog.”

One of the off campus projects that we are working on is out of Chicago and we fully intend to bring some of the “tail of the dog” projects to Chicago in 2011.

If these new technology developments start to bring some people from Chicago into the region, I would be happy to make introductions and help set meetings (all of the local management will start out the year in their same positions – we’ll see if it is a Tech Valley takeover, later). Tech Valley is the Hudson North of NYC.

The SSTCC starts the year with 140,000 square-foot facility with over 25,000 square feet of clean rooms for micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication and packaging. We were developing 10 – 14,000 square feet and the manufacturer Moser Baer is developing another 10,000 square feet (expanding to 2 more buildings, on campus). The new developments may split our development into separate projects in some of the new buildings. I get to find out what the big dog wants in bits and pieces.

Hope all is well. I’m registered to go to some tech events in Chicago in the Fall.

Tarkus

NEW YORK STATE ANNOUNCES UNPRECEDENTED HIGH TECHNOLOGY INITIATIVE

Infotonics Technology Center and College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering form unprecedented

partnership to enable world-class nanotechnology research, development and commercialization

Merger leverages and builds on the state’s R&D assets to drive new opportunities and position

New York State as a global center for integrated systems

Empire State Development (ESD) and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and

Innovation (NYSTAR) today announced the merger of two of New York State’s Centers of Excellence-

Infotonics Technology Center (ITC) in Canandaigua and the Center of Excellence in Nanoelectronics and

Nanotechnology at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) in Albany. Empire State

Development and NYSTAR will invest up to $10 million to the merged operation, the Smart System

Technology & Commercialization Center (STC), which will be managed and supported by CNSE.

The merger and the addition of new processing capabilities at ITC and CNSE’s Albany NanoTech

Complex situate New York State for significant private sector job creation and investment in all areas of

advanced manufacturing across the state. In addition, the partnership leverages the state’s investment in

these two facilities and positions New York State as a global leader in smart system and smart device

innovation and manufacturing.

“The creation of the Smart System Technology & Commercialization Center will advance and strengthen

New York’s role as a leader in this innovation economy,” said Governor David A. Paterson. “Our Centers

of Excellence have become national models for facilitating critical private sector investment in emerging

high technology fields and for creating and expanding New Economy jobs. This merger will now allow

for the best and brightest minds to collaborate and partner together to leverage these assets and drive new

opportunities that will have a resounding affect not only in the Finger Lakes region but across the state. I

applaud Empire State Development and NYSTAR as well as our partners-Infotonics Technology Center

and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering-for their vision and continued commitment to

our Centers of Excellence.”

“Today’s exciting announcement is a critical piece of Governor Paterson’s New Economy initiative,” said

Empire State Development Chairman & CEO Dennis M. Mullen. “Through the deployment of new

technologies into real products and manufacturing processes, this merger will drive economic

development, thus creating value and new markets for private sector companies. These days, every

industry has a smart system or smart device problem but now, together, these Center of Excellence

facilities will help companies all over the world and the U.S. Government reduce the time and cost

associated with bringing smart system/device solutions to the market. This partnership will allow for an

improvement in the overall competitiveness of ITC and CNSE by not only expanding capacity, but

enhancing operational efficiency and creating more synergy when bringing economic opportunities to the

Finger Lakes region and New York State.”

“This merger represents a strategic alignment of the state’s technology assets in nanotechnology creating

new synergies in research, prototyping and product development,” said Executive Director of the New

York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation Edward Reinfurt. “We congratulate Paul

Tolley and Alain Kaloyeros for the leadership they have provided in developing an exciting business

model that enhances the many strengths of each center.”

Significant market opportunities exist in the area of systems and devices with “smart” features, such as

those commonly found on consumer products like smart phones or a Wii controller. A smart device is

simply a mechanical device integrated onto a computer chip. It can analyze a situation-usually with

sensors-and make decisions/actions based on data collected. The challenge, and therefore, opportunity,

is to take this know-how and translate it across every major industry sector.

This merger will position CNSE as a vertically integrated “one-stop-shop” for smart systems’ device

development and process manufacturing, coupling CNSE’s preeminence in nanoelectronics R&D with

ITC’s expertise in integrating computer chips with hundreds of mechanical devices. These capabilities

will be unmatched the world over, with regards to capacity, infrastructure and operational capabilities,

and create immediate job and investment opportunities in all areas of advanced manufacturing, such as

aerospace, defense, medical and energy industries.

Similar to the successful strategy developed and deployed by CNSE with the nanoelectronics industry, the

merger will take advantage of a highly fragmented industry through the creation of a New York Statebased

private-public consortium of stakeholders to develop the technology roadmap for smart devices and

accelerate the path from research to commercialization. The merger also positions New York State to be

a key partner with U.S. government and private industry in reducing the time and cost associated with

bringing these devices to market. Furthermore, as New York State makes inroads on the smart

system/device integration, this strategy will put the New York State at the center of future industry

expansions and consolidations.

College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering Senior Vice President and CEO Alain Kaloyeros said,

“The merger of the Centers of Excellence at the UAlbany NanoCollege and the Infotonics Technology

Center is testament to the vision of the New York State Assembly and Senate, as embodied by

Assemblymen Joseph Morelle and Brian Kolb and Senator Michael Nozzolio, and the leadership of

Empire State Development CEO Dennis Mullen, in further expanding New York’s globally recognized

ecosystem for nanotechnology research, development and commercialization. Leveraging CNSE’s worldclass

research and infrastructure resources with the advanced development and prototyping capabilities at

the Infotonics Center will enable the Center to accelerate the deployment of innovative nanoscale system

technologies, while creating exciting opportunities to attract high-tech jobs, companies and investments to

the Greater Rochester Region.”

Infotonics Technology Center CEO Paul Tolley said, “In order for the innovation economy to

successfully create sustainable job growth in our State and nation, commercialization and manufacturing

are of vital importance. Without them, we fail to capture the full economic benefits generated by this

innovation activity. This merger, creating the new Smart System Technology & Commercialization

Center, and the infrastructure investment being made here, further underscores that New York State is

leading the nation in supporting an industrial plan committed to keeping high tech manufacturing on our

shores. Together, CNSE, a proven leader in creating economic growth in the Albany Region, and ITC, a

center dedicated to transitioning innovation to commercial products, will leverage our combined

resources to enable smart devices to reach their full market potential and be competitively

commercialized here in New York State.”

Terry Taber, Chief Technology Officer at Kodak said: “At Kodak we are very pleased to see that the ITC

is being reinforced through this merger. Microfluidic MEMS technology is a key component in Kodak’s

inkjet businesses both in consumer and commercial devices. This aligns perfectly with the ITC’s mission,

so we hope to see our collaboration with the center expand over time to encompass feasibility,

prototyping and low-volume manufacturing.”

The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering is the first college in the world dedicated to

education, research, development, and deployment in the emerging disciplines of nanoscience,

nanoengineering, nanobioscience, and nanoeconomics. CNSE’s Albany NanoTech Complex is the most

advanced research enterprise of its kind at any university in the world. With over $6 billion in high-tech

investments, the 800,000-square-foot complex attracts corporate partners from around the world and

offers students a one-of-a-kind academic experience. The UAlbany NanoCollege houses the only fullyintegrated,

300mm wafer, computer chip pilot prototyping and demonstration line within 80,000 square

feet of Class 1 capable cleanrooms. More than 2,500 scientists, researchers, engineers, students, and

faculty work on site at CNSE’s Albany NanoTech, from companies including IBM, AMD,

GlobalFoundries, SEMATECH, Toshiba, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, ASML, Novellus Systems,

Vistec Lithography and Atotech. An expansion currently in the planning stages is projected to increase

the size of the CNSE Albany NanoTech Complex to over 1,250,000 square feet of next-generation

infrastructure housing over 105,000 square feet of Class 1 capable cleanrooms and more than 3,750

scientists, researchers, and engineers from CNSE and global corporations.

The Infotonics Technology Center of Excellence in Photonics & Microsystems is a technology

commercialization center that assists firms transition new technologies from concept to manufacturing.

ITC maintains a 140,000 square-foot facility with over 25,000 square feet of cleanrooms for micro

electromechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication and packaging. ITC works with large and medium sized

companies to help them bring new technologies to market, with small companies ready to transition from

prototype and low volume manufacturing to scalable manufacturing, and with various federal agencies to

develop technology solutions addressing areas of critical national need. The collaboration includes

industrial participants such as Corning Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, and Xerox Corporation. Academic

participants include approximately twenty New York State colleges and universities, including the

Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester.

NYSTAR is a public benefit corporation that helps grow New York’s innovation economy with its

support of high technology development and commercialization through academic and business

partnerships.

Empire State Development is New York’s chief economic development agency, committed to being

recognized on a global scale as the economic development engine driving job growth, strategic

investment and prosperity in New York State. ESD is intent on paving the way for New York State to

become the leader of the innovation economy and one of the most business friendly, productive and

competitive economic development climates in the world. ESD also oversees the marketing of “I LOVE

NY,” the State’s iconic tourism brand. For more information, visit www.esd.ny.gov.
____________________________________
Tom R. Bennett: The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory

Subject: The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory
Date: 9/22/2010 11:20:59 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: tomrbennett@yahoo.com
To: RONALDMAY@aol.com

Dear Ron:

I hope this email finds you doing well. I have to tell you that I truly enjoy reading your “riffs” related to Chicago politics as well as the upcoming Mayoral 2011 Rugby Scrum and Chess Match. On this note, the recent Larry Bloom pontificating goo-goo perspective was very insightful. In any event, I have developed a theory (“in progress”) related to Rich Daley’s “shocking” September 7, 2010 announcement related to voluntarily not seeking an unprecedented 7th term.

In any event, The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory goes like this….its starts with The Rich “Misdirection” Daley or “The RMD”. The RMD was first introduced in 1979 when Rich Daley was evaluating a campaign for Cook County State’s Attorney —

www.themediaoasis.com/byrne/byrne3.htm

The cliff-noted version of the Ray Hanania-reported 1979 introduction of The RMD is that Daley and his advisors/associates effectively “baited” the local media into reporting that Daley was no longer considering a campaign for Cook Country State’s Attorney (CCSA) and was shifting his sights toward the Cook County Recorder’s Officer as Ed Burke (a Jane Byrne and Chicago-Outfit-backed candidate) was seriously evaluating a campaign for CCSA as well. Upon the misdirection being complete, Daley impaired the field and mounted a successful campaign for CCSA.

The 21st Century RMD goes something like this…..and it is now playing-out as the ultimate play-action Hail Mary Political Pass (“Think football”) in the history of Chicago Machine Politics.

Up until the Rich Daley’s September 7th announcement, all local media pundits were predicting and reporting that a Daley 2011 re-election campaign was underway (except for The May Report). In fact, most tea leaves were pointing in the direction of a 2011 re-election campaign given the overall tone of Rich Daley’s press appearances and special event appearances (i.e., Commercial Club of Chicago, City Club of Chicago, et al). Given this dynamic, most professional politicians (with the exception of Scott Waguespak and Bob Fioretti) were fully anticipating a Daley Re-election Campaign.

To borrow from the Play-Action Football Metaphor, Rich Daley has been grinding-it-out with his “three yards and a cloud of dust” running game while lulling his opposition into a painfully slow submission for past several months. Meanwhile, Rahm “The Ballerina” Emanuel (who you might recall started openly pandering for the Mayoral seat during an April Charlie Rose interview) has basically been helping Daley establish his running game in order to set-up his passing fame.

On this note, I now introduce the 10-point Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory:

The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory

1. First…..Think The Rich “Misdirection” Daley

2. Second…now simply implement the “three yards and a cloud of dust” Daley & Rahm “The Ballerina” running game as a response to the Olympics 2016 public relations disaster.

3. In sticking with our football metaphor, Daley begins to lull the defense to sleep with his rope-a-dope running game.

4. With Rahm “The Ballerina” Emanuel as the Half-back pounding the defense with his Mayoral press releases and media placements since his April 2010 Charlie Rose disclosure re: his mayoral ambitions, the defense is confused.

5. The Rahm “The Ballerina” Emanuel Running game has now effectively frozen all fundraising and potential mayoral opposition organizing.

6. The Daley September 7, 2010 announcement is the football equivalent of the play-action pass.

7. Streaking down both sidelines are both Tom “TD” Dart and Terry “Speedy Willie Gault” Peterson.

8. RMD fakes the game-changing (misdirection) hand-off to Rahm “The Ballerina” Emanuel and looks downfield.

9. RMD does one of two things —

A. He launches the Hail Mary Pass to Tom “TD” Dart who is waving his arms in the End Zone.

“or”

B. The RMD tucks the ball under his arm and scrambles for the first-down (i.e., for one final revisionist history mayoral term or victory lap – aka – The Brett Favre tour) behind the blocking of Jeremiah Joyce, Bill Daley and Tim Degnan. Methinks the tuck-and-roll is Daley’s preferred (and most likely) option.

10. Rahm “The Ballerina” Emanuel remains in D.C. continuing to strike poses for the national mainstream press in his favorite game gear……

www.freakingnews.com/Ballerina-Kitten-Pictures-41179.asp

The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory

__________________________________

Bennett gets comments on his theory

Subject: Re: Tom, the TIF panel on Tuesday, Sept. 28th.
Date: 9/25/2010 7:05:36 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: tomrbennett@yahoo.com
To: RONALDMAY@aol.com

Ron.

Someone – who is an excellent authority on mayoral politics – just informed me on Facebook that The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory – is the funniest stuff in politics they
have read in a long time….and, perhaps, even true. Irrespective, they said its some of the best political satire they’ve read in a long, long time.

TRB

— On Sat, 9/25/10, Thomas Bennett wrote:

_________________________________________

Tom R. Bennett: The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory, Part II

Subject: The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory, Part II
Date: 9/25/2010 9:04:19 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: tomrbennett@yahoo.com
To: RONALDMAY@aol.com

Ron:

As an aside to the 10-point, misdirection guerilla campaign that Emanuel (and company)
are driving point for Daley (and company) — Chicagoans will clearly need to ask themselves the following —- if indeed, Rahm Emanuel is a genuine contender for the 5th floor:

Please consider this…..

While serving as White House Chief of Staff for the past 18+ months, I presume one-of-
the-prevailing questions in the minds of Chicagoans (both blue collar and white collar) will
be the following >>> Where’s the love Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Obama?

Irrespective of the effectiveness of Emanuel’s “arm-twisting coalition” of Daley loyalists (and political hacks) to create the current “media buzz”, there is appearing to be a profound lack of meaningful love “or” federal bacon ($$$) that has been delivered to the City of Chicago (or greater Chicago area) since Barack Hussein Obama has been in the White House.

However, Emanuel and Obama’s lack of ‘delivering-the-goods’ to Chicago should not be surprising given Rahm Emanuel’s ineffectual leadership as Congressman for the 5th Congressional District. To this point, during Emanuel’s three-term congressional tenure – he appeared more interested in the Democratic National agenda — then working alongside Congressional Republicans to deliver the goods for the City of Chicago during the Bush Administration.

Moreover, if you’re a Chicagoan with any type of affinity or loyalty for the Union Trades (carpentry, electric, pipe-fitters, et al) — how well does Emanuel’s NAFTA experience play with Chicago — a union town? After all, most Washington D.C. pundits credit Emanuel as being the main architect (along with Bill Daley) behind the passage of the unprecedented (and union-busting) NAFTA legislation.

In closing, what specifically is Rahm’s agenda in ‘floating’ his mayoral ambitions to the D.C. mainstream media if he truly cannot be competitive with the creation of a relevant and compelling message as well as the creation of an effective ground game (organization)?

Further, given Rahm Emanuel’s demonstrated track record in being both uninterested and unsuccessful in securing meaningful Federal economic resources for the City of Chicago during the Clinton Administration, the Obama Administration and during his three-term tenure as 5th CD Congressman — how exactly is Emanuel qualified to serve as the next Mayor of Chicago given his ineffectual track record.

Again, its appearing that Rahm Emanuel is simply serving as an effective ink-generating ‘misdirection’ for Richard “Misdirection” Daley. Don’t be surprised if Rich Daley reconsiders his September 7th decision ‘after’ the November 2, 2010 general elections.

http://www.freakingnews.com/Ballerina-Kitten-Pictures-41179.asp

The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory

________________________________________________

Carol Marin’s article confirming parts of Tom Bennett’s theory

Subject: Re: Tom, the TIF panel on Tuesday, Sept. 28th.
Date: 9/25/2010 6:10:33 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: tomrbennett@yahoo.com
To: RONALDMAY@aol.com
Thank you. Please include the email (in its entirety) that I sent you.

Also…..today’s Carol Marin column really reinforces The Rahm Emanuel Pussycat Theory >>> www.suntimes.com/news/marin/2745074,CST-EDT-carol26.article

— On Sat, 9/25/10, RONALDMAY@aol.com wrote:

From: RONALDMAY@aol.com
Subject: Re: Tom, the TIF panel on Tuesday, Sept. 28th.
To: tomrbennett@yahoo.com
Date: Saturday, September 25, 2010, 5:59 PM

It will be in the next report. I already have it in there. Probably will go out tonight. Sat. night.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Rahm Emanuel may face problems in South Side wards
Comments

September 25, 2010

BY CAROL MARIN
Rahm Emanuel, in a run for mayor, has a problem in Chicago wards south of Madison Street, according to a number of black Democratic committeemen I talked to last week.

And Friday’s report by Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed that Terry Peterson, the prominent African-American head of the CTA and former Daley campaign manager, may be signing on to run an Emanuel campaign, doesn’t seem to make much difference.

“I’ve heard no one on the South Side saying, ‘Oh, boy, I’m glad Rahm is running,’ ” said 5th Ward committeeman and Ald. Freddrenna Lyle. “And Terry Peterson signing on would not move 10 blacks in my ward. It might harden people’s hearts against Rahm who believed Daley planned all this.”

At the very least, if Emanuel has signed up Peterson, then the wily White House chief of staff has eliminated one of his potential opponents. But plenty remain, and a dozen or more of them are in the African-American community alone.

A number of black politicians, ministers and activists huddled behind closed doors Friday morning at 16th Ward Ald. JoAnn Thompson’s office on the South Side to see whether there is any possibility they can boil the field down and unite behind one candidate.

One of those mayoral hopefuls, State Sen. Rickey Hendon (D-Chicago), told me by phone before that meeting, “Without unity, we’re gonna get our ass kicked.”

After it was over, he sounded morose. Hendon, who has just written his second book, Backstabbers: The Reality of Politics, told me, “I better go back and read my own damn book.”

Unity within a community is one thing. But a coalition between communities — an absolute requirement for whomever wins in 2011 — looks even further out of reach.

For blacks and Hispanics, some argue, common ground dissolved when Harold Washington died and Richard Daley came into power.

“You had two key voting blocks that helped elect a mayor to empower this new majority. . . . Since the mayor died, it fell apart,” said Jesus Garcia, the Democratic candidate for the 7th District Cook County Board seat and a former state senator.

Hispanics don’t seem any more excited about an Emanuel candidacy than do blacks.

“Rahm isn’t a friend of the Latino community,” said 22nd Ward committeeman and Ald. Ricardo Munoz on Friday, citing Emanuel’s record on immigration reform. “I am not a fan.”

But with at least four potential Hispanic candidates in the mayoral sweepstakes, unity there is also a challenge.

All of this could bode well on Feb. 22 for someone as strategic as Emanuel who, like Daley, is heavily favored by the business community and certain to be extremely well funded.

What it doesn’t bode well for is the election in November, which is practically on a respirator as the mayor’s race sucks away its oxygen.

It presents an enormous challenge for Democratic ward committeemen trying to focus voters on all the other races that matter: for governor, U.S. Senate and the wild-card battle for Cook County assessor.

“To be frank, I’m not sure that people are really engaged in this election period,” said 3rd Ward committeeman and Ald. Pat Dowell.

“What I see out there, we’ll have low voter turnout because issues are so complex . . . and nobody is talking about a real change,” lamented 2nd Ward committeeman and Ald. Bob Fioretti.

Fioretti, by the way, is one of at least 10 white candidates also thinking about running for mayor in February.

But first things first, pleads city Democratic Party Chairman Freddrenna Lyle. With just 37 days until the November election, she said, “We’ve got to step up our game.”

____________________________________

Melanie Adcock: Snarky Comments about Jesse Jackson’s “Social Acquaintance,” as it relates to Social Media

Subject: Snarky_Commentsabout Jesse Jackson’s “Social Acquaintance” as it relates to Social Media
Date: 9/24/2010 1:38:01 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: melanie_adcock@msn.com
To: ronaldmay@aol.com

Snarky Comments about Jesse Jackson’s “Social Acquaintance,” as it relates to Social Media…

The latest hot gossip story about a Chicago politician draws some parallels to social media and the way people define their relationships on Facebook and other sites. A Facebook friend of mine posted an article about Jackson’s usage of “social acquaintance,” and I’ve included his comments because they are amusing and made me think about Social Media in a new way. These comments were made by Jerry Boyle, a Chicago-based highly liberal minded legal professional, and other friends. Jerry has a great sense of humor and is very accepting of everyone who is different and unique. The Story about Jesse Jackson Jr. is also reprinted below for your reference. Enjoy!

Jerry Boyle Jackson’s usage of “social acquaintance” has provoked a fierce jurisdictional dispute between the Relationship Status and Friends Subcommittees of the Facebook Social Engineering Group. Asked to comment on the dispute, the Congressman’s office issued a terse press release stating: “It’s complicated.”

Melanie A. Adcock Is that a joke? I totally want to quote you on that!

Jerry Boyle Apparently, the Friends Subcommittee contends that Jackson’s usage of “social acquaintance” is governed by the precedent set by the prior dispute over the term “friends with benefits” which, by a close vote, was assigned to the jurisdiction of the Relationship Status Subcommittee. Both Subcommittees have issued identical position statements on the dispute: “We don’t want to touch this one.”

You can quote me, of course.

Private I thought we were calling mistresses social acquaintances now. Me, I prefer the more courtly “paramour.” Or Doonesbury’s system of colored lapel pins.

Jerry Boyle As usual, the gay community is way ahead of us on such things. Facebook could learn a lot, for instance, from the example of the semiotics of bandanna color conventions overlaid on the binary code of pocket placement.

The Relationship Status Committee is totally lacking in imagination.

Melanie A. Adcock LOL!!! You guys are cracking me up with your snarky comments on social media… Status Subcommittee is totally lacking in imagination.

www.suntimes.com/news/brown/2738798,CST-NWS-brown23.article

Privately, she was a ‘social acquaintance’
September 23, 2010
BY MARK BROWN Sun-Times Columnist
Darn. I’ve got a Burt Bacharach song stuck in my head. I think it’s the Dionne Warwick and Friends version.
Maybe I can dislodge it if everybody sings with me. All together now:

“In good times
“And bad times
“I’ll be on your side forever more
“That’s what social acquaintances are for.”
What? You thought I was going to sing “Jesse’s Girl?”
Where can I find a woman like that?
Apparently in a martini bar, which explains where I’ve gone wrong.
In characterizing Washington hostess Giovana Huidobro as a “social acquaintance,” Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has not only tickled our funny bone but may also have achieved the trailblazer status he has long sought.
That’s because, as far as I can tell, he may be the first U.S. politician to use “social acquaintance” as a euphemism for woman-with-whom-I’m-suspected-of-having-an-affair.
I mean it. This is groundbreaking stuff. Think of all the major American politicians that have walked this road before him: Clinton, Edwards, Hart, just to name a few.
And not one of them came up with something so, how can I put it … cold. That’s it. Cold.
You can’t get much more impersonal than that.
Even in this brave new world of social networking (OK, I know it’s not so new anymore), every Facebook acquaintance is called a friend, even the ones you’ve never seen. Do you think Facebook would have taken off the way it did if people were vying to amass “social acquaintances?” Not likely.
But Huidobro was not a friend, a pal or a chum. She was not “that woman.” She was not even an associate. Nor was she a business acquaintance, no-no, certainly not that.
She was a social acquaintance.
And even if we are not exactly certain what it means to be a social acquaintance in this situation, we are fairly clear on what it is not: a social acquaintance is not a stranger. Jackson Jr. did not try to tell us that he doesn’t know Huidobro, and for that, the rest of the news media is grateful because they weren’t sure until then that it was safe to repeat the Chicago Sun-Times exclusive.
Here’s a reminder of what Jackson did tell us in that written statement released by his congressional office:
“The reference to a social acquaintance is a private and personal matter between me and my wife that was handled some time ago. I ask that you respect our privacy.”
Respecting his privacy would have been easier if Jackson weren’t a member of the U.S. House, wasn’t flirting with a mayoral run and hadn’t allegedly arranged for a political fund-raiser involved in the Blagojevich mess to fly Huidobro here to Chicago to see the congressman on two occasions.
By the way, what do you call a politician’s friend who pays to fly his social acquaintance halfway across the country for a rendezvous?
In Chicago, we call that person the bag man.
And suddenly it seems more plausible to us when it’s the bag man who allegedly tells federal authorities he was to be the go-between for Jackson offering millions of dollars to Rod Blagojevich for a seat in the U.S. Senate, because hey, if you can be trusted with the social acquaintance, you are a friend indeed.
But I don’t want to get too bogged down in that serious stuff. For today’s purposes, I’m really more interested in the inspired novelty of referring to Huidobro as a social acquaintance.
I made an electronic database search of all the instances in which the words “social acquaintance” appeared in any context in any English-speaking news organization of note in recent years, and while I couldn’t make it through every one, I found no articles involving embarrassed politicians explaining their relationship with a member of the opposite sex.
The closest I came was that “social acquaintance” seems to be the terminology favored by judges who are forced to explain why they’ve been hanging out with alleged mobsters.
Something else I noted from the database search was how often the authors of horoscopes refer to social acquaintances, usually by way of warning, such as this advisory to Virgos that appeared in a Downstate paper last week: “It would be smart to insulate your business contacts from your social acquaintances at all times in the year ahead, because one could get in the way of the other and cause you trouble.”
Watch out for those social acquaintances. They’re nothing but trouble. That’s what friends are for.
________________________________
Sheila Cull: Link to her blog

From: SHEILA CULL
Subject: Re: The May Report: 9/23/2010: Total Attorneys has another round of layoffs and Kevin Chern, one of the founders, puts his house on the market for $799K; Dan Miller is back to reading TMR thanks to that Adcock woman; the new TMR website is close to being ready — data has been converted
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 05:46:36 -0700 (PDT)
To: The May Report

sheila-cull.blogspot.com/

___________________________________
Briefly noted, by Ron May

* I called Dave Pearah Friday. He’s the SVP at Allscripts who resigned to go to a healthcare IT firm, the name of which he won’t disclose yet. I saw him at the MIT-EF meeting.

The problem is that no one at Allscripts picked up on my strong hint about whom he was and what he was going to do BOTH times I mentioned it, the first time on Thursday of last week without using his name and the second time on Friday of last week with his name. That is more than a hint. So, his resignation on Monday of this week did come as a surprise to them.

Now, I ask you, what darn good is this report if it cannot destroy a person’s career?

Anyway, Dave starts his new job on October 4th after his two week notice. They did want to know what it would take to keep him.

Allscripts used to be in Libertyville, but five years ago, they moved to the Merchandise Mart. Dave says that with the firms they have bought, they are now a 5,000 person company. Most of those people are in North Carolina and Georgia, he told me. And they do have many competitors but Caremark, now owned by CVS, is not one of them.

Their competition is any firm that is in the electronic medical records business. That includes firms helping physicians, clinics, hospitals, etc.

Dave said that most people think of Allscripts as being in the electronic prescription business, and that was true years ago, but their business is much broader today.

Dave said the firm has gross revenues of $1.3B of which about $600MM is tied to the core Allscripts firm.

Dave said he will be at the MIT-EF meeting next month and that he gets the itch to change jobs about every four years.

Mort Zuckerman just said on The McGlaughlin Group (Saturday evening) that we have 166,000 people in the computer industry in the United States and there are 1.5 million in China. That number sounds to me like bunk. Right here in Chicago alone, if you combine Motorola and other firms, we have at least what? I am often amazed by the misinformation and ignorance of the pundits. Chris Matthews on his program The Chris Matthews Show last Sunday did not know that the Mayor’s race involves a run-off in April between the top two contenders. Clarence Page had to educate him on it.

Avery Cohen told me Thursday night and last Wednesday at MIT-EF that I should take a tour of Echo Global Logistics, Groupon, etc. at 600 West Chicago. He said that they have large rooms filled with tons of sales people at desks.

* Let me get this out. Tomorrow, Sunday, my plan is to write-up the FundingPost event from Tuesday, the 14th; the Motion Graphics event from Thursday night, the 16th; Melanie’s and my excellent — and crazy — adventure after the event with Poker Charity attendee Kevin O’Donnell; and the Social Media Club Chicago event Thursday night. The highlight of the Social Media Club Chicago event was clearly a talk by Mike Ivers. That will be available in about a week, but in the meantime, you may want to view this: www.youtube.com/user/CuspConference

At the SMCChicago, Mike was dressed in moss to go along with his “swamp” talk. After the meeting the after party from CUSP was held at the Palomar Hotel. www.hotelpalomar-chicago.com/

CUSP was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I believe it was in its third year.

And I will also write what happened to my plans to attend the poker charity. I owe you that. There is a song sung by the Henry Higgins character in the movie and play My Fair Lady entitled “I’ve grown accustomed to her face” and I am going to write my own version to that melody with the words “I’ve grown accustomed to your bans.”

I have become somewhat inured to all the attempts to ostracize and excommunicate me. It is sad to me that there is a spill over effect that sometimes includes Melanie. She has not exposed the incompetence of the ITDA and ITA boards and the irregularities in the management of the ITDA. She did not publish the many lawsuits against TIHII or the divorce papers of DW. So why punish her? That is guilt by association. Melanie is her own person and she writes whatever she wants with no censorship from me. I don’t hold Fred Hoch’s parents responsible for his increasingly territorial attitude. As one person put it to me, “Fred is very much of a ‘it’s my bat and ball’ kind of guy.” Is Fred an only child? I don’t know, but I will bet you that he was the type of kid to take his marbles and storm off toward home when he got pissed about something. I can just see him pouting in the corner in grade school.

Fred is not contributing as much as he could to the feeling of one community. He continues our tradition of fiefdoms, and he is not the only one. Don’t get me started. Oh, I almost forgot, since I was in the hospital on July 8th, a date I have informally dubbed “Rachel Rusch day in Chicago high tech.” (312-890-3167 and r.rusch@asahq.org )

Rachel has not been given the credit she deserves for blowing the whistle on all the nonsense at the ITDA to me. After I got the basic outline from her, I got much more info. from other then current and some former employees at the ITDA.

In fact, Fred is contributing to dividing us, as evidenced by the complaints I am increasingly hearing about the condescending attitude of some of the staff at the ITA and the dismissive attitude toward people who are not ITA members. I am hearing complaints from several people about the snootiness of Kathy Liu and Mary Pat Glynn exhibited by their view only ITA members are allowed at their events and their actions to back up that view. I suspect that is coming directly from Fred’s orders. Margaret Plett would confirm that, I am sure.

Let us remember that this is not a case of the members subsidizing the non-member attendees. The ITA had no problem charging some members full boat for their Tech Nexus space while giving Josh Karp and his minions free space at the same time, so don’t talk to me about their commitment to fair and equal treatment for all parties. It is anything but impartial.

Most importantly, it is not about membership fees. The ITA is living largely off of federal money that was transferred! The money in the ITDA bank account, about $750K, was probably 90% federal money from the Office of Naval Research that was left over when their contract ended. That is your tax dollar paying for Mary Pat and Kathy, not to mention the rest of the staff!

Now, one could argue that the ITA staffers are just doing their jobs and dutifully taking their orders.

But my point would be that if you are going to sell someone on the merits of something, like joining the ITA, do it on positive and inclusive grounds, not on negative and exclusionary grounds. Let non-members in and then after a year or so of doing that, survey them to find out what value the events added for them to their businesses. Don’t just say, “We have an event and it is assumed that it has value to you, so we won’t even let you in unless you join.”

Some consulting firms, rather than charging by the project or the hour, charge by the value of the results. They take a percentage of the value-add. That should be the ITA’s stance — we’ll charge you only if we can bring something to the table for you.

And what has really been done for the 150 or so ITDA members in the year since the so-called merger whose welfare was supposed to be the top priority in exchange for the windfall the ITA got from the ITDA coffers? I have not had time to investigate it, but I doubt that it could withstand much scrutiny. Mobile apps are great but they are not the only game in town. Everything does not revolve around Raymond Reinhardt, although he is doing a great job and we appreciate his contributions to this report in keeping the community informed.

What happens when that $500K — or whatever the amount turned out to be — runs out?

Just as hope is not a policy and anger is not one either, offering space for events is not the same as planning them and organizing them.

Remember that combined staff salaries at the ITA must exceed $500K a year.

Does the ITA have a long term strategy for survival other than charging rent at Tech Nexus?

Having space where events can be held is great, but it is not unique to the ITA. The Gleacher Center holds many events too and you don’t see the University of Chicago thumping its chest for providing a facility for meetings.

The ITA is trying to take credit for events it is not responsible for organizing, just hosting in their space. Just offering space for the meeting does not cut it as a basis for bragging.

Tech America also sponsors events, and so does Julian Pretto’s firm Chicago Micro for that matter and they are not chest beating every time their name is associated with an event as much as the ITA is.

This is starting to turn into a rant. Don’t get me started. Gimme that old time stream of consciousness. Late on a Saturday night is the best time for it, about 3am.

BTW, in Melanie’s article on GrubHub she notes that Ed Domain has people chasing him to give him money. I can’t wait. What Ed may not know and I know very well is that funding will destroy any Chicago publication dedicated to the high tech industry. Proof of point: Look at what happened to Darcy (i-Street) and ePrairie which renamed itself Midwest Business. At one point, Darcy had about ten people and ePrairie had twelve — with a CEO, no less.

The driver is passion, not a bloated staff or money, and Melanie and I have the drive and the passion. Ed, keep on worrying about raising money, keep on trying to get a deal with Steve Lundin.

But Ed, if you do get the deneros, we embrace it and are ready for it. I loved staying up till 3am to beat Darcy and would gladly do it again. The Ed Domain model — aside from having a professional photographer take his pic — seems to be a series of self-serving and ingratiating articles a la Dave Lundy in the Chicago Sun-Times. Or he could be following the Brad “rewrite any press release and re-print it as an article” Spirrison model. Chicago tech readers are not stupid. They want real, hard nosed, in-the-trenches reporting, not puff pieces on Fred Hoch — or even on Melanie Adcock.

And Ed, you might want to call some former TMR columnists and find out how things have gone for them — like Jim Eiden and Todd Allen. The one person who has had some success, Tim Smith, was not paid, nor was Jeff Gilbert and they have both done fairly well.

Money, Ed, is pure poison for a venture which is really about passion. Would Fred Hoch work for free? I doubt it, but Terry Howerton, as much as he and I have our differences, does many things without financial remuneration. In the world of entrepreneurs, I suspect that Andrew Mason would work for free or very little compensation. Remember that he studied music and public policy.

Despite my not being allowed to attend, I do have inside sources in organizations that have effectively banned me. Bring back Adarsh Arora and Anjali Gurnani to run TiE. It has gone the route of exclusion.

But the Troy Henikoff talk (Wednesday, the 22nd) was great, according to one unnamed attendee. “Troy Henikoff was great yesterday at the TiE event. He talked about Excelerate, his (and others’) attempt to support start-ups in Chicago. Slide show was well constructed and interesting to follow. Content was powerful. The ASK at the end appropriate and aligned with his commitment. The event had around 50 participants. Sold out although 15 or so no shows from the name badges still on the sign up table. Venue great, food great, and interesting caliber of participants (some familiar faces, some new ones). A good event overall.”
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END OF REPORT

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