Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
Online retailer Jane’s Closet is going offline and picking Williamsburg’s fashion district (the North 6th Street corridor between Bedford & Kent) to make their debut. Their boutique will be located at 60 North 6th Street near the Music Hall of Williamsburg and Kent Ave.
“We’ve been eyeing Williamsburg for some time,” said founder Jane Rim. “It is a unique neighborhood filled with a great blend of people and shops. I’m confident a Jane’s Closet customer will feel right at home here. We saw that the location at 5in1 Studios was available and knew we found our first home. The storefront is small, intimate, and within the shopping district of Williamsburg. 5in1 Studios has a history similar to ours in displaying up-and-coming designers.”
If you don’t feel like schlepping, they’ll still be happy to take your orders online.
BROOKLYN INDUSTRIES, which started in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1996, has blossomed into $12 million in revenue per year, and just as many locations from NYC to Portland. Lexy Funk, CEO and husband/co-founder Vahap Avsar grew the business from scratch, after Vahap Avsar put together a messenger bag from material he found in a dumpster. One of the many challenges in the company’s impressive growth had been in manufacturering, where normal New Yorkers cost too much and a team of Equadorians meant potential raids by the Feds.
What would you do? At the end of the day they chose to outsource a third of that work to factories in China, and BusinessWeek has a good interview with Lexy explaining her reasoning and some of the steps it took to get there. Outsourcing to China is not the coolest thing to do, especially considering Brooklyn Industries’ demographic, but at the same time, there’s more than meets the eye and Lexy is ready to give you the breakdown so pay attention. Read: BusinessWeek
Professor and economist Carl Case, of the S&P Case Shiller Indices, called the bottom of the housing market at the New England Mortgage Bankers Conference in Providence, R.I. While he doesn’t believe “we’ll come out of this roaring”, he cited a 25% increase in housing starts since April and a marked drop in inventory of unsold new homes – which he said was the best indicator of all.
To sum up the market’s nosedive, the professor of economics at Wellesley pointed to housing starts, which peaked in 2006 with 2.273 million units to 598,000 units in August of this year. That difference cost the U.S. economy 4.2% of GDP or $588 billion, he said.
photo: a home for sale credit: sean dreilinger via Flickr Creative Commons
Author Michael Lind, of Foreign Policy, makes some bold predictions about a post-recession global economy. The good news? America is well positioned to benefit from a predicted resurgence of commodity prices, and overall we’ll adapt to a scaled back global marketplace pretty well. The bad news? New York City is expected to continue its economic decline, due to our reliance on the financial and publishing industries.
“New York, London, and other financial centers were heavily dependent on financial-sector profits. Throw in the technology-driven collapse of the publishing and broadcast industries headquartered in such places, and those cities are likely to suffer devastating blows. Capitals of both politics and commerce, such as Paris and Tokyo, will adjust the best in the new state-capitalist world. Purely commercial centers such as New York and Frankfurt will suffer the most. Without the obscenely rich investment bankers and the legions of well-paid retainers who supported their lifestyles, formerly flourishing parts of these former financial capitals may become as derelict as Detroit or the crumbling industrial towns of northern Britain and Germany’s Ruhr region.” Source: Michael Lind, Foreign Policy
We’re certainly not as bearish about New York City as Mr. Lind. In the first place, a definition of New York City as a ‘purely commercial center’ wholly ignores the uniqueness of NYC as a social, cultural, political and artistic destination. While not as lucrative as Wall Street, there are other reasons for people to live here than the Financial District. Yet his case for the rest of the country and the world is quite lucid, and for those who agree with his analysis, is a good road map of what to expect macro-economically in the next few years.
Desperately looking for a profitable business model, old school media companies are latching on to the realization that cheap and dirty sites like HuffPost, Gawker (and hopefully us someday) are onto something. Why pen original pieces when you can curate the boatloads of content that’s already on the web?
That’s not to say merely aggregate, because that suggests an automated, unfiltered solution (e.g. all stories with the keyword “Obama” and “G-20″). Curating is spending your human capital on editors that don’t necessarily write original content but curate and quality control the content that’s already out there – linking to substantive sources ala the new maxim “write what you know, link to the rest”.
Makes sense to us. Consumers are getting quite overwhelmed with all of this content coming out of there ears, and it does explain why HuffPost and other “curators” are doing well with very little staff (besides the fact that they get celebs to write an original article once in a while for free). Yet, with everyone curating, won’t that lead to the pile-in that occured with aggregating and user generation? We think so, at the end of the day, curating may work as a starter solution (its the model we’re following until we have more resources), but nothing beats scoops, long-form investigative and original pieces. It is afterall what the “curators” will be linking to, if they see fit. Read: “Can Curation Save Media?” Business Insider
Image via: CloserUp.Wordpress
Sure the newly unveiled HDR-TG5V is a svelt looking number, with a decent feature set including built in GPS, NAVTEQ maps (for geo-tagging), 10X optical zoom and a 2.7″ LCD, but give us a break, the suggested $1,000 price tag is far too high considering its 1080p is running off tiny little sensors. This thing might as well be a $500 point and shooter or a hybrid DSLR like Sony’s much better valued DSC-HX1.
The 1080p and schwaggy feature set just isn’t good enough to command that kind of price. Unless of course you fancy yourself a James Bond who likes his toys small and overpriced. Our advice, buy a $300 point and shoot that does 720P HD video, like the excellent Canon SD970.
Sure the newly unveiled HDR-TG5V is a svelt looking number, with a decent feature set including built in GPS, NAVTEQ maps (for geo-tagging), 10X optical zoom and a 2.7″ LCD, but give us a break, the suggested $1,000 price tag is far too high considering its 1080p is running off tiny little sensors. This thing might as well be a $500 point and shooter or a hybrid DSLR like Sony’s much better valued DSC-HX1.
The 1080p and schwaggy feature set just isn’t good enough to command that kind of price. Unless of course you fancy yourself a James Bond who likes his toys small and overpriced. Our advice, buy a $300 point and shoot that does 720P HD video, like the excellent Canon SD970.
Forget Sarkozy’s defiance, Prime Minister Brown and Barack Obama are poised to lead the G20 through the economic crisis. As for Sarkozy’s threat to leave the G20 in the middle of the session, Prime Minister Brown’s response was typical of British elegance: “Let me also add that I’m confident that President Sarkozy will not only be here for the first course of our dinner, but will still be sitting as we complete the dinner.” he said.
Also read:
When Gordon met Barack, Guardian (UK)
Obama Warns Others to Step Up to Crisis, WSJ
Forget Sarkozy’s defiance, Prime Minister Brown and Barack Obama are poised to lead the G20 through the economic crisis. As for Sarkozy’s threat to leave the G20 in the middle of the session, Prime Minister Brown’s response was typical of British elegance: “Let me also add that I’m confident that President Sarkozy will not only be here for the first course of our dinner, but will still be sitting as we complete the dinner.” he said.
Also read:
When Gordon met Barack, Guardian (UK)
Obama Warns Others to Step Up to Crisis, WSJ
Don’t Believe the hype.
BusinessInsider is reporting on a Deutsche Bank research report which predicts a doomsday scenario for NYC home value. New York (and West Palm Beach/Miami/Ft. Lauderdale) should be preparing for a drop of up to 47% in its property value.
In fact, we think the opposite, that real estate value in the U.S. is near the bottom, and while New York City will be delayed more than others due to the wiping out of Wall Street, flowers will grow in the cracks of concrete. While we are troubled by David Paterson’s inadequate performance as Governor, Mayor Bloomberg, one of the few to get richer during the financial crisis, is as smart of a leader for NYC as we can have. What we need is a game changer, in the form of a strong Governor – Cuomo or Guilliani come to mind. Albany is a ruly place, just like New York City was before Guilliani. Of the forecast, we think that’s a severe outlook, and one we hope doesn’t come to pass before new leadership can be found in the state’s capital. Read @ BusinessInsider.com
