DoubleClick deal

Seems like only yesterday. I can remember meeting DoubleClick (all four employees) back in 1995 at a New York New Media Association sponsored event at 55 Broad Street, at that time promoted as NYC's first "wired building" (w/ a T1 line). There were ten companies presenting. Organa, Tumble Interactive, K2 Design, MCNY and others startups which have long ceased to exist. (Organa and Tumble were Bruni PR clients). DoubleClick not only survived the '90s bust, but went on to revolutionize the online ad industry. The DoubleClick deal will surely usher in a wave of acquisitons of NY based online ad and marketing companies. That's a good thing. Hat's off to Kevin O'Connor, a founder and one of those four original employees. He's probably playing golf somewhere in California or Florida, and relishing the success.

Virginia Tech & Citizen Journalism

The coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings surely indicate the importance of citizen journalism and the Web. Tonight's network newcasts (especially ABC World News) featured eyewitness accounts culled from student cell phones videos, Facebook blog reports and even a college citizen journalism site (the Blacksburg Report). The questions raised by citizen/ student journalists themselves are shaping the coverage. NowPublic.com, Newsvine, Topix and other citizen journalism sites are seeing a huge number of views on info related to the shootings. Hopefully, this combination of citizen (or student) journalism and professional newsgatherers will shed light on this tragedy.

Empowering The Phone: 2Recall.com

What if you could record phone calls and store them using the web?
Consumers could empower their phone calls when shopping or doing business over the phone.
2Recall, a new startup, has launched a new service that allows you to record calls and store them for future use in your own personal web folder at 2Recall.com. A sort of verbal contract that can be put to use later -- if that contractor, broker or salesperson renegs or decides to charge you a higher price than was quoted over the phone.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington endorsed 2Recall this week in his post.
Bruni PR will be pitching 2Recall to the mainstream press during the next few days/weeks, and anticipate substantial news coverage.

Foreclosure Mania

Got a call this morning from Meredith Menz, producer of the Today in New York show at WNBC. Seems TINY is doing a segment on "Buying Foreclosures" in the Real Estate market. A sign of the times, indeed. A projected 1.1 million Americans are expected to face foreclosures. While my client, StreetEasy.com, doesn't list foreclosures, a new site,
Foreclosure.com, does and will surely be a quick hit with the press and the Blogosphere.

The Valley vs. The Alley

From today's Information Week online edition:

"Move over, Silicon Valley, there's a greater call for IT professionals in the New York and New Jersey area than there is in Northern California, according to a new report.

Dice, an online career site for technology professionals, reports that there are 12,377 jobs posted for IT positions available in an area that encompasses New York City, Long Island, and northern New Jersey. By comparison, there are 9,393 jobs advertised for the Silicon Valley area, including San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland."

Ning: Instant Social Networks

I just did a testdrive of Ning, the new "instant social network" app, and have to say it's amazing. Kudos to Gina Bianchini, founder/CEO of Ning. In just three minutes, I set up my social network, called Bruni, with a tag "PR buzz". Check out brunipr.ning.com. Yet another forum for my views on PR trends & Net startups (and my rants on the ethical sins of our nation's biggest PR firms).

Burson Marsteller's Hat Trick

PR Watch, a respected industry watchdog org., takes on Burson Marsteller this week with a report on Mark Penn, the worldwide CEO of BM, my former employer, and points out that he wears "many hats", maybe too many hats. Penn is also chief stategist to the Hillary Clinton campaign and head of a polling firm working for the Senator. BM's head Howard Paster brushes off this huge conflict of interest by stating that WPP, owner of BM, has many units that work "independently". I knew Penn back in the Eighties when I was a political pollster working with Dick Morris, and think he's a smart guy, but doubt he can handle the scrutiny of the mainstream press when this issue becomes a problem for BM. My bet is that he picks Clinton over BM.

The Rise of Niche Job Boards

A newly released study by Borrell Associates indicates a sharp rise in the use of "niche" online job boards. Looks like trouble for generalist online job boards like Monster. This bodes well for New York-based JobThread, a fast growing startup that markets a full service job board product for publishers, recruiters and small/mid size businesses.

NowPublic.com + AP Agreement

NowPublic.com, a Bruni PR client, and Associated Press are hooking up. NowPublic, the largest citizen journalism network on the planet, and AP, the largest news organization, will share news leads, photos, video and other info supplied (or crowdsourced) by NowPublic's 35,000 contributors.

Silicon Alley 2.0

Price Waterhouse Cooper just released a new report indicating that $2 billion in venture capital was invested in approximately 250 New York based startups. It represents a two fold increase over last year's funding. The message in the report is clear : Silicon Alley is back. Kudos to PWC for making the news official. Anyone who attends the New York Tech Meetups has known this for some time, but it's great to see the larger business world acknowledge the rebirth of Silicon Alley.

Urbis.com

Whither the slushpile? The Publishing industry is ripe for revolution. Until now, any aspiring writer had to submit manuscripts to the infamous "slushpile" at major publishers. Now, many publishers are looking to the Internet as a way to discover new writers. Therein lies the potential of Urbis.com, the web's leading literary social media site. A new Bruni PR client, Urbis allows aspiring writers to submit their latest work to a customized group of critics. HarperCollins and other key publishers are looking closely at Urbis.com. Founder Steve Spurgat has created a valuable new platform that will soon disintermediate the slushpile and revamp the way publishers find new talent.

New York City's Price Choppers

StreetEasy.com, a Bruni PR client, is working closely with New York magazine on tracking the latest "Price Choppers" in the NY Real Estate market. Here's an excerpt from the latest issue of New York.


The Year of the Price Cut
Overreaching is so 2006.

* By S.Jhoanna Robledo

So is it a soft market, or isn't it? The consensus is forming: Sellers just can't overreach and expect a huge payout the way they did a couple of years ago. New York asked Streeteasy.com, an online database that gathers information on most listings in the city, to run the numbers and find the largest price drops of the year (leaving out mixed-use and multiple-unit buildings and new developments). Bargain-hunters and bonus-toters, this may be your moment.

read further at nymag.com/realestate/realestatecolumn/25993/index.html/

"Blogola" Scandal at Edelman PR

Edelman PR does it again. From the PR firm that helped coin the term "flog". You don't have to be a PR genius to know that giving out Acer laptops loaded with Microsoft Vista as "gifts" to bloggers is going to backfire. So far, the mainstream media hasn't picked up this story, but will in the coming days. Let's hope that 2007 sees an end to these unethical practices, and Edelman's involvement in the Blogosphere.

Bayonne

Boraie Development and the New Urbanism

Boraie Development, a major NJ based Real Estate development firm and Bruni PR client, has won approval to redevelop the Bayonne Ocean Terminal area, a $900 million project involving a new hotel, condos and a retail complex. In essence, Boraie and several other RE firms chosen, will be reshaping the look of this industrial town, often featured in the "Sopranos". The Newark Star Ledger recently did a profile of Boraie, engineered by Bruni PR.

New York Tech Meetup Xmas Party

The NY Tech Meetup Christmas event this week featured several new startups that will surely succeed. Urbis.com, founded by Steve Spurgat, allows writers, publishers and critics to hookup in an almost social media like format. Cogmap.com promises to disintermediate list brokers. And, uplayme.com offers music play list swapping. It's almost like 1997 in the reborn Silicon Alley, with VCs and key players showing up regularly at these events. One of the VCs predicted that the "next billion dollar Net company" will come out of NYC this coming year. As NYers say, "from your mouth to God's ear...." Kudos to Scott H., our NY Meetup tech organizer and impresario.

Gannett Copies NowPublic

Gannett's recent decision to embrace Citizen Journalism puts this trend on the map. As BuzzMachine aptly put it, they "blew up the newspaper". Gannett is copying the crowdsourcing model of a recent Bruni PR client, NowPublic.com, which has the largest news organization on the planet. "Gannett is attempting to grab some of the Internet mojo of blogs, community e-mail groups and other ground-up news sources to bring back readers and fundamentally change the idea of what newspapers have been for more than a century...Elements of Gannett's plan are seen elsewhere.
NowPublic.com, claims of 31,000 citizen reporters in 130 countries who post news, photos and video to the site."
- Frank Ahrens, Washington Post

Business Week covers PSS!

Remember the old Burger King tag, have it your way. Well, the latest trend in search engines is the customized, personal search engine. Business Week put the trend on the map last week with a story on Google's new personal search engine tool. Bruni PR scored a major hit for PSS!, a personal search engine company here in NYC.

"And Google shows no signs of letting up. On Oct. 24, Google unveiled tools to allow users to build and customize their own search engines. In doing so, it moved onto the turf of companies such as Septet Systems, which offers the ability to personalize search engines and share them with others through its "Personal Search Syndication" site (www.pssdir.com). The company sells ads through Google and splits the revenue. "I'm very flattered that they are doing this, because it makes our business model that much more legitimate," says PSS's co-founder Benjamin Epstein, adding that his search engine still has some features Google's does not. "But, yeah, there is always concern that they will just wipe us out."

Reuters/Second Life

The future of PR is here, and it looks like PR pros can now test their story pitches in the virtual world on virtual reporters. From our media contact, Eric Auchard, at Reuters:

By Eric Auchard and Kenneth Li

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Reuters is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life this week, joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the Internet.

Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members and news of Second Life for real world readers who visit a Reuters news site at: http://secondlife.reuters.com/

New York Daily News article/StreetEasy

Bruni PR scores a major placement for StreetEasy.com in today's New York Daily News. Here's an excerpt.

Homework on the Web

Real estate information is just a mouse click away

By PHYLLIS FURMAN
DAILY NEWS BUSINESS WRITER

Vincent Ngai did his homework.

For Vincent Ngai, hiring a real estate broker wasn't enough.

Ngai, a 34-year-old product manager for a financial services company, was recently searching for a studio apartment to buy on the upper East Side of Manhattan. He stumbled on a New York real estate web site, StreetEasy.com, and started doing some research.

Once Ngai honed in on an apartment he liked, he checked the site to see the listing prices for other units in the same building. He was then able to base his offer on "reliable information," as opposed to strictly using a broker.

"The question is, is a broker working in my best interest?," Ngai said. "This gave me a sense of security. I wasn't in the dark." Want to know about public schools in the neighborhood? Curious about what your neighbor sold his apartment for? How about getting an on-the-spot estimate of what your house is worth?

You could call a broker, but these days more and more people are heading to the Web.

Some 77% of all home buyers first search on the Internet, according to the National Association of Realtors.

New Yorkers are leading the way. Started nine months ago, StreetEasy draws 20,000 visitors a month and is growing 20% a month, though it has yet to score advertisers. Another prominent real estate site with roots here, PropertyShark.com, gets about 8,000 searches a day, up 44% from last year.

"Everyone in New York lives in an expensive box," said StreetEasy CEO Michael Smith. "They are tracking their real estate just like they track their stocks. Am I in the right apartment? Could I sell my place and move? Can I move from Tribeca to Chelsea?"

Raketu: the new "Skype Killer"

Raketu, a new Bruni PR client, officially launched this week, and received endorsements from Tom Keating, VoIP and Gadgets, and from numerous VoIP/telecom blogs. Information Week, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others have expressed interest as well. Check out raketu.com, register and get a million free minutes. Call it "Viral PR".

VoIP and Gadgets:

Raketu new P2P VoIP app takes on Skype
September 12, 2006
RaketuIs Raketu the next Skype killer? Raketu today launched a new VoIP client that also offers information and entertainment services. Raketu’s communications features include dialout calling (rakOut) to landline/mobile phones, Instant Messaging (supporting Raketu, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ICQ, Google and Skype), SMS-text messaging, and file transfers/sharing.

Raketu's information features include news, sports, weather, stock feeds, and an advanced internet and travel searching facility. Raketu’s entertainment features include a podcast reader/player, games, and a full featured multi-media player with karaoke. Raketu supports click-to-call, click-to-im, click-to-sms, global online presence, and enhanced social networking features. I even noticed the software supports plugins, including games such as the classic Battleships game. I guess this would be Web 2.0 meets VoIP 2.0. Still missing some of my "cool" features for the perfect unified communications client.