Sorry to disappoint any of you who will be sitting in front of your computers this coming Monday, but we at neighborbeeblog will be wrenching ourselves away from our keyboards for the weekend to eat hot dogs, get some fresh air, and expose our pasty skin to the sunlight (The sun! It buuuurns!). We’ll be back on Tuesday.
Happy Memorial Day!
Welcome to At Large, neighborbee’s newest column. In this column, we will host bloggers who, although not regular columnists, will be contributing to the ‘bee on a relatively frequent basis. Our first At Large post is from one of our favorite bloggers of all time (and last week ’s featured blogger on The Swarm): Rob The Bouncer .
I know where Roger Clemens ate dinner on Wednesday night. I know where he ate, what he ate, with whom he ate, and what was talked about at his table. I know these things because I was sitting six feet away from him for the better part of an hour.
What happens to me, from time to time, is I get invited to events and activities hosted by very wealthy people. Now, I don’t know a lot of very wealthy people. For whatever reason, though, I know more than my share of people who know people who are very wealthy. The people I know aren’t wealthy themselves, but they seem to receive a disproportionate number of invitations to things involving very wealthy people.
For the purposes of this discussion, “very wealthy people” are, indeed, very wealthy. I’m not referring to some dude who makes $300K per year, plus bonuses, working for Goldman Sachs. This is about people you’ve probably heard of
When these friends of mine receive these invitations, they’re often inexplicably inclined to bring me along as a guest. I don’t know why this is the case, but it happens quite frequently. I have no complaints about these invitations. I simply find it rather amusing to end up, every few months or so, floating around in environs to which I’m not particularly accustomed – and by unaccustomed, I’m not talking about some hackneyed “Which fork do I use?” scenario, either. I just mean that I don’t hang out with very rich people on a regular basis, so I find it interesting to observe them in their natural habitat.
Tags:clublife blog, really rich people, Rob the Bouncer, roger clemens
This week, neighborbeeblog is the featured site for Cool In Your Code.com’s “Around The Blog” section!
Cool in Your Code.com is the online destination for Cool In Your Code, an “infotainment” show that airs 3 nights a week on NYC TV (Channel 25). This Emmy-award winner breaks down what’s cool, new, undiscovered, and different throughout New York City’s 200+ zip codes. The website features content from the show, contests, games, and links to NYC-focused blogs. And for those who live on the other side of the pond, there’s a London edition as well, published in conjunction with the Times Online. Do yourself a favor and check it out!
Tags:around the blog, cool in your code, nyc tv
Leibya Spells Freedom from Leibya Rogers on Vimeo .
Meet Leibya Rogers. Well, OK, we admit, her mother didn’t really name her Leibya. That’s only the name she uses when she performs. You know, kind of like an American Gladiator. There’s Wolf. There’s Venom. There’s… Leibya.
Are we going to tell you her real name? Nope. Instead, how ’bout you just check out her original musical composition above. (Warning: Lyrics NSFW) Then go see her live at W.R.A.G. Fest (Womyn. Rocking. Are. Godly.) Wednesday at 9:30 at The Tank . Admission is a lowly $5. If that’s too steep for you, you can visit her MySpace page .
If you were to be a freegan for only one week, this would be it. After you hit up all of tonight’s gallery openings for their free booze, continue on to the fine establishments below for some more free nourishment. That is, if you can call fast food nourishment.
Free Southern Style Chicken Biscuit or Southern Style Chicken Sandwich at McDonald’s
Free small (16 oz.) Iced Coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts on May 15th (10am-10pm)
Greetings, readers!
We at neighborbeeblog have just finished our first month, and we think things are going pretty well! That being said, there are a lot of topics out there that we would love to cover, but don’t have any writers to do it. These topics include:
- Queens
- The Bronx
- Pets
- GLBT
- Dance
- Tech
If you are interested in writing about one of the aforementioned topics (or if there’s a topic that you think we should be covering), send an email with your blog (or any sort of writing sample) to kate@neighborbeeblog.com.
Thanks! We’re looking forward to hearing from you.
We finally have our own page on flickr!! Ok it’s not that exciting, but as you have seen we’re adding pictures to the blog so you can see the people who are working so hard to make neighborbee a success. Now that we have our own flickr page, all the pictures of our beautiful faces are now in one place for all of you to enjoy. So what are you waiting for? Check us out on flickr at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/neighborbee/
or
http://www.flickr.com/people/neighborbee/
-Matt
We finally created our Facebook group!
The purpose of the group is to keep everyone updated on the launch and other important news concerning neighborbee.
You can view it (and hopefully join!) by clicking on the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5798704098
Cheers,
Anthony
So I had this idea back in late 2003 to create an internet delivery company. If you remember Kozmo.com (now Max Delivery), they would deliver just about anything you can think of (dvds, books, junk food, etc) right to your doorstep in under an hour via a bike messenger. You would basically point, click and it was there. Well that business model didn’t work out for a number of reasons and I was pretty bummed out when they went under because the service was fantastic - the lazy-man’s (or woman’s) dream! So instead of managing the actual inventory like Kozmo did, I thought it would be cool to leverage the existing small business infrastructure in metropolitan cities (for inventory and means of delivery) while our site would essentially be the middle man. What I loved most about it was that communities would benefit economically from the increase in business our site would effectively bring them.
I spent all of 2004 flushing out the business model at Fordham University’s Business School. Then I realized I didn’t know the first thing about starting a business of this magnitude and entrepreneurship in general, so I started the Fordham Entrepreneur Society (FES) in early 2005. I met a lot of great people & entrepreneurs through FES, including a small boutique branding company called In The Round Design. IT Round consisted of two partners, Wendy (who happened to be a Fordham GBA Alum) and Carl (who used to work with Wendy at S&P). We used to have these magical brain storming sessions at Wendy’s apartment on Sunday mornings and our ideas came right from the heart. The meetings were a blast. Wendy’s strengths were branding and strategy while Carl’s was creative design. Together, we worked on the business model, came up with a brand platform and then realized that an internet delivery company left us all unfulfilled. So we kept pushing the envelope until we came up with the neighborbee concept.
(we purposely do not capitalize ‘neighborbee’ because we don’t think too much of ourselves)
We’re settled on neighborbee, right? Well, not quite. I also met a boutique consulting company called Venture Archetypes through FES a couple of months after the meeting with Wendy and Carl. At the time, I was a bit unsure about neighborbee, so I hired them to analyze my plan and give it some candid feedback. Nathan and Brita were really smart and honest about their analysis. You don’t always want people to agree with you - you appreciate feedback as long as its constructive. They liked the concept but thought it was on a collision course with Yahoo! and Google and recommended I come up with something else.
So I came up with creating an online marketplace that focused on “cool and unique” products indigenous to metropolitan cities. That seemed to be a more focused and “safe” plan. After I rewrote the plan to reflect the new model and pitched it to friends, I always got a skeptical response. The consensus was that I wasn’t passionate about it and that came out in the pitch. Then I pitched it to Wendy and Carl over drinks at Rosa Mexicana and they flat out rejected it. They believed in neighborbee more. It forced us to rethink the orginal concept and we consequently outlined it on the back of a bar napkin. I know that sounds corny but it’s true (however, I don’t have the bar napkin anymore!).
At the end of the day, VA’s advice was sound, but we believed in this more, regardless of the risks. This process taught me to do my due diligence but also have the confidence to believe that you can make anything work. There are 100 reasons not to do something but also 100 reasons why you should. VA’s advice was applied into rewriting neighborbee’s final plan.
Back to Business School…. I pitched neighborbee to anyone that would listen (including professors, students, alumni, etc) and took classes that had some relevance to it. While it certainly made school more tolerable, it was also exposed to an audience that was conditioned to be skeptical. I thank everyone who provided feedback (positive and negative) during that time because it taught me how to listen and deal with all sorts of advice. In addition, the collaborative approach helped shape it into what it is today.
I guess by now, you’re wondering what the business does (or plans to do!)… Good question…. Well, neighborbee is an online community based on real neighborhoods that gives members (residents, businesses, residential buildings etc.) access to everything in their neighborhood all in one place at their fingertips. And when we make money, we’re going to give back to “real neighborhoods” by donating part of our proceeds to them through our non-profit arm, “aroundthebee.org.”
I finished B-School last December (2006) and left my day job on September 28th (2007) to pursue this dream of mine fulltime. Remember Wendy and Carl? Well Carlis now my business partner and Wendy sits on our board of advisors (however, IT Round still exists). In addition, I somehow attracted my undergraduate marketing professor/mentor, 17 Fordham interns both from the undergraduate and graduate schools and some other great people including our legal team, finance teamand a board of advisors. Today we have over 25 worker bees involved that are putting a lot of sweat equity into making sure neighborbee is an online and offline success, which I am certain it will be. Funny how things work out.
Our launch is planned for early 2008 and we look forward to documenting our progress.Thanks for reading and Happy Thanksgiving!
Ciao,
Anthony