CMU Copyright Conference

Some enterprising artists at Carnegie Mellon are having an art fest/copyright law conference this weekend, and the keynote speaker is my law professor colleague from Duke, Jamie Boyle. The conference earned a nice piece of promotion in this morning's Post-Gazette - even if the headline is a little misleading (don't go to the conference expecting answers to anything!). Here is the conference website.

The coolest thing buried in the story is the "Bound by Law" comic book all about copyright law and fair use (cover above), copies of which apparently will be distributed for free at the conference. Jamie Boyle is a co-author of the book. It was drawn by my colleague Keith Aoki, multitalented law professor extraordinaire.

Go to the conference to hear a witty talk by Jamie, and to see some cool art, but you don't have to go in order to get a copy of the comic. Copies can be downloaded for free from the Duke Center for the Public Domain website.

Networks

An anonymous comment makes an excellent point about the importance of city politics, something which I hadn't really appreciated. The stagnant water on Grant Street makes the region look like a dead end for economic development:

Large self-contained companies like Westinghouse usually have fewer uncertainties, and locating in a second class township is pretty safe. But if you are a company that depends upon networks, and you prefer to locate in the city, than there are a lot of risks doing that right now. Ironically the uncontested elections, which are supposed to portray a sense of stability, instead seem to be signalling that new ideas are not welcome, even though the city's finances may be below the water line.

Is there lemonade in those lemons? For smaller companies that rely on financial, professional, and technological synergies and networks, what are your options these days -- assuming that you want to stick around Pittsburgh?

Possibility one -- look around the existing "networked" Pittsburgh neighborhoods: Oakland, Hazelwood, the South Side, the Strip, Lawrenceville. Anonymous suggests: That future doesn't look so bright. Lose the shades. Is that right?

Possibility two -- look to the burbs. The other day, over at Blog-Lebo, I offered what one reader calls the "Tech Lebo" proposal. Mt. Lebanon has a pleasant but underdeveloped downtown retail strip and a surplus of what I think is Class B office space. It also has one of the region's excellent coffee houses. Could start-ups and would-be start-ups coordinate their efforts and negotiate discounted rents for space in exchange for filling up empty space? It would generate some much-needed networking -- and put much-needed foot traffic on Lebo sidewalks. There are a lot of younger professionals in the South Hills who might leap at a short -- or nonexistent -- commute.

For the firms, is the move worth the stigma? What about the burbs themselves -- is this an opportunity that they should seek out? I mention Mt. Lebanon only to throw out an example; lots of towns could do the same, or have begun to do something similar. Wexford, for example. Now that Westinghouse is planning to leave Monroeville, should Monroeville look for a big score to take its place, or lots of little bets? Anonymous might say: For a smaller town looking to make a move on the City of Pittsburgh, now's the time. Economic development officials there might place a call to Innovation Works.

Possibility three -- worth mentioning, if not completely seriously: Go virtual. Why sign a lease when everything can be coordinated online? Success here depends on scale; eventually, if you take the benefits of networks seriously, physical location matters. But not everything needs to be bricks-and-mortar; if you're a company looking for space, consider what needs to be physical -- and what doesn't. And if you're a neighborhood or town with something to offer, consider whether what's available matches a need.

Fiddling While Rome Burns?

One of the reasons that I rarely blog about Pittsburgh politics is my view that the who's in / who's out / who's playing by the rules / who's not details of Grant Street are largely irrelevant to the future of Pittsburgh as an economically viable community. Bill Peduto fell on his sword to satisfy the imperatives of local Democratic Party clubbiness? No surprise. No matter. From an economic development perspective, Ravenstahl is completely beholden to the imperatives of the Allegheny Conference. Old Pittsburgh. Could Peduto have been effective with the AC still trying to wield so much power? The AC and old-style Pittsburgh business is the issue these days, not the identity of the Mayor.

Much more important: the Westinghouse move to Cranberry. Monroeville's loss has to hurt, but the region keeps a major employer, and one of the few that has growth in its sights.

Does moving to Cranberry mean that the bar-circle-W can offer new hires more attractive non-Allegheny County residential options than it could in Monroeville?

The Fuss About Cupcakes

I'm gradually being seduced by the idea of the cupcake class, simply because the cupcake-obsessed take nice photos.

A member of the world-beating Cupcakes Take the Cake team was in Pittsburgh recently, and collected cupcake specimens from their habitats in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill. A review is promised; for now, here are links to the photos:

Dozen

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

The Caffeinated Class

Cupcakes not your thing? Then check out this thread on CoffeeGeek.com. It's all about finding the best coffee bar in Pittsburgh.

Penguins Nation

The deal has been done; the Penguins and their local fans will, it appears, get a new home. And I've been thinking more about the team's future, in response to Chad's response to this post. In an email note, Chad pointed out something that I simply wasn't tuned into: Some significant portion of the Penguins fan base, including (especially including) fans who show up for home games, doesn't actually live in Pittsburgh. They travel here, stay overnight here, and pay tourist dollars for tickets and food and parking and other things, in order to see Sid and Gino, et al.

What should we make of this?

First -- Are there any numbers on this? Has anyone counted bodies or dollars connected with hockey tourism?

Second -- If those numbers are significant, then maybe a Penguins / entertainment arena is not just a community resource, but instead an economic development resource. What I mean is that the arena would and will be useful precisely because of its appeal (or at least the Penguins' appeal) as a draw for out-of-towners. Hockey and entertainment dollars spent by locals would, in all likelihood, get spent in Pittsburgh anyway. Hockey and entertainment dollars spent by out-of-towners might get spent elsewhere. "Keep the Penguins in Pittsburgh" arguments for public money over the last few months weren't just or even mostly about saving the team for loyal locals. As a local team for local fans, the case for public funding just about collapses. Instead, those arguments were about saving the team for outsiders; public funding of the arena is justified, if it's justified at all, as an investment in attracting outside money.

Third -- What about the Penguins as a draw for inbound, relocating young'uns? As young as the home Pens crowd apparently is, I'm still skeptical that the presence of an hockey team is itself likely to draw people to Pittsburgh, or keep them here once they already have one foot out the door. We need numbers. As a justification for public funding, I still don't get why the city (or the state) should, in effect, bribe people to live here. Fortunately, if the Penguins are an economic development resource, per point two, then this third question is much less important.

Fourth -- If the arena is an economic development resource, then the team should expand its marketing (and its local fans should coordinate themselves accordingly): We need a Penguins Nation, of a size and scale and intensity that tracks (even if it can't quite approach) Steelers Nation. If you build it, they will waddle, and so on. Dear Mario: Publicly embrace hockey-starved fans in Cleveland, Baltimore, Harrisburg, Erie, and Morgantown and encourage them to catch a game in Pittsburgh. Organize hockey charters for Canadian and European fans. Build business-and-hockey relationships with professional and amateur clubs around the world. Work with the VisitPittsburgh team. (Of course, the Penguins themselves don't need to monopolize this market. Calling all entrepreneurs!) The Penguins may be the best flightless ambassadors in the history of Pittsburgh -- and marketing outreach may be the best way for the taxpaying public to see back-end value from their share of the arena deal.

[UPDATED 3/20: "Penguin" in the title became "Penguins," as it should have been in the first place]

The Cupcake Class is Coming for You

Cupcakes are on the march, and those who doubt that cupcake destiny is manifest will get an earful. From Cupcakes Take the Cake: "Just Say No to the Cupcake Haters."

Cupcakes are democratic. For everyone that invokes Sex and the City, I actually think they're not about being showy or glamorous, but down home and simple (with some exceptions, of course). They are not about east coast or west coast or big city vs. small. Cupcake bakeries are spreading all across the country and into the rest of the world and you can almost hear the clamoring for them. So you'd better get used to it!

If Stephen Colbert can get his own flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, as he has, then surely he will soon have his own cupcake. It's all too easy to imagine SC saying, "If you hate cupcakes, then you hate America."

In other cupcake news, a reader pointed out to me that revisionists at the Tribune-Review have corrected the record, attributing the word "jokingly" retroactively to my cupcake posts in the online version of a story about Pittsburgh's cupcakeries that prompted my post entitled The Truthiness About the Cupcake Class.

more pseudo stocks to trade

Since Mike suggested it, here are a few more psuedo stocks to trade.

Who will win the Democratic Party nomination for Mayor?

Who will win the Democratic Party nomination for City Controller?

and ongoing:

When will a casino open in the City of Pittsburgh?

Also, here is a new reference link for all of these: www.briem.com/npse.html
For those who saw it, I had created a blog page to keep track of the trading, but it didn't really work. This new page will have the current market tickers.

Prediction Markets Pittsburgh

Chris Briem wants to use prediction markets to guide Pittsburgh's renewal, and I think that it's a great idea. Chris is starting off with contracts (registered participants "buy" and "sell" these contracts, which determines a predicted market "value"; the thicker the market -- the more people participating -- the better the prediction):

When will a casino open in Pittsburgh?

Will the Penguins announce relocation on or before April 1st, 2007

(this one seems to be a non-starter, so I'm not including the link!)

The markets are online at http://home.inklingmarkets.com/, but we need more contracts. How about:

Who will be the next Mayor of Pittsburgh?

What will be Pittsburgh's next breakout technology company?

When will the Steelers get back to the Super Bowl?

When will Allegheny County's Latino population reach 2% of the total?

Will Pittsburgh's Creative Class ever get the recognition and respect that it deserves?

and, of course,

Which store -- CoCo's or Dozen -- will win the local cupcake wars?

Now that you mention it

Chad Hermann is a great writer and he's right about so many things, so it's disconcerting to read him so . . . off (Thursday, 3/15, "A REACTION AND ANOTHER SUGGESTION / for all the inveterate whiners."). I didn't like the prospect of public funding for a hockey arena, and I still don't. State or local public funding is still public funding, and if the state has the money to spend, should a hockey arena be at the top of the list? Moreover, much of the pro-Pens crowd has an entitlement sensibility that is offensive regardless of the economics of a new house.

But I for one never threatened to boycott anything if the place gets built; that would be silly. Still, the prospect of never going to an hockey game or a Celine Dion concert or a WWE smackdown or a monster truck rally . . . is appealing. I'll give it a shot. Nine years in Pittsburgh and I've only been to the current arena once, for an Eagles concert that my son really wanted to see, so I'm optimistic that I won't miss anything if I pass on the new venue. I'm sure that the City of Pittsburgh will be fine if I spend my recreation dollars elsewhere. Never say never, but for now, thanks!

[corrected the spelling of Chad's last name!]

Pgh Designers

This is a shout out to a relatively new resource: Pittsburgh Designers, an online community for and of web designers here in Pittsburgh, assembled by Chris Cagle.

My Pitt Law School colleague Luis Torrefranca, who does web design under the nom-de-web Digital Bonsai, is on the list.

Check it out.

Benchmarking Pennsylvania Innovation

Worth a read is the The 2007 State New Economy Index - Benchmarking Economic Transformation in the States report recently put out by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). They have a summary page for Pennsylvania.

Everybody Comes to Rick's

Among the many fabulous lines from Casablanca is Rick Blaine's comment to Major Strasser. Strasser wants to impress on Rick that the Germans know everything about him; Rick, reading the dossier himself, asks the Major, "Are my eyes really brown?"

I flew on USAirways over the weekend and had an "are my eyes really brown" moment reading the Profile of Pittsburgh that appears in the current (March 2007) in-flight magazine. The whole thing is a masterful piece of marketing by the Allegheny Conference, the Pittburgh Technology Council, and the Mayor's Office. The city and region have rarely been shown off to such wonderful advantage. Still, reading some of the descriptions of the city, I wondered about the region's self-description much as Rick Blaine wondered about the color of his eyes.

Some interesting, and representative, quotations:

"The economic development climate in Pittsburgh has gone from hot to one fire," adds Mayor Luke Ravenstahl . . . .

"VisitPittsburgh President and CEO Joe McGrath says, "There's tremendous momentum in Pittsburgh right now, and that message is being heard across the globe -- how the city continues to develop, creating an environment that's great for business and families alike."

"[T]he region's economics are both strong and diversified," says Allegheny Conference's [CEO Mike] Langley . . . ."

"With the role they've played in past renaissances," Ravenstahl says, "we know we can rely on the Allegheny Conference for the revolutionary advances we'll make in twentieth-century Pittsburgh."

[Referring to the Life Sciences Greenhouse, Innovation Works, and the Technology Collaborative] "This is the kind of help that technology receives in Pittsburgh," [PITC CEO Steve] Zylstra says. "It is unprecedented -- and unmatched."

"Where else could innovators and entrepreneurs be in the midst of both corporate and university research centers, live affordably near where they work, and have access to world-class culture and outdoor recreation?" wonders Future Strategies President Harold Miller. "No wonder people never want to leave."

I don't want to be too hard on well-intentioned, meaningless puffery, since it's always nice to see Pittsburgh look good. Criticizing Luke Ravenstahl for praising the "revolutionary advances" he anticipates from the Allegheny Conference would be like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Lucy loses that confrontation; we pity Charlie Brown.

But do people really never want to leave? Didn't the Commonwealth just agree to pay Mario Lemieux $10.5 million to stay?

Own Your Own Penguin

I've read and heard a lot of dumb things over the last year in connection with the Pittsburgh Penguins, but this may be the dumbest yet.

If hell freezes over and a citizen suit forces the city to condemn the Penguins and sell the team to city residents, then I assume that the next negotiating tactic will be the city's putting a negotiating gun to its own head and making the following threat: Build a new arena for the team, or we're leaving. Every last one of us.

(Photo of Cleavon Little as Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles. You'll have to find the dialogue on your own.)

Pittsburgh Arts

The Post-Gazette's coverage of the just-released RAND Corp. report titled "Arts and Culture in the Metropolis: Strategies for Sustainability" focuses on how local arts organizations need to get better organized, find common ground, and raise new money -- especially from us rank and file arts patrons. The nonprofit foundation gravy train is starting to dry up.

While the report itself was commissioned by and principally addresses the needs of the Philadelphia arts community, its lessons are relevant to Pittsburgh and the other cities that RAND reviewed.

Two things leap out from the report:

One, arts development and sustainability are economic development challenges for the region, requiring collaboration and public/private strategic planning as well as entrepreneurship and innovation by individual artists and related organizations. It's a Creative Class challenge, except the challenge isn't to attract the hip folks who go to shows, but instead to attract hip folks with business plans, persistence, and a knack for finding capital.

Two, replacing foundation support and public (RAD) support with smaller dollars from a broader base is a challenge that local arts organizations have been aware of for a long time but have not yet truly embraced. The especially difficult thing is that most of the time, the arts will be chasing a fixed dollar. Every ticket I buy to the Symphony or afternoon I spend at a museum is a ticket I might buy at the movie theater -- or an afternoon I might spend on the trail and a DVD that I might borrow from the Carnegie Library. Arts organizations need to figure out how and why they offer us a better deal, and then they need to make that case persuasively and publicly.

With a local public foaming rabidly over the Penguins, even an organization as large and successful as the Cultural Trust will have trouble getting the public's attention in the first place -- not to mention the attention of local government. As the P-G reports, "The Ravenstahl administration has approved a full-time public art manager position, partially funded by private foundations, but it has not yet been filled. The city Art Commission also is being reformed." Mayor Luke, however, personally went to Philadelphia yesterday to "save" the Penguins for Pittsburgh. If the arts are going to flourish broadly in Pittsburgh, the Mayor and the County Executive should put their interests at the same high level currently reserved for men named Mario and Rooney.

Other thoughts on what might be done:

As with all economic development, bringing in outside money offers more opportunities for local growth than persuading local residents to redistribute existing money. Of course, with outside money the arts aren't competing with local professional sports; instead, they're competing for redistribution of arts funding in other cities. Or, best case, they're trying to take non-arts-related funding from other cities.

Finally, what about combining economic development strategies? Want a TIF for real estate development? Commit to some tangible support for an arts institution. For example, down in Mt. Lebanon, where I live, some local residents are up in arms over a proposal to throw public tax money at a super-upscale condo development on Washington Road -- while the old Denis Theater, once one of Pittsburgh's few homes for independent films, sits shuttered nearby. And how about a stronger (and transparent) partnership between the Pittsburgh Film Office and the Cultural Trust?

Enjoy a relatively warm weekend, everyone.

Summary of the RAND report:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2007/RAND_MG477.sum.pdf

The whole long thing:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2007/RAND_MG477.pdf

Best Practices in Tech Transfer

[cross-posted from madisonian.net]:

Licensing directors at 11 leading American research universities have released “In the Public Interest: Nine Points to Consider in Licensing University Technology,” a best-practices-style white paper summary of strategies for university-based technology transfer. The points are:

Point 1
Universities should reserve the right to practice licensed inventions
and to allow other non-profit and governmental organizations to do so

Point 2
Exclusive licenses should be structured in a manner that encourages technology development and use

Point 3
Strive to minimize the licensing of “future improvements”

Point 4
Universities should anticipate and help to manage technology transfer related conflicts of interest

Point 5
Ensure broad access to research tools

Point 6
Enforcement action should be carefully considered

Point 7
Be mindful of export regulations

Point 8
Be mindful of the implications of working with patent aggregators

Point 9
Consider including provisions that address unmet needs, such as those of neglected patient populations or geographic areas, giving particular attention to improved therapeutics, diagnostics and agricultural technologies for the developing world

Link: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/gifs/whitepaper.pdf

Will Pitt and CMU sign on?

Downtown Pittsburgh as a College Town

Do college students hold the future of Downtown Pittsburgh in their hands? Be careful what you wish for; maybe Pittsburgh really will end up as Berkeley (or Madison)-on-the Mon. Independent bookstores; head shops; itinerant tie-dye t-shirt sellers; really good, unlimited free wireless. What's not to like?

Given Pittsburgh's dual fascinations with reinvigorating its Downtown and with replicating the economic success of Silicon Valley, a recent piece in The Economist is worth noting. San Jose, at the Valley's urban core, is struggling with the same issues:

San Jose has attempted to create a commercial heart by selling city-owned land or even giving it away to developers. The city offers tax breaks and uses a portion of the property tax to pay for improvement projects. Since the late 1970s the redevelopment agency has shelled out $2 billion, almost two-thirds of it on downtown. It has built museums and theatres to lure people to the centre. Trams have been supplied to entice them out of their cars.

Such largesse has indisputably made the middle of San Jose more appealing than it used to be. By any measure other than an historical one, though, the campaign has been a failure. The office vacancy rate in downtown stands at 21%—higher than it was four years ago, during the dotcom slump, and almost twice as high as the Silicon Valley average. The theatres, which were supposed to lift downtown, now depend on the council to bail them out of trouble. In a city of 912,000 people, just 30,000 passengers ride trams each day. All this in a wealthy metropolis that has higher house prices than anywhere else in America, according to the National Association of Realtors. . . .

Not so long ago, downtown shops could at least claim to offer an urban alternative to the strip malls and boxy stores dotted about the suburbs. No longer. Santana Row in San Jose is a shopping street with distinctive, French-accented architecture, art galleries, shops and pavement cafés, with some apartments mixed in. It is exactly the kind of urban environment that the downtown boosters say they want, but for two details. Santana Row is three miles from the city centre, and was built in 2002. This fake downtown, with ample parking and no homeless people, is doing so well that similar schemes are mooted elsewhere.

“San Jose needs to be more than just a nice, suburban community,” says Mr Reed, the mayor. But perhaps it does not. An unconvincing downtown has not held down home-prices in San Jose, just as it has not arrested Las Vegas's extraordinary growth. All it has done is give officials a sense of inferiority.

Link: http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RSRQGRD
[full story by subscription only]

Good News for Pittsburgh

Pop City's Justin Hopper writes today about what he calls the true gospel of Pittsburgh:

Whenever someone fails or succeeds in Pittsburgh, it’s like we all fail or succeed. That’s why, when things go wrong, it’s such a betrayal – when a politician gives a break to some big-box shop while a local, whose head tells them to move but heart tells them to stay, struggles. That’s why, when things go right, it’s a joy – when Wiz Khalifa gets “Pittsburgh Sound” into Rolling Stone’s top picks.

This city is something of a tabula rasa – as I sometimes say to outsiders, it’s open season for freaks here. Try something. Try anything. If it fails, we’ll help you move on; if it succeeds, we’ll be the first to buy a round. And by “we,” I don’t mean some institution or government agency, but the rest of us who believe in the true gospel of Pittsburgh – the base layer of “hope” that holds everything here together, including you and me.

Tabula rasa? That's not the Pittsburgh I've learned about over the last nine years. Try this as piece of possible Pittsburgh scripture: "The steel industry is over and one with, and its history matters not a whit to Pittsburgh's future." Everyone (the Pittsburgh "we," believers in the true gospel of Pittsburgh) ready to recite that statement and help the city just move on? When you see a new Pittsburgh business fail, are the Pittsburgh "we" ready to lend a helping hand and put the owner and employees on new footing with a fresh start and a new bank loan, no harm no foul? I didn't think so. Tabula rasa, and open season for freaks ("Berkeley on the Mon")? Maybe someday, and maybe some of that would be a good thing. Too much, probably not.

Right now, the good news in Pittsburgh consists mostly of veneration for its history. History, that is, that lives in us -- steel, glass, labor, Maz, Roberto, Pops, Franco, Mario, not history lost to the ages, such as William Pitt the Elder). The gospel has room for some hope for the future (biomed, higher ed, high tech, Downtown residential development), but good news for the future comes less frequently than it should; hope is often tempered by clouds, and by fear. Like any city, Pittsburgh has its freaks, but it keeps them at a safe distance, reading the City Paper and hanging out at the Beehive.

The religious metaphor is an interesting one, but metaphoric gospel of Pittsburgh that contrasts true traditionalist believers with heretic freaks (note, as always, that one group needs the other) misses the best of Pittsburgh's future. Metaphorically, Pittsburgh needs less old-time religion. It needs less hope. The future of Pittsburgh needs economic and cultural evangelicals, doers (not hopers) like those showcased in today's other Pop City promo, freaks who got organized and funded and are building their own church on the foundations of its predecessor.

Penguin Pandering

The conversation about whether the Penguins will leave Pittsburgh for warmer climes has reached a new, low level of epic lunacy.

"Who lost the Penguins?" could become to Pittsburgh politics what "Who lost China?" was to the national political debate of the 1950s, a source of never-ending, unresolvable bickering.

(from today's P-G "analysis" by James O'Toole.)

O'Toole is right on, though, with the implied claim that ice hockey is now the third rail of Pittsburgh politics. Were a local elected official to write or say something like "NHL hockey is a dying sport that relies on voodoo economics, and no responsible public official will write a $5 check to build an arena to house a team, come what may," the long knives of hockey boosters -- a vocal minority if there ever was one -- would be out in an instant.

Do the Penguins generate money for the region (does the team generate revenue that comes from outside Western PA that adds to the money that is already here)? No. Does the team provide jobs for young people? No. Are the Penguins a major draw for young professionals who might choose to move elsewhere? For the number who fill the Igloo night in and night out, maybe; for most, no again. And even for those drawn to stay by the Pens and by nothing else, why, again, should you feed at the public trough?

Should County Executive Dan Onorato's political future hinge on whether the Penguins stay or go? If he stands up and delivers a statement like the one I invented above, then I'll vote for him again. If he keeps on pandering, he's out. Pittsburgh's future is in doubt, and the Pens are becoming a distraction.

New Businesses

Entrepreneurial notes from all over . . . companies out-competing themselves:

Talkshoe, which I blogged about last Fall, seems to be humming along with its "talkcast" technology, but it turns out that the firm has something of a competitor -- locally: Liberated Syndication, which recently got rolled up into Wizzard Media, part of Wizzard Software, to create what it calls "the largest podcasting distribution network in the world." "Sharecropping" is what Nick Carr calls the user-generated content production business model. It's lucrative, and simultaneously old and new; podcasting distribution means your customers and consumers are out there competing on your behalf. Eventually, however, the sharecroppers will go into business for themselves.

The intelligent avatar technology called "Abby" got a nice plug in last Saturday's Bits & Bytes as Abbyme.com, which allows users to program the avatar to send audio files on their behalf, was getting prepped for a business plan competition. Note to team, based on a quick check of the files that users are sending: watch for the copyright cops. All those clever movie clips that Abby is sending -- they belong to someone.

Abby has other applications and a much more polished appearance, via http://www.getabby.com/, the intelligent virtual assistant firm that used to be known as Eidoserve. (Earlier notes on eidoserve here (Post-Gazette) and here (Pittsblog).) Abby is more traditional entrepreneurship: nifty technology looking to fill every niche it can find. I don't know about the business prospects for using Abby to send movie clips to your friends (then again, ringtones are just about the world's biggest music market; who knew?). But CMU, which spun out the underlying technology, is making money here.

And I spent some time last Friday visiting Ellsworth Street's CoCo's Cupcake Cafe courtesy of an invitation from co-owner and self-proclaimed cupcake chick Shea Mullen, who took note of my earlier posts on the Cupcake Class. CoCo's, like Squirrel Hill cupcake competitor Dozen Cupcakes, is about two months into streetside retailing. If traffic on a late Friday afternoon is any guide, the walk-in trade is doing fine. Better money, though, at least for now, likely comes from call-in orders and catering. Can Pittsburgh support two cupcakeries? Better two than one, perhaps (echoing the old line about how a small town can't support one lawyer, but it can support two). But chic itself won't carry a cupcake store, even one like CoCo's that has space to host private parties and receive soon-to-move-to-Pittsburgh hipsters looking for a future oasis. Shea was a generous host and an excellent in-person ad for the business, and I bought a bunch of cupcakes to take home to the family. She has no plans, she said, to sell cupcakes anywhere except through the store, so that she isn't tempted to compromise on quality. My inner foodie likes the line; my inner-amateur-entrepreneur wonders how long that will last. I saw cupcakes in Starbuck's last week.

With cupcake saturation, how long will people be willing to shell out $2.50 per cupcake -- anywhere? The cupcake market presents Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma: Should you specialize, maintain your margins, and move upmarket? Low cost competitors will move in like sharks. Or should you give up those fat margins, maintain your market share, and commodify? You don't get rich, and you don't get new, but you stay in business. (Christensen's third way is to innovate outside the box -- challenge your own business model.) Right now, and reading the leading cupcake blog, the industry is betting on option one: fancier and purer cupcakes. Home bakers aren't hurting that business. But low-cost upscale cupcakes eventually will. When high end cupcakes come to Costco and Sam's Club, watch out -- or watch for branded cupcakes in a restaurant or coffee house near you.

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Updating Pittsblog's Look and Feel

I invested several hours this evening updating the template here (three columns! who knew?) and reorganizing the blogroll. I have mixed feelings about the blogroll; categorizing things is more art than science, and inevitably some blogs that are wonderful blends of different things end up labeled in some awkward way. But some of that is inevitable; the list was getting simply unmanageable and, more important, it was no longer useful.

I'm going to try to persuade my son to produce a new header, and more tweaks here and there may dribble in. Comments and suggestions are welcome (along with CSS and/or HTML, if you have something concrete to suggest. ;-) All in all, though, it feels good to be part of the twenty-first century.

I beg to differ, Peter

Today's P-G Morning File reports:

We're late to this Saturday story from Lodi, Calif., that's been the toast of the Internet's oddball sector for having one of the great opening sentences in the history of journalism. Here goes:

"A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi."

It is a thing of beauty that packs so much drama and broad life experience into a mere 22 words, ending with the comic finality of "Lodi." (Try substituting "Palo Alto" or "Mt. Lebanon," and, you'll agree, the sentence doesn't work as well.)

Au contraire! Let me spell it out:

"A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Mt. Lebanon."

Right there, that sentence is a thing of beauty. They're roaring in Lodi, I'll tell you what, and in Upper St. Clair and Churchill. In Mt. Lebanon maybe, not so much.

Pennsylvania PILOT

I'm catching up to this P-G article by Rich Lord detailing Pittsburgh's struggles to raise revenue from its wealthy, expanding, and tax-exempt nonprofits. The piece describes alternatives in place elsewhere, notably Connecticut's PILOT (Payment In Lieu Of Taxes) program, which compensates cities for revenue lost due to the non-taxability of nonprofit-owned land. The major beneficiary is New Haven, where Yale is the large tax-exempt land-owning elephant in town. (2 Political Junkies comments.)

PILOT programs have some potentially serious drawbacks: PILOT payments are, in a manner of speaking, the gifts that keep on giving: Constituencies on the receiving end are never happy with what they get; they're apt to lobby for increases in the amount paid, which leads to some level of continuing conflict. New Haven, for example, receveives PILOT payments that equal roughly 2/3 of what Yale would otherwise pay in regular property tax, and Yale faces pressure from community organizations (including labor unions representing Yale employees) to cover the difference voluntarily. The entities that are subject to PILOTs may be chosen more for their political impact than because of concern that tax burdens should fall genuinely equitably.

And the possibility that a PILOT program may solve their revenue gap may encourage local governments to play some ugly hardball: Threatening (via state legislatures) to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits, and using local control of zoning to freeze their expansion and development plans -- until and unless "voluntary" payments are made. In New Haven, that last tactic ultimately persuaded Yale to start kicking in voluntary payments to the city. Yale was desperate to expand its footprint; only New Haven could say yes -- and New Haven, with the cooperation of a friendly legislature, got to set the terms. [Added 3/02: At the end, in fact it was Yale that lobbied the legislature hard for the PILOT, because the university figured that it could put an end to the city's hardball tactics.]

In retrospect, New Haven's hard bargaining was a success -- not just because Yale started compensating the city for lost tax revenue, but because over a number of years the university administration realized that it could fend off most political pressure to do more by quantifying its other contributions to the community. Yale invested its money in New Haven, bringing taxable property on line and new business to town. It offered to underwrite low-interest mortgages to Yale employees who bought houses in the city -- and many have. Yale designed and located new facilities in cooperation with New Haven, so that they would benefit city residents as well as the university.

The moral of the story? The city of Pittsburgh has leverage here -- if Pitt or UPMC (among others) want to build. Which they do. And history shows that using that leverage can work in the long run, and the results can build better communities. For the first time in their joint history, New Haven and Yale are mostly on the same page today, and the city actually has a little economic momentum. But using that leverage is costly: It provokes litigation. It burns goodwill. Realizing those long-term benefits takes time. Leaders with vision on both sides of the table can cut through much of that. If Pitt and UPMC and Highmark want to avoid demands for payment by claiming that their regional contributions are worth so much, then they need to step up as investors in the city and as partners with the private sector, not just with charitable contributions and valuations for free and low-cost health care. One quick example, since this post has been long enough: South Oakland could use a police substation. Pitt could pay for it and jointly staff it.

Blogging the City

A spate of new real/virtual blogging communities has popped up, trying to connect virtual blog-based communities with their geographic counterparts. These are aggregators 2.0, a step beyond something like Pgh Bloggers, which has mostly outlived its initial usefulness.

The slickest is outside.in, which has some hot-shot backing. You register a city-related blog, then outside.in aggregates and displays their posts. Voila! A virtual (Pittsburgh, or Brooklyn, or wherever). The technology can parse and deliver RSS feeds based on post tags, so if I'm careful to tag my posts "economic development" then you can subscribe to Pittsburgh-oriented "economic development" posts and read my stuff, among others.

Not quite as slick in the technology department, but more of a "citizen journalism" effort, is Metroblogging, which offers "Metroblogging Pittsburgh" via a team of local bloggers, some of whom have been around the Pittsburgh blogosphere for quite some time. [Updated 3/02: There are other, similar enterprises that haven't yet come to Pittsburgh: backfence.com and yourhub.com.]

And in the "not corporate, but authentically user-generated" department is WikiProject Pittsburgh, led by Overheard in Pittsburgh blogger Chris Griswold.

What's missing in each and all of these is something that I've been talking about in lunchtime conversations recently (and something that, I should add, I have no personal ability to supply): intelligent filtering. The wisdom-of-crowds phenomenon that supports wikis works well but is labor intensive. Is there a Google News-style resource that does the same thing? That takes user-supplied specs, searches the blogosphere and the public media space for relevant posts, eliminates duplicates, and displays it hierarchically? By city? region?

Make Yourself Obsolete

Some entrepreneurial Carnegie Mellon students believe that letting me know about their new startup company will help them somehow. I hope they're right, but I have my doubts.

The company is called Mave, and it's located here, and their email to me said this. Mave is

an "e-conomy for everyone". Anyone at any skill level can easily start their own "business" offering any service – drum lessons, home improvement, interior design, haircuts… and find local customers, display work samples, and get their own domain name(www.AquaWorks.mymave.com).

On Mave you don't waste time searching through irrelevant listings and you're not obligated to do anything. If you need something, you simply post a need and have businesses bid for you. If you offer a service, you're automatically notified anytime someone in your locale posts a need for the services you offer. Businesses can then choose to serve only the most convenient and most profitable customers at their leisure.

Our vision for Mave is a place where anyone can take any idea they have or anything they're passionate about, share it with the world, and maybe even make a living from it.

Honestly, I'm not sure what this means, so check it out yourself.

Here's a note to other entrepreneurs, students and otherwise: If you want to promote your company, feel free to drop me a line. It's best, though, if you have an angle, and it's best if the angle is something more than "I want to get rich." (Again, not that there is anything wrong with that!) One reason I paid attention to the Mave message was that the Mave folks have a blog (don't we all?), and on the blog they report this fabulous exchange:

A few weeks ago in one of my entrepreneurship classes, a student asked my professor, “How do you hold off the competition?” to which my professor answered, “You have to continuously make yourself obsolete.”

Listening, Pittsburgh?

Out with the Pittsburgh Old?

I get letters . . .

Someone forwarded me a link to Yappin' Yinzers, "Pittsburghers with Personality," little mullet-headed dolls that speak in Pittsburghese, which, according to the note, "does a good job of promoting Pittsburgh as a uneducated redneck town that only cares about beer, steelers football, and pierogies." I'm quick to add (before the Comments start pouring in): not that there's anything wrong with that!

My initial reaction to yesterday's announcement that Pitt is going to clean and restore the exterior of the Cathedral of Learning was -- someone is out there muttering about how the dirty Cathedral is a symbol of Pittsburgh's glorious industrial past. And it should preserved as is. (Looks like I'm starting to think like a Pittsburgher.)

Pittsburgh faces a tight bind, between the argument that nostalgia is the best way to move us forward, and the argument that (as Timon once said) "You got to put your past behind you."

$75 million for a Steel Industry National Historic Site? Eventually, nostalgia stops being romantic, and it gets expensive. $75 million is a lot of hot metal.

Is there any other city in the world that wallows in its past the way that Pittsburgh sometimes does -- and not as a way of promoting tourism, but as a way of envisioning the future?