New York Visit Highlights

Better late than never, I guess. Last week I was in NYC for 2 days, visiting the Pulver.com office in Melville, and speaking at the NYSSA's 3rd Annual VoIP Conference in Manhattan.

I've been demo-ing the Nokia N90 phone, and I wanted to include some photos taken with the phone. It took a while to get around to downloading them to my PC, but I've got them now. I'm still learning, so some photos are better than others. Also, I didn't take all the photos at NYSSA.

In Melville, I caught up with Jeff Pulver, and conducted a podcast in the comfort of the VON Radio studio. As you can imagine, Jeff is a busy guy. In short, it's not easy being Jeff.....




I don't think anyone would mistake us for being Siamese twins....




The Empire State Building - by day and by night....




I always love visiting NYC, and have an endless fascination with big buildings and urban architecture. For now, the N90 will serve as my travelling digital camera and will share the good shots as I get better with the features. The Empire State Building is still awesome to me, as corny as it sounds. Even though tech is a big part of my life - and a bigger part of most people's lives - the ESB always reminds me in a big way of the power of human ingenuity and sheer willpower when it comes to doing big things. When you think about how buildings like this and the Brooklyn Bridge were built way before computers and how well they've stood the test of time, you have to tip your hat to doing things the old fashioned way. Technology brings great advances, no doubt, but there's no substitute for pure imagination and the inspiration of big ideas.

Why the night shot of ESB? I thought it looked cool, and only after I got back from NYC did I realize how special this site was - lucky me. It turns out that Monday was the premiere of King Kong, which I was not aware of. As I later read, it was the biggest NYC movie launch in history, and to emphasize the event, the lighting at the top of the ESB was all white. At this time of year, apparently it's lit up green and red for the holiday season. The photo is bit out of focus, but at least I've got it on file!

On Tuesday, I was on the opening panel of the NYSSA conference, held at the erudite Hahvuhd Club. Seated on my right is David Ballarini of Mercator Capital, and on my left is conference Chair Lorenzo Mejia.







Lots of interesting presentations throughout the day, and NYSSA did a webcast of the event. It's available free to members, and $100 for non-members - here's the link.

Below is a grainy shot of Ofer Gneezy, CEO of iBasis presenting at the event. Next time, the indoor photos will be better - promise!