Well, I am not sure the title “Go back to school” is correct but whenever there is an alumni event from my school (Carnegie Mellon University) I try to attend. Always great to meet old friends, fellow alumni, students and new faces. When I get a chance to speak in an alumni event even better!

Tomorrow I am doing just that. I was asked to participate at Tepper School of Business entrepreneurship Alumni gathering in New York City.

The evening is focused on starting new ventures in NYC: “The Next Frontier: Starting and Joining New Ventures in New York City” and is actually sold out from what I just heard. We will have a great panel of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists participating in a lively discussion about the NYC venture community in general and specifically hi-tech / internet related ventures.

Over the last decade after the internet bubble and the telecom melt down I have certainly witnessed how New York (and may I add Metro as it certainly includes New Jersey as well) is becoming more and more important and relevant for new ventures. New media, social networking, communications and other technology ventures (as well as a lot of bio-tech / life science ventures) are popping up and creating a new buzz that is just growing. some think of buzz as bubble but what I am seeing is that NY with all its liveliness and “coolness” was always part of big business, especially in hi-tech (certainly in NJ: AT&T, Bell Labs, big pharma etc) but now we see hundreds if not more funded start ups and dozens (if not more) networking and incubation groups that create an extremely vibrant new venture community of the kinds we were seeing only in Silicon Valley, Boston and one or two other countries.

OK. The last couple of days were very Twitter eye opening for me.
Here is a link to a story Amy Hoak wrote for MarketWatch that came out Tuesday.

For anyone who is not on Twitter or could not see what and why all the fuss here are 5 reasons why it can be useful:

1. Its a real-time opinion aggregator
2. Its a networking tool
3. Its a way to connect with people offline
4. Its a customer-service channel
5. Its a place to track down savings and value

Phone.com is using Twitter and will be using it much more. Mainly we would like to use it to help our customer service.

As Amy writes:

“Instead of writing a strongly worded letter to a customer-service department, politely complain on Twitter. Chances are, the company is listening… If youre a small business, it might not hurt to give Twitter a try too… even a small boutique owner might broadcast on Twitter when a new shipment comes in or when a sale is launching. The information would help customers and “give them that inner circle feeling” of being kept in the loop about the store.”

So, to all our customer, follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/phonedotcom and let us know your thoughts / suggestions or post questions. We will do our best to tweet back ASAP!

Last week I wrote about the SocComm event we were attending. Now it is time to summarize it. The event took place Tuesday at a great facility downtown New York City and was planned and produced by Jeff Pulver. Right after the event I left on vacation so I just got an opportunity to post this now. 48 hours delay is still ok, no?

SocComm was a great and energizing event. It was different than most conferences or seminars one usually attends and it really did live up to our expectations bringing together experts, professionals in the space and just enthusiasts from several disciplines and from all over the US, who all share one main thing: passion for MICE change (this is my interpretation or attempt to summarize in one word).

As I wrote in my earlier post, combining MICE – Media, Internet, (non traditional) Communications and Entertainment may not be as new as the introduction of VoIP in the first 2-3 years of that industry and the whole world (or most of it) is talking about it one way or another but SocComm had a great mix of expert speakers and dynamic panels.

It was an entertaining, intellectual and high energy event. No boring moments, a crowd (of about 200) listening (analyzing and commenting) to every word (like a good professor lecturing…. well, there was one very good professor), and, as it should be, both the speakers and audience included individuals and start ups, as well as reps from established companies (like MTV, TimeWarner and also Facebook and Google (the last two through surrogates: David Kirkpatrick spoke about Facebook’s role and Jeff Jarvis spoke about Google). One more note: the age group included a few teens and some senior citizens (I think I can say that). They all want to push for “a faster MICE change” and they all understand that there are still challenges both artificial and regulatory as well as adoption of new behavior and yes… also technology and business models.

Phone.com’s Alon Cohen, spoke in the Communications panel. You can read more about this panel here. New ways of communications is what the panel meant to explore. What we are doing today with such ease (call forwarding to any phone with a few clicks on your pc or accepting, routing and greeting your calls based on caller ID, answering your phone based on your presence (location) or clicking on your blog or personal page and reaching you be phone wherever you are all ways of communications using your dumb old phone or brand new iPhone that were not possible just a few years ago.

A couple of good postings on the event can be found here and here – two very different perspectives.

I am already looking forward to Jeff’s next SocComm.