Tech Town, NC

Someone needs to streamline government the way Steve Jobs streamlines products. Politicians love to trot out nausea-inducing spaghetti-like organizational charts to illustrate bureaucratic waste. I know it’s easy to just point to a successful person like Steve Jobs and say we need more people like him, but whenever the bureaucratic gobbledygook gets paraded around I am reminded of a story about Mr. Jobs and the way he handled designs from a recently acquired DVD software company.
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Where are the jobs? That’s the refrain heard all around the country these days. So far no one has had the answer, but to hear Vivek Wadhwa tell it, all you need to do to solve the jobs problem is answer another question: Where are the startups?
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I’ve been testing Argyle Social this past week as a social media (read: twitter) dashboard and thought I’d share my impressions. Right off the bat I’ll say this – as a professional results-driven tool, it’s among the most promising I’ve used. Think Google Analytics meets bit.ly.

Argyle Social is being developed by Eric Boggs and Adam Covati, both formerly of Bronto in Durham. Their hope is that Argyle will justify in dollars and cents why you should (or shouldn’t) invest in social media. The app bills itself as a “social media marketing platform that helps marketers measure and optimize the social channel” and in my testing, it delivers.
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Between the two recent announcements of Downtown Durham Startups & American Underground, Durham is making serious waves in the world of startups, entrepreneurs and small business.

Downtown Durham Startups launched on July 2nd and is meant to be an information hub offering startup news, background info, and resources for budding entrepreneurs. The site is looking to grow its database quickly by allowing local businesses to submit info, but the Startup Directory is already pretty comprehensive. One somewhat confusing quirk to the site – the blog is actually on its own domain at Bull City Startups. The Bull City site (now added to the blogroll) was founded by Jason Murtha this May, and he has now officially teamed up with the Downtown Durham effort. Another local name behind the initiative is Taylor Mingos of Shoeboxed, a (relatively) longtime stalwart of the Triangle startup scene.

As if that weren’t enough, today the American Tobacco Campus announced a great new space (26,000 sq. feet) they hope to fill with, you guessed it, startups. The space, dubbed the “American Underground,” is slated to open this October and a few significant tenants have already committed, notably the Council for Entrepreneurial Development as well as incubators LaunchBox Digital (previous coverage) and Joystick Labs. The announcement means the CED will be leaving its current location at the Alexandria Technology Center.

For full coverage and a nice video on the American Underground announcement, WRAL has the scoop here. More coverage is over at TechJournal South as well.

While these announcements are great cause to get excited about the future of the region, it’s also a good time to appreciate that these things have not happened overnight. Durham and the Triangle have been building the foundations and networks necessary for this kind of activity for a long time. The area has drawn new minds and cultivated its own through universities and organizations like the CED. The exciting events to come will be a testament to the efforts and foresight of those in this community.

I am tired of novelty. Objects of mild amusement are off-putting. Anything lauded as “must see” is suspect. Twitter Trends are to be avoided at all costs. I have no time for these baubles of the brain. I am ready for a post-novelty world.

Lately I have the feeling that much of the internet exists for the sole purpose that someone will convince me to “check it out” once and and then add it to the pile of discarded lolcats. The act of “trying” something is now the whole experience of that thing. And perhaps the final, perfect, manifestation of this arrived in the form of Chatroulette.

Chatroulette was nothing more than a one-off experiment to answer the question “What if we mashed up webcams and roulette?” The answer is, well, that (and, of course, naked lonely men). In a sense, the whole of the internet is becoming a game of thought-roulette. Now that Chatroulette is over we can “next” the service itself and fix ourselves on Lebron James. And then something else, and then…

Or is there a way out?
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