East Side Showroom for drinks or a meal (delicious and serves old fashioned drinks that take like 5 minutes to make). If in North Austin, the tres leches cake at Chuy’s. “Frank” for brunch. Magnolia for breakfast. South Congress Cafe for any meal, cool spot that is delicious. Music: La Zona Rosa, Antones, The Parish.. Typically shows are at those places. I love Austin, simply the greatest city in the world. Oh yeah, Oasis requires a car but well worth it for the sunset view, go for dinner but have enough time as a wait occurs for tables (but there are hundreds of tables literally). Salt Lick needs a car but is some amazing BBQ, it’s in a dry county so you can’t buy beer/etc there but people pack their own cooler of beer and roll it up next to their table. ‘The purple’ at Baby Acapulco if you’re feeling rowdy (they’ll only serve you two, that’s how strong they are!).

Bats at dusk under the South Congress Bridge. Go on the bridge and see the stream of black pour out from underneath — 1.5 million bats! Largest population in USA.

SXSW in March for the greatest music festival in the world, nearly 2000 bands playing over 4 days.

East Side Showroom for drinks or a meal (delicious and serves old fashioned drinks that take like 5 minutes to make). If in North Austin, the tres leches cake at Chuy’s. “Frank” for brunch. Magnolia for breakfast. South Congress Cafe for any meal, cool spot that is delicious. Music: La Zona Rosa, Antones, The Parish.. Typically shows are at those places. I love Austin, simply the greatest city in the world. Oh yeah, Oasis requires a car but well worth it for the sunset view, go for dinner but have enough time as a wait occurs for tables (but there are hundreds of tables literally). Salt Lick needs a car but is some amazing BBQ, it’s in a dry county so you can’t buy beer/etc there but people pack their own cooler of beer and roll it up next to their table. ‘The purple’ at Baby Acapulco if you’re feeling rowdy (they’ll only serve you two, that’s how strong they are!).

Bats at dusk under the South Congress Bridge. Go on the bridge and see the stream of black pour out from underneath — 1.5 million bats! Largest population in USA.

SXSW in March for the greatest music festival in the world, nearly 2000 bands playing over 4 days.

Just read this article: The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future

It is an excellent article and he conveys what I have been feeling for a couple years now, since Arrington was on his last legs at TechCrunch.

Crunchbase for techies to specify city/state/country they from, and school, and employer(s). Thus the way ‘WeAreNYTech‘ is, but for all cities. Crunchbase isn’t complete. It also lacks those fields like school and employer. I want to connect with other Purdue grads in the tech/startup world. Or those people from Buffalo, NY that maybe don’t live here anymore.

There’s LinkedIn, but man I hate that site. I don’t use it.

This is simply an idea of doing a daily podcast where an app or website is discussed for 45-60 minutes with some other experts in the field… VCs, UX guys, etc. The rights, the wrongs.

To Vancouver Canucks

Mika NoronenTo Buffalo Sabres

Second-round pick in 2006

Have you ever worked somewhere that some employees are sitting around, surfing the web, and not being productive? They obviously have too much time on their hands and likely should be fired if they suck, because they are likely bringing the entire organization down on productivity (“if she isn’t working and doesn’t care, why do i? she doesn’t get punished for it”).

Anyhow, what about possibly outsourcing some spare time that your employees have. This could also help if the company is in need of revenue. If a programmer could work 10 hours per week for another company that wasn’t a competitor, that could help pay their salary.

This is a simple idea really, although probably could use its’ own website to help facilitate/coordinate. What about using Kickstarter (which is a website for crowd-funding ideas) and utilize it for neighborhood initiatives, such as painting a house, fixing someone’s roof, etc. Essentially helping thy neighbor.

This could simply be that one person leads the way for getting someone’s house painted that can’t afford it. Maybe $500 is needed for the paint and supplies, and 10 people are needed. I believe people locally would contribute financially if they couldn’t be there in real life to help.

Think of it as a crowd-sourced (and on a smaller-scale) Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, for communities.

I believe these types of activities simply benefit everyone — you feel great about helping someone, you meet others helping, the recipient feels grateful with their new/refreshed *insert whatever here, such as Home*.

And/or mowing lawns, snowplowing driveways.

My belief is that there’s a lot of elderly and single Mothers out there that could use some help, as I’m sure many other people.

I find it amazing that most of us don’t know our neighbors.

This was written specific to City of Buffalo, NY, but really this should be built for any city. Here’s my idea, it’s yours, please go execute and build it!

We need a mobile parking app that allows you to see if you can park in that spot, or on that side of the street, and also when you can’t park there — also the app will show you were parking tickets get most often reported (via our app; and maybe there is open city data with that info too!).

Here’s how it works: $0.99 app (or other biz model). Shows the map, shows a number on each street in a circle — click on that and it gives info on reported tickets on that street. You can also see the rules for the street, either side — maybe each side of street is in red or green, to show if you can park there right now; also you click on the side of street to get full rules of the street. You could also have it set an alarm for you at 8am or something as a reminder to ‘move your car’. The reported tickets on the street will say ’5 tickets reported on this street in last 30 days’ ’12 in last 90 days’.

The other part of the app is to be a good samaritan and notify someone that their car ‘is on wrong side of street’, ‘needs to be moved’, … a drop-down of options, no freeform text. You input the car’s license plate #. If the license plate is a registered user of our app, they receive a text saying, “Heads up from a good samaritan: your car is parked illegally”. We only send one text every hour (using twilio) — thus if multiple users identify the illegally parked car, only one text is sent. The end-user can then ‘thank’ the users that alerted him/her. Could be anonymous, or you could share your info. I think anonymous is the way to go though.

Also, if you get a ticket, you report that into the system. Good for the people to know, so that we can see if something fishy is going on with the parking police — maybe the signs are faded, or confusing, and hence why so many tickets are occurring each day.

The parking police can’t mess with this idea! Power to the people!

Thoughts?