What a trip! Five fun packed days including amazing time spent at GigaOM East. Apart from friends, I spent time talking to –
- Zach Sims, co-founder, CodeFoundry.
- Michael Galpert, co-founder of Aviary.
- the Ken Lehrer.
- Paul Berry, formerly of the Huffington Post.
- John Borthwick, betaworks.
- Steve Crandell, ex-Bell Labs.
- Perry Chen, co-founder, Kickstarter.
About 15 amazing young entrepreneurs who are building news generation Internet-media companies. Yup, this whole New York thing is for realz!!!
Through some strange turn of events, I am leaving New York and heading to San Francisco on March 23rd. It was this very same day, nine years ago, I left the city I called home from the minute I came to the united States.
In nine years, the city has changed. Never did I imagine there will be an Olive Garden on 23rd street. Or that the grungy meat-packing district where I would go for Mutiny parties, is the downtown equivalent of the Fifth Avenue. There are billion of changes, some observed and others that went unnoticed.
As luck would have it, we experienced an unseasonably nice run of weather, which according to experts was freakish and a direct result of climate change that is causing upheaval across the planet. The unintended consequence — trees were blooming. White and pink flowers everywhere, their fragrance masking the smell of millions of bodies compressed in an land mass that is actually smaller than all the space taken-up by WalMart stores.
It is amazing how much fun and work one can pack in a week when in the city that never sleeps. Between hosting our Structure Data conference and meeting my friends and spending time with my colleagues at paidContent, I managed to walk nearly 3 miles every day. I did some shopping and while I was at it, spent time catching up with my literary agent Stephen Hanselman and my watch muse, Ben Clymer (sorry dude for not being able to attend your Royal Oak bash.)
The thing is that I don’t come back to New York often enough, so I had to cram too much into the limited time I have. It can be too much. Of course, the other option is to spend more time in Big Apple!
Also, it is so, that I feel a twinge and certain sadness when I leave New York. Like today! As my flight noses its way to San Francisco, I wonder if the lesson of New York is change – moving forward, and sometimes glancing back to know how far you have come. The week was just that glance.
Berlin is an interesting place. A city that is old and new at the same time. Instead of taking pictures of some of the classic tourist spots, I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time looking at the Rolling Horse sculpture at the Berlin Central Station. Jürgen Goertz sculpture is half horse, horsehalf wheel and in many ways it symbolizes the industrial age so well. In a century from now, we will think of it as a symbol of a different way of life. Here are four different views of the Rolling Horse taken with iPhone 4S.
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I took a few photos with Camera+ app on my iPhone 4S and played around with SnapSeed to add special effects and clean-up the blemishes. I also wanted to somehow bring the feeling of the place and its Cold War history in the photos, considering most of them were snapped in what was essentially East Berlin. Here are some of my favorite photos from Berlin. Hope you enjoy them.
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