New Work City (NWC) is one of the most important hubs of the NYC technology scene.

Why?  New Work City houses ~50 amazing tech freelancers and entrepreneurs running a dozen or so fledgling startups such as Perpetually, Loosecubes, Urban Pregame, Homingcloud and TouchGraph.  Creating a home for independent workers and early stage entrepreneurs creates the fertile soil needed to seed innovation and birth new companies. NWC is that home. In short, New Work City is a home for the homeless and a desk for the deskless, individuals otherwise relegated to working from coffee shops or trapped in the depressing isolation of their own apartments.

If you’re thinking “desks for rent” you’re missing the bigger picture.  It’s all about the people. NWC is people getting together because working in a stimulating environment surrounded by friendly passionate people who love what they do is f***ing awesome. It’s productive, it’s fun, and it’s deeply satisfying.

On September 1, a mere ten days from today, NWC opens its new home:  a brand new 5,000sq space at Canal St and Broadway. The NEW New Work City will support a larger community and will be amazing. As an independent space, New Work City is self-sustained by paying members of the community — people like me. There’s no sugardaddy bankrolling it and no VC firm backing the space.  It’s run as a break-even business and it’s entirely volunteer run — truly a space for us and by us.

In ten days, the dream for NYC to have a dedicated coworking space will be realized. It’s a dream that initially took shape back in the summer of 2007 as part of an East Village coffee shop (CafeBricolage).  Many of the same people are still at the helms.

Having an awesome home to independent workers and entrepreneurs is crucial to New York City’s goal to become a major technology hub.  However, NWC needs your financial support to make this happen. We need about $100,000 total for the new space, and are attempting to raise $15,000 through Kickstarter.  Please donate to our KickStarter fund and be generous (let’s smash through this goal!)

Also, please seriously consider whether your company or organization could benefit from a partnership/sponsorship opportunity with NWC.  If so, please get in touch with me and I’ll happily put you in touch with “mayor” Tony.

By supporting NWC, you’re supporting NYC as a healthy place for startups.  On behalf of me and all New Work City members, thank you for your support,
Jonathan Wegener

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Mobile spyware is the focus of the tech media’s latest frenzy. It started when a hacker discovered that the Pre sends back location data about users to Palm.  Next, a blogger ‘discovered’ that certain iPhone apps also phone home.  The frenzy came to a head when ReadWriteWeb published Dear iPhone Users: Your Apps are Spying on You.

(from www.flickr.com/photos/gerlos/3119891607/)

This article focused on the NYC-based iPhone Analytics company Pinch Media. The issue? Pinch Media’s software allows developers to learn a lot about their users: Apps with geolocation features can return information about the location of their users. Apps using Facebook Connect can even return demographic information (gender and age) about their users.

Of course, there’s no personally identifiable information here. It’s all aggregate anonymous information — and this has been Pinch Media’s response to the issue. Tracking anonymous information for benign purposes is analytics — not spyware. At the end of the day, developers simply don’t know all that much about their individual users. It’s not like they can identify them by name, right? RIGHT?

Well, um, on that note… we know the full name and location of each and every Android user with our app.

How?!  Did we build in some sneaky spyware into Exit Strategy NYC?

Nope.  Google tells us. This information is part of the Google checkout process behind android app purchases.  Each app download contains the full name of the user:

Clicking on the order number reveals a more detailed page containing the billing city and zip code of the user:

Creepy?  Absolutely.  A google/facebook/linkedin search can reveal incredibly detailed information about every android user with our app. Furthermore, this information is pushed on us — I certainly didn’t choose to see this detail about our users!

Seeing this level of user information displayed was extremely alarming at first. But when you think about it, it’s really not that surprising. Google Android purchases are processed through Google Checkout — the same system that applies to e-commerce transactions.  Certainly I would need to know my customers’ personal information if I were shipping a physical product.  Should digital purchases be any different?

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