It’s with great pleasure that today we’re announcing the opening of our New York office, located at 220 Lafayette St. #2, New York, NY 10012 (MAP) . We’ll be co-located with Personal Democracy Forum, Open Congress, and other like-minded civic innovation organizations. This move comes at the heels of our bid to run the NYC Big Apps competition, an initiative that will become crucial to NYC’s plans to maintain and grow its leadership position in digital media and technology innovation. We’ve learned a lot about citizen driven innovation through the course of creating Apps for Democracy, and hope to translate and apply the experience to NYC Big Apps, if we should be so fortunate. If you’re in NYC this Saturday, join me at BigAppsDevCamp to talk about this project, meet with other people passionate about it, and add your ideas for NYC data/apps here.
Regardless of whether or not we win the Big Apps project, we’re committed to building our business in NYC, and adding tremendous value to the tech/social media/marketing communities in The City as we’ve done – and will continue to do – in DC. iStrategyLabs is a strange bird – we feel much more like a community organizing entity than anything else, but we’re a for profit that does marketing/innovation work for brands both big and small. In the end, what we’re passionate about is adding value to communities and solving problems – and The Big Apple’s got big problems to work on just as DC does.
This is an especially sweet moment for me personally, for a number of reasons:
- I was born at the foot of the George Washington Bridge in Palisades Park, NJ – in the last great decade of the 20th century (the 80′s).
- I grew up in Ridgewood, NJ and began my love affair with NYC as a 7-year old, heading to Yankees’ games with my late grandfather (my namesake), who classically called the Yankees “a bunch of bums” whenever they were losing, and “the greatest team in the world” when they were winning.
- My 9th birthday included a trip to Yankee Stadium to meet the dominant closing pitcher Dave Righetti who, like many celebrities, sported a monkey on his shoulder when we met. I’m still not sure why the 80′s had so many monkeys in it.
- By 12, my friends and I were riding our bikes 20 miles to get to the GW Bridge just to spit off of it and head back home.
- At 15, my friends and I began hopping on the NJ Transit, and then grabbing the PATH from Hoboken to Christopher Street to explore Greenwich Village and Central Park. Yes, we were your classic Bridge and Tunnel (BnT) kids that New Yorkers despise – especially when they too were once BnT’s themselves.
- At 23, I graduated from business school at Emory and lived out the first big dream of my young life – to live and work in NYC. I got my start as a TV Producer for VideoFashion Network… running around the world shooting fashion shows and learning how to tell stories using media. Our new office is a couple blocks from my old office, and I plan to frequent Cafe Angelique as I did back in 2003/2004 – it has the best coffee in NYC!
iStrategyLabs will celebrate its 2-year anniversary in about two weeks – and in that time, during a period of serious economic strife, we’ve grown from a team of one (me) to 4 full time iStrategists, along with a sea of talented collaborators who are helping us forge new paths in fields of interactive strategy, experiential marketing, content creation, civic engagement, and more.
If you’re in NYC, drop me a line – I’ll be splitting my time between DC and NYC from now on and would love to talk about what you’re up to, and see if we can find a way to work together.
