So Ed Kim sent me a tweetpic just now of an American Airline advertisement from a New York City billboard located in lower Manhattan.

I will keep this post short and simple. The text that is difficult to read says “The most first and business class seats to LA.”

First, business class and first class is meant to be exclusive. This ad completely kills the exclusivity element of flying in plush leather seats with flight attendants waiting on your every beckoning call as you make the 5 hour flight from NYC to LAX. Second, I just flew from SFO to LAX on AA last week, and enjoyed the in-flight Wifi for $5.95. I have a new ad idea for you AA. It goes something like this “$6 - Coast-to-Coast Wifi”.

People want connectivity 24/7. AA please let them know you have it. Every airline has the “most” first class seats, not everybody has Wifi today, so use it to differentiate yourself. If an AA rep reads this, please also see to it that you put outlets at every seat so when my Macbook runs out of juice, I can plug it in and continue to get my $5.95 worth of wifi.

Please also note that NextStep has attempted on more than one occasion to get AA as an advertiser for an annual contract at a price point much lower than what it would cost to design the poor ad above and keep it posted in the outdoor advertising space in lower Manhattan for one week. It is tough to change the mind-set of dinosaurs.

The best business directory in China, or at least we think so can be found at www.NextStepDirectory.com

Here you can find answers to your many business service questions. Looking for an accountant, a logistics manager, or a graphic designer? Find all this plus more. In the coming weeks we will be launching some new features that will enable our users (for FREE) to get quotes from multiple service providers with one push of the button.

Tell me what you think about our new tagline…”NextStep Changing the way you interact with a directory.”

 You ask, how can you possibly interact with a directory? Well I will let you find out about by exploring the comments, rating, and announcement section of the directory. Let your voice be heard and find out how you can take advantage of our ever-growing directory.

 If you have any comments or suggestions on the directory please let me know

joseph DOT constanty AT nextstepdirectory DOT com

Is it me or has Coca-Cola taken the whole Beijing Olympics sponsorship in China too far? It is now January 31st, 2009 and I am still purchasing 600mL bottles of Coke and McDonalds soft drinks with Olympic’s sponsorship splashed everywhere. Either Coca-Cola thought a lot more people would be buying their product last summer and stocked China to the brim with Olympic sponsored products or they are milking every last dollar spent on their global sponsorship rights. I would be too if I spent nearly a trillion dollars for sponsorship rights on the Olympics. But honestly, let’s move on to sponsoring the 2010 World Expo, or maybe they will leave that up to PepsiCo who used to be the official sponsor of Shanghai’s busy corridor, Nanjing Walking Street. Who can forget the days when 7-UP and Pepsi dominated the lighting fixtures along the pedestrian ways?

We are very proud that M1NT Shanghai decided to write a quick notes about our NextStep Event on Nov 18th.

Here is what they said :

“NextStep provides a forum for like-minded entrepreneurs to collaborate in building new businesses and also helping one another navigate the many pitfalls of conducting business in China. NextStep every second Tuesday holds net working event at various venues around Shanghai. The event is designed to keep conversation casual, and the bonus is that a majority of the people attending are like-minded entrepreneurs.

On November 18th, NextStep held the regular net working event in M1NT Shanghai; give their members an exclusive look at this members only club to dream big with like-minded entrepreneurs. The founder of M1NT Alistair Paton has brought a unique concept to partying for the fabulously wealthy; party-goers are making money as they party as shareholders in the club.

More information about the event, please check
http://www.nextstepshanghai.com/”

More on http://www.m1ntnews.com

Thanks to M1NT Shanghai for the great event, and thanks to the 260+ people who joined us that night.

So I am not announcing any new news here, but something dawned on me today. Social Networking Sites are starting to become their own Treasury Departments of sorts. Let’s look at the recent failed deal between Facebook and Twitter, two SNS giants. Facebook attempted to buy Twitter for $500 million in Fb stock at the valuation given to Fb by Microsoft’s earlier $400mil+ investment. Twitter walked away fromt the deal believing that Fb was overvalued by Microsoft.

This has to be one of the craziest times in modern history for mergers & acquisitions simply based upon the transition of one unprofitable company’s stock to another as currency for assets. Fb is becoming the treasury and the bank all in one. It is pure genius. Here they are able to print Facebook bucks to buy Twitter “so-called” assets on the hope that one day one of these services will make some serious cash. To me this looks like the blind leading the blind. I am not a researcher myself, so I have no idea as to the precedent for similar deals between companies that have no revenue streams or maintain revenue streams that are weak at best, but this one surely must take the star of the show.

After speaking with some business owners based out of Hangzhou last evening at the NextStep Tuesday at M1NT it appears from a cursory discussion that not enough attention is being paid to smaller tier one and tier two cities. As I am off to GuangZhou today to learn more about the web community in GZ and HK, my eyes have been opened to the smaller communities who are looking for resources to make connections and grow businesses in China. This also plays right into the direction of NextStepDirectory.com ’s growth for China–move on to Beijing, Hangzhou, Suzhou and beyond.

Some raw numbers that I was given last night speak of a mere 9000 foreigners working in Hangzhou of which no strong community of business owners have focused around. Obviously this community needs to be built up. If you are interested in talking to me about doing more NextStep focused events in your Chinese city feel free to send me an email or comment here.  joseph (DOT) constanty (AT) nextstepdirectory (DOT) com

Again, I would like to thank Frank Phillipe of M1NT for giving us such a great venue last evening. The M1NT team is on to something quite interesting for the Chinese marketplace, and I am interested to see where the Shanghai and future Beijing endeavors take them.

Check out this site (http://www.nytimes-se.com/).  There were over a million paper editions that were also handed out. 

I’ve been in New York for the past few months so I have the fortune of being here for this election.  I was watching the election results from an apartment that overlooks Union Square.  I have to say, it is absolutely incredible here.   

As soon as it was announced that Obama had won, people started coming out of buildings from every direction and running into the square. There is an NYU dormitory a block from Union Square and students were literally pouring out cheering and banging on pots and pans. Within 15 minutes, thousands of people had gathered on the south side of the park. Its been a few hours and even now the noise is deafening.  Each time the traffic lights change, hundreds of more people charge into the square. In the center of the crowd is an American flag so massive it is being held over hundreds of people.   

People are screaming, smiling, laughing, hugging and even crying. People are cheering ‘Yes we can!’, ‘Yes we did!’ and other things that I won’t post. All the cars that pass by are honking their horns and people are screaming out of their windows as they drive by. Once Obama’s speech ended, another massive wave of people poured out of buildings. There must be tens of thousands of people now.   

Fireworks are going off.  I’m going back out.  It is absolutely incredible here.       

Another cool PR and SEO tool that I came across on my twitter and blog roll over the weekend is something called HubSpot. In a nutshell it grades your press releases based upon a variety of criteria. It is an intuitive tool that take seconds to start using, something that I like most about the product. Within 30 seconds of landing on the site, a LexDex.com press release was being ripped apart by HubSpot’s software. Needless to say, we didn’t make the grade, scoring a lackluster 51%–it was too long, links with no key word anchors, and a whole laundry list of issues. Go check it out for yourself, especially you marketing and pr reps who make your bread and butter off of this work everyday. I was introduced to HubSpot by a blog posting by Lonnie Hodge on CultureFishMedia.

This afternoon I had a great conversation with Lonnie Hodge of CultureFish, a firm based in Guandong focused on SEO, SEM and online management of your company’s brand. It sounds like a lot of boring stuff, but when you meet Lonnie he makes you see otherwise. Beyond the SEO stuff we were knocking around, Lonnie brought up an intersting point about tech in China. So I am asking you, where is the best place to be a running a tech company? Lonnie made some great points about southern China(including HK) as THE spot for tech in China, including access to IT decision makers, talent pool, foreign media to push your product to the world to name a few.

We all know of the incubation centers bursting at the seems in Beijing. Google and Microsoft keep their Beijing campus right next to the main gate to Qinghua University (for those of you out of the loop, Qinghua is the MITof China). Hangzhou and Suzhou are flooded with incubation centers, as well as every other city in China looking to attract tech dollars, or should I say the little red maos.

Being that I run two tech start-ups, and I do so in this little city we call Shanghai only because this is where we have always been, I would like to know from the China tech world where they think China’s tech home is. Today’s conversation makes me believe there may be some real opportunities lurking elsewhere that the land of Oz in Shanghai is blinding my eyes to.

I want to hear your thoughts and opinions on where the tech epicenter of China is.