Press
Husani Oakley of Goldbean speaks Candidly about the Need for Diversity in Tech & More
ShoppeBlack - Tony Oluwatoyin Lawson
Husani Oakley is the Chief Technology Officer at GoldBean, an online investing platform that helps people start their investment journey with companies and brands they love, know, and buy.
This week, he will soon be joining technologists and community leaders at the White House to discuss the Obama Administration’s TechHire initiative, and how we can continue to work towards a more inclusive workforce after “he-who-shall-not-be-named” takes office.
I caught up with him to discuss his work at Goldbean and the issue of diversity in the tech industry. This is what he had to say:
SB: You’ve been dubbed a Technologist. What does that mean to you and how did you develop an interest in technology?
HSO: As nerdy as it sounds, my technology interest came from being seriously into Star Trek as a child. My friends, who were also into Trek, wanted to be Captain Kirk, but I wanted to be Scotty. I liked being the person with his hands on the keys, on the buttons making things work.
SB: Goldbean is a tool that helps people learn about investing. Why do think there’s this idea in the Black community that investing in stocks is hard?
HSO: I think the resistance of people in the Black community to being a stock investor comes mainly from being unfamiliar with the terminology. When you make a Goldbean account, you plug in your bank account details and we pull your transactions and we analyze where you spend your money.
Then, we are able to put together a recommended profile for you that includes companies that you know. You might not know what a P/E ratio is, but you certainly know Nike versus Adidas, you know Whole Foods versus Trader Joe’s. We’re trying to show people that this stuff is easy to learn.
Imagine if, right when the iPhone was launched, you saw that suddenly, all of your friends were buying iPhones. That might’ve given you an indication that maybe Apple is an interesting investment target for you as an investor. We want to help people grasp that you can participate in this economy as more than just a consumer.
SB: What is the target demographic for your product?
Husani: Our average age is 29, we have a 50/50 split, male-female, which is great, and the average deposit in an investment account is about $4000. We’re actively talking to young people, particularly women and particularly people of color. The underserved groups who the large financial institutions, frankly, don’t give a shit about.
SB: In terms of diversity in tech, do you see things getting better?
Husani: I think it is getting better, if getting better is defined as the number of people who are not straight, white dudes who are in the field. If you look at the big brand names and look at their diversity reports, it’s fucking awful.
Facebook has two Black designers globally. It’s insulting and ridiculous, but I don’t look at diversity in tech on that level because tech is so much more than Google, Facebook and Apple.
There’s hundreds of thousands of startups alone on the East Coast of the US. We’ve got to count for something in terms of diversity in tech. Everyone at the large companies seems to use the excuse of the pipeline. “It’s a pipeline problem, there aren’t enough applicants.” Of course there aren’t, you’re only looking at Stanford. Have you been to Howard?
Have you been to Morehouse? Did you send your senior engineers to sit there and talk? Do you give money to these computer science programs? No, of course you don’t. So don’t blame the pipeline when you’re not doing shit about it.
SB: Well, damn. Tell us how you really feel.
Husani: I’m just the kind of guy who says this stuff. I’ve been in this field for 20 years and I’m senior enough to not give a shit what anybody actually thinks. You can’t blame the pipeline and then not do anything for real to solve what you blamed. You can find women, and you can find Black people, and you can find gay people. We’re out here, we’re all everywhere.
I really do think it’s getting better, if only because there are so many interesting startups doing really interesting things, and I see more and more people of color realizing there’s an opportunity here, whatever here means. AirBnB is a great example of, “All of your people are racist bastards? Ok, we’ll just start our own.”
That’s what I love about this country, the ability to say, “Screw you guys. I’m going to to make my own thing and I’m going to put social progressivism in the DNA of my startup.”
It strikes me as so obvious. It’s a blind spot. If we can walk on the moon and make self-driving cars, we can hire some Black people.
Designer of the Week: Husani S. Oakley
Print Magazine - Amanda Aszman
A look at Designer of the Week Husani S. Oakley’s latest tweets reveals quite a bit about the veteran technologist. He’s a fan of Stephen Colbert and The West Wing. He thinks everyone should be taught both coding and basic media literacy. And — lucky for us — he’s delivering the closing keynote at HOW Interactive Design Conference in Boston in November.
The Brooklynite has spent more than 15 years building “digital experiences that bridge the gap between art and science.” Currently, he’s the chief technology officer at GoldBean, an online investing platform that helps people start their investment journey with companies and brands they love, know and buy. And although he’s made attempts to erase the lines between “designer” and “technologist,” he does consider his role to be closer to that of a technologist.
Here, we feature some of the best projects Oakley’s had the pleasure of working on, and hear a bit of his unique perspective on things like the definition of design, “full-stack design,” and designing a whole company.
Name: Husani S. Oakley
Name of Company: GoldBean
Location: New York, NY
Design school attended: None. I’m a dot-com-bubble-baby, I landed my first job (at AGENCY.COM) shortly after high school.
How would you describe your work?
At my core, I’m a technologist, but my work focuses on telling a story and hiding engineering complexity.
Where do you find inspiration?
The best work is a synthesis of old ideas remixed to solve new problems. I try to find inspiration from lots of different sources: well-edited movie trailers, well-designed television graphics (The Weather Channel has done great work recently). TV show opening credit sequences. The chaos that is my Tumblr dashboard. Dribbble. I devote a weekend each month to reading magazines—on paper!—that I appreciate for both layout and content: The New Yorker, Scientific American, and MIT Technology Review, amongst others.
Who are some of your favorite designers or artists?
I’ve been a huge fan of Nick Felton’s work since I saw him speak at Eyeo a couple of years ago. I love the work that comes out of Hush Studios, Ideo, and Siberia. Tumblr has an awesome product engineer named Tim Holman; I admire his ability to craft both pixels and code with equal awesomeness. (He also used to work for me!)
Do you have a favorite among all the projects you’ve worked on?
My favorite so far is an experiential project for ESPN called “Human Twitter.” I worked with a fantastic team of designers, technologists, and event planners at Wieden + Kennedy (full credits listed at end) to create an analog way for X Games fans to participate with the games. We placed hundreds of extras in the stands at the Staples Center armed with big books of letters and numbers. Tweets with a specific hashtag were pulled into our system, and selected tweets would be spelled out by the extras holding up the letters and numbers. On live television. We also took a photo from across the stadium and sent it to the original Tweeter.
This project is an example of what I call “full-stack design”—every single aspect, from the interface used to approve tweets, to the custom, TV-ready font in the character books, was specifically and consciously designed to service the primary story.
Is there a project that stands out to you as having been the biggest challenge of your career so far?
So far, the biggest challenge of my career is my current role as CTO of GoldBean, a fintech startup. Our mission is to help beginners get started with investing in the stock market. All of our challenges—and, thus, all of my challenges—involve thinking about different dimensions of design. How do we
design a trading interface that beginners can use, and hide the complexity of what happens behind-the-scenes when a stock order is placed? How do we design our internal systems to allow us to service our clients in the best possible way? It basically comes down to a core question, one that has always fascinated me—how do I help design a whole company?
What do you hope to accomplish in the future?
Television and film are my third and fourth loves, respectively. I’d really like to explore creating work for both.
What’s your best advice for designers today?
Design ! = visual design. Design is what you see, sure, but design is also what you don’t see. Don’t restrict yourself to a single medium, and don’t assume that making things work is not part of your job description. Design is the conscious creation of an experience.
Fintech and Lessons in Investing Come to the New York Tech Meetup
Xconomy - Joao-Pierre S. Ruth
Learning the Trading Game: Husani Oakley (l), chief technology officer, and Jane Barratt (r), CEO, said GoldBean can give beginners in investing a better understanding of stocks and the financial markets.
The flurry of fintech startups hell-bent on modernizing the financial world may need a reminder that not everyone is savvy about the ins and outs of stock investing.
This month’s New York Tech Meetup brought to the stage a startup trying to address this issue. GoldBean CEO Jane Barratt and chief technology officer Husani Oakley presented their website and software for helping more people understand how they spend money; the site also suggests some investment options when it comes to publicly traded companies. Barratt said GoldBean is an algorithm-driven investment advisor, which uses voluntarily provided data on personal expenditures—also known as consumption data. “You can choose to share your consumption data with us, but it’s not mandatory,” she said.
New York-based GoldBean was one of ten teams to demo this week (see slideshow) in a gallery of ideas that included a brainwave sensor hacked to control a drone and Kinetic, an alum of the R/GA Accelerator.
Barratt and Oakley said they want to show beginners in investing that companies and brands they are familiar with, and may even buy products from, may be potential fits for their portfolios. Of course, there are plenty of websites, apps, and services, such as Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, Scutify, and StockTwits for watching trends and fluctuations of the market.
GoldBean looks at each user’s consumption data, which is entered using the Intuit application program interface, to determine where they are financially and assess their risk profile, Barratt said. “Our clients can see by category, by time, and by company where they spend their money,” she said. If someone does not qualify to get into the trading scene—they may have too much debt or not enough income—GoldBean can recommend virtual portfolios for them to learn with. The site also offers advice to people who need to be on better fiscal footing before they start investing.
Once GoldBean sees where people spend their money, its software converts merchant codes on credit card purchases into ticker symbols, where applicable, Oakley said. Those publicly traded companies get run through an algorithm that scores them based on the companies’ financial records and performance. Putting in personal financial information is not necessary in order to use GoldBean. “If someone doesn’t share their data, we have a recommendation engine built into the algorithm itself,” he said.
Those recommendations, Oakley said, are drawn from companies suggested to other users with similar profiles.
The advice GoldBean offers ranges from developing budgeting skills to building a portfolio. The site also presents top-performing companies from each user’s spending history that the algorithm quantifies as potentially good investments. “You can explore what people like you also like, what’s popular in the community, or recommendations by themes,” he said.
The trading system is built on top of an API from TradeKing, an online brokerage that is GoldBean’s broker-dealer partner.
Throwing a lot of financial information at a layperson can still lead to confusion, so GoldBean uses plain language, a jargon decoder, and links to free online resources in its learning section, Barratt said. “When you throw out words like indexes and ETFs, beginners shut down,” she said. “If you say Nike and Under Armour, they know what you’re talking about.”
GoldBean is currently in open beta.
The Art of Chaos: Making Jordan’s CP3.V Experience
Fast Company - KC Ifeanyi
With the launch of the CP3.V, Los Angeles Clipper Chris Paul’s newest shoe, the Nike Jordan Brand was looking to move away from traditional advertising, opting for a more engaging, athlete-appropriate experience. What they got, courtesy Wieden + Kennedy New York, was a surreal and stylized interpretation of the chaos Paul wreaks on the court.
“Chris is known for his quickness and speed, so we wanted to give the audience a way to view the game from every angle,” says Brandon Mugar, W+K creative director on the “Quick Controls Chaos”experience. “On any given day there are so many things you miss that he does, so this slows it down. We thought it’d be great for people to dissect his game.” W+K NY didn’t want to capture your standard exhibition game. Instead, with help from production company Prettybird and the post-production team at Identity FX, the shop created an Flash-based site that gives viewers video-game like control over live action spanning an 180 degree arc. Visitors to the site can follow the game, zooming in, changing angles and uncovering additional content, enabled by over 100 streaming videos seamlessly swapping in and out.
“We wanted to use Chris’ quickness as an impetus to [relate] a chain reaction of the events on the court and extend that to off-the-court situations as well,” says Andy Ferguson, creative director at W+K NY.
The on-court action was captured in a three-day shoot, before which the crew constructed a green-screen set with rigs outfitted with 18, count ‘em, 18, EPIC RED cameras, which, as W+K senior interactive producer Brandon Kaplan notes, was the only camera for a job of this magnitude. “Being able to go in and rotoscope and composite the scenes together, we needed the extra resolution [EPIC RED provides],” he says. Dan Blaney, broadcast producer at W+K, goes so far as to say this shoot has “taken the interactive/online experience beyond what has been done with RED cameras before.” The production team incorporated two nine-camera arrays of EPICs with a single camera overlap in a 180-degree arc that allows for “a completely seamless and immersive experience.”
So exactly how much footage is captured from 18 cameras shooting for three days at 48 frames per second? Apparently, three to four times that of the length of a feature film. On the flip side, there was hardly any editing involved–the production team had to work with scenes from start to finish, even if some background action wasn’t quite on point. “It was a very different process having to live with your final scene at the moment on the shoot as opposed to having a bunch of different takes and finding it in the edit,” says Ferguson. “The challenge for us then became, ‘How do you hide moments that are less than glorious that are there for the viewer to see?’“
Because all the scenes had to be shot separately, a heavy amount of composting fell to Infinity FX–with composites consisting of more than a dozen layers captured at 18 angles. Given the sheer volume of post-production involved, it’s fair to say the Infinity FX team was more than relieved that not all of W+K’s chaotic ideas became a reality.
“At one point we had the idea of the balloons being all over the place and it sort of became impractical to think about where they would all be. You see a little bit going on but not to the degree we wanted,” says Ferguson. “We talked about a flock of doves being released behind it too–that didn’t make the cut.”
When it came to putting the site together, the question of whether to build it in Flash or HTML5 was a non-issue. “HTML5 and streaming video are not friends yet,” says W+K technology director Husani Oakley. “We wanted the experience to be used by a majority of people, and Flash has that high integration rate.”
Kaplan also mentions that the streaming aspect of the shoot attributes to the campaign truly being the first of its kind.
“Each camera is actually a streaming video and as the user moves around, we’re switching those streams in real-time,” he says. “Switching streams in a very seamless way hasn’t really been done before at the scale of which we accomplished it.”
With “Quick Controls Chaos,” W+K et al. were looking to create an experience that transcends basketball. “We tried to put in a ton of Easter eggs and a lot of little things that we knew weren’t going to be seen by a ton of people, but the people who see them will really appreciate it,” says Ferguson. “I think that to do right by the idea you have to give it your best effort.”
W+K NY Gets Melo to Dunk on Water
AdAge - Shareen Pathak
In the past few months, Wieden + Kennedy, N.Y. has given busy city dwellers plenty of reason to look up from their smartphones. For Heineken, the shop turned a garden-variety billboard into the backdrop for impromptu concerts in New York and Chicago. More recently, for Brand Jordan, the agency gave crowds a good excuse to gather along the Hudson River-- an all-out launch event for the Jordan Melo M8 featuring three-story-tall 3D projection of Carmelo Anthony dribbling, shooting and running on the water.
The monster Melo was the centerpiece of a multiplatform spectacular that kicked off at New York's Pier 54 with a breathtaking helicopter stunt and ended with surprise appearances from rap star Nas and Anthony himself in the flesh. Those not in attendance could also get in on the action through a special site, which eschewed traditional video in favor of HTML5-powered multiple, pop-up browsers --making for an online experience all its own.
The brief from the client was to highlight Carmelo Anthony and his explosive game and align it with the brand in a larger than life, aspirational campaign. W+K didn't want to simply show power with a guy flexing his basketball skills on a court. "We wanted to do something more authentic," says Andy Ferguson, W+K N.Y. creative director. Art Director Asza West and copywriter Eric Steele came up with the idea of holograms on water and that was the team's "a-ha!" moment.
Once Pier 54 was selected as the location for the stunt, creative was molded to work with how Melo would interact with his surroundings.
Holograms - Just the Tip of the Melo
Wieden chose projection specialists Klip Collective to work on the 3D projection aspects of the event. The company has previously worked with clients like Target, New Balance and Charter and on projects like Syfy's "Follow the White Rabbit." For Melo, it not only created the animations and holograms but also directed the live-action components. "We didn't want a company that only did 3D mapping," says Dan Blaney, senior producer. "Klip specializes in creative applications of media technology. They shared our passion to create an experience using… existing technologies in a way that hasn't been done before."
And then there was the wishing, hoping and praying, a necessary part of any event-based campaign. The night before the event, the team had planned for a dress rehearsal using all the misters, holograms and props that would be used day of. But 30 miles per hour winds and rain found the team holding its breath. "We couldn't get that first mister up until after midnight," says Blaney. "When we saw that hologram go up, it was an amazing feeling." That's the creative difference between a traditional campaign and this, adds Blaney. "Otherwise, we always know what's going to happen," he says. "This is just so remarkable and surprising when it all works out."
A Life Online
Another significant challenge was extending the reach of the campaign beyond the people who experienced it first-hand. "We had to treat the event as one and make the web experience just as dynamic as what was happening on the pier," says Ferguson. "What we were doing was so amazing that putting it in a 16-by-9 box on YouTube would not be good enough," says Brandon Kaplan, interactive producer on the project.
The tech team built out the interactive video on the website using two separate builds: HTML5 and Flash, as a fallback. Javascript techniques produced pop-up windows which opened at different times, each showing a piece of the action. Window choreography was based on a standard XML file, so rebuilding of code was kept to a minimum and both creatives and tech could easily modify where and when the windows were opening. Each separate window was an HTML5 player so you could pause and record video.
"Using HTML5 meant we could actually do stuff that was different from the event," says Kaplan. "In our toolkit, windows fade away when Melo's image fades away. That wasn't there on the pier." The stunts, the performances, the projections and the website each could have acted as standalone advertising pieces. But together, they produced an explosive experiential event. "One of the most important things we learned from the project was to let each medium do what it does best," says Ferguson. "You can't turn what happened out on the pier into a video exactly, so don't try to."
Other important lessons? Bring technologists in as early as possible, and keep them there till the end. "Tech is the other side of the coin but it's the same coin," says Husani Oakley, tech director on the project. There's also an increased sense of teamwork and integration, says Blaney. "A traditional ad campaign is so singular, but here there is a conscious effort to make sure everyone is working together. It's a real learning experience."
Where The Action Is
Word-of-mouth, not hype drives new city guides' success
SFGate - Glenn Helfand
In Internet culture, big used to be better. The idea was that Web space is limitless, a free frontier, open for the taking, capable of storing vast libraries worth of information. When you launched a Web site, there was almost an obligation to include everything possible and to toot your own horn loudly so everyone could hear.
Take city guides, for example -- sites like the defunct Microsoft-backed Sidewalk and the extant Citysearch (which bought Sidewalk) that provided a comprehensive way of engaging with a city, like a Yellow Pages telephone book crossed with a travel guide. To combine current listings with a database of urban resources of all sorts is a hefty proposition, and daunting in scale and cost.
Of course, it's not surprising that such guides are having a hard time living up to the task -- or to the hype. It didn't take long for Sidewalk to sell to Citysearch, which these days may be something of an institution, but one buffeted by an erratic economy. According to a recent article in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, Citysearch is slumping. Its earnings dropped 41.3 percent in the first quarter of 2002, to $7.3 million from $12.4 million a year ago. The reason: a poor advertising climate.
Yet, somehow, in a shrinking world, there's some growth and evolution in the realm of Internet-based city guides. Mind you, they're smaller in scale, more concise in content, increasingly grassroots-style and invariably concentrating on e-mail missives. Oh, and they seem to be operating with a lucid business ethos that's quite the opposite of early Web-business disasters. Projects like the recently launched Flavorpill and Daily Candy and the queer-centric SCUM have tweaked the model by paring down cultural-events information and delivering it to an audience that comes to them and asks for it.
Flavorpill is a memorable moniker for a new e-mail-based city guide, one that essentially functions as a very digestible weekly hot list of stylish, sometimes off-the-radar cultural events -- electronic-music happenings, fashion shows, exhibitions, readings, etc. -- delivered via e-mail to anyone who signs up for the service on its Web site (www.flavorpill.net). Though the weekly lists are available on the site, the URL is only a conduit -- Flavorpill is viewed by its producers as primarily an e-mail publication. What sets this apart from other e-mail lists, like the revered Squidlist, a funky, SF-based post-it-yourself community clearinghouse of underground arts events sent to subscribers twice weekly, is that Flavorpill is tightly edited and highly designed and has aspirations to evolve and expand into a profit-making business.
In fact, Flavorpill's S.F. edition, which launched this May, is its second city guide. The project began in New York, where its three-person headquarters is located. Since the middle of 2000, it's been sending out e-mails to smart, trendy Manhattanites and has managed to garner corporate advertising sponsorship for the project. San Francisco is the first branch in an international hip-city network that will include Los Angeles, London and Miami before the end of the year.
While Flavorpill is ambitious in scope, its numbers are humble. The New York e-mail list hovers at 27,000, while the San Francisco subscriber base is 3,000 -- lists developed virally, without any advertising or marketing push. The organizers, having learned lessons from the dot-com frenzy, are attempting to keep things small -- bare-bones staff, low overhead, reliance on volunteer labor, self-sufficient digital publishing tools. By beginning modestly and hoping to grow into a viable business, the project reverses the old startup strategy of launching venture-capital big and crumbling quickly.
Interestingly, Flavorpill grew out of an e-commerce site called netsetgoods.com, a somewhat typical boom-era startup with the vision of selling high-end "lifestyle essentials" that charted some trendy ground between Barney's and Urban Outfitters. While the site got a lot of attention and kudos for its design sensibility, like most e-commerce endeavors, it was shaky in the revenue department.
"To attempt to keep things exciting, we took our existing database of New York City tastemakers and we started sending out e-mail updates about parties," says Sascha Lewis, who along with Mark Mangan and Husani Oakley founded both Netsetgoods and Flavorpill. "The idea was to update audiences to promote sales. Needless to say, it didn't save the business."
Tapping into the self-selected hipster mailing list, however, evolved into something promising. After the trio shut down their e-commerce business in earnest, they began to evolve a new, pared-down strategy. For a few months, they continued to send out text-based e-mail alerts to their mailing list, and then they began to think of that information as a product, like a magazine, and began to seek advertising-type support. (The Flavorpill team also has an income-generating side business called Sublit, a marketing company that specializes in handling e-mail interactions between businesses and consumers.)
The New York edition of Flavorpill features single monthly sponsors, companies such as Bloomberg, the American Express/Tribeca Film Festival, Absolut, Puma and Evian. "They're the lifestyle brands we think fit with our aesthetic," says Lewis, who admits he was in real estate before hitching on to the dot-com bandwagon.
This sponsorship model is a close cousin of the banner-ad system, differentiated -- however mildly -- by the idea that a single business, rather than many, is represented each month. This strategy, Lewis says, suggests that the advertiser has made some kind of cultural commitment to the project, perhaps following Absolut's 1980s practice of carpet-bombing hip lifestyle magazines. "The advertiser is going to approach it more like a print-style campaign rather than a Web campaign," Lewis explains. "It's been an interesting progression; there's been some hesitancy. We had to break the mold."
The business goal, Lewis admits, is that the sponsorships can be applied across markets to the international lists of Flavorpill addicts, but as of yet the San Francisco lists haven't attracted sponsorships.
Flavorpill isn't the only site entering into this territory. The like-titled Daily Candy (www.dailycandy.com) follows a similar, if more commercial, city-list model. This bicoastal business, with specific content for New York and Los Angeles, is a daily, fashion magazine-style bonbon delivered each morning to subscribers' e-mail boxes. Where Flavorpill goes for outré DJ events or underground parties, Daily Candy is all about tartly written buzz on the latest chic eatery, new facial techniques, a manicure bargain or, as its own breathless ad copy boasts, letting readers know "the first day peonies appear in the farmer's market."
That bit of colorful news is accompanied by a banner ad from a single sponsor -- a spirits company, a cosmetics corporation or another suitably upscale business. Twice a month, Daily Candy sends out a dedicated e-mail with some kind of offer from a tony retailer -- a 50 percent-off special at Neiman's, an Armani fall preview, that kind of thing. In a sense, the Daily Candy is a fashionable city rag doled out in practical bite-size morsels.
"We clearly state that an advertiser made it worth the readers' while," says Daily Candy founder Dany Levy. "We always explain that this is our way of staying afloat, since we can't charge our readers for content. But the funny thing is, a lot of people really like getting those sponsored e-mails."
Levy developed her project based on her ideas of how people actually use e-mail information. "I felt there were too many big e-mail newsletters," she says. "Daily Candy is meant to be one small, concise bit. I used to work in magazines, and I got the name from the idea of eye candy, of how people read magazines on the subway. That kind of attention span is what e-mail's perfect for."
The service launched in March 2000, and about 100,000 people nibble on N.Y. and L.A. editions of Daily Candy, with 400 new subscribers added each day. A London edition is coming soon, and Levy says she's pondering which city to target next; San Francisco is under consideration (though she admits there are already plenty of S.F. subscribers to the L.A. mailing).
Things definitely seem to be growing from the ground up. Levy claims it's a profitable business in less than two years. But the combined staff of the East Coast and West Coast offices is modest: just six, plus a stable of freelance writers. "I'm just about to hire a CEO," Levy adds proudly.
It's difficult to know whether S.F., land of the free, the unedited and the nonprofit, is ready for something like this in a time of nesting and retrenchment. Here, commercial-free community Web resources like Craigslist (which charges only for job listings) delivers, as does Squidlist, a free e-mailed compendium of underground-ish events, and these endeavors have flourished in the Bay Area and become cultural institutions, thriving on their ad-free integrity.
Squidlist, for example, is supported through the resources of Laughing Squid (www.laughingsquid.com), the server company that runs it. "I was courted by businesses to provide content during the boom," says proprietor Scott Beale. "But that kind of arrangement doesn't ever work." Beale also prides himself on the fact that Squidlist events are usually the kinds of arty, political or fetishy things that never even make it into the Bay Guardian. "We rarely post anything from SFMOMA," he adds. "They don't need us."
A more recent, and perhaps slicker, entry into this community-based market is SCUM (www.scum-online.com), which targets lesbian and gay culture hounds and gives them a rich, user-generated list of interesting events. An offshoot of the irreverently successful Guerrilla Queer Bar (GQB) (www.geocities.com/guerrillaqueerbar) , an e-mail list of about 2,500 used to generate quick queer happenings like a drag-queen invasion of a Marina watering hole or a bus tour of bars in Daly City, SCUM is a blog-driven, democratic forum for getting the word out on a transgender theatre piece, a benefit sex party or a midlife gay mixer. The listings, sent in digest format twice a week, can be accessed via Web site or e-mail, and both SCUM and GQB are grassroots affairs that look marvelously slick.
(As of June 25, Yahoo/Geocities is no longer carrying GQB, due to "obscene and objectionable content.")
"E-mail can be a good marketing medium, but you gotta have something to make people [want to open it]," says Brian McConnell, a founder of the Urban Anthropology Institute, the corporate "parent" of both GQB and SCUM. "What made GBQ work was because there's a large audience of people bored with gay bars in SF. Our e-mails offered an alternative."
SCUM's name, an acronym for "Sub Cultural Urban Marketing," is a term adopted by some advertising firms aiming to sell booze and cigarettes to gays and lesbians through "underground" networks such as gay bars, and it directly reflects its founders' savvy about marketing strategies. The goal here, however, seems to be more community based.
"Online communication is a very good fit for event-related information, because every reader has their own biases about what is "cool," "interesting," etc.," McConnell says. "What we wanted to do is make it easy for people to see, at a glance, what is happening around town and to view and post comments about these events. One of the problems I have with most event guides, especially in print, is they always turn into a self-appointed elite that decides what is cool enough to merit their attention. The Internet allows you to create a medium that is much more open, yet has enough adult supervision to prevent it from turning into chat-room blather."
SCUM users can create their own event listings by filling out an online form; the information will be posted there and also made available to other community sites. Additionally, the service has a seriously cute "Make a Date" feature that allows like-minded strangers to hook up via e-mail to go to kooky events like cat shows.
It's surprising to learn that McConnell basically runs the fairly extensive project for $200 a month, a sum he absorbs into his telecommunications business. (As with Flavorpill, SCUM's writers are unpaid.). "That's the bright side of technology," he says. "It's so cheap now that, if you're clever, you can build a really sophisticated system for not much money. Not to toot my horn, but from a technology perspective, SCUM compares favorably with much larger sites with much larger development budgets."
"We could make money off it if we really wanted to," McConnell adds. "People are interested in SCUM precisely because it's not commercial. What we're hoping it'll do is inspire others to get their own events going." The latter is a goal perhaps shared by all aforementioned, modestly scaled projects, and it's both wonderfully civic minded and graciously large.