I am a Professor of technology management at Polytechnic University and have been a member of the technology community in New York City since 1984. I started out working at Merrill Lynch as a member of an Advanced Technology group. Our job was to test out new technologies and persuade business people in Merrill to use them. This was easier said than done (try telling a trader who makes millions that he should install a new kind of monitor which may or may not help him do any better in his work). Yes, there were frustrating aspects to my job but I also got to meet people in the technology business, play with new technology and be a pioneer of sorts. I was a lead user (for want of a better term) and every few weeks, another piece of hardware would land on my desk (a Compaq LTE, the first Motorola cell phone). I got to test out this stuff and see the looks on peoples' faces when I used one of these gadgets on the train or in other public places. Our group, which was a fairly unorthodox bunch of technologists, succeeded in bringing Netscape into the firm and also spent alot of our time educating the employees about the Web which was just in its infancy.
I also was a web mistress and managed one of the first websites at Merrill. In those days, websites were very crudely built but it was fun to be able to connect to other sites around the world and see what people were doing. I will never forget the day I connected to the website run by a bunch of investment bankers in Tokyo expecting to see some interesting content and instead found a set of menus for takeout food as the main content on the site. My site was not much better - every morning I wrote up the top ten list from David Letterman and posted it (until the people in Corporate Communications decided it was 'inappropriate'). I once brought down the entire LAN by posting a video of King Kong climbing the Empire State building.
After my stint at Merrill, I was recruited by Polytechnic University and joined the academic community. I became the co-Director of the Executive master's programs at Poly. I teach a number of courses at the University on managing innovation and spend a great deal of my time writing and researching the impact of new media on the traditional media industries. This has proven to be very challenging since everything seems to be changing at a dramatic pace. Recently, I have been researching the social media space and looking at how companies, which I call user-centric are changing the nature of innovation. Fortunately for me, I can do most of my research in New York since there are so many wonderful companies only a subway ride away.I have traveled all over the world and have talked to people who are involved in developing new media or are using them to create new things under the sun. I learn alot from my students (who we call participants) and from my colleagues.
I still enjoy tinkering with new technology and recently bought an MP3 player (not an IPod) for recording interviews and listening to music (it's a Samsung). Every time I take it out of my backpack with the intention of asking some very serious questions, the conversation inevitably turns to my new gadget which most people have never seen. This is a great way to get people to talk about what they think is cool and interesting.
You can read about why I decided to write a blog on the new media industry on another part of this website. I have high hopes that I will contribute regularly to the website and hope others will too. I have set aside some space for my students so they can respond to my comments or yours.
Thanks for visiting my website.
Nina
