wrkng

This past week, I spent some time cutting a hole in the wall in between our kitchen and our family room. It’s a project we’ve been talking about for a long time, and we considered lots of different ways of doing it before we actually got down to it. We were concerned about the cost, [...]

As of 11am this morning, buses in Brooklyn are telling the internet where they are.  And I’m proud to say that our work is behind it. For the past several months, we’ve been working with the MTA on this one-line pilot, to demonstrate that it’s possible to achieve a workable bus tracking solution using existing [...]

    I opened my talk at last week’s Times Open event with this little video plugging Phone Idol.  It got a few laughs, which was the point, but unfortunately no new songs sung just yet.  Derek Gottfrid from NYT made the great suggestion that I print up some stickers and put them up in [...]

Thank you so much to everyone who helped us think through our re-name of TOPP Labs yesterday.  Your feedback and insights were absolutely invaluable to our process. After a long night and day of deliberations, we’ve settled on our new name. Drumroll please… (and this is obviously unnecessary since it’s in the title of the [...]

For the past year or so, the group at TOPP that I manage has been known as TOPP Labs.  TOPP Labs was originally chosen not because it was the best or most compelling name, but because as we were dialing back work on the OpenCore project, we needed a name that was better than “The [...]

At work recently, we’ve been exploring the idea of integrating voice and/or SMS into our applications.  Much of what we do has to do with people responding to their physical environments — their neighborhoods and the streets and public spaces that constitute the bulk of our public experience. So, I decided to take on a [...]

A few weeks ago, I created a small web app for scheduling project teams at TOPP Labs.  At any given time, we’ve got anywhere between 10 and 20 active projects, so keeping track of it all is difficult, and planning ahead requires a good clear overview of everything that’s happening. Why create something new? Good [...]

For your reading pleasure, the Broadsheet Wide theme for the Vienna RSS reader.

This week, we launched the new, improved GothamSchools.  GothamSchools is the latest media / advocacy initiative from The Open Planning Project, and our first foray into the world of education.  We’ve got a great team of reporters in Philissa Cramer, Elizabeth Green, and Kelly Vaughan, and the new site website was put together by the [...]

In the spirit of blogging all the cool stuff we’re doing at TOPP, I’d like to announce the launch of a new website: Park(ing) Day NYC. Park(ing) Day is a global event, originally conceived by awesome SF-based arts collective REBAR, where for a single day, regular parking spaces are “leased” for use as temporary public [...]