Friday, January 22, 1999

Talk to me!

It was a day of eloquence, music, venture, champagne kisses and caviar dreams dahling. I started Thursday, January 21st with Burt Alimansky and ended it with Robin Leech. The New York InfoTech Forum held their first meeting on Thursday, January 21st at the Toy Center. This elegant old hotel ballroom is usually the setting for charity balls. Today it was waking up Alley professionals with strong coffee and a presentation on speech recognition from IBM. IBM has had about forty years background in development of this technology. And, incidentally, I will be speaking on Monday night, January 25 on MLC's "MetroByte" show (Cablevision) on one of their top competitors, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Several charmers from Richard A. Eisner were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, especially Richard Shanley, who gave me a copy of his book, "Financing Technology's Frontier." Bruce Strzelczyk (who is also a WWWAC board member), Christopher Loiacono and Walter Timoshenko joined him in greeting attendees. Michael Goudie of Oracle introduced me to Susan Dowling, director of worldwide marketing and biz dev. for this company. John Evans of Arthur Anderson, Steven Fink of MessageBank (cool voice messaging services!) and Alan Brody of the famous Silicon Alley Breakfast Club were all warming up to the day with a coffee and muffin. In addition to IBM's presentation, ZyDoc Speech was showcasing their software in the reception. This software is for medical dictation. Following the medical theme, HOST (Healthcare Open Systems & Trials) also had a booth. Silicon Alley non-profit darling MOUSE and Andrew Raisej were mixing and mingling with the likes of Marie Nelson (Industry Scoops). Always charming in her Southern dialect, Anna Copeland Wheatley (AlleyCat News) was representative of her publication, which was also a sponsor of the breakfast.