Tuesday, October 26, 1999

Cocktails and a Book Signing

Those crazy NetSlaves! Steve Baldwin and Bill Lessard were rubbing elbows and continuing on their mission of freeing the industry's net slaves from the 1's & 0's that bind them to their desks. Sponsored by McGraw-Hill and The Swayne Agency, this party had a great mix of some heady-book-types as well as solid gear-heads. McGraw-Hill was well represented after a job well done by editorial director Susan Barry, associate dir. of publicity Karen Auerbach, publicity manager Lydia Rinaldi, executive editor Nancy Mikhail, marketing manager John Kwasek and art director David Dell'Accio of McGraw-Hill. They all have something to be proud of in getting the word out about this neat and revealing book. Other McGraw-Hillers were Mary Glenn, Michelle Reid, and Steve Elliott. Lisa Swayne, of her own agency was also on hand, early in the evening to meet and greet guests.
Some of the other early arrivers were Irvin Barash of VenCon Management, Philip Kampe of the Gramercy Partnership and Javed Rahman of EquiServ. Stephen Negron of the Center for Technology Solutions, Gian Trotta of MSNBC, Jeremy Dill of Technology Investor magazine and Lee Kaplan of CBS New Media came out to meet the newly-established writers. Michael McNally of Vantage Technologies, Inc. was also there early with Michael Mochnal. PK Fields, who recently left Mirage Resorts, told me Steve Wynn of Mirage does not have any interest in extending into cyberspace. Well there's a missed opportunity!

Fortunately there were no brawls considering the GE Capital representatives of the Equity group were in the same space as some Forbes reporters, based on the recent article in Forbes about GE Cap folks. However, iStream's pres Chip Ruhnke, and Larry Vassel (an old pal from a past lifetime!), a gang from Globix and Steve Warren, David Olson and Heidi Raebeck of the elusive and nice No-End list came for some Halloween cheer and pictures from the fun EarthCam kiosk! (See them at: http://www.earthcam.com/events/PulitzerParty/107.html)

Steve Petri (CigarLife.com) and Deborah Hope (Hope Management Consulting) were two who got some pics in! This one is a scary prediction... Angela Alvarez Azzolino of The Research Center, Lillian Wang of Iguana, Knox Robinson of IndiePlanet.com, Hamilton Boardman of Women.com and Jennifer Frommer of Sony's New Media division were also there early and got some fun spider rings to sport around. The vast cyber world was made a little smaller with visits from German-based Sari Sapon of CDC Communications and Bart Buijze and Marc Schipperheyn of Netherlands-based BFM Tonebeeld. Karen Teig of Roche Pharmaceuticals, Philip Taub of BlueStone Capital and Ishwari Singh of Trade.com were among the guests who stopped by too.

For the raffle of wacky halloween gifts like a tiger outfit, "witchy socks" a glow-in-the-dark knife, handcuffs and two geek outfits, I managed to capture the attention of MyUtility.com's CDO Gerard Heimbuch, Matthew Bruck of Robert Meredith & Co., communities editor of the WSJinteractive David Flores, Shirley Petchprapa of MTVi and the BlueWave crew--CFO Robert Adair and Alexandra Bouillon (London-based) and Andrew Smart. Steven Miller of the NY Times won the silly string. Pam Spector of GoAmerica and Amy Wilson of BroadPoint represented communications Co.s and Sam Stone of the Wall Street Reporter magazine were chatting with me for a bit. Rob Argento told me Zagat's has some new announcements coming up and the FiveSpice(.com)Girls--Helen Moynihan and Lora Krulak--were out and about as usual. Tracy Chan of the Institute of International Research, Michael Madrigale of Teleglobe and Mary Reagan of the Ocean Drilling Program were mingling about with Deirdre Lightfoot and Seth Rosenberg of Foodline.

Near the end of the event I stopped and chatted for a while with Chip Austin of iHatch Ventures and Melissa Blau of Constellation Ventures about various charity events she's chairing and compared notes. Jaclynn Fischman of Telemedia Accelerator was next to our right, talking with David Friedensohn of BigStar.com. And David Boorstin, one of the best corporate identity consultants I ever worked for, was on our left, mingling with the new media sorts. After several hours of socializing the 13th "Cocktails with Courtney" came to a successful close.