I’ve spent most of the week pounding the pavement, looking at new office space for Fog Creek. We’re focusing on a neighborhood in New York called the Garment District, which used to be the home to thousands of small clothing factories, many of whom are still there, but they’re slowly getting pushed out of business and the old factories are being gentrified with architects, designers, modeling agencies, photographers, and of course software companies taking over, putting in nice new windows and polished wood floors, replacing the rows of sewing machines with laptop computers, and paying double the rent. It’s great to be a creditworthy tenant looking for office space; there’s so much empty office space in New York that landlords are falling over themselves to do good deals.

Clay Shirky: “Two years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, FedEx pulled the plug on ZapMail, allowing it to vanish without a trace. And the story of ZapMail’s collapse holds a crucial lesson for the telephone companies today.” Excellent. Clay has hit the nail right on the head; everybody’s looking for the huge business opportunities around 802.11 and VoIP and they probably aren’t really there.