4 posts and columns on City Hall

Early Adopter: Pothole-Reporting App SeeClickFix Raises $1.5 Million to Help You Be a Squeakier Wheel

in News on January 14, 2011 at 11:00 am PT

It’s a fine line between keeping your potholes filled and walls graffiti free and being a civic tattletale. Civic nuisance reporting app SeeClickFix lets you toe the line, and just got another $1.5 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech and Omidyar to help users keep at it.

New Library Technologies Dispense With Librarians

in News on October 25, 2010 at 6:45 am PT

Hugo MN–In this suburb of St. Paul, the new library branch has no librarians, no card catalog and no comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read. Instead, the Library Express is a stack of metal lockers outside city hall. When patrons want a book or DVD, they order it online and pick it up from a digitally locked, glove-compartment- sized cubby a few days later. It’s a library as conceived by the Amazon.com generation.

Scott McNealy's Top 15 Reasons He's Surprised We're Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Web

in News on May 27, 2010 at 7:30 am PT

Last night, BoomTown headed to San Francisco’s wedding-cake City Hall to attend “The 25 Years of .Com Gala,” which is honoring a quarter-century that I have been jacked into the matrix. Actually, it’s the 25th anniversary of the .com Internet domain name. And perhaps the most enjoyable blast from the past was the appearance of jeans-clad former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, who ably retains the title of Clown Prince of Silicon Valley.