Posts tagged startups

Made in New York City A map of NYC start-ups, incubators and investors. Also includes information about companies that are hiring if you’re in the market.

Made in New York City

A map of NYC start-ups, incubators and investors. Also includes information about companies that are hiring if you’re in the market.

MISSION Possible

In an alternative life I’ve been working on a startup called MISSION.tv. It’s a community and publication focusing on global philanthropic and volunteer activity. And, happily, its soft launch is today.

MISSION was founded by Amy Schrier who also happened to be my first publisher for a magazine she launched in the 90s called Blue.

For those interested in MISSION, check the Web site. Job opportunities are listed here.

And if you’re in New York City, there’s a launch party Wednesday, May 2, from 7-10pm on the Lower East Side. There are two ways to attend:

  • For free: simply register at Eventbrite and come on down.
  • For $20: proceeds collected will benefit Flying Kites Global, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that runs a leadership academy for orphaned children in Kenya.

MISSION is on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. We’re working on getting our Tumblr act together.

Hope to see people on Wednesday at the launch party — Michael

Facebook Buys Instagram for a Reported $1 Billion That’s billion, with a ‘b’, in cash and stock. Via Mark Zuckerberg: [I]n order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook. That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people. Glad to see they’ll keep it independent. — Michael

Facebook Buys Instagram for a Reported $1 Billion

That’s billion, with a ‘b’, in cash and stock.

Via Mark Zuckerberg:

[I]n order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

Glad to see they’ll keep it independent. — Michael

onaissues:  What Journalists Can Learn From: Startups “Startup culture has captivated the nation over the last few years, with starry promises of long nights spent in product development resulting in millions of dollars of funding and the potential for billion-dollar payoffs…So what lessons can media makers pull from startups?” Here are five ways that startups can inspire journalists.

onaissues:

 What Journalists Can Learn From: Startups

“Startup culture has captivated the nation over the last few years, with starry promises of long nights spent in product development resulting in millions of dollars of funding and the potential for billion-dollar payoffs…So what lessons can media makers pull from startups?”

Here are five ways that startups can inspire journalists.

To All the (US-Based) Ladies in the House

The International Women’s Media Foundation is awarding three $20,000 grants to women-led digital journalism startups.

The application deadline is March 2 and is open to US-based women for a project that has not yet launched.

FAQ and application materials are located here.

H/T: 10000 Words

Y Combinator wants to Kill Hollywood

youmightfindyourself:

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they’re serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo.

It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families. Maybe they will. All other things being equal, we’d prefer to hear about ideas like that. But all other things are decidedly not equal. Whatever people are going to do for fun in 20 years is probably predetermined. Winning is more a matter of discovering it than making it happen. In this respect at least, you can’t push history off its course. You can, however, accelerate it.

What’s the most entertaining thing you can build?

One thing we like are new tools and platforms that enable storytelling, curating and content sharing. This keeps our eyes glued to new platforms such as Storify and why we enjoy our time on Tumblr so much. It’s also a reason why we’re very interested in an email we just received. It’s the announced launch of Cowbird by artist and technologist Jonathan Harris. It goes something like this: After 2+ years of work, 145,000+ lines of code, one Icelandic grass hut, one night in jail, one serving of jellied ram’s testicles with fermented shark meat, and countless pieces of toast with orange marmalade, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Cowbird, a labor of love, and hopefully something that will have a long and meaningful life. Cowbird is a community of storytellers, focused on deeper, longer-lasting, more personal storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today (starting with the Occupy Wall Street movement). Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience — kind of like a Wikipedia for real life (but much more beautiful). Grand plans, indeed, and we’re interested in testing the platform. If you are too, you can request an invitation here. Harris writes that they are looking for writers, filmmakers, journalists and storytellers in general to come onboard to grow the community.  Image: Detail from Jonathan Harris’ Cowbird diary. Bonus Points: PRI has an interview with Harris in which he explains the project’s genesis.

One thing we like are new tools and platforms that enable storytelling, curating and content sharing. This keeps our eyes glued to new platforms such as Storify and why we enjoy our time on Tumblr so much.

It’s also a reason why we’re very interested in an email we just received. It’s the announced launch of Cowbird by artist and technologist Jonathan Harris.

It goes something like this:

After 2+ years of work, 145,000+ lines of code, one Icelandic grass hut, one night in jail, one serving of jellied ram’s testicles with fermented shark meat, and countless pieces of toast with orange marmalade, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Cowbird, a labor of love, and hopefully something that will have a long and meaningful life.

Cowbird is a community of storytellers, focused on deeper, longer-lasting, more personal storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.

Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today (starting with the Occupy Wall Street movement).

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience — kind of like a Wikipedia for real life (but much more beautiful).

Grand plans, indeed, and we’re interested in testing the platform. If you are too, you can request an invitation here. Harris writes that they are looking for writers, filmmakers, journalists and storytellers in general to come onboard to grow the community. 

Image: Detail from Jonathan Harris’ Cowbird diary.

Bonus Points: PRI has an interview with Harris in which he explains the project’s genesis.

Can You Peer Review the Internet?

This is the question that Hypothes.is raises. The non-profit startup hopes to provide tools so that communities of people can evaluate and comment upon content they come across online.

This falls outside normal commenting systems. Instead, it’s a tool that readers bring with them as they visit sites.

Via Hypothes.is:

Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.

It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O’Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.

Via ReadWriteWeb

It’s a peer review system to check, verify and critique content all over the Web - and beyond. “Improving the credibility of the information we consume is humanity’s grandest challenge,” [Hypothes.is founder Dan] Whaley says. Topic experts will be enlisted in addition to crowdsourcing, a reputation system, browser plug-ins and APIs are on the roadmap and all the data will be stored at the Internet Archive.

It sounds very interesting but I wonder if people are up for leveraging it. For example, a few years ago Google launched Sidewiki as a browser-based annotation tool. Recently, the company announced it’s discontinuing the project. Which is another way to say that people weren’t really using it.

Here’s hoping Hypothes.is learns from that example because the idea of having a crowdsourced verification system is amazing. — Michael

Who Are These Journalists

A new site called News Transparency is trying to bring transparency to journalists by publishing basic biographical information, recent stories and social media presences.

Via Poynter:

Ira Stoll is 38. He has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. His phone number is (718) 499-2199 and his email is ira@futureofcapitalism.com. He went to college at Harvard, has worked at the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Sun, and he considers Seth Lipsky a personal friend.

I know all this from Stoll’s profile page on NewsTransparency.com, a new site he just launched to make it easier for the public “to find out about the individual human beings who produce the news — human beings with opinions, relationships, history, and agendas.”

The site consists of journalist profile pages which, like Wikipedia, allow anyone to add information and, like Amazon, enable ratings and reviews. They also collect articles written about the journalist’s work.

If you’re familiar with Techcrunch’s Crunchbase, the idea should be familiar: Create a publicly accessible database that lets anyone learn more about the movers and shakers in a given field.

Created by Ira Stoll, News Transparency hopes to build trust between the public and journalists. Let’s see what happens when the journalists find their digital paper trail easy to find and read.

Disruptive Companies Infographic Disruptive companies create innovations that invade the market, force change, and create new sectors of the industry. Here we examine a list of disruptive companies, and the industry effects of their innovation. iPad, Google Apps, Skype, Zynga, Tata Nano, Netflix, Pandora via Focus

Disruptive Companies Infographic

Disruptive companies create innovations that invade the market, force change, and create new sectors of the industry. Here we examine a list of disruptive companies, and the industry effects of their innovation.

iPad, Google Apps, Skype, Zynga, Tata Nano, Netflix, Pandora

via Focus

focus.com

iPad Photo Mag Doing Rev Share with Photographers Via Wired’s Raw File: There’s no denying it, photos look great on the iPad. So it makes sense that quite a few iPad-only photo magazines are cropping up to take advantage of its lush display and low digital overhead. In particular, we’ve been watching Once Magazine. Over the last few months of its development, we’ve seen beta versions filled with thoughtful and provocative photo stories. On Oct. 6, the magazine is launching its first paid edition on iTunes for $3. One thing that makes Once stand out from some of the other iPad photo mags is its revenue sharing model for its contributors. The founders, including San Francisco freelance photographer and CEO of Once, Jackson Solway, hope it will pave the way for photographers to start benefiting financially from the digital revolution instead of being crushed by it. It was a decision that the magazine’s executive editor, John Knight, describes as a “no-brainer.” “When we realized we could know exactly how many subscribers we had on a given issue,” says Knight, “it made it possible to calculate exactly how much each issue was making. The whole idea started as a way to pay photographers what they deserve for their work, and so splitting that revenue seemed obvious. Right now we only share that revenue with the photographers and we pay a fee to our writers. In the future we’d like to expand that model to include writers as well.” Image: A woman walks though the streets of Gali, Abkhazia. Ivor Prickett. 

iPad Photo Mag Doing Rev Share with Photographers

Via Wired’s Raw File:

There’s no denying it, photos look great on the iPad. So it makes sense that quite a few iPad-only photo magazines are cropping up to take advantage of its lush display and low digital overhead.

In particular, we’ve been watching Once Magazine. Over the last few months of its development, we’ve seen beta versions filled with thoughtful and provocative photo stories. On Oct. 6, the magazine is launching its first paid edition on iTunes for $3.

One thing that makes Once stand out from some of the other iPad photo mags is its revenue sharing model for its contributors. The founders, including San Francisco freelance photographer and CEO of Once, Jackson Solway, hope it will pave the way for photographers to start benefiting financially from the digital revolution instead of being crushed by it. It was a decision that the magazine’s executive editor, John Knight, describes as a “no-brainer.”

“When we realized we could know exactly how many subscribers we had on a given issue,” says Knight, “it made it possible to calculate exactly how much each issue was making. The whole idea started as a way to pay photographers what they deserve for their work, and so splitting that revenue seemed obvious. Right now we only share that revenue with the photographers and we pay a fee to our writers. In the future we’d like to expand that model to include writers as well.”

Image: A woman walks though the streets of Gali, Abkhazia. Ivor Prickett. 

Startup Photo Agency Highlights Iraqi Photographers’ Work Photojournalists Kamaran Najm and Sebastian Meyer recently launched Metrography, a photo agency that now represents the work of 65 Iraqi photojournalists. Speaking to Wired, Meyer explains the agency’s origins: Kamaran Najm, a Kurdish photographer, started Metrography in 2009 while he was working as a photo editor for an Iraqi news magazine. He was looking for photographs and realized there was no central place to go for images from Iraq. So he decided to start one. Kamaran and I had been friends since 2008 and when I moved to Iraq in 2009 he asked me if I’d help him with Metrography. The first year was slow going, mainly because we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do. We dabbled in stock imagery and tried our hand at breaking news, but we eventually realized that we could do something much more important, namely to create a culture of photojournalistic storytelling in Iraq. To that end we’re focusing more on running workshops and trainings so Iraqi photographers can learn how to shoot at the level demanded by Western clients. We leave the breaking news—for the most part—to the wire agencies which do an excellent job and we focus on the features, portraits, and intimate stories. Image: An Arab migrant worker stands in the corridor of the Asia Hotel in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq. Photo by Ahmed Al Husseini.

Startup Photo Agency Highlights Iraqi Photographers’ Work

Photojournalists Kamaran Najm and Sebastian Meyer recently launched Metrography, a photo agency that now represents the work of 65 Iraqi photojournalists.

Speaking to Wired, Meyer explains the agency’s origins:

Kamaran Najm, a Kurdish photographer, started Metrography in 2009 while he was working as a photo editor for an Iraqi news magazine. He was looking for photographs and realized there was no central place to go for images from Iraq. So he decided to start one. Kamaran and I had been friends since 2008 and when I moved to Iraq in 2009 he asked me if I’d help him with Metrography. The first year was slow going, mainly because we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do. We dabbled in stock imagery and tried our hand at breaking news, but we eventually realized that we could do something much more important, namely to create a culture of photojournalistic storytelling in Iraq.

To that end we’re focusing more on running workshops and trainings so Iraqi photographers can learn how to shoot at the level demanded by Western clients. We leave the breaking news—for the most part—to the wire agencies which do an excellent job and we focus on the features, portraits, and intimate stories.

Image: An Arab migrant worker stands in the corridor of the Asia Hotel in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq. Photo by Ahmed Al Husseini.

Here’s the solution: spin it off. Slate doesn’t deserve to be slowly whittled away to the bone, or to be publishing link-bait, traffic-gaming pieces, no matter how witty the conceit. Slate is an established, valuable brand, with a lot of smart people (still) working on the editorial side. But the business side of Slate has not kept pace with the desires or the needs of the editorial team. Both sides are stifling each other — Slate’s bookkeepers demand budget cuts that lead to staff reductions, and Slate’s editors are under the gun to deliver a more valuable product with less resources. Weisberg may be Chairman of the (dwindling) Slate group, but what Slate needs is a CEO, someone who can lead a spinoff, attract venture capital, talent in the engineering, sales and business staffs with the prospects of equity and a clean, er, slate, with which to reinvent the modern online magazine.

The Washington Post may not love the idea of selling out — Slate was supposed to be a feather in their cap, and an incubator of ideas and talent, but like Microsoft before them, the Post should accept that they didn’t manage the acquisition well, and be willing to divest it. They could try to sell Slate to another company, as they did with Newsweek, but that makes little sense — Slate was conceived without the extraneous baggage and overhead of a print publication. Physically, it’s little more than office leases and web servers.

Paul Smalera, How to reboot Slate

I concur. Which probably means it won’t happen, and Slate will instead die the death of a thousand cuts.

(via stoweboyd)

FJP: Smalera writes that Slate should act like a nimble startup. Question though: after 15 years of being relatively cocooned by first Microsoft and then the Washington Post, could they?

Or is Slate DNA pretty much fixed at this point in time?

It’s definitely a golden age for curators. Over the next five years, the amount of published information will increase exponentially. It will become more difficult for readers to assess and to evaluate the quality and the relevance of a growing database of content.

Rochelle Grayson, CEO of BookRiff, in an interview with O’Reilly Radar’s Jenn Webb.

BookRiff is a startup that let’s curators create, compile and sell books in digital and print formats.  

Thought another away: imagine turning your Tumblr into a book.