I grew up about an hour outside of New York City. My parents would take me in a few times a year, and from those experiences I developed an idea of what big cities are like. It took a while for me to realize that New York is remarkable as cities go. It’s huge. It has a prime geographical location. Its people are diverse in a multitude of ways. It’s filled with wealth, yet more than 20% of its citizens live in poverty. There is no other city in the world like New York, and that’s why the Museum of the City of New York must be a fascinating place to visit. They are a non-profit that explores “the past of this fascinating and particular place for lessons about our future” while celebrating “New York’s heritage of diversity, opportunity, and perpetual transformation.”
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This morning I got an e-mail from Amazon.com. As part of a settlement with book publishers, I will receive an automatic credit to my account “that it will range from $0.30 to $1.32 for every eligible Kindle book that [I] purchased between April 2010 and May 2012.” That’s good news, but it’s indicative problem. We live in a time when intellectual property is becoming a massive economic issue. The patent stuff between Apple, Samsung, Google and dozens of other players is getting ridiculous, and our government is trying to pass legislation that significantly inhibits our ability to share information. As someone who has built a business based on intellectual property, I understand why rightsholders are being defensive, but I also think that they’re hurting their businesses by limiting use of their content. We need some sanity, and that’s exactly what Public Knowledge is aiming to restore. They’re a Washington, DC based non-profit that “preserves the openness of the Internet and the public’s access to knowledge, promotes creativity through balanced copyright, and upholds and protects the rights of consumers to use innovative technology lawfully.”
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This Gangnam Style craze is kind of ridiculous, right? I originally saw the video in July and found it pretty amusing, but didn’t think much more of it. A couple months later it has over a quarter billion views on YouTube. I’m not sure if the interest will carry over into other Korean entertainment acts, but if it does, DramaFever is extremely well positioned. They are a New York, NY based company that gives “you a better way to find and watch the best TV and movies from around the world.” Their original focus was on Korean dramas, but they are rapidly expanding their offerings of tv shows and movies from Taiwan, China, Singapore and the Philippines. Bollywood films and latin telenovelas will come next. What’s interesting about DramaFever is that they target their content toward English speaking audiences, so it’s not just about giving expats the content that they miss from home.
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Sometimes a company knows that they’re on to something, but they can’t quite get it right at first. They have an idea, they build some technology, they hire some people, but the business doesn’t come together. That seems to have been the story with NewsCred for their first two iterations. Now it sounds like the New York, NY based company may have it figured out. After scrapping publisher ranking and a custom online newspaper engine, they’ve moved on to “sourcing and licensing trusted content across a broad range of subjects and perspectives.” Generating quality content is extremely hard. NewsCred allows the brands who need it to get it from the publishers who are experts at creating it.
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There are some industries where company histories gets really confusing. Mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, name changes, and all kinds of other events make it hard to truly understand what parts of the story are meaningful. I’ve found this especially prevalent with financial institutions, advertising agencies, and publishers. We’re going to talk about the latter today. Macmillan is the New York, NY based face of a “group of publishing companies in the United States held by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck” (a German company). As I read through their history, I got a bit overwhelmed. It starts in 1843 with two Scottish brothers, and includes the story about a completely different publisher named Macmillan. While understanding Macmillan’s history is important, it’s far more important to understand their future, which might include you.
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We’re almost back to where we were ten years ago in terms of being able to listen to music online. There are finally services that will let you listen to whatever you want whenever you want, and many of them are free (with ads). The big change (beyond the move to streaming instead of downloads) is that most of this listening is actually legally sanctioned. This is good new for artists and songwriters, but it also creates a lot of new headaches. Managing your music’s rights and collecting the royalties that you’re owed is extremely time consuming if you can’t pay a professional to do it for you. Songtrust replaces the need for that professional with a simple software solution. The company is based in New York, NY, and their product ensures that their “writer members keep 100% of their rights, get paid 100% of their royalties and can opt out at anytime.”
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Sometimes what you think is a niche community isn’t really “niche” at all. I’ve come across deviantART periodically while browsing the web, and I always thought how cool it was that there was a place online for artists to share their work. I had no idea that deviantART was a Top 100 website in terms of traffic and has “over 16 million registered members and over 145 million unique artist generated works of art.” I knew that it was a sizable community, but I had no idea that it was that sizable. While deviantART is a place for all kinds of art, there is definitely a focus on manga and digital art. Other categories include photography, traditional art, literature, Flash, filmmaking, and skins for applications. If it’s artsy, there’s a good chance that there’s a place for it on deviantART. The site was founded in 2000 in Hollywood, CA, and it’s unclear whether it was with the intention of building a business. Regardless, deviantART now appears to be a thriving business with a bunch of job openings.
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There’s no question that the way in which we consume video content is changing. It wasn’t that long ago that watching something meant sitting down in front of the television at a specific time. Now we have DVRs, On Demand, sites like Hulu, and a variety of other ways to consume content on our own schedules. This isn’t just a cultural shift; it comes as a result of (while also being a cause of) significant technological advances. One of the major companies behind this shift is Avail-TVN. They’re based in Reston, VA and they work “with every major studio and television network” to offer “a full content line up of MPEG-4 encoded live programming as well as video on demand content in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to multichannel video providers throughout the US, Canada, the Caribbean and Mexico.” I know this might be a little confusing for the non-techies out there, but the basic gist of it is that they make it possible for you to watch video over IP (internet protocol).
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