Media Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Serious Startups

Startup Spotlight: Minnesota’s Altsie A New Way To Watch Indie Films

Nibletz takes pride in being the startup voie for “Everywhere Else” as such we love bringing you stories about startups from everywhere under the sun, especially startups that are doing something uniquely different and uniquely fun. Altsie is one of those startups.

Altsie hails from the Twin Cities. It’s about socially mixing indie films, but not online, offline. How’s that for a change. Of course you use a website to find out where to go but after that it’s a fully immersive experience with you, the movie, the venue and the attendees.

Lucas Rayala and co-founder Joe Dolson launched Altsie in the twin cities with plans to refine the experience and then roll it out at other areas across the country, but what is it exactly?

Here’s how it works. You go to the Altsie website which will tell you what the current movie is for that month. Rayala curates the movies himself through relationships with indie film producers. They then partner with a venue which agrees to host the film. It could be a sports bar that’s trying something different for a night or a coffee shop or anywhere in between.

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When Hollywood And A Tech Incubator Have A Baby They Called It io/LA

Just steps away from the famed Hollywood and Highland intersection is LA’s newest Startup Incubator io/la. Mixing Hollywood and Tech like never before, io/LA tries to infuse old Hollywood with new Tech in a way we’ve never seen. In an attempt to break the stigma that the Bay is where you want to be io/LA invites those with a Hollywood aspirations and a Tech way of thinking. The newly launched Incubator is the brain child of former MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb, Donovan Leitch and Chris Gartin.

Millennial Media Stock Opens With A Bang

Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile ad platform in the world, went public this morning on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol MM. Millennial had said earlier on that they expected shares to go for between $9 and $11 at their IPO. Yesterday that number was revised to $11 to $13 per share. What happened today was nothing short of amazing.

The opening trade this morning on Millennial stock was $25 it was hovering around $26 per share around 10am eastern time this morning. It was at $25.16 at noon.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer has been talking up the mobile phone space saying that it’s the way of the future. That could be what’s driving the stock for the Baltimore based ad network.

They also have a financially sound business. Millennial did over $104 million in ad placements last year and have been on a steady trajectory of growth since being founded in 2006 by former Verizon VCast honcho Paul Palmeri.

Millennial Media’s stock story this morning has been raising some eyebrows. Yahoo advertising executive, Michael Katz, tweeted this morning:

Millennial Media’s marketcap is almost bigger than the actual Mobile Ad Maket [sic]. Tell me how this makes sense.

The Motley Fool this morning called Millennial Media “The mobile advertising play you’ve been waiting for”. Fool writer Rick Aristotle Munariz speculates that Millennial’s position as the second largest mobile ad player overall, and ahead of Apple’s mobile ad unit, may be driving the success of their IPO.

source: SAI

Hacktivism, All Explained In An Infographic

Anarchist, Hackers, Criminals, Freedom Fighters, which ever you want to call them. Hacktivist has become part of the vocabulary over the past two years with groups like Anonymous, LulzSec and others. Below is a graphic explaining where it started recently, the cause and effect of such actions which we’ve seen.

Huffington Post Co-Founder Has His Sights On CNN With New Startup

Ken Lerer, one of the co-founders of the Huffington Post has embarked on a new video startup. He is going to deliver the news via the web and has his eyes set on traditional tv cable news outlets like CNN and Fox News. According to AllthingsD’s Peter Kafka Lerer is looking to provide a news outlet for those who watch Jon Stewart, and a generation that consumes most of their media from the internet.

It’s obvious that people are moving to the web for news, and real time events especially when there are live events and breaking stories. That’s evidenced in a 20% upswing in NCAA tournament viewing online.

Lerer who, with co-founder Ariana Huffington, sold the news giant Huffington Post last year to AOL for over one million dollars. Of course the Huffington Post is a more traditional new media outlet.

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Charlotte Based Startup Rawporter Putting A New More Viable Spin On Citizen Journalism

Rawporter made a pretty nice impact at South By Southwest in Austin Texas earlier this month. This two person start up out of Charlotte NC is bringing a new concept to citizen reporting. With Rawporter, not only can a citizen report the news via video, they can also get paid for it.

Rawporter came about when friends and co-founders Kevin Davis and Rob Gaige were hanging out and then saw a horrible accident. Of course everyone on the scene of the accident had their camera phone out and were shooting the entire scene, but when they got home and turned on the 11:00 news, Gaige tells me that the only shot they had was the reporters stand up at a cleared scene.

Gaige and Davis knew that there had to be someway for those people who too that video, and the hundreds of thousands of people who take videos of incidents like this everyday, could both get sourced and make money.

Gaige has a background in marketing. Davis has a background in news radio, and then changed careers to marketing. They both met in the marketing department at Bank of America. As they see first hand that the biggest companies in the world are cutting back staff, and Davis knows that news media jobs are eliminated every day, citizen reporting can easily become a huge source for news stations.

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AOL, TechCrunch, Crunchbase Et Al, Ignore Android Developer’s Intellectual Property

The one time internet giant AOL, which has been declining over the past few years, has been trying desperately to bring readers from other sites to their media properties like TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Patch and other blogs and online content. With some of the more notable websites in the tech community, AOL has always seemed to be very supportive of intellectual property.

In fact, as recent as last week, we published a story about AOL considering licensing patents rather than suing over them. A move to not further clog the arteries of our already busy patent court system.

You would think that AOL, TechCrunch and Crunchbase would be very protective of not just their intellectual property but also the intellectual property of those businesses and members of the community that they serve. You would also think that TechCrunch, Crunchbase and AOL would be protective and supportive of Android developer’s, especially those who have premium apps in the Google Play Store.

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Walmart & T-Mobile Tapped For Angry Birds Space Promotion

Walmart has signed up to help promote Rovio Mobile’s next big mega hit Angry Birds Space. The game goes live in app markets across the world tomorrow, and if there was a store to line up to buy the app the tent lines would be around buildings by now.

The newest installment of Angry Birds is very well developed and takes on it’s physics nature that the game is grounded on. To come up with physics principals pertaining to space and weightlessness Rovio consulted real astronauts from Russia and NASA.

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Even Oprah Can Have A Failed Start Up

When Oprah Winfrey announced almost three years ago that she was ending her run as the queen of daytime tv and instead, starting her OWN (no pun intended, ok maybe a little) Network, it was met with mixed response. There was already Oxygen (which Oprah has an interest in), Lifetime TV, the Hallmark channel and other networks that are focused on the lives of women. I think because of Oprah being Oprah she was given a bigger chance than anyone else who would have started their OWN (there it is again) network.

Oprah brought some of her other daytime pals along, most notably Rosie O’Donnell who herself sat pretty high on the throne of daytime tv. Unfortunately, OWN hasn’t gained the viewership that Winfrey had anticipated.

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