New Work Cityers hard at work on a winter night late last year. Photo: Alexander Hotz
Last month we spoke with Tony Bacigalupo, the Mayor of New Work City and a prominent figure in New York’s tech scene. New Work City is a Soho based co-working space where independent professionals can come and work among other go getters. Most recently Bacigalupo and Co. were written up by NPR as part of a trend piece. Check out one of Tony’s other projects Tech Drinks and of course listen to our podcast here:
Last week, we spoke with Roger Wu the CEO of Klickable.tv. Klickable is an interactive video platform that allows users to click on objects within a video. Imagine watching a music video and clicking on Jay-Z’s bling to learn where you can get some for yourself. It’s possible with Klickable’s interface.
We tried Klickable by applying it to a video we made last month with Fred Wilson. Check out the video and click around:
Roger told us the story behind Klickable’s founding and shared his plans for the company’s future development and funding. Below is the interview:
Mary Kathleen Flynn at last December's Obliterati Party. Photo: Nick McGlynn,
In December, Alexander Hotz spoke with Mary Kathleen Flynn, the Senior Editor/Senior Video Producer for The Deal. Flynn has been covering the tech scene in New York City for over 20 years. In the podcast she shares her insight about industry and its future.
Also check out Mary’s list of the most interesting startups in NYC:
David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, explains how he created the microblogging platform. Karp also outlines his team’s next steps for the Tumblr community.
To date Tumblr has over 3.1 million publishers. Karp said in December the site got 500 million impressions. And that same month more than 4 million unique visitors came to the site, according to Compete.com numbers. What’s next? Karp said he hopes to add new features and “perfect” the dashboard.
We sat down with Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures to talk about the trends he’s seeing in tech and the trends he’d like to focus on in the coming year. We also picked his brain about advice he would give to startups.
Fred Wilson Intro: The key words that we look for, that we invest around, are mobile, social, global, playful, intelligent and probably also immediacy. Immediacy is another time for the real-time web, things that are happening right here right now.
Matt Mireles thought of the idea for SpeakerText while working with video and audio as a journalist. (Photo: Vadim Lavrusik)
SpeakerText has the potential to make video a lot more searchable, useful and navigable. Founder Matt Mireles demoed the video tool at January’s NY Tech Meetup with resounding applause and approval from the audience.
The tool syncs the video track with the transcript and allows you to navigate the video by clicking on different parts of the text.
Perhaps the most useful feature is that if anyone copies the transcript text from the video and pastes it into a blog post, it turns it into a link that goes directly to that moment in the video (a feature that got oos and ahhs at the meetup).
Right now the tool works with YouTube API, and it would be great to see the technology extended to other video platforms. So where does the transcript come from? It integrates with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for one hour of video transcription for $20. Considering most videos are a little over 3 minutes long, that’s not too bad of a price.
