General Assembly Demo Night is an informal tech gathering in which this startup community’s members learn about new projects and launches hatched within its comfy coworking space located on NYC’s lower Broadway. No judges, no awards. Just a guy or gal standing up (or sitting down) and saying what they’ve been doing and then getting some feedback.
While sitting in the audience yesterday evening, it felt more to me like the biz equivalent of a certain folk music scene that took place further downtown and a few decades ago, minus the smoke and black turtlenecks.
I was captivated by a few of the GA presentations given by these entrepreneurial artists. Their message seems focused on breaking down pretty well established business models, and returning power back to the consumers.
Tred, was one of those rebels, and they have the proposition that car buyers should be able to order the auto they want rather than being limited and steered to the dealer’s current inventory. They’re not the only player in this space, of course, but Tred seems to have perfected the on-line ordering experience, initially for Audis and BMWs, with panoramic views of exteriors and dashboards, along with menus for selecting features and package bundles.
Presumably they will move on to cars for the 99% in the future. In any case, Tred’s Grant Feek explained that auto manufacturers can’t accept orders directly–anti-trust rules and state laws prevent this. Instead, his startup will still funnel orders to dealers, but with color choices and options that consumers really want. Dealers will then bid on these orders in a reverse auction.
It’s a transfer of pricing power away from dealers, but said Feek:’We’re charging per transaction which makes it easier for them [the dealers] to assign value to what we’re doing.”
Another power transfer, this time in the video space, is the basis behind VHX. In this exchange, viewers become TV producers of their channels, loading videos and sharing their choices with friends, while legacy TV networks are left to find new lines of work.
You say you’ve seen this idea? But as boxee alum, “Star Wars Uncut” creator, and co-founder Casey Pugh put it, YouTube is the last place to go for interesting video. Pugh said he usually finds great work buried in tweets or Boing-Boing posts or emailed by friends. VHX is essentially crowd curated TV, where you can follow the video streams of your social network, or pick ones suggested by the anonymous masses. Unlike YT, the stream of videos are played back-to-back with no interruption and in a non-teeny format.
I tried VHX when I returned home, and I began to feel the lure of its endless-loop approach. My wanderlust got the best of me, and I found myself immersed in something called Venizia, a video visit to Venice. I left my Italian journey reluctantly.
There’s more here than just a VXH web site. This crew of video developers has built a platform–read APIs– which lets anyone create a standalone site. Pugh used it to make something called Music Video Genome, which he describes as a “Pandora for music videos”. Enough said.
Another presentation in this power-shift theme was from MakOm. It’s described as a publishing solution for niche travel publishers to reach mobile readers. It allows travel bloggers and small print-based publishers to distribute their material on to tablets and smartphones.
MakOm figures out where travelers are located (GPS, WiFi) and then suggests relevant material. Then it gives readers the ability to create their own synthetic travel guides on devices (IOS now, Android later) by pulling in selected sections–the part on great local restaurants from one blogger, and that off-the-beaten path historic site from a different source. And yes, materials can be downloaded ahead of time so that international roaming charges can be avoided.
Travel content providers can choose to charge for their material (and MakOm will take a 30% cut of the transaction), but they are not required to.
With so much travel material locked into print, or in not very device-friendly forms and the expense of turning it into usable mobile content still quite high, MakOm offers a direct, no-expense path for travel authors to get recognition and get paid.
And a final shoutout to PaperLex, who’s doing similar power shifting magic in the legal forms market.