I’ve read many, many tech white papers sprinkled with the conventional bizspeak phrase, return on investment. But at Hoboken Tech Meetup last night, I came across a new metric, social return on investment or, in acronymese, SROI while listening to founder Malcolm Arnold discuss his company RubyNuby.
RubyNuby is a social good company that teaches Ruby on Rails programming to at-risk and disadvantaged youth. The startup matches teens with professional mentors, sponsors start-up competitions, and gets its youthful members high-paying jobs.
There were other startups with big dreams and compelling demos. You should’ve been there!
RubyNuby
RubyNuby is technically set up as a for-profit LLC—for complicated reasons Malcom decided against 501c status—but which plows all its profits back into the company. I hadn’t known the non-profit model was so intricate until listening to Arnold’s presentation.
To make matters even twistier, RubyNuby has a 501(3c) part, called Agile Activism, which has a project afoot to deliver laptops and Ruby training in Kenya and Uganda. See the reference below if you’d like to volunteer or contribute old hardware.
I also enjoyed presentations from MegaPhone Labs and Mimedia. It was almost a relief, in a way, to listen to more conventional startup stories with mundane business models. 😉
Megaphone’s interactive TV platform at work.
Megaphone Labs
MegaPhone Labs turns boring and unsexy telephony and DTMF keypads into a kind of collaborative remote controller for television. The company’s goal is make television a social and interactive experience. And give TV advertisers measurable click data on audience engagement.
To demo this concept, HTM attendees used their cell phones to call into a special number and participate in a simple game of Whack-A-Mole, which was displayed in real-time on the conference room screen. This type of game has in fact been used by Megaphone’s sports teams clients on stadium-size screens. Fun stuff.
The bigger point is that MegaPhone has developed a proprietary telephony platform —this ain’t Twilio or Tropo—to handle massive numbers of callers and then feed touch tone keys to a web app. The audience interacts with what appears on their TV screen— Q&A-type contests, surveys, games or just about anything that can be imagined with their APIs.
Mimedia
Mimedia is more than just a cloud-based backup company. They’ll send you their special Shuttle Drive to perform the initial full back up of music, videos, and photos that live on your computer. You mail back the Drive to Mimedia, and then they’ll then store the media into the cloud. Much easier and less painful than doing it yourself over a typical upstream-limited broadband connection.
By the way, incremental storage is then quickly handled by their on-computer software.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Unlike some the other players, Mimedia also provides cloud-based media management—album art and artists for music, playlists—and media players. And most significantly they do transcoding on the fly. So for example an H.264 video which won’t play natively on your iPad, can be viewed as a Mimedia video. Mimedia currently translates 125 audio and video formats.
It’s all very convenient for viewing your own media content on any device that has a browser. And they have iPhone and iPad apps as well.
Addendum: In getting this post out quickly, I neglected to mention Bob Dorf’s presentation on customer development. Working with Steve Blank, his partner, Dorf helped midwife the now well-known customer development model—taught at many business schools— for new product creation. Based on my limited business understanding, I’d call it a market-driven approach, which certainly resonated with many of the entrepreneurs in attendance. Dorf also had many fascinating business anecdotes that I hope to steal for some future posts. Thanks Bob!
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