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Inside MuckerLab, The Startup Accelerator That's Amping Up L.A.'s Tech Ecosystem
In the San Francisco Bay Area, there is no shortage of “accelerator” programs that promise to take fledgling technology companies to the next level by providing mentorship, funding, business introductions, and the like. And as the startup scene a few hundred miles south in Los Angeles continues to heat up, the appetite for accelerators is growing too.
One of the leading new startup accelerators in L.A. is MuckerLab, so while TechCrunch TV was in Southern California recently we stopped by to take a look inside and find out about what makes the program tick. Check out the video embedded above to look at the MuckerLab space and hear co-founder Will Hsu talk about the MuckerLab vibe, what he and other MuckerLab mentors bring to the table when it comes to shaping new companies, what he’d like to see in the future to make the L.A. startup scene really shine, and more.
Video Platform OpenWatch Aims To Support Global Citizen Journalism
OpenWatch, which presented at media startup accelerator Matter‘s NYC Demo Day today, wants to become a video platform for citizen journalism worldwide. Founded in November last year, the company is at the start of its fundraising process, with the hope of closing a fast seed round to get things off the ground.
The purpose of OpenWatch is to create a global network of video reporters and investigators who can expose important issues around the world, co-founder and CEO Rich Jones tells us. The appeal of OpenWatch is especially apparent overseas in countries where the press isn’t free.
“We still have a semblance of a free press [in the U.S.],” Jones said. ”This project has serious international implications. I really do believe that mobile tech and network tech has a huge opportunity for creating a public free press for countries that didn’t have that opportunity before.”
He added that although Android adoption overseas is taking off, those without smartphones can call an OpenWatch line and use the phone as a voice recorder.
Since the new version of OpenWatch launched one month ago, Jones said thousands have been using the network — NSA PRISM protests generated videos from Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago, for instance.
Multifaceted storytelling provides perspectives that might go untold in a news report written by one person. At the same time, open source journalism means that the facts might be unintentionally skewed, or worse, hijacked as propaganda.
For that, OpenWatch includes full primary sources with all videos so that if a viewer is dissatisfied with the story, he can fact-check it himself. Everything, including phone calls and emails, should be posted and considered on the record.
The OpenWatch platform is also meant as a resource for official news organizations.
“Maybe the New York Times can send someone [abroad], but the Village Voice can’t,” Jones said. “This really lowers the cost of doing that kind of international reporting.”
OpenWatch existed as an open source project for a number of years before the company was officially founded. During that time, the founders also created an application called Cop Recorder, which gave people a platform to secretly film their interactions with police officers and upload those videos. Those were built into a global map of police encounters that spoke to regional trends in police enforcement and civil rights abuses, Jones said.
“I don’t like seeing the current role of media as public relations or propagandist,” Jones said. “There’s not that much that does what journalism is supposed to do, to keep authorities accountable.”
Mixamo Is Building A Platform For The Biggest Game Developers To Create Their Own 3D Characters
With app stores becoming ever more competitive, game makers have had to upgrade from building 2D games to creating 3D titles over the past two years. That has meant even more creative and intensive work for artists and producers, as the graphics processing power on smartphones has increased.
But there are tools to help. Mixamo is a 25-person startup that has existed very quietly for the past five years. Even though they haven’t really spoken to the press much before, they’ve raised about $11 million in total and have racked up customers like Microsoft, EA, Sony, Blizzard and Gameloft.
They’re a web-based service that helps developers tool and animate 3D characters by making rigging and animation easier. A developer can upload the mesh for a character, place joint locators and locator rings to figure out how to make the character move, and then run Mixamo’s auto-rigging software. For console titles, the company says they can cut the cost of 500 seconds of animations by anywhere from 70 to 80 percent compared to standard techniques like keyframing and motion capture.
An offshoot from some research out of Stanford’s BioMotion Lab, the company has built up a store where they sell existing characters and animations on top of a subscription-based service. (They’re one of the largest animations providers in the asset store for Unity, a hugely popular game development platform backed by Sequoia Capital).
“We want to be an end-to-end solution where you can do complex animations with 10,000 polygons on a single character,” said Stefano Corazza, the CEO and co-founder of Mixamo.
Naturally, Mixamo has a SaaS-based business model, where they sell subscriptions by the seat to gaming studios. Their All Access product gives studios one year of unlimited access to their 3D characters, Auto-Rigger and their library of thousands of animations for $1,500 per seat.
They’re seeing developers handle about 800 or 900 characters per week and have a few thousand customers. The company has taken funding from Granite Ventures and Keynote Ventures.
Journalism May Be Collapsing, But With Pressfolios, At Least You Can Build A Nice Portfolio
If you’re a working journalist (or even an aspiring one), you’re probably getting tired of hearing that it’s important to build your personal brand. Now, leaving aside the obnoxiousness of the phrase “personal brand,” I suspect we hear it so much because it’s kinda true. A startup called Pressfolios aims to make it easy for journalists to build that brand through an online portfolio.
“Journalists probably best served by adopting the mindset of entrepreneur rather than a serial employee,” said co-founder Marc Samson. ”If they can put their best foot forward, they’re going to be better served in their careers, and a big part of that is keeping track of your published work and developing a professional identity.”
There are some obvious questions: Isn’t an online portfolio just a website? And aren’t there already tons of website-building tools? Well, yes, but there are some unique challenges for journalists, like the fact that old articles can be taken offline, and that you may be generating new content constantly but you don’t have time to add it to the portfolio.
For example, there’s a section of my personal website where I highlight some of my past work, but I haven’t updated it in a year, and one of the articles is no longer online. Samson told me there are “three core components working in symphony — our platform simultaneously serves as a personal repository, a cloud backup service, and a website builder, all wrapped into one.” So instead of just linking to the stories that you want to highlight, Pressfolios creates a backup version, as well. The profile is also specifically designed to highlight the kinds of things a journalist would want to highlight — the links to past content are pretty prominent, and there’s also a space for listing skills and a detailed biography. You can see my (very basic) profile here.
The site is leaving private beta today and adding a $12 per month pro version. New features include the ability to include RSS integration (making it easy to add your latest stories to your portfolio, and to even do it in bulk if you want); custom domains (so your Pressfolio doesn’t have to be a Pressfolio.com URL); and private Pressfolios (which makes it less obvious to your bosses that you’re looking for a new job).
What Pressfolios doesn’t offer is significant integration with social networks — you can link to your profiles, but that’s it. Samson acknowledged that a reporter with an active account and a significant following can attract a potential employer’s “curiosity,” but he argued that reporters probably aren’t going to “get hired based on their social media accounts.”
I like the product and I plan to build out my profile even further (though check back in a few weeks). However, I did wonder whether there’s enough of a market to build a big company here — after all, journalism is neither a lucrative nor fast-growing profession. Samson countered that journalists sometimes sell themselves short, and while he doesn’t necessarily think Pressfolios will become a big, venture-backed company (which is why it’s self-funded), he does see a real opportunity here.
Media Startup Accelerator Matter Comes To New York For Demo Day
Matter, the San Francisco-based accelerator and early-stage venture capital firm, held a Demo Day in New York today for its first class after an initial Demo Day last month in SF. Matter formed last year and is backed by the Knight Foundation and KQED, a public media network, with support from the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.
Matter invests in media startups, giving them $50,000 and five months to work on their products. As CEO Corey Ford said, it’s an attempt to figure out what new media will look like. Here’s a look at the six members of the first class, a cohort the accelerator is calling “Matter One”:
ChannelMeter: A video analytics platform that aims to help publishers and brands grow their audiences. The service, which focuses on YouTube videos but will expand to other video platforms, is meant to be a cleaner version of YouTube analytics, which packages reports in ZIP files of Excel sheets. The system also enables users to slice their own data.
Zeega: In its noun form, a Zeega is an embeddable combination of music, text, and GIFs. The audio plays continuously while viewers swipe through the GIFs; it’s essentially a music video creator that requires an artistic touch similar to that used on Vine. Some users are creating politicized stories, while others use it to make birthday cards for their friends. Zeega, which launched at Matter’s SF Demo Day, is also meant to serve publishers. The Atlantic and Mother Jones are already using Zeega, and today the team announced the launch of Zeega Publisher Pages.
SpokenLayer: Debuting at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in May 2012, SpokenLayer provides a listening option for news articles. The team at SpokenLayer created a system in which they can send articles to their voice artists and have the voice artists send back the recordings. They have partnered with The New Republic (post redesign) and with Fast Company, and announced today that they will now be working with The Globe and Mail, TIME, Time Out, Tablet, M, Byliner, and Narratively. SpokenLayer is bootstrapped and has not announced a funding round yet; founder and CEO Will Mayo said that they have reached a revenue-generating point.
OpenWatch: Launched as a video platform for citizen journalism, OpenWatch is hoping to draw participants worldwide. In an era when so much “news” looks like press releases, OpenWatch is aiming for accountability by putting the news in people’s lives, particularly abroad. The app provides a map that shows who else is covering the event and what aspects of the story still need to be uncovered.
Mixation: Enables publications and individuals to create 24-hour TV stations, which exist on Mixation’s site and can also float on external sites. The idea is that the online video viewing experience is stilted, because it requires clicking and browsing. Mixation is hoping to work directly with publishers and is promising a jump in increased revenue (in the case of TechCrunch, $300,000 per month).
Inkfold: Inkfold is built on the idea that people send a lot of article links via email, and most of those articles never get read. Because people are busy. The iOS app, which goes live today, finds these links in your email and pulls them into an Inkfold inbox, where they show up as a stream of complete articles, rather than URLs. The app also has a chat function in which users can respond to the person who sent them the article and carry on the conversation.
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