#xconomy

[fabricmedia]

Over the last two years I have often been asked: What is the best way to move out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) or other public cloud services? There are ma

Anthony Skinner, Head of Engineering and Product at iSpot.tv, on building an agnostic cloud infrastructure.

[fabricmedia]

iSpot.tv Lands $22M to Measure TV Ads and Their Online Impact | Xconomy

Many modern advertising campaigns still start with a prime time TV commercial, but any Mad Man worth his salt follows that up with social and digital media

iSpot.tv closed a $21.9M Series B round of funding.

[cottonbureau]

Eventually, the concept of T-shirt as a medium got turned in on itself. In the early 2000s, discount retailers like Old Navy began mass-producing cheap tees with slogans and insignia for things that didn’t even exist. Cotton Bureau allows people to take the idea even further—sure, you could get the logo of your actual company or club made into a shirt. But the truly great stuff on the site seems like a one-off in the best way possible: an idea you’ll never see anywhere else, dreamed up by someone out there with an eye for style or a wry sense of humor. That vision of the T-shirt happens to fit perfectly with the atomized nature of popular culture in the Internet age, when anyone can publish anything at any moment and powerful creative tools are in more hands than ever. The idea that you’d be wearing a piece of clothing only owned by a handful of people in the world is much more likely today than the chances of another “Just Do It” or “I Want My MTV” T-shirt craze becoming a thing. “There are no real cultural monoliths anymore. Everyone is part of their own sort of nano-culture. And I think what Cotton Bureau is able to some extent to do is find other members of a nano-culture and display it on a T-shirt,” Fanelli says. “Someone is sort of putting a T-shirt out there as a beacon, and they’ll find a few dozen other people who respond to that.

Curt Woodward wrote about us for Xconomy. Check out the whole article to get the scoop on Cotton Bureau.

[kickassledes]

The future is way behind schedule.

Wade Roush, "In Google's Moon Race, Teams Face a Reckoning," Xconomy

[nomiku]

A great new piece about the story of Nomiku from Xconomy!

Read more about Nomiku and its approaching ship date and how it came to be here! 

[bytelight]

The Problem With Kickstarter

Kickstarter helped pioneer crowdfunding for creative projects. It has been enormously successful. The Kickstarter model is to set a fundraising goal. If the project meets its goal, the money is transferred to the creators to fund the development of the project. Kickstarter collects a 5 percent fee, the creator gets funding, and the backers get the satisfaction of sponsoring a new idea.

For creative projects this model works well. As long as the creator is genuine, you can expect that they’ll deliver something. An aspiring director is probably going to make a film. Sure, it might be bad. But that’s the only risk you take.

Hardware projects are different. Hardware is hard. Things blow up. You get sued for patent infringement. Going from prototype to mass production is an enormous challenge. You need the help of experienced industrial designers, engineers, and manufacturing experts to make everything work. Inventory costs and cashflow management become an issue. For the types of companies that go on Kickstarter, they often don’t have the expertise required to successfully deliver on their promises. Delays are inevitable.

Continue to Xconomy to read the full article.

[patkinsel]

Curt wrote a great article in Xconomy about Spindle and the broader local discovery space. It was great to chat with Curt and I continue to be very impressed by Xconomy. They really understand a company and a space when they write about them. See this past article about Docs.com as another example. Thanks, Curt! 

[n-days]

While spending some time in Berlin earlier this year, several colleagues brought up the point that Detroit today is similar to what Berlin was 20 years ago (right after the wall fell and the city was rebuilding). They do share some characteristics, but not enough where they would be close analogs of each other (Berlin is on another scale in terms of being a capital city and cultural center, plus the level of investment being made in its infrastructure).

It did intrigue me enough though to take a closer look at Detroit through the lens of progress being made as an entrepreneurial hub and my perceptions of that from following it passively over the years. The above op-ed captures my thoughts on the trajectory of the city and special thanks to Xconomy for publishing it.