A corporation’s online presence today has expanded far beyond the single page brochures of the past. Now companies regularly churn out content for their web site, blogs, social media sites, etc. They often need writers to help create this content, but that expertise can be difficult to find on staff. Contently is helping solve this problem through its online platform that connects writers with companies who need their services.

“Contently is an easy way for businesses to get high quality writing done,” explains Joe Coleman, Co-founder of Contently. “What we’re finding is that brands are increasingly producing more and more content, but publishing isn’t their core competency, so typically brands don’t have people in-house who can write the content. Usually they don’t want to build editorial teams, and there’s really no central place where you can go find great writing talent. Contently is building that marketplace of professional journalists and bloggers where companies can come and find great talent and work with those guys to create great content.”

When you sign up with Contently, the first thing you do is have a conversation with the head of Contently’s editorial division. You describe your audience, your brand, your goals, topics that you want to cover, and the dos and don’ts for your brand.  Contently uses that information to build a style guide, which they can give to writers and editors to make sure they’re creating content that’s well written and on-point. They also use the style guide to help find writers uniquely suited for your project.

“One of the things we believe about great content,” says Coleman, “is that it’s important to have not just a writer who’s a good writer but also somebody who really understands the topic they’re writing about. We have that big database of professional journalists and bloggers. We know that they’re good writers. We know what they’re good at writing about, so if P&G [for example] comes to us and needs specific writers around a certain topic, we can go and connect P&G to a group of writers who talk about those sorts of things and can do a good job with that content.”

Finding steady, reliable income can be quite challenging for freelance writers, and seeking out new projects takes away from time that could be spent on their craft. Contently hopes to give writers and journalists a quick and convenient way to pursue their passions and earn competitive wages doing it.

“One of the things we’re most excited about with the business is giving freelance journalists a new way to work,” explains Coleman. “Being a freelance writer is really hard. As you start out from journalism school…you spend a lot of your time chasing editors and chasing checks when all you really want to do is write about the stuff you love. At Contently, we found a unique formula where we have brands paying for high quality original content. They’re willing to pay more than say traditional media companies and people who are only paying as much as they can afford based on ad impressions and those sorts of things, which means we can give writers higher payouts and basically allow them to earn a living through Contently.”

More info:

Contently web site: http://contently.com/
Contently blog: http://contently.com/blog/
Contently profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/contently
Contently profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/gocontently

Social media has allowed us to preserve and share moments from our lives in ways we never could before. But with so many different social media services out there, these memories are often scattered in multiple places making it difficult to search and retrieve the specific moments we want to re-discover. Memolane has created an application that pulls all of this content together to create a timeline of our lives.

“What we see is basically everyone is getting more and more active in posting their lives on the Internet, and contrary to [what] many believe, it’s actually happening much outside Facebook. And the number of amazing, great social media services is ever-growing. You have Foursquare, you have TripIt, you have Gowalla, you have Foodspotting, you have SoundCloud. All these services all capture different parts of your life, and it’s all happening now, so more and more people are capturing more and more of their life on the Internet, and it’s capturing and presenting all these moments, but the problem is, I think, also now how do we consume this?”

One challenge with many social media services is that you miss whatever content appears during those times that you’re not looking at the live stream. Memolane indexes all of this content by time and presents it in a format that allows you to see, search and share.

“A lot of our users are coming back and saying, ‘I tried to find it on Facebook, I tried to find it on Twitter. Where was it I actually posted this?’ And then they come on Memolane and they search and boof, it’s there. And what we’ve really emphasized is a nice visualization of their search result.”

Content on Memolane is organized in “lanes”. You might have your own lane or a lane with friends, and you decide how much you want to share and with whom for each lane. To sign up, you simply provide an email address and password, select the social media services that you want to feed into Memolane and then create your first lane.

Memolane recently released an updated version of its application with additional features. It also has been optimized for touch, so it will work well with iPads or Android tablets.

“We have emphasized a number of cool, new features to make it even more engaging for users. Your life is not just about one timeline. Your life is consisting of multiple timelines, like the time when you were back in high school, or the time when you were on vacation with your best friends or your wedding or something like that. You create lanes with your friends, with your family, with your kids, and we pull in all that content and suddenly there’s a lot of different, fantastic lanes that come to life.”

More info:

Memolane web site: http://memolane.com/site
Memolane blog: http://blog.memolane.com/
Memolane profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/memolane
Memolane profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/memolane

I’ve always wanted my own, live radio show, but creating such a broadcast has typically involved lots of equipment, technical staff and coordination between the two. Now it’s easier than ever with a new app called Spreaker, which allows you to broadcast high quality audio over the Internet with nothing more than the microphone on your iPhone.

“What we do is we help people to create their own audio content,” explains Francesco Bashieri, Co-founder and CEO of Spreaker, “their own radio show or their own podcast, broadcast it live to their social networks and actually monetize that content.”

While there are other companies that provide technology that enables live broadcasting, Bashieri believes that Spreaker has a competitive advantage.

“We compete on the quality of the broadcast—much better quality—and on the ease of use…” says Brashieri. “It has to do with the infrastructure and the backbone. We actually chose to stream on 128 kilobits stereo, and it’s somehow more resource intensive, but we think that the quality in this kind of application is very important. Other guys are doing 32 kilobits, and you can feel it.  It’s like listening on the phone.”

Spreaker offers both streaming and pre-recorded capabilities. With live streaming, the audience can interact with you and each other as the broadcast is taking place. They can post questions and get answers in real-time.

You can embed the Spreaker player on any third party web site and customize it, similar to YouTube. You also have the ability to download broadcasts as MP3 files, and use iTunes-compatible RSS feeds to syndicate the content pretty much anywhere. Spreaker is available as both a free service with ads and a premium service, which eliminates ads, while providing more storage and bandwidth.

“What we figured out is that the podcasting ecosystem is currently flawed,” explains Bashieri, “because it’s very difficult. People have to source all their tools from different parts and somehow stitch them together. They need to deal with technology, they need to deal with hosting and bandwidth, [and] they need to do promotion. They have no idea how to monetize this, and this is what we are all about.  We want to help those people.”

More info:

Spreaker web site: http://www.spreaker.com/
Spreaker blog: http://blog.spreaker.com/
Spreaker profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/spreaker
Spreaker profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spreaker

Professional bloggers and publishers are always looking for ways to generate more engagement from their audiences, and one of the best ways to do that is to encourage people to share their opinions. Urtak helps get your audience talking with its unique polling system, which not only allows you to ask questions but enables your audience to ask them as well.

“Urtak is a question and answer tool that can be embedded on your content,” explains Marc Lizoain, Co-founder and CEO of Urtak, “and it increases engagement and captures much more audience response…It’s a new kind of poll. We call it a collaborative poll. You do a poll to find out what people are thinking, but if you don’t know what they’re thinking already, how can you know what questions to ask them? Urtak lets everyone ask questions, and all the questions are answered ‘yes,’ ‘no’, or ‘don’t care.’ That’s just to keep things really simple, so that we can compare the results of any two questions. In fact, we built an algorithm, and the more you answer ‘don’t care,’ the less that question will get asked, so ‘don’t care’ is like a quality control.”

Next to each question is a pie chart that shows the results of that poll. If you roll over the chart, you can see exact voting percentages as well as the number of people participating. Urtak is a free tool, but the company hopes to generate revenue by allowing high volume professional publishers to insert sponsored questions into the Urtak flow.

While Urtak is built to be capable of standing up to professional use and traffic, it’s simple enough and powerful enough to be used no matter how big your following is. As the content generator, you start the conversation, and with Urtak, your audience has the power to keep it going and take it in new directions.

“You seed Urtak with a few questions,” says Lizoain, “and share those with you audience. The audience can answer them, and if they’re so inspired, and they often are, they can add questions of their own. So a boring and ordinary poll becomes a living, growing conversation.”

More info:

Urtak web site: https://urtak.com/
Urtak blog: http://blog.urtak.com/
Urtak profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/urtak
Urtak profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/urtak

There are a number of services that allow us to leverage the cloud for file storage and file sharing, unlocking information once trapped on a single device and making it accessible from our smart phones and tablets. In fact, many of us have files stored in several locations, and while there are certainly conveniences that come with these services, having files with multiple services that have multiple sign-ins comes with its own set of problems. Dispatch is developing a way for us to simplify file management in the cloud by supporting a seamless integration of our many cloud accounts.

“Dispatch brings together the cloud services you have—your DropBox, your Google Docs, your Evernote, your email and even your Instagram and Spotify eventually—so that you can see all of your stuff in one place,” explains Jesse Lamb, Co-founder and CEO of Dispatch, Inc. “Because everything’s moved to the cloud, everything gets kind of scattered, and Dispatch brings it back together.”

Whether it’s our photos on Facebook or our ideas on Evernote, we’re storing more and more information in the cloud. With Dispatch you can simply drag and drop files among the different services you use.

“There’s a power of having your stuff together…” says Lamb. “You can see the latest of what you’re working on and even launch into the different services, so if you have a lot of Google accounts, you can launch right into what you need from there without having to fight with the single sign-on that they have right now.”

Dispatch allows you to, in effect, connect your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Contacts, etc. and use these media to share files without having to worry about which cloud services the recipient uses. For example, instead of direct messaging someone on Twitter to get his email address so that you can share a photo, video or other file, you can just grant him access to the file directly via Twitter.

“We’re not trying to build another channel for messaging,” explains Lamb, “because we already have really good channels. The idea is extending those so you can do more with them and maybe finally get people to stop using email attachments [and eliminate] all the friction that happens around that. [It also] gives you a way to move things back and forth and have a conversation around [the file] you’re talking about. There’s a lot of power, once you bring all these services together and bring all the people together that you know so that you can work around your stuff in new ways. It’s really exciting.”

More info:

Dispatch web site: http://dispatch.io/
Dispatch profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/dispatch-io
Dispatch profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Dispatch

If you’ve been inside of a school recently, you may have noticed a mixed bag of computing resources—some new systems, some very old systems and everything in between. Managing such a wide variety of devices running a hodgepodge of old and new operating systems can be challenging even for the most experienced IT professional, much less someone who’s day job is something other than IT as is often the case in schools. Neverware has developed a solution to this problem in the form of a hardware box that allows yesterday’s computers to run today’s software.

“Technology for me is simply a means to an end,” explains Jonathan Hefter, CEO of Neverware, “and the end needs to be a clear value proposition…Using technology, we’re often able to identify these great inefficiencies, so in the case of what I’m doing right now, I realized, ‘Hey, we’re replacing hundreds of computers in schools a year when each computer is only using a fraction of its computing power. Why not put one powerful computer in the middle of that and have all the old computers just use that power?’ Now, nobody ever told me that I was just re-inventing mainframe computing for the modern day, but I guess it was just before my time.”

Incorporating Neverware is a fairly straightforward process. Users signup for the service and receive a juicebox, which they put on their network. They instruct all the old computers to boot from the juicebox instead of the hard drive, and the box takes over from there. It provides all the computing power and allows the old machine to run the latest software in a virtual environment. The goal is for installation to be as quick and easy as possible so that any school can use Neverware, regardless of the technological expertise on hand.

“Simplicity is key,” says Hefter, “because I don’t know if it’s going to be a Citibank veteran or the extra science teacher who’s going to be managing the network. That being said, a great part of what the IT person does in the school is just run around putting out fires. So if I can remove the need for the kind of constant, non-stop maintenance, it frees them up to do what IT people want to do, which is continue to build and improve the information experience in the school.”

More info:

Neverware web site: http://neverware.com/
Neverware profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/neverware
Neverware profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/neverware

It wasn’t that long ago when taking a photo required at least a small amount of prior planning. Now, we simply pull our phones from our pockets and snap high quality photos whenever and wherever we want, and we have dozens of apps that allow us to edit and share our photos with ease. Aviary is making these apps even more powerful and feature rich with their new developer tool kit.

“We build an SDK that developers can build into their mobile apps—iOS for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch as well as Android,” explains Iz Derdik, Chief Technology Officer with Aviary, Inc. “[This SDK] allows them to embed a photo editor directly inside their app, [so] within the workflow of taking photos, people can now edit them as well.”

With Aviary’s SDK, you can apply a wealth of effects, such as vintage effects or negative effects, to your photos. You can manipulate colors, add stickers, add text, adjust contrast and brightness as well as crop your photos. Or you can simply use Aviary’s auto correct filter, which takes a photo and makes it better automatically.  And it takes only minutes for developers to include Aviary in their code.

“On the mobile side of things, it’s really, really easy,” explains Derdik. “There’s no cost for the tools at all. All they have to do is download the SDK, which is a library in both iOS and Android…that they can statically link inside their code, change a couple of config settings in their app and deploy to the app store. That’s all there is to it.”

Aviary plans to generate revenue by offering users the opportunity to pay for premium effects that will allow them to build their own filters using ingredients like stickers and fonts that they can purchase through the apps. The partner app that generates the sale will get a percentage of that sale.

“The market opportunity is huge,” says Derdik. “The phone is a ubiquitous part of every person’s life. They have cameras on them, and now that people have cameras in their pockets, they’re taking tons and tons of photos. [Our SDK] allows us to help them make their photos even better.”

More info:

Aviary web site: http://www.aviary.com/
Aviary blog: http://blog.aviary.com/
Aviary profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/aviary
Aviary profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aviary

There’s a palpable energy right now around the New York City startup scene that’s been building over the last couple of years. One organization right in the middle of the action is General Assembly, a campus for technology, design and entrepreneurship.

“The idea [for General Assembly] was really kind of a grass roots community building project in New York,” explains Adam Pritzker, Co-founder of General Assembly. “And what we wanted to do is we wanted to get really bright, young entrepreneurs under one roof in a really collaborative environment.”

Pritzker and three co-founders, Matthew Brimer, Brad Hargreaves, and Jake Schwartz, founded GA in 2010.  They leased a 20,000 square foot space on Broadway and began polling the New York technology and design communities to determine what they wanted in this environment. What resulted is a combination of work space, communal space, a library and a classroom—a true entrepreneurial campus.

“The classroom is really the most interesting part,” says Pritzker. “One of the initial things we did is we said, ‘Ok, we’re not going to charge too much for the desks, but we know we have really bright people working here—people who have started Etsy, people who have started Vimeo, people who have won Emmys—what we do want to do is have those people teach classes to a wider community and have anybody in the New York community who wanted to come learn have that resource available.’”

Courses are designed to build upon the basic liberal arts education that prevails at most American educational institutions by providing more specific skills necessary to thrive in today’s workforce. GA appears to have identified a significant gap in the market as demand has been great and has outpaced expectations.

“Over time,” says Pritzker, “as demand outstripped the supply we could offer, we have started to put processes in place to be able to think about who might be a part of our community. And that really is twofold—number one is how serious are the various people about what they do and about developing their craft and, almost more importantly, what they want to give back to the community, because this whole thing is based on reciprocity. I’d say that’s the core of what we do. So someone may be totally brilliant but if they’re not at all interested in getting involved in the community, it doesn’t really work.”

Dedicated memberships, those with a dedicated desk at GA, cost $600 per month. Communal memberships are currently $300 per month and include 24/7 access to all of the common areas at GA, early access and discounts to classes and events as well as some special members-only perks like Rackspace hosting and access to private fireside chats programmed just for members.

“We have all these major, legacy industries [in New York] of retail, entertainment, finance, publishing, and advertising,” explains Pritzker, “and everyone’s kind of realizing now that we’ve reached this inflection point where technology is touching every one of those. I think employers and employees alike are wondering, ‘Where do we go learn about this. What are my resources?’ So GA is hopefully, if we do our job right and focus on what we’re doing, going to become that place.”

More info:

General Assembly web site: http://www.generalassemb.ly/
General Assembly blog: http://www.generalassemb.ly/blog
General Assembly profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/GA

With more and more of us carrying around camera-equipped mobile devices, there has been no shortage of tools created to help us share the photos we take. Piictu enters this crowded space with an iPhone app and a different approach to photos and their role in the way we communicate with one another.

“Piictu is a platform to use pictures as objects of interaction,” explains Jonathan Slimak, CEO of Piictu. “In Piictu, every photo that anybody uploads is the beginning of a conversation. Anybody can then respond to that picture or start a new theme or new thread of their own. So really all these pictures have a value within the context they’re being served to.”

Piictu creates a narrative through photography. Unlike other photo sharing tools in which users comment on photos, in Piictu, conversations are entirely photographic. Your reply comes in the form of a photo you share.

“We’re keeping kind of the belief of restriction at the forefront of the product we’re building,” says Slimak, “and we’re trying to stimulate creativity through this concept of restriction. It reminds us a little bit of Twitter in their early days of putting restriction and maybe making people find ways to work around those restrictions, and it generated a lot of these interesting ideas about how people can communicate to each other. I think we’re doing a very similar approach through pictures, and when you think about it, the beauty around it is that pictures as a language goes beyond any culture. You can have someone in Africa talking to someone in Brazil talking to someone in Alabama, and they don’t need to have the same backgrounds or know the same language, but we like to say, ‘We all talk picture.’”

Users can search to find existing streams in which to insert their photos; however, Piictu is not meant to be a cataloguing tool. The app is meant to stimulate short specific interactions around photos.

“A good example could be what I’m drinking right now,” explains Slimak. “When you think about having a very public interaction of pictures of what you’re drinking right now, [that] may have little value; however, if you start a stream and participate…with you three of your friends, even though that stream may have like five or six pictures, every time someone adds to that stream, that can be a very satisfying interaction for everybody involved.”

More info:

Piictu web site: http://piictu.com/
Piictu blog: http://blog.piictu.com/
Piictu profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/piictu
Piictu profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/piictu

Joel Spolsky is the programmer’s programmer. He started Fog Creek Software, Stack Exchange and has been a famous blogger for over 10 years. I sat down with him at his New York office to talk about the early days of blogging, how small teams are having a big impact in the world, a new product that Fog Creek just released, and a host of other topics.

“We’re the old school bloggers from the past,” explains Spolsky. “When I started blogging, I didn’t want to say I was a blogger, because I didn’t think I was doing the official blog thing, which was to link to something that someone else has [written]…and say, ‘Here’s an interesting thing, and then here’s my perspective on that.’ I didn’t want to do that.”

Instead, Spolsky used what was essentially the one tool available at the time, EditThisPage.com, and created his Joel on Software blog to publish a series of essays on subjects where he thought he could add value—describing how a certain part of the software development process works, how you should design software, how you should build software companies, and others.

Blogging has, of course, exploded over the last 10 years, and it’s one of many ways that small teams can have a big impact—a theme I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Technology allows someone to publish to millions of people instantly. Developers can swipe their credit card and have access to hundreds of servers in the cloud. Small teams of people are empowered now like never before, and, in many ways, small teams seem to work better and more efficiently than larger ones.

Spolsky has a theory regarding why smaller teams work so well, at least in regards to software development teams. “None of [our teams] is bigger than eight, and that’s a gigantic team that we have of eight people…What I know for a fact is it’s all about communications between people. If you have two people, there’s one communication path. If you have three people, there are three communication paths. You went from one person that needs to talk to one person to three people that need to communicate among one another…You get to four people, and there are six [lines of communication], I believe. It grows like crazy, and once you get to teams of eight or nine people, they don’t even know each other practically; there’s just way too much communication and coordination that needs to happen. It’s just not possible for everybody to listen to everybody.”

Even small teams have to work to stay organized and focused on the right tasks, however, and Fog Creek Software’s latest app, Trello, helps them do just that.

“The basic idea of Trello,” explains Spolsky, “is it’s a list of lists…It’s for teams keeping track of what everyone is working on, but you can use it for any kind of list of lists…You can add lists whenever you want and throw things in there. You can rearrange lists freely. Everything is very, very flexible.”

With Trello, you create boards associated with certain projects, for example. On those boards are cards with items that need to be accomplished to complete the project. Click on the card and you can list even more specific tasks associated with each item, assign team members to each task and establish due dates. You also create lists on the boards that represent stages of the project, so whenever tasks are completed, you click on the card and move it to the appropriate stage until the entire project is finished.

“The basic idea is that we started with something reasonably simple that’s still very useful…and now we’re building an API.” Spolsky hopes that developers will start to build cool plug-ins for the app like permissions, workflow, a way for people to anonymously submit new things to boards, or change the background color, allowing Trello to continue to improve over time.

More info:

Fog Creek Software Web Site: http://www.fogcreek.com/
Trello web site: https://trello.com/
Trello blog: http://blog.trello.com/
Fog Creek Software profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/fog-creek-software
Trello profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/TrelloApp