This Is How We Pick A NewCo

Over on the NewCo site, I’ve updated our explanation of how we chose NewCos around the world (1,100 or so so far). Here’s that post for those readers at Searchblog who might be interested. 

Since we launched NewCo’s festivals in late 2012, tens of thousands of people have experienced the unique NewCo model of “getting out to get in.” Thousands of NewCos have opened their doors in cities as varied as London, Austin, San Francisco, Detroit, Palo Alto, New York, Cincinnati and Amsterdam. Upcoming cities include Istanbul, Los Angeles, Portland, Mexico City and Boulder.

Read More

Leave a comment on This Is How We Pick A NewCo

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

Spanning SF and Oakland: The First Ever NewCo Bay Bridge Festival Lineup Is Out!

Bay Bridge banner

While NewCo has been celebrating unique San Francisco companies for three years, 2015 is the first year we’ve produced our hometown festival with a fully staffed and funded team. And it shows: We’re adding Oakland as a companion city to San Francisco this year, and more than 200 companies will be opening their doors for a four-day festival this October 5th through 8th – by far the largest festival we’ve ever produced.

In case you’ve missed our other posts about NewCo festivals, NewCo is a unique, city-based event that turns traditional business conferences inside out. Instead of sitting in a stuffy hotel ballroom and hearing an endless queue of startup CEOs pitching from the stage, NewCo attendees get out into the modern working city, and get inside the headquarters of the city’s most interesting and inspiration companies, hearing from the founders and senior teams in their native environment. Just as Airbnb (an SF NewCo) creates more intimate and distributed travel experiences by taking people out of sterile hotels and into the homes of hosts around the world, NewCo enables its festival goers to experience the “homes” of startups and established companies from a wide array of industries. Each NewCo company is hand selected for its unique mission and the positive change it is creating in its chosen market.

Read More
Leave a comment on Spanning SF and Oakland: The First Ever NewCo Bay Bridge Festival Lineup Is Out!

Branch Deepviews: Routing Around The Damage of Apps and App Stores

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Read More
1 Comment on Branch Deepviews: Routing Around The Damage of Apps and App Stores

NewCo Cincinnati Is Next Week. Here Are The Companies I’m Getting Inside

NewCoCincyI know I rave about all the NewCo cities, but once again I am picking my companies from a new festival lineup – and once again, I’m blown away. Next week is NewCo Cincinnati, and wow – what a stellar group of companies to chose from. Our partner Cintrifuse has really killed it – an impressive list of sponsors (P&G, SnapChat, BuzzFeed, Google!) and an even more impressive list of host companies. From arts to private/public partnerships to tech startups to food (and beer!), who knew Cincinnati was such a hub of NewCo innovation? Check out my picks for NewCo Cincy:

Weds, July 22, 6:30 pm: VIP Kickoff – @84.51 – Ill be there with the Mayor and the founders, movers, and shakers behind Cincy’s more than 80 NewCos (as well as the conductor of Cincy’s own symphony!). The program also features Nestle bigwig Pete Blackshaw, who left P&G more than a decade ago to start a company in what was a pretty bad area of town (but is now a hotbed of NewCo activity).

Thursday, July 23

Read More
Leave a comment on NewCo Cincinnati Is Next Week. Here Are The Companies I’m Getting Inside

Get Out, And Get Into Silicon Valley: SurveyMonkey, Google, GoPro, FlipBoard, & So Many More

B0g6uIdCYAArY43
Brian and I on SurveyMonkey’s rooftop last year.

New York is in the can (what a great event!) and next up, for those of us in the US anyway, is NewCo Silicon Valley. I won’t be able to actually attend NewCo SV, as I’ll be on the road visiting NewCo Amsterdam and NewCo Istanbul. But If I could go to Silicon Valley, these are the companies I’d pick to attend:

Day 1 – Monday June 8th

Read More
Leave a comment on Get Out, And Get Into Silicon Valley: SurveyMonkey, Google, GoPro, FlipBoard, & So Many More

Uber, The Rashomon.

Uber Women Promo

Our industry loves a rashomon, and in the past year or two, our collective subject of debate has been Uber. Perhaps the fastest growing company in history (its numbers aren’t public, but we’ll get to some estimates shortly), Uber has become a vector for some of the most wide-ranging arguments I’ve ever had regarding the tech industry’s impact on society at large.

It’s not that Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft didn’t evoke great debate, but all those companies came of age in an era where tech was still relegated to a sideshow in the broader cultural conversation. Microsoft was taking over the computer industry in the 1990s, Google the Internet in the early 2000s, Facebook and Apple the mobile and social world in the late 2000s. But Uber? Uber is about a very real and entirely new approach to our economy, a stand in for the wealth divide festering in the US and beyond, an existential rorschach testing your values around the role of government, the social contract, and the kind of society we want to become.

Read More

3 Comments on Uber, The Rashomon.

Integrations (and Metaservices) For The Win

GBoard
A GeckoBoard sample dashboard, integrating half a dozen separate data services.

What makes for a truly NewCo business? I’ve been giving this question a lot of thought the past six or so months, leading to posts like Maybe The Best Way To Change the World Is To Start a CompanyLiving Systems and The Information First Company, What Makes a NewCo, and posts on NewCos like MetroMile and Jack.

But lately I’ve noticed a strong theme running through a number of interesting and successful businesses: Integrations. From Acxiom and sovrn (where I am a board member) to Slack, Gecko and Zapier (where I am a happy customer), these companies are thriving because they have built a platform based on the integration of many different products and services. At NewCo, we call this “being platform’d” – an inelegant but apt descriptor.

Read More
Leave a comment on Integrations (and Metaservices) For The Win

A Few Questions For Publishers Contemplating Facebook As A Platform

5921703288_2e6a0f4007_b

Well, it’s happening. According to no less authoritative source than The New York Times, The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook.

As Times’ executives contemplate moving The Grey Lady squarely under the rather constrictive confines of Facebook’s terms of service, they may be comforting themselves with a few palliative pretty-much-truths:

Read More

Leave a comment on A Few Questions For Publishers Contemplating Facebook As A Platform

With Meridian, Sovrn Levels the Playing Field For Publishers

meridian-logo-invA long, strange, and ultimately rewarding trip, that’s what many involved in the past ten years at Federated Media, Lijit, and now sovrn Holdings might say. One year ago, give or take, we sold FM’s assets to LIN Media, and created sovrn Holdings, a programmatic data business focused on one mission: to foster an ecosystem where independent and influential publishers can thrive.

Sovrn has had an extraordinary year. It’s led the way in the fight against fraud, and has one of the cleanest networks in the industry. It’s a profitable, fast-growing business, and it’s more than quadrupled its network CPM – an amazing feat that is a testament to both eliminating fraud, as well as focusing on data science – understanding the reams of data the network throws off each day, and putting it to work for its 20,000+ publishers. And it’s that focus on data science that has led to sovrn’s latest crowning achievement: The launch of meridian, sovrn’s completely rethought publisher platform.

Meridian is a cooperative data-driven platform. So what does that mean? Publishers integrate with meridian – mainly because of its advertising platform – and when they do, they share their collective audience, advertising, and other data.  Because sovrn has massive scale, we can share back information to publishers that no other platform offers – and we can do it for free.

Read More
Leave a comment on With Meridian, Sovrn Levels the Playing Field For Publishers

Metromile: A FitBit for Your Car

MetroMile staff
The Metromile staff in front of their SF HQ (Preston is in the red shirt in the back right).

Ever since writing Living Systems and The Information First Company last Fall, I’ve been citing Earnest, the financial services startup, as a poster child for what I mean by an “information-first” company. But earlier this month I met with another perfect exemplar: Metromile, a company that is already upending industrial-age assumptions about what “insurance” should be.**

I’m fascinated by the idea of “potential information” – flows of information that are locked away and unused. Potential information flows live in the imagination of every NewCo – once tapped, they create all manner of new potential value. Metromile is a stellar example of a company that has found a vector into a treasure trove of potential information – the automobile – and is busy turning that information into a new kind of customer experience, one that has the potential to completely retool the utility and value of the insurance business.

Read More
Leave a comment on Metromile: A FitBit for Your Car