Small Empires Season Two

My favorite web series, High Maintenance, began appearing on Vimeo back in 2012. The directors picked Vimeo for the same reason many independent artists do: a guarantee that their material would appear without ads and free of the clutter that surrounds videos on Youtube. This year, after a very successful run as a free show, High Maintenance became the first big-budget project backed by Vimeo, an attempt to emulate Netflix original content creation for a streaming video audience.

The market for professionally produced video that skips television and theaters, going straight to the web, is still fairly young. As we move into a world where more and more people are cutting the cord and choosing their entertainment on demand and a la carte, there will be room for plenty of competitors. The challenge for Vimeo is not getting outbid, and overshadowed, by much larger companies with billion-dollar budgets.

Unless you’re one of those gluttons for punishment who tunes in to CSPAN on a regular basis, it can be tough to follow along with the way the wheels of government are turning. That’s especially true in recent years, when partisan gridlock has been the norm, not the exception. Civic engagement, as measured by voter turnout, is at its lowest point in the last 75 years.

Capitol Bells, a startup based in Washington, DC, is hoping to change all that. The service asks users where they are from so it can match them with the right members of Congress. Then it lets you cast your vote for upcoming bills, and informs you when your elected representative votes for, or against, or not at all.

Warning: this episode contains scenes of graphic violence and mature content

Worldstar isn’t just a company. It’s a meme, an adjective, and a verb. It means to go nuts, to lash out, or to have fun. It can describe a moment that is hilarious or poignant or sickeningly violent. For 30 million people each month it’s the site that brings them their daily dose of music, news, and entertainment. Whatever you think of WorldstarHipHop.com, one thing is for sure, it is completely unique.

Building and launching an app is actually cheaper and easier than ever. With free tutorials and open source toolkits, the barrier to entry is low. Much of the complex backend work can be offloaded to big providers like Amazon or Facebook, who handle cloud storage or identity. Getting people to actually notice your company among the throng of new startups launching every day, however, is very tough. Unless you’re featured in an app store or make it into the top 10, it can be difficult to find your initial traction. That’s where a viral video comes in.

Sandwich is a video production company that has found the perfect tone for the moment. Dry, self-deprecating, and hilarious, while simultaneously conveying lots of information and a sense of cool that comes from being a part of the near future. We’ve covered many of the companies they crafted videos for, from Casper to Coin to Push For Pizza.

We’ve reached a stage where most consumers are familiar with the concept of a “smart home,” full of “connected devices,” that works, at least in the commercials, something like the futuristic home of The Jetsons. The problem is that unless you’re building a home from scratch, most people are going to be adding these smart features in a piecemeal fashion. Each device has to justify its price tag over cheaper, more conventional appliances.

The August Smart Lock brings a couple of enticements to the table, starting with its design. Crafted by the legendary Yves Behar, the August lock is a gleaming, modernist beauty. More importantly, it’s social. Because the “keys” to the lock are just some code executed by a phone, you can use the app to send “keys” to anyone you like. Having friends over but you’re stuck in traffic and won’t be there to let them in? You can use the August to send a temporary key that will get them into the house and self-destruct at your command.

Before there was Vidyard, there was Redwoods Media, a small Canadian startup making marketing videos. Slowly but surely, the company, like so many startups, had to learn two lessons and has come to embrace them over time: being creative is difficult to scale, and they’e actually much better engineers than they are artists.

A lot of Redwood’s clients were looking for ways to understand how their videos were performing and why. They wanted to be able to measure the ROI, return on investment, so they could justify the money being spent on these videos, and craft subsequent videos that would have more impact with their customers.

When venture capitalists are considering whether or not to invest in a startup, there’s a stock question many will ask the founder: What would you do if Google decided to enter your business? You could swap the name of any tech titan — Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon — into that query. The bigger picture is figuring out whether the thing you’re building is a unique and defensible business or just a cool feature these companies haven’t bothered to focus on yet.

This hypothetical challenge has just become a reality for Wattpad, a Toronto startup that has built a community of writers and readers creating millions of new stories each month. Amazon jumped into the game last month with the debut of WriteOn, a service offering the same mix of author tools and a readership composed of the huge audience already using Amazon for ebooks.

Ahh beer. You can drink it. You could brew beer in your bathtub. Maybe you already have. One of the great things about beer is that in some ways it’s pretty straightforward to make. That simplicity also allows for lots of variety. You can throw in everything from pumpkin to strawberry to chocolate when it comes to flavor, but brewing for yourself isn’t a great way to make money.

One of the big buzzwords in tech startups is the “platform play.” You’re not building a service that just does one thing, like make beer. You’re building a platform that allows anyone to do that thing, a plug-and-play system that helps drive innovation. That’s the premise behind Two Roads Brewing Company, a Stratford, Connecticut startup. The company offers its facilities to so-called gypsy brewers, who can input the recipe for their craft beer variety into Two Roads system, then make beer with all the efficiencies of scale that come from having a big brewery.

One of the reasons venture capitalist are so eager to invest in technology startups is that the mobile internet has enabled massive, global companies to be built with very little infrastructure and a small number of employees. Instagram had tens of millions of users and international reach when it was bought for a billion dollars, but was staffed by only a dozen hard working coders and designers.

Open English is a Miami based startup looking to reinvent the market for learning a language. Customers sign up from anywhere in the world and through the magic of the web, begin working one on one with a teacher. This can be a video session, or in the low-bandwidth areas the Open English reaches, simply a audio call.

Let’s say you need to fix your vacuum cleaning robot, or even worse, the machine that makes your vacuum cleaning robot. You know which part is broken, but where do you go from there? Most of the time when the machine reaches the customer, it’s already assembled and the parts aren’t labeled at all. Without that crucial bit of info, it can be very difficult to explain to a sales rep exactly what you need, or find a replacement you can order on the web. Googling for “round, squiggly rubber thing with the metal edges” won’t help.

Partpic, a startup from Atlanta, Georgia, is hoping to solve that problem. Think of it as visual search for replacement parts. Snap some photos of the item with your phone and the app will try and match you to a replacement part you can buy nearby or online.