Small Empires Season Two – The Verge

Small Empires: Can Vimeo build a big business without selling out?

2014-12-18T12:04:44-05:00

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 mo …

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Small Empires: Can an app really get Americans to care about their government again?

2014-12-11T12:00:02-05:00

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 representati …

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Small Empires: Meet the man behind one of the web’s most popular, and controversial, sites

2014-12-04T13:54:23-05:00

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.

Our host Alexis Ohanian knows a thing or two about building a massive audience. He helped create Reddit, sometimes called the "front page of the internet." Like Wo …

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Small Empires: meet the startup that makes your startup look cool

2014-12-02T09:00:02-05:00

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, …

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Small Empires: Forget your keys? There’s an app for that

2014-11-25T09:03:07-05:00

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 soci …

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Small Empires: Vidyard demonstrates the time-honored art of the startup pivot

2014-11-20T10:15:28-05:00

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.

So Redwood be …

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Small Empires: can Wattpad’s DIY writing empire survive an invasion by Amazon?

2014-11-18T11:25:38-05:00

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. …

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Small Empires – the drinking game: can we code our way to better beer?

2014-11-11T09:00:02-05:00

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 p …

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Small Empires: a startup tries to scale its human workers against an automated approach

2014-11-04T09:01:38-05:00

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 …

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Small Empires: Hunting for spare parts and seed funding with Partpic

2014-10-28T09:00:27-04:00

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 replacem …

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