In this month’s edition of First Fridays, we introduce you to Zach Frechette, the founder of Quarterly Co., a subscription service that gives people an extraordinary way to connect with their favorite tastemakers. Much in the way that they would select a magazine that appeals to their interests, subscribers sign up for remarkable people. They then receive “actual items that tell a compelling story crafted and narrated by the contributor.” It’s kind of like Show-and-Tell for the post-kindergarten set that, in an era in which magazine subscriptions are migrating to tablets, holds the potential to reinstate the joy once found in unwrapping the postman’s latest delivery. Read on for Zach’s insights on the company and more.
Aside from the obvious, like the current state of the real estate market, brick-and-mortar stores are facing a number of challenges lately. For one, customer service expectations are shifting, as shoppers have become accustomed to more independent modes of consumerism online. Needless to say, it takes guts to open up shop these days, yet these three retail projects may be trailblazing new ways to make the cash register sing.
Openspace: Having opened at a time when entertainment media is increasingly moving into the cloud, a physical store that sells intangible items may seem counterintuitive. But at least one entrepreneur is hedging his bets on the fact that it’s a business model for the new era. Robert Reich’s Openspace, a downtown Boulder, Colorado store that opened its doors in December, sells…apps? The cornerstone of the shop is its “App Gurus,” a team of expert staffers, similar to Apple store Geniuses, intended to educate and aid shoppers who typically have difficulty navigating cyber stores. It’s a bold move, but one that already has franchise offers on the table.
They say everyone has a novel in them. However, those who have ever attempted it know that converting that idea in your head into a 50,000 word manuscript is no easy task. Imagine, then, the devastation of publishing house rejection. Now, rather than let their literature linger in the slush pile, more authors are going the self-published e-book route. Check out these three success stories.
Amanda Hocking: Amanda Hocking spent nearly a decade trying to get published. At one point, desperate to raise $300 for a trip, she uploaded one of her books to Amazon’s Kindle Store. Little did she know that she was about to make history. Within just a few months, she sold two million copies of her nine uploaded novels, earning her desired airfare, and then some, in the form of a record setting $2 million haul. Now, her fans are downloading 9,000 of her books a day, she’s inked a multimillion dollar contract with St. Martin’s Press, and her hit paranormal romance trilogy is headed for the big screen. Not bad.
From cat videos to memes to current events, YouTube is a vast ocean of entertainment. As such, playlists have become a necessary way of tracking and queuing videos, particularly those of the music variety. And with Spotify’s free unlimited service having expired, people are looking for new ways to access tunes from the cloud that don’t show up on their credit card bills. On the heels of flavor-of-the-month Tubalr are a flood of similar applications that offer tools for creating simple, convenient YouTube playlists.
MusicTandem: Pandora’s most alluring feature is its ability to identify users’ musical preferences through taste graphing. Taking that concept in a more visual direction is iPad app MusicTandem, which helps people filter through millions of YouTube videos by creating custom video playlists to match their unique tastes. To begin, listeners build channels by typing in a favorite artist, song or genre, upon which they are presented with relevant videos to queue up and offered suggestions of similar bands for uninterrupted music video streaming. To ensure that favorites aren’t forgotten, any video can be added to a ‘loved tracks’ list or can be shared with friends through via Facebook and Twitter.
As Cassandra Report subscribers know from 2010’s FaSCInation macro trend, the possession of scientific knowledge has gained its own form of street cred. More recently, “Open Science” collaborations have lent a new prestige to hacking. But this movement goes well beyond fashion. In fact, the Internet now affords researchers an efficient method of scientific discovery within which almost anyone can contribute to experiments, be they physical, digital or social.
BioCurious: “Hackerspaces” are surfacing in considerable numbers, demonstrating that young researchers want lab environments that are as social as their online lives. To that end, a “biohackers” space was created for scientists and entrepreneurs to explore innovations in biology. The 2,500-square-foot BioCurious community lab in the Silicon Valley offers members a welcoming site in which to conduct experiments and/or participate in enrichment classes. To date, 30 paying members have used the space, leading the founders to consider starting an incubator to fund startups, similar to that of Y Combinator or Bing Booster. Suddenly, the idea of meeting a new ‘lab partner’ doesn’t sound too harrowing at all.
