Photo by Alec PollakBigScreen LittleScreen, the New York City meetup for web video producers, is kicking off 2009 with presenters  John Threat, Sunny and Joy Setton, Chris Jones, Peter Brauer and Jessica Wolfson. Each presenter will screen a video and be available for Q&A from the audience so bring your apetite for watching great content and desire to learn. Hosted by Matt Semel of 10ton.tv and Paul Kontonis of For Your Imagination, the meetup will be on January 28th at 6:30pm at For Your Imagination's studio, click here to RSVP at meetup.com.

Last week at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Howard Han presented his NY-based startup GigMaven. The service is described as a way to streamline the booking process for musicians and venues. This morning I sat down with Han to learn more about GigMaven.

Basically GigMaven is a marketplace where venues list open gigs and musicians "apply" to the gigs. Once the musicians have applied, the venue selects a band to fill the gig. The venue pays a fee when they complete the process. It's a similar business to another NY-based startup, ZocDoc.

For GigMaven to be successful, the key is to get enough venues from enough locations worldwide to always be able to fill a musician's needs. I'd like to see them optimize their venue pages for the search engines. It would also be interesting to look at creating a destination site to help people connect with artists and to research venues. They could also work on ticketing or partner with a company who already handles the ticketing. The more they can "own" parts of the venue booking and ticketing process, the better I think they will do.

GigMaven is launching this month in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The company has raised an angel round of funding to-date.

A Twitter presence is getting harder and harder to manage.  Charlie O�??Donnell�??s �??how to manage a professional network online�?? podcast on BlogTalkRadio gives some interesting guidance in this area for those starting out.  I know Charlie limits himself to following 250 people, but it�??s not uncommon for superstars on Twitter to be following thousands.  I don�??t know what the number should be, but following 210 people feels very different from when I was following 50.  Why is that?

Twitter is an attention aggregator.  The best conversations on Twitter take place in close to real time, and evolve FAST.  Taking advantage of mobile web or SMS updates to tweet from an event or while away from a computer adds a lot to the experience.  My RSS reading dropped dramatically once I started using Twitter, because I was getting MORE of the folks whose blogs I read: more of their thought process, their likes and dislikes, a bit of their lives�?�and attention from them.  If Twitter is a network of status messages, its biggest achievement may be to confer status (or as Nate Westheimer put it, the paypal of social capital).  Attention is an input for distributing social capital.

But not everyone can stay on Twitter, all day every day.  While we�??re asleep, doing our jobs, even making eye contact with people in real life, living life, we are usually interacting with the world without writing it down.  We get value from Twitter when we pay attention TO it, and everyone pays a little different amount.  Twitter's effects are normally distributed, too.  There is some minority of people it hurts, a great many who get little to moderate value, and some other minority who get supercharged about it.  Twitter changed how I view a lot of events, connected me more closely to co-workers, and made it clear that instantaneous responses from marketers could have an impact on brand reputation.

My next post on this topic will discuss how the necessity of filtering affects social network and community growth.

A Twitter presence is getting harder and harder to manage.  Charlie O’Donnell’s “how to manage a professional network online” podcast on BlogTalkRadio gives some interesting guidance in this area for those starting out.  I know Charlie limits himself to following 250 people, but it’s not uncommon for superstars on Twitter to be following thousands.  I don’t know what the number should be, but following 210 people feels very different from when I was following 50.  Why is that?

Twitter is an attention aggregator.  The best conversations on Twitter take place in close to real time, and evolve FAST.  Taking advantage of mobile web or SMS updates to tweet from an event or while away from a computer adds a lot to the experience.  My RSS reading dropped dramatically once I started using Twitter, because I was getting MORE of the folks whose blogs I read: more of their thought process, their likes and dislikes, a bit of their lives…and attention from them.  If Twitter is a network of status messages, its biggest achievement may be to confer status (or as Nate Westheimer put it, the paypal of social capital).  Attention is an input for distributing social capital.

But not everyone can stay on Twitter, all day every day.  While we’re asleep, doing our jobs, even making eye contact with people in real life, living life, we are usually interacting with the world without writing it down.  We get value from Twitter when we pay attention TO it, and everyone pays a little different amount.  Twitter's effects are normally distributed, too.  There is some minority of people it hurts, a great many who get little to moderate value, and some other minority who get supercharged about it.  Twitter changed how I view a lot of events, connected me more closely to co-workers, and made it clear that instantaneous responses from marketers could have an impact on brand reputation.

My next post on this topic will discuss how the necessity of filtering affects social network and community growth.

NYConvergence ORIGINALNYC-based video publishing platform company Magnify is holding a contest to commemorate a milestone in its existence, reaching 50,000 channels. They expect this to happen shortly in the coming weeks.To commemorate this occasion, the company's 50,000th customer will receive...

Howard Greenstein led an all star social media discussion at the Social Media Club meeting at For Your Imagination on January 22, 2009. The Social Media Club was  organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. We are very happy to support them!

Photo by David Parmet.

NYConvergence ORIGINALThe newspaper joined forces with the social network for its New Museum inauguration party in NYC's Lower East Side neighborhood earlier this week. The party included a Facebook-branded photobooth which provided a strip of photos emblazoned with both The...

NYConvergence ORIGINALThis past week, Serious Eats gathered some of its contributors for drinks at Drop Off Service in NYC's Lower East Side neighborhood to give them, many of whom only know each other virtually, a chance to have a few...

One risk that can scare off investors is the presence of gatekeepers in critical parts of the supply chain.  By "gatekeeper" I'm referring to a person or company that can prevent your business from obtaining access to resources that your business is dependent on.  If you need another party's permission to obtain access to key resources (e.g., distribution), your company faces the risk that it will not have access to those resources (the gatekeeper might say 'no') or that it will be charged a heavy toll in order to access them.

One classic example of gatekeepers existed in the mobile industry in the days before Apple opened up the iPhone platform to developers.  In 2007 and before, many entrepreneurs creating applications for mobile phones needed the permission of Verizon, AT&T or a few others in order to launch their companies.  Without the approval of these giants many of these entrepreneurs couldn't deliver their products to consumers.  Those that received permission paid a high price for access to their mobile networks since Verizon and AT&T had significant negotiating leverage.

It's worth noting that concentration in the tier of the supply chain that has the gatekeepers generally increases risk.  When there are fewer gatekeepers it's less likely that entrepreneurs will get the deal that they want, as 1) the entrepreneur simply has fewer chances to close the deal and 2) gatekeepers that face less competition are less motivated to take risks and new businesses or new ideas. 

Fragmented tiers of a supply chain can also create gatekeeper problems for entrepreneurs.  If competitive pressures are limited, gatekeepers may not explore new opportunities and may negotiate aggressively on pricing and terms.  The gatekeeper issue in un-fragmented markets can be especially problematic for companies that threaten the status quo of gatekeeper's marketplace.

The gatekeeper issue is one that investors pay a decent bit of attention to.  There are, however, ways to mitigate this.  The first way is to cut out the partners that you might have been dependent upon.  If your gatekeepers played a key role in distribution, sales or marketing, this might mean selling your product directly.  For example, in the days of the closed mobile platform some companies sought to distribute their product over the mobile web, alleviating their need for partnerships with Verizon and AT&T.  The other, slightly more obvious way, is to secure gatekeeper partnerships early-on before you invest much time in your company or seek to raise capital.

The more your company depends on partnerships the more calculating you should be thinking about how to mitigate the gatekeeper risk for your business.

NYConvergence ORIGINALThe Future TV Show 2009 kicked off yesterday at the Hilton Hotel in NYC. The show, gathering top executives from the television and media industry, began with two keynotes by Colleen Fahey Rush, Executive Vice President Research, MTV Networks...