IN THE NEWS - Innovations in a Down Economy

Laura Sydell did a great story on NPR's Morning Edition this AM about a new company that is managing to be profitable and grow even in our current economic climate. She interviewed Chris Sacca - former innovator at Google, early investor in Twitter and most recently a telecommunications, media, and technology advisor to the Obama campaign. Sacca said that now...

"all you need is basically food and rent money to start these things (internet companies) the tools are open source tools and one or two computers is more than enough...".

The story notes that advertising is no longer believed to be the way to monetize websites; instead, Sacca suggests that the way to do so is by

"...building a product that solves a problem so concretely that people are willing to pay for it."

Sacca discovered (via a tweet, of course) FanBridge, a company that strategically connects band with their fans as well as the music industry. (A huge need in our post-MySpace era in which "every band must market themselves online").

Irma Zandl has been addressing these issues as well (most recently in a Zandland blog post yesterday) and her thoughts fall in line with what Sacca attests:

"These new businesses are more likely to have been founded by a group of friends with very little overhead and basically just based on smart ideas. This is very different than starting businesses in the past that required factories and lots of capital to get started. Young people have more online tools at their disposal to help them to maneuver through this current recession. They are also more likely to come up with new ideas to get us out of this mess."

Listen to the full NPR story here.
Interview with FanBridge co-founder on Indie-Music.com.
Blog post by Irma Zandl on "Generation OMG".
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