Startup

In the latest episode of mediabistroTV’s Elevator Pitch, host Alan Meckler chats with Gauri Manglik, the co-founder and CEO of Fondu.

Fondu is an iPhone app that allows users to share bite-size restaurant reviews with their friends (sort of like Yelp meets Twitter).

For more videos, check out our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

There’s an interesting private event being held tonight at io/LA, a brand new digital incubator located in the heart of Hollywood.  Through “Discussion: Tech and Art,” Shepard Fairey, Sebastian Copeland and several others will share their thoughts about the dynamic possibilities to be pursued at the intersection of these two realms.

Per an article in The Hollywood Reporter by Daniel Miller, the incubator and monthly-membership workspace – officially launched in April by Myspace co-founder Aber Whitcomb, actor Chris Gartin and actor-producer Donovan Leitch – has about 50 paying members so far. The trio also plans to separately invest $500,000 in 25 companies, all of whom will get a reserved spot at the company’s open-concept collaboration environment. Io/LA’s location just down the sidewalk from the Hollywood Roosevelt is a key foundation block:

Leitch and Gartin told The Hollywood Reporter that io/LA’s location in the heart of Hollywood sets the company apart from other incubators and co-working companies that have cropped up in and around Santa Monica. The founders say that their personal networks and an eclectic membership will help the companies io/LA incubates and the members who use the facility forge business relationships and dream up new ideas. “It is all about the convergence of tech and entertainment and aligning storytellers with technologists,” said Leitch, the son of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame singer-songwriter Donovan.

Read more

LA based performance artist Ze Frank has been working in the Web video trenches for just over a decade now. It started with a 2001 birthday invitation that went viral and 2002 Webby Award for Best Personal Website; it continued in the spring of 2006 via daily series The Show with ZeFrank. Six years later, the multimedia saga is set to add another chapter.

According to a report on gigaom.com by Janko Roettgers, Ze Frank (pictured) has added to an earlier $146,752 kickstarter.com campaign with just upwards of three-quarters of a million in seed funding.* This latest amount was pulled together from some very high-profile people:

Ze Frank quietly raised around $756,000 $200,000 late last month from Marc Andreessen, Buzzfeed co-founder John Johnson and Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti… Frank told me that he intends to use the funding to start “a new kind of media company” that develops and produces shows with active audience participation. “I’m obsessed with media and the way audiences can become creative participants,” he said.

Read more

Well that was fast. Fresh off ceding control of his startup Spot.us to American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, David Cohn is already diving into a new project. He calls it Circa.

It’s in stealth right now. But I can say this much – it will start off as a mobile application and the goal is to create a consumer friendly product that keeps people engaged and informed about what’s happening in the world. The problem set is unique and as the details of it shape you’ll see how it fits into the history of my career thinking of journalism as a process, not a product. I’ll be the founding editor helping think through, from top to bottom, the process of consumer driven journalism.

Cohn says Circa is inspired by Ben Huh‘s Moby Dick Project. But that’s about all we know at this point. We’ll press Cohn for more details as the project evolves.

While Inc. occupies the same shelf space of other business publications like Entrepreneur, Fast Company and Forbes, the magazine has a distinction that separates itself from its competitors.

“We are a magazine about people who are incredibly passionate and have the will to start a business from scratch,” said Alexandra Brez, managing editor. ”We are different because of our sophistication, as well as our connection to and interest in community events. And we are a very likable brand. People are proud to be featured by us.”

Get pitching guidelines and information on open sections in How To Pitch: Inc.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

Any of you freelancers out there ever get screwed out of a payment? We know we have. A new site, Assignmint.com, is promising to “fix freelancing.”

How exactly?

According to a recent writeup in Fast Company, the site will offer “a complete pitch-to-payment cloud workflow system for freelancers and their employers. It helps digitally manage work assignments, editorial calendars, invoices, pitches, expenses, contract information, and payment. Freelance journalists, meanwhile, will be able to have access to all their outstanding invoice and payment information in one place. The startup also plans to implement a clip and algorithm service to match freelancers with potential new clients.”

We spoke with one of Assignmint’s founders, former New York Press editor and recent LA transplant Jeff Koyen, who told us more about how the site will work.

“In short, as currently planned, the system will be free for all writers (and, in the future, any kind of freelancer). These are fully functioning accounts, no throttles, no limits. Freelancers can create, send and track pitches, create assignments from the ones that land, then track and manage these assignments all the way to the end. We’re also building editor-side tools — the same tools, in fact. Editors can filter and manage incoming pitches, issue assignments and then handle all related fulfillment (e.g. contracts and invoices) right from their dashboard. We’ll also have premium team editorial accounts that feature more workflow and sharing tools.”

Read more

Over the weekend, a new venture from the co-founders of YouTube went live. Sort of.

Along with a static home page featuring the tagline “Discover & Create Beautiful Magazines,” the company shared the following tantalizing Facebook status update and tweet ahead of Amsterdam’s The Next Web conference, where the Pinterest-slash-paper.li-like App is scheduled to be officially unveiled:

Read more

In the latest episode of mediabistroTV’s Elevator Pitch, host Alan Meckler chats with Jux CEO Ted Metcalfe. Jux is a personal publishing platform that allows users to create immersive, full-screen collections of photos, videos, and words. The startup says it’s like blogging without all of the crap.

For more videos, check out our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

Also, find out who’s hiring on the Mediabistro job board.

After serving as president and chief executive officer of Guitar Hero, as well as COO at Yahoo, Dan Rosensweig switched to the task of building out college textbook rental service and student network chegg.com. The Santa Clara headquartered firm now boasts over 500 employees and has warehouses in Pasadena, San Francisco, Utah, Oregon and Kentucky.

One of Rosensweig’s investors is Ashton Kutcher, front and center in a recent LA Times article by Andrea Chang about the increasing intersection of celebrities and tech startups. The chegg.com president and CEO explained how he interacts with the Two and a Half Men star:

Rosensweig said Kutcher occasionally visits the startup’s headquarters, recently meeting with the product team for four hours. One Friday afternoon, Kutcher sent an email saying he had spent a couple of hours on the site and had put together a lengthy “series of notes” on his ideas for improvements.

Read more

The eXiled is on the verge of launching its new media transparency project, aimed at exposing the “conflicts-of-interest and corruption in the media and among our major ‘thought leaders’ and ‘independent voices.’” They’re calling the site S.H.A.M.E–Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics. The eXiled’s Yasha Levine put up a preview dossier of The Atlantic‘s resident Randian Meghan McArdle–who, incidentally, just got into a bizarre argument in the comment section of Julian Sanchez‘s blog, in which she essentially argued that prosecutors shouldn’t bring charges against George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case because they might lose. Wouldn’t want to squander taxpayer money in pursuit of justice, now, would we?

Anyway, Levine claims he has the goods on dozens of prominent U.S. journalists who take money from various think tanks and corporate sponsors in exchange for slanted coverage. Can’t wait to see who makes the list. Although we have a few guesses who might be on there.