Get your Startup Attention at SXSW, Spot.Us in Canada – eh, and thoughts about sustainability

A roundup post of sorts.

First: Perhaps you’ve heard of South By Southwest, a festival that I lovingly refer to as “spring break for the Internet.”

This year I’m on the advisory board for the SXSW Accelerator. Why, you ask? Because this year they are looking for, among other things, news related startups.

News Related Technologies – This category pertains to applications and technologies to support the dissemination of news and information for communities, both on the content side or on the underlying business model side (an example is advertising). This could include technologies related to data, text, documents, mapping, engagement, among other areas.

If you’ve never been to SXSW I highly recommend it. Leave your suit at home – this is not a “conference” in the traditional sense. It’s a who’s who in the technology and venture capital space. Getting a chance to demo an idea there could be huge for any startup. The rope is there – now you have to tug. Learn how to apply.

Community-Funded Reporting Spreads

Check out GoJournalism.ca. It’s for all you Canadians – eh.

It is the second international site to use our code. The first – YouCommNews.com is Australian.

There is also SpotUs.It and YouCapital.It, and the soon to launch Emphas.is. While these sites don’t use our code base – they are very similar in concept. For that, I welcome them with open arms. When I first launched Spot.Us the idea was a foreign concept. Having competition is a GOOD thing. It’s a big validation of the concept and the work we’ve done at Spot.Us.

My only regret so far is the name “Spot Us” which, as apparent in the last three examples, may have started a bad trend in website names that double as puns. My bad 😉

Related Posts

Finally: A post I published at the Reynolds Journalism Institute blog on the “Newsroom Efficiency Index.” I may republish it in full on Digidave soon. It’s just a little experiment in my thinking about how news organizations can scale up by figuring out how to scale down first.

Tomorrow on the RJI blog I will probably write about how to “Keep your head down” when building a startup. That I will def. repost here soon, as I believe it is a valuable lesson that I can only take away after having been in the game now for two years.

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