Betabeat » dogpatch labs

Khoi Vinh Wants to Transform iPad Users Into Artists By Making the Collage Social

Nitasha Tiku — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:01:42 -0400

via Mixel

Back in July when Betabeat talked to design guru Khoi Vinh, the former design director for the NYTimes.com, Mr. Vinh criticized publishing companies whose approach to the brave new world of the tablet was limited to replicating a magazine experience within an app. Building an app, he said, only makes sense when there's real utility: "I would build social features and sharing that really resonate with people."

Well, Mr. Vinh's stealth project made its debut in the App Store today and it appears he's done just that. Mixel is a free collage-making app aimed at democratizing the creation of art the same way smartphones with cameras and apps like Instagram and Picctu have turned us into a nation of photographers.

This summer, Mr. Vinh and his co-founder Scott Ostler of Dump.fm, picked up $600,000 in funding for their startup, called Lascaux, from betaworks and Polaris Ventures. Since March, they've been working out of Dogpatch Labs in Union Square. We stopped by Dogpatch last week to talk to Mr. Vinh about why he felt compelled to venture into Startupland, how Mixel is avoiding IP issues, and how he plans on mainstreaming art-making into a new category of activity.

"I noticed that this is really the perfect art-making device," said Mr. Vinh, explaining the genesis of his idea as he fiddled around with his iPad. "For the first time in computing history you’ve got an ideal, super-powerful art-making device in the hands of mainstream consumers. Because no one ever bought Wacom tablets before and even Photoshop had a limited audience because of how technical it was."

Mixel, on the other hand, gives users intuitive tools for playing around with photos from the web, Facebook, etc. You can crop, scale, duplicate and basically remix images into a collage that then becomes part of a conversation with other users. They in turn can see how you put a particular Mixel together and take images that you used and add their own. Click on any particular image within a collage and you can see all the other Mixels that used that same image. That kind of functionality means social is more deeply integrated than just the usual following and liking and ability to share Facebook and Tumblr, although Mixel has that too.

"When I looked at all the art apps in the App Store, I thought they were all great and really powerful, but I also realized that they were all single-player, they were not social," said Mr. Vinh. "Unless I’m already convinced I can make art, whether I’m a professional artist, designer, or committed hobbyist—only those people are going to stick with these apps. All the barriers for non-artists remain."

"Our thinking is that we can combine social with making art, so we can renew that social context, so that you’re encouraged, so that you’re having fun, so that it’s very low personal risk, so that it’s very rewarding—you can create a whole new category of activity . . . and turn all these non-artists into people having fun making art before they realize that it’s art," he explained. Basically, time warp back to elementary school art class.

As we sat on a stool in Dogpatch, Mr. Vinh casually created a few Mixels with photos of trees and head shots from the lead singers of Hall & Oates. That's sort of the idea. "We want people to make this stuff really quickly. We don’t want them laboring over crops—really simple, fast tools is what we’re trying to do."

It's easy to see how the app would be a big hit with bloggers and Tumblrs, although Betabeat was admittedly disappointed the app doesn't yet have drawing. Mr. Vinh explained that's partly to maintain the integrity of the images. "We want to create a really family friendly-environment, so you have to sign in with Facebook and use your real name. We’re leaving painting and drawing out of it for now, because we don’t want people defacing the content. Even though you can cut it up, you can't really mutilate the images. We have some ideas about how we can add brushes in the future, but now we’re focused on collages."

Hence the PG-rated promotional video:

Introducing Mixel for iPad from Mixel App on Vimeo.

Mr. Vinh said the reason behind keeping the images positive didn't have to do with copyright issues, although he thinks he has a great argument for fair use because Mixel users are creating new works and adding value. "But we’d also comply with the DMCA—a takedown approach. We filed all the papers and stuff so if somebody has a complaint about their images in here, we’ll take them down. That’s definitely going to be something to watch as we scale the business. But if we try to square every copyright, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to do this at all."

Another tool left out of the app is the ability to add text, although we saw crops of images of text as Mr. Vinh gave us a tour of the app. That was a purposeful decision to take a different approach than, say, 4chan or LOLcats. "What we saw was when you have the ability to add text in the same editing environment as you’re composing an image, the vast majority of cases people stop thinking visually and move into a captioning mode and think of a funny line to add to a piece instead."

Mr. Vinh said they decided to keep the app free to use because they think the potential is huge, "But no one is sitting around and thinking: 'I need a social art making experience.'" The focus now is on building an audience, but a freemium model, in-app purchases and working with brand marketers are all possibilities for monetization down the road.

Whether or not the app takes off, Mr. Vinh, who paid $10,000 out of pocket to build a demo and even flew out to Palo Alto to get feedback from Sand Hill Road, has no regrets about venturing into the startup world. At the Times, he said, "What frustrated me was that sometimes the final call on user experience or details of a product were made by some project manager somewhere who is not qualified to do that, but they’re in charge of the schedule. I realized the only way I could do this was if I owned the final product, meaning, I built it from scratch, I built the company around it."

"I definitely wanted to get into a startup and I definitely admire the startup culture," he added. "But I feel like the core motivation is there’s a product that I wouldn’t be able to build any other way."

Polaris Ventures Made No Return on Dogpatch Labs New York’s First Exit

Adrianne Jeffries — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:27:14 -0400

Matt Meeker, entrepreneur-in-residence and start-up liaison at Dogpatch Labs.

The sunny Polaris Ventures-sponsored Dogpatch Labs space is a mystery! Start-ups hand-picked by Polaris Ventures and entrepreneur-in-residence Matt Meeker get to jam on their product for six months and often longer rent-free, giving up no equity stake, agreeing to no "first-look" caveats, no strings attached, in a super space just south of Union Square. And despite some rumorous rumblings to the contrary, start-ups seem to have no trouble moving up after they leave. Today the five-person analytics start-up Spinback was acquired by Buddy Media for an undisclosed sum which was "very compelling"--compelling enough that the company scrapped the term sheets it had signed with east and west coast VCs for an (also undisclosed--but "very normal") Series A. And after giving the company free rent along with the free coffee, free lunches and visits from tech luminaries that come with the space, Polaris Ventures made zero monetary return on their success.

Polaris wasn't one of the companies Spinback was planning to include in their series A, either--although it's unclear if that was because they weren't interested or because Spinback got more attractive offers from other VCs. Either could be true, although a company with Spinback's prospects--social media analytics in a world where Facebook serves up a third of online display ads in the U.S. now--seems like the kind of company that Polaris should have been comfortable banking on after "getting to know them" for half a year. But the firm is extremely choosy about investing, and Mr. Meeker says they gave Spinback an extension on their stay in part because they knew Spinback was talking to Buddy Media about an acquisition.

"We're looking for a couple great companies each year to invest in and work with for a long time. Dogpatch is a great platform for getting to know people. Polaris doesn't make many investments in a year--probably two or three early stage (seed or A round) investments in New York this year, so we want to really know people well before we invest. Dogpatch gives us a way to do that," Mr. Meeker told Betabeat.

That means Polaris Ventures will invest in less than 10 percent of the companies that go through the residency. There are 41 people in 16 companies in the space now.

I wasn't trying to be cynical, but I couldn't quite get my head around how two or three investments could support a Union Square space and all its associated costs. Polaris must be expecting this to pay off somehow, right? we asked Mr. Meeker.

Polaris is "serious about giving back to the ecosystem," and "supporting young startups" and is also somewhat altruistic, he said. "That said, the strategy is also to get to know 15 to 18 companies over an extended period of time, so we make smarter investment decisions."

Polaris is happy about Spinback's acquisition even though it didn't make money on the deal, he said.

"There's a lot that goes into the "return on investment" calculation of Dogpatch, but we're super happy with outcomes like this. We believe if we help great entrepreneurs be successful, that's nothing but good for Polaris, the ecosystem, and the entrepreneurs," he said.

"I wouldn't have joined them (Polaris) if I wasn't convinced it was real."

Spinback Poised to Close Series A When Buddy Media Snapped Them Up

Adrianne Jeffries — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:34:15 -0400

Andrew Ferenci, 24-year old founder of Spinback.

Buddy Media, the Facebook managing platform for businesses, announced this morning it had acquired the five-person New York start-up Spinback, which makes a social media plug-in and analytics dashboard that customers can enable by embedding a few lines of code on their web sites. "I've never seen a product that does what it does. It does what four or five technologies do in one," said Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow when Betabeat reached him by phone this morning at Disney World, where he was attending the Mashable Connect conference with Spinback CEO Andrew Ferenci.

The New York connection was essential to the deal, the two CEOs said. "New York start-ups understand marketers better than West Coast start-ups," Mr. Lazerow said. "Social media at the end of the day is word of mouth marketing on steroids."

Spinback raised a small angel round of funding and had term sheets in place for a Series A when Buddy Media made a "really compelling offer" that the companies chose not to disclose. The companies had been talking about a partnership since February and it quickly became clear that the services were highly complementary--and both companies were strongly tied to New York. "We really like working in New York," Mr. Ferenci said. There were some VCs that wanted them to move out to California, he said, but he felt the New York start-up scene was too vibrant to leave.

Spinback will move immediately into Buddy Media's Flatiron office, where the parent company has around 170 employees, and the products will become "tightly integrated" over the next year as the companies merge, Mr. Lazerow said.

Dogpatch Labs: We’re Slammed With Applicants!

Adrianne Jeffries — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:13:33 -0400

Dogpatch Labs has interest from 250 to 275 companies for about eight to 10 desks, liaison Matt Meeker told Betabeat, after a steady increase gave way to a rush. "It's been building over the past couple months, but the past couple weeks have really accelerated a lot (sorry for the pun)," he said. "I wish I had twice as many desks."

As a result he's scheming about getting more desks into the sunny Union Square area coworking/accelerator hybrid, which is sponsored by Polaris Ventures and provides some exposure to mentors, but lets companies move in for six months or so without paying rent or giving up equity. "About to do some spring cleaning of the space, invest some into the space, and hopefully add more desks with a new layout," he told Betabeat. "Right now we have 41 people in 16 companies, have some moving out soon (their six months are up and their fundraising has been successful), so meeting lots of companies to move in during June... probably will have eight o 10 desks for four or five companies, but interest from 250-275 companies for those seats."

With all the new accelerator programs popping up in New York (DreamIt, Entrepreneurs Roundtable, TechStars Summer Redux), Betabeat was surprised to hear that any one space had seen an increase in interest, even though it's a pretty sweet deal.

"Some is the trajectory of the NYC startup scene, which as you know is on fire," Mr. Meeker said. "Some is having me 100 percent focused on it, which is different than 2010, where no one was working solly on Dogpatch in NYC. And a big part is our community and residents--having the big events here, our residents talking about it a lot, lots of people visiting the current residents, and even investors referring some of their portfolio companies to us."