This past Tuesday I attended the January New York Tech Meetup – http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech – at FIT’s Haft Auditorium. Of the companies that presented during the hour long get together to a packed crowd of 700+, I found two in particular interesting, Blazetrak and SpeakerText.
When the founders of Blazetrak – http://blazetrak.com -began their pitch I found myself rolling my eyes and laughing out loud. The further they got into their explanation of the service, the more value I could imagine it creating. The beta incarnation of the service exploits our society’s fascination with all things celebrity, in particular, the enormous success of the ‘celebrity-discovery’ programming genre, i.e. American Idol.
In the company’s own words:
“Blazetrak puts you directly in touch with the untouchables. Blazetrak is the first website to allow anyone in the world to get in touch with a highly sought after professional (celebrity) for a fee and receive a guaranteed video response from that professional.”
Initially focused on the music industry, Blazetrak allows individuals to submit headshots, audio and/or video files of their performances, etc. for a specified fee. Industry professionals create their own profiles and receive submissions from the public based on what they are looking. Blazetrak is thus another source of ‘deal flow’. Or, as Billboard.biz put it:
“With everyone in the media and entertainment industry exploring ways to make money online, a startup is looking to help entertainment professionals digitize and monetize the talent discovery and mentoring process, while giving hopefuls a shot at stardom.”
Fees are split between Blazetrak and the entertainment executives.
Once I stopped snickering, I realized that the service leverages what the Internet is best suited for, i.e. as a communication/networking medium. Furthermore, I could see the service being used by a variety of professionals whose livelihood is based on discovering talent/opportunities, everyone from investors, to the worlds of television, fashion, film, and design.
As we all know, video online is exploding. Speakertext –http://speakertext.com – a service that its founder claims was initially developed for $4,000 and some free iPhones, seeks to make ‘searching’ within a video as simple as searching within text. By presenting the transcript of a video alongside the video itself – courtesy of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome -, users can highlight text that delivers them to the corresponding instant within the video.
In essence, the service makes videos “searchable” in a way they haven’t previously been. In the process, Speakertext hopes to extract value from the videos’ ‘metadata’, i.e. their transcripts.
I am glad that you liked our presentation. I understand that you felt a little turned off at first. Frankly I had the same feeling about Twitter the first time I heard about it. Through a great deal of research we discovered that there were a lot of people out there trying to be discovered and also a lot of people out there trying to find talent. We found a bunch of sites attempted to marry these two problems but nobody out there had created a safe scenario for the professional that monetized their valuable time. Over the past couple of months it has been so exciting to receive positive emails and twitter messages from our users and professionals. We think that we have something pretty profound in the making – something we did not realize the full potential of until we launched back in Nov. Below is a real unedited email from a user. Thanks so much for the write-up.
(Nate Casey – Co-Founder of Blazetrak)
Dear Blazetrak,
Never in a millions years did I think that my favorite producer of all
time, Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, would ever hear me sing. But that
dream became a reality and was made possible by you. I can’t thank you
enough for giving people like me the opportunity to get closer to
industry professionals. I’ve gotten advice from many people, but to
get it from someone as accomplished as Darkchild is invaluable. You’ve
helped me get my toes in the door. Hopefully, my whole foot will be in
the door some day, and that’ll be mostly because of Blaztrak. Thanks
again!
Best,
Name left blank for privacy
Nate – Just curious as to what service you use to monitor postings regarding BlazeTrak? How it was that you knew I had written about the company.
Thanks – David
David,
We monitor Google – via alerts.
Best to you,
Nate