The Digital City Project - Columbus, OH
Marc Canter, a founder of Macromedia and now CEO/Chairman and Founder of Broadband Mechanics, gave a very interesting presentation/pitch yesterday at the TechLife Columbus Meetup at the Chocolate Cafe near OSU.
If you don’t know Marc, he was with the MacroMind/Macromedia back when they had first developed and released Flash (or maybe it was the predecessor to Flash, I’m not 100% sure). Multimedia is a huge interest of Marc’s, and more recently, he’s been teaching a course at Case Western Reserve University on this concept of a “Digital City”.
The presentation was a little scattered, but here’s what his vision as how I understand it:
Using a special interest of “Workforce Development”, his company, Broadband Mechanics, is developing and deploying an open source social network software platform called “People Aggregator”. This software allows blogging, social networking, live video chat, and all the other usual social-media stuff. It is developed to OpenSocial specifications, so that it can be integrated with other open social media platforms (Facebook, Google, etc.). Now, at this point in the presentation, I was starting to think “so what?”
But here’s what is very interesting about this, and what makes this is unique business. Marc realized that there are a few needs that are unfulfilled in the market today: