Idea Lab

An Inside Look at Stroome's Metamorphosis in Three Iterations

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you've used Stroome, our collaborative video remixing site, in the last few weeks, you will have noticed, and hopefully enjoyed, a complete redesign of the site. User flow has now been streamlined, and the embedded community and collaborative elements make the process a lot more fun: Clips can be added to a bin using a quick click on any footage; new groups are offered through the recommendation engine; videos can be shared more easily across the web or friends can now be invited to remix together. This is our third iteration of the site, and while most quick definitions...

• August 16, 2011
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Stroome Reels Filmmakers Into Online Collaborative Video Editing

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

While speaking in Tribeca a couple of months ago in front of a packed theater of New York independent fiction and documentary filmmakers, I introduced Stroome, a collaborative online video editing community, and was astonished to receive a standing ovation. One filmmaker explained to me that she had been sending clips back and forth with a collaborator in London, and having to take the time to re-edit a sequence to make slight changes or slowly upload finished segments was encumbering her entire filmmaking process. She, like many others in the room, envisioned how Stroome could vastly improve collaboration, and she...

• May 26, 2011
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Female Entrepreneurs Hit Glass Ceiling for VC Funding

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism is dead! Long live journalism! And so it goes as we continue on through the process of Schumpeter's gale of creative destruction. With pay walls that come and go and come again (or hacked with four lines of code) and linkbacks ever so briefly taking it on the chin, how is it that we continue to misunderstand the business of the news? We've got to get long past the "what, me tweet?" debate and must move on to a diversity of news-telling technologies that serve communities across the globe. News needs new monetization models; to get there, we must...

• March 23, 2011
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Innovation Strategy #1: Don't Take 'No' for an Answer

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past week, Tom Grasty and I were invited to the Paley Center as part of "The Next Big Thing: The New News Entrepreneurs." We were asked to present Stroome before an extraordinary audience stuffed with CEOs, COOs and presidents of some of the world's most important media companies. During one presentation, Google's entertaining president of global sales operations and business development, Nikesh Arora, claimed the company culture regarding innovation at Google is about saying "let's try to find a way to say yes." It was one of the most inspiring leadership principles laid out during the two-and-a-half day conference...

• November 24, 2010
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How a Fish Story Inspired Collaborative Video Platform Stroome

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Like birds, most fish have something to say, especially when it comes to mating calls. You can read it about in a piece I wrote a couple of years ago for the New York Times' Science Times. But what does a talking fish sound like? Look like? In fact, it was exactly those questions that led to the creation of Stroome. Rush to Produce video for the Times The decision to publish the fish story happened in a hurry. On a Thursday afternoon, I received a phone call from one of my editors letting me know the piece would be...

• October 22, 2010
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