Ghost of Midnight

Local Online Start-Up Funding and a Prize Winner

A couple interesting posts by Peter Krasilovsky today.  First, funding levels for several start-ups with a local focus…

Belated congratulations to our friend Sebastien Provencher and his Praized Media team for getting $1 million from Garage Ventures Technology Canada… you can do a lot with $1 million. You can hire key staff, pay salaries, build software, do some PR, travel (and hire consulting firms). In fact, a number of firms have recently landed deals for $1 million or so….like Outside.in ($900k) and City Voter ($1.1 million). Boston’s City Squares is also apparently funded at this level. And if you haven’t been on the site lately, it is building nicely.

A couple of years ago, the “must have” amount for a startup was more like $3 million. Smalltown, Backfence and others got the larger amount (or said they did). I never could figure out what they needed that much for.

And a story about a local citizen journalism site succeeding in New Hampshire…

At first, there was no news coverage for the 15,000 residents of a central coastal New Hampshire area including the little villages of Deerfield, Candia, Northwoods and Nottingham. Manchester’s Union Leader, a family-owned paper that is fairly notorious for its politically-charged, NH primary coverage every four years, basically ignored the area.

But then three years ago, the residents started their own news site and called it The Forum. Today, the site, a recipient of the 2007 Knight Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism has 240 contributors, sells ads to local businesses, and even publishes an occasional print edition on special occasions… the site has an 1.6 “reporters” for every 100 residents.