The startup I head up tech for, http://latakoo.com/, is designed around a strong social mission (that also happens to be a solid business model). In fact, it arose from a separate attempt to find a new commercial model for local investigative journalism.
We allow anyone to send high quality video very quickly - and then store it in a web-based archive for search and later retrieval. All you need to do is drag your video into our tool and click "start", and it uploads it to the cloud. (There's an API for integration, obviously, and we've got some interesting video sharing ideas up our sleeves.) Our payment model is like a cellphone plan: you pay for minutes of video sent every month, and even get rollover minutes.
A lot of the people who find the greatest value in this are video journalists. They can shoot some footage and send it back to base faster than they ordinarily could, significantly cheaper than hiring a satellite truck or other comparable Internet products. They can also use the web archive and pull down other footage to create an edited piece in the field.
I think improving our infrastructure for news has a tangible impact on peoples' lives: access to information is a requirement in a functioning democracy. And of course, we're directly improving the lives of anyone who needs to move high quality video around.
We allow anyone to send high quality video very quickly - and then store it in a web-based archive for search and later retrieval. All you need to do is drag your video into our tool and click "start", and it uploads it to the cloud. (There's an API for integration, obviously, and we've got some interesting video sharing ideas up our sleeves.) Our payment model is like a cellphone plan: you pay for minutes of video sent every month, and even get rollover minutes.
A lot of the people who find the greatest value in this are video journalists. They can shoot some footage and send it back to base faster than they ordinarily could, significantly cheaper than hiring a satellite truck or other comparable Internet products. They can also use the web archive and pull down other footage to create an edited piece in the field.
I think improving our infrastructure for news has a tangible impact on peoples' lives: access to information is a requirement in a functioning democracy. And of course, we're directly improving the lives of anyone who needs to move high quality video around.