Current and recent Knight Fellows will take center stage next month at
SXSW Accelerator to pitch their interactive products that are
finalists in the third annual start-up competition.
They'll be showcasing their products March 14th during
SXSW Interactive, a sprawling 5-day conference that is one of the leading innovation-technology gatherings of the year. The audience and a panel of expert judges will narrow the field and the following day, the top 12 companies will be asked back for further presentation and the winners of the competition chosen.
Knight Fellow
Adriano Farano will be pitching for
OWNI, a Paris-based start-up that he joined as a partner last year. The company was named best non-English small website by the Online News Association in November. Here's how Farano describes OWNI his a post on his blog about the Accelerator:
"OWNI is your gateway to media innovation. Based in Paris, OWNI both cover and monetize innovation with a social media featuring the best ideas on the digital age and with our webagency designing beautiful WordPress sites and datavis. ... OWNI is the only non-US startup to be among the finalists this year."
2009 Knight Fellow Burt Herman's
Storify is also a finalist. Herman and his partner, Xavier Damman, launched Storify last year. Earlier this month, the San Francisco-based start-up received $2 million from Khosla Ventures, one of the most prominent venture capital funds in Silicon Valley. Storify is a social-media aggregation service that makes it easy for journalists or anyone writing online to pull in content from Twitter Facebook, Flickr and YouTube to generate stories integrating real-time information from those networks. Herman is a former Associated Press foreign correspondent who began pursuing this idea during his Knigt Fellowship.
A third finalist in the Accelerator has strong ties to the Knight Fellowships.
Apture, of San Francisco, is lead by CEO Tristan Harris and CTO Can Sar, who began pursuing their idea in 2006, while computer science students at Stanford. Harris and Sar sought advice from members of that year's Knight Fellowships class, some of whom have remained informal advisers since Apture launched in 2007.
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