I wrestled with whom to start this effort we want to undertake, to spotlight incredibly innovative MediaTech entrepreneurs, and ultimately settled on an old friend and peer as her past, passion, and intention align so closely with my own. We (I) want to encourage you to get to know Kim Gorsuch-Bradbury.
She’s an Austin based innovator I had the pleasure of meeting through my early work in the state of Texas, to simply help. This was well before our thoughts about the convergence of media and technology were even remotely a vision. Kim was in the early stages of developing a new business model and platform for capturing and preserving stories. Her early work with Weeva was exploring how to make it easy (easier) for someone to collect personal narratives so as to publish them in a book. Publishing MediaTech.
It was another great friend, and trusted advisor, Jim Bledsoe, CEO of Solid Green Companies, who took note of her vision and worked with her to publish a personal keepsake that got me hooked on seeing Weeva work – on seeing her passion realized so as to support everyone’s personal passions.
As one of the passionate entrepreneurs and innovators invaluable to our collective future in media, someone who has identified a tangible desire in the market and is developing a new way of providing real value to consumers, her work was much of the inspiration for ours: How might we better leverage technology so as to foster our personal need for tangible experiences with, in this case, the written word and photos? Media.
She’s the founder of Weeva, disrupting the ways in which people capture and preserve collective experiences. You might be aware and recall that our first, inaugural and somewhat local, private event, was about Austin’s Music (media) industry and the role technology can play in fostering the capitalization of music economies. As we were bringing MediaTech Ventures to life, Kim was discovering and supporting the music industry by way of her work: publishing.
Seduced by Sound
As a result of that wonderful coincidence, we had the pleasure of collaborating with her a bit to feature Weeva at our event. You see, Weeva had just finished working with dozens of Austin musicians to help capture and preserve their stores in their then latest book: Seduced by Sound: Austin.
Kim, a book publisher and startup entrepreneur, noted that the magic of Austin is in the musicians who play, night in and night out, in small clubs like the Continental and at big festivals like South By Southwest. She looked to her passion, talent, and technology to serve that, collecting many of the city’s best artists to help reveal why Austin music is so magical; that making music is not a choice – it’s something they have to do.
It’s an incredible narrative about the Austin music scene in which artists share what inspires them, who influences them and how they write songs. It features well-known artists such as Alejandro Escovedo and Joe Lewis of Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, to the rising stars on today’s best-bands lists like Sweet Spirit and the Ghost Wolves. The book pays tribute to some of the Austin music scene’s most influential people, as musicians share stories about master singer-songwriters Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, guitar-slinger Stevie Ray Vaughan, and more.
And it’s that idea of a tribute that so inspired our passion and reflection on how all forms of media work together to foster our love for artists. She nailed that, it’s more than a book: every copy of the book comes with more than 50 downloadable tracks from the artists, including Jesse Dayton, Walker Lukens, Elijah Ford, Lincoln Durham, Shinyribs and more. AND… a portion of the sales proceeds are being donated to the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians (HAAM), a local nonprofit that provides access to healthcare for the music community.
Technology to publish books fostering the economy and industry of music.
Thanks to her work, our first endeavor to support you was all the more rich as we had the honor of being joined, in our kickoff, by one of Weeva’s notable stories: The Ghost Wolves. Musicians Carazy Wolf and Jonathan Wolf took the time to join us with their support, share the book, and help SHOW what MediaTech means – that the experiences people want to have with artists isn’t being disrupted by technology but rather enriched. That the potential capitalization (monetization) of the music industry we strove to explore in our inaugural event was experienced: that musicians can easily reach fans online, through apps, through video, and through books; good old fashioned print media which enables for all of us that rich and tangible experience we still seek with media, made more accessible thanks to technology and entrepreneurs like Kim Gorsuch-Bradbury.
We’re just getting started both with the Spotlights and events such as that. At the time of this post, it just so happens that our next event is about publishing books; or rather, more specifically, the job market for writers. Join us at one of our local events, or if you’re remote, catch us on social media as we ourselves turn to social media technology to endeavor to enrich your lives.
Very cool and important!