Recent Stories with tag group

In the beginning there was Mercata and the promise of discounts from group buying. And there was also ActBig, Zwirl, and C-Tribe. And the market liketh them not. Mercata was laid low in 2001, although its intellectual property would live on.

Today, a new generation of group and social buying sites have sprung up: Groupon, Living Social. And, since it's the Internet, a second (or third) generation. Seattle is home to Tippr, Wrazz, and DealPop. Chicago has YouSwoop. Buywithme is expanding. Whither Groop Swoop, SwoopOff, SocialBuy? One can only wonder.

The largest have millions of subscribers, across the country; the bulk are just starting out, and working a geographic niche furiously, advertising themselves as the way to connect with your city. The shared, cloying cuteness of Internet naming conventions aside, the clock is also ticking for all these second-generation companies as they try to define themselves for customers.

TechFlash already sat down with Tippr for a differentiation chat: They see themselves as a collaborative, deal-delivering platform, less tied to brand recognition than Groupon. We knocked on DealPop's door to see what they were all about.

[Full disclosure: DealPop is a SunBreak advertiser and you should probably subscribe to their email alert service right now. Upper right-hand corner there. Do it.]

Right away what sets DealPop apart is that their downtown Seattle offices are the home of WhitePages.com. Alex Algard founded WhitePages in 1996 in his Stanford dorm room, stealing a march on Baby Bells and their printed phone books everywhere, and today the company has 200 million personal listings and 15 million businesses, with over 20 million monthly unique users. They're now incorporating Twitter and Facebook results into their people searches. They have a top 10 iPhone app.... (more)

Eric Banks

While I was working on this story, the news arrived that Eric Banks, founder of Seattle's choral group The Esoterics, had won the 2010 Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America. (The Esoterics are multiple winners of the Chorus America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.)

Describing what the award is for--Banks gets to compose a work for Austin's Conspirare--also happens to serve as an introduction to the kind of thing he's always up to.

This delicate universe will be an a cappella cycle for 16-parts, performed in both Greek and English--it draws on five poems by the Greek-Egyptian writer Constantine Cavafy (whose poetry served as a spiritual guide to Alexandria for Lawrence Durrell). Banks is also trying to round up funding for an Olivier Wevers ballet with the St. Helens String Quartet. 

The Esoterics at PACCAR Pavilion

Earlier this month, The Esoterics were performing Haptadâmã (subtitled The seven creations of ancient Persia) at the PACCAR Pavilion in SAM's Sculpture Park, which turns out to be an amazing preparatory setting for transcendent choral experiences.

Based on, yes, ancient Persian texts, the work employs 40 singers, singing "in" Avestan and Pahlavi (the languages are broken down phonetically for them).

As Banks has arranged them, verses from the extremely old hymns of Zoroaster , the Gathas ("Who will rescue my soul? / What will protect my flock?), are responded to and supplemented by verses from the Bundahisn ("The Sky Spirit, an agile warrior / Clad in metallic armor / From the Sky itself, / Prepared to lead the defense").

While they may be 4,000 years old, Banks believes the Zoroastrian outlook in the Gathas is still gripping: "Every day we have to choose between good and evil. It's all around us. We're a combination of that. I loved that even in the creation of the world we know, evil exists."... (more)

Curiously, Mark Morris is 55 53 years old. It's hard in some ways to reconcile that figure with what you hear in his voice--he's irrepressible. He's made a long career in dancing out his pagan temperament, splayed against his catholic comprehension of the body. Of course Baroque satyrs get old, too, and maybe one reason they're often seen with grapes and wine is that they also age well.

In his Mark Morris preview on Crosscut, Roger Downey tells you that you can't miss one particular work in the upcoming program at the Paramount Theatre (Fri. & Sat 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m.): "Despite its exuberant title, 'Gloria' ranges across more emotions and moods in its half-hour than many a full-evening drama or ballet." (Hear Morris preview the evening himself, here.)

Morris first got inside the music, he says, while he was in the Franklin H.S. choir, a "motley and enthusiastic" group where he sang tenor. In 1981, when he created the dance, he was still fiddling with the hinges on the doors of perception, and what arrived was something like a rosy crucifixion, a cross-section of life's painful beauty and beautiful pain. Set to Vivaldi.

(Also on the program are Haydn's "A Lake" and Bach's "Jesu, meine Freude," which "talks about a bunch of Jesus-y things" and is intended as a tribute, just not to Jesus.)... (more)