5 projects at Made in NY Media Center’s incubator Demo Day

Companies incubated at the Made In NY Media Center had a chance to show off their projects to invited members of the community, local dignitaries and investors at the Dumbo facility’s first Demo Day.

Members of the incubator receive business development services from the center and four members got a chance to showcase their work to investors and branding agencies, after a month of training supported by center staff.

Here are some of the incubator members we talked to last night and the tech spin we gleaned from their work.

Vincent Obermeier and Ben Swiss, TreSensa, Inc.

TreSensa operates both from Dumbo and Manhattan. They have some space here at the MiNY Media Center which allows some of their developers to get away and focus on making games. The company’s business model includes revenue from building its own games to building branded games to helping small game makers extend their reach. The core of all their work, Vincent Obermeier, a cofounder, explained, is liberating games so that they can work across platforms.

It’s possible, Obermeier explained, to make game development financially worthwhile through ad supported free games on a strong platform. That’s where TreSensa comes in. They work to make the user acquisition cost for games negligible.

Sam Eaton, Displaced.

“Displaced” is a new project by Sam Eaton, which seeks to document global migration due to climate change. Eaton said he was, “Looking to expand the tech frontiers of journalism with this new project.”

The goal is to take a series of large issues around climate change and document them through the perspective of an individual person. It’s a trans-media project that will be shown in multiple formats. The goal is to wrap it up in advance of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Lindsay Branham, Cofounder, Discover the Journey.

Discover the Journey is a nonprofit media company that’s aiming to use film’s narrative strengths to facilitate peace-building in Africa. Their first film, They Came At Night, is currently showing around Central Africa, using mobile, blow-up movie screens. Branham explained, “We are showing media in places that are completely media desaturated.”

Discover the Journey is in the center under a media fellowship for socially good projects.

Matt Sky and Alden Peters, AlleyWire, holding prototypes of the AlleyWire awards.

AlleyWire plans to launch its “AlleyWorthy” awards soon. Here, Matt Sky and Alden Peters show off model awards. Sky is a correspondent for the company and Peters is the Head of Production. We used an AlleyWire video to supplement our story about Simply Grid.

Peters works from the MiNY Media Center. He will be helping Sky launch his new show, AlleyWire Buzz, which Sky explained as a sort of Talk Soup for startups.

Ashley Mui and Leslie Norville, Urban Romances.

Urban Romances is a project by filmmaker Nelson George. Associate Producer Ashley Mui and Producer Leslie Norville explained that it is moving into transmedia productions now. The film Ballerina’s Tale is in post production now. This summer, the team will put out a call to young girls around the world to crowdsource a ballet.