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A Greeting Card Startup Inspired By 'The Wire'? It's All In The Game

While Keisha DePaz’s story – an up and coming Manhattan litigator tosses aside her six-figure job to move back home and start a greeting card company in her family’s basement – might sound like something out of a Lifetime movie, the inspiration for her company, Punch Street, came from a very different and much grittier source.
“I was watching The Wire on DVD one day after work.  There is a scene in the second season where a young character named Bodie is in a gift shop looking for flowers for a friend’s funeral. He is unsatisfied with the popular and traditionally arranged flowers.  A store employee ends up bringing Bodie to the back of the store and shows him the most unique arrangements. There were flowers in the shape of a cell phone, another in the shape of a car emblem and another as an RIP sign. Bodie is ecstatic that these flowers were more in line in representing him and his street life. Bodie orders an arrangement with ‘strong colors’ that must look like the towers where he and his friend used to hang out. The writer in me thought, ‘Hmm…well, he’s going to need a unique a greeting card to go with those flowers, too.’”
True to its inspiration, in additional to more traditional themes, Punch Street’s product offerings include cards aimed at teen parents, inmates in the prison system and patients just getting out of rehab – all reflecting raw realities of urban Millennial life that might make a Hallmark executive blanch. Greeting cards are a $7- 8B/year business and despite the image of white-haired grandmas sending out Christmas cards with crisp twenties tucked inside, it’s actually the 24- 35 year-old demographic that spends the most on cards, dropping over 41% more cash than Gen Xers. Punch Street is hoping to grab a piece of this pie, but DePaz knows that while Millennials might be a lucrative target market, they’re also a high maintenance and mercurial one.
“The idea screams risk, but I have purpose. I want to embrace today’s culture using a vibrant platform. I create cards that reflect young adults and teens in a way that is missing yet very much needed in the greeting card market today.  Also, I believe that to truly make a meaningful connection, we need for it to be printed cards. Millennials, in particular, are using email, text messages and engaging in so many other wireless connections. With Punch Street, we act as a bridge to allow our customers to still use technology in the way that we are familiar with, yet send real products focused on us to help make real connections,” she says.
DePaz hopes Punch Street’s business model, which attempts to marry the convenience of e-cards with the thoughtfulness of traditional print cards, will do just that. Customers choose their card design, personalize it with a message or their own images and then outsource the printing, addressing, stamping and mailing to the Punch Street team. Senders get all the karma that comes from the effort of providing a hard-copy message of support, commiseration or congratulations, but don’t have to brave the post office to do so and can remain firmly ensconced in the Millennial socio-cultural bubble that presumes letter mail to be an incredibly confusing phenomenon that should have died out with the Pony Express (Wikipedia that, kids).
DePaz is frank about the fact that she has a lot riding on the success of Punch Street. In addition to leaving her law job, she gave up an apartment overlooking the Hudson and sank all of her saving into launching the startup. Despite the fact that success is far from guaranteed, especially when it comes to banking on young Americans both having disposable income and being willing to spend  it on her product, she doesn’t regret the decision to embrace entrepreneurship.
“There are nights when I can’t sleep because I’m bursting with ideas on design or strategy. I even keep a notepad and pen by my bed stand now for those last minute ideas I have.  It’s a feeling of genuine passion in what I’m doing. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, because I was a very hard working attorney, I wasn’t stretching when I was working at the law firm. I wasn’t reaching. I was just doing. Only now do I feel as if I’m flying.”
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Credit : Forbes

EDM : Deadmau5 rubbishes Forbes Rich DJ List

Back in August, U.S. business magazine Forbes turned its number-crunching nous towards the world of ‘EDM’ to come up with ‘The World’s Highest-Paid DJs’ list. Apparently calling on sources like Pollstar, RIAA, promoters, managers, lawyers and some of the artists themselves, the article’s author Zack O’Malley came out with a top ten headed by Dutch kingpin Tiesto with an estimated $22 million haul over 12 months. As the magazine put it: “Often toting nothing more than a USB stick and a pair of Pioneer CDJs, their production costs are often negligible, unlike rockers and pop stars who typically take home just one-third of gross ticket sales.”
Joel Zimmerman, who came in at #6 with the figure of $11.5 million beside his other name Deadmau5, this week presented a counter-argument in an interview with Reuters. As he puts it, the article’s research is speculative at best. “If I was making $11 million, do you think I’d be fucking sitting right here, right now? No fucking way,” Zimmerman said. “You’re putting the whole industry on one article written by one dude, who does not have access to any of our accounts.”
It’s a point the producer also made in an entertaining chat with Spin.com this month. Production costs on a Deadmau5 tour, he argues, are far from ‘negligible’. “It’s bullshit,” he told Spin. “I had to call my manager and say, ‘Yo! Where’s the other 10?’ Sure, we’ve seen $20 million in the past two years, but that’s gone back into the studio, into tours – they cost up to $10 million alone. It’s money in, money out for all of us, but the list makes us look like a bunch of overpaid dicks.
“The cool thing about it, though, is that it says, ‘Invest in this shit because it’s hot,’ to the idiots with more money than all of us put together. It’s a self-propelling stupidity that’s now influxing big industry money into the previously small EDM market.”

Credit : In The Mix

Finance : The Forbes Five: Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists

Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter has had quite a career thus far. Since debuting in 1996 with hip-hop classic Reasonable Doubt, he has sold over 50 million records worldwide. He’s parlayed his musical success into lucrative businesses in the realms of fashion, cuisine and advertising (for more, check out my new Jay-Z book, which hits stores next week). Last year he earned $63 million, tops among hip-hop artists for the third time in four years.
But when it comes to net worth, Jay-Z is number two. The top spot goes to Sean “Diddy” Combs, who tops our accounting of rap’s richest with a fortune of $475 million, fueled by his interests in Sean John clothing, Bad Boy Worldwide record label and, most significantly, his Diageo joint-venture vodka brand Ciroc. Jay-Z ranks a close second, with $450 million.
In Pictures: Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists
Superproducer/rapper Dr. Dre ranks third with $125 million, fueled by past earnings generated from his own career and by helping to launch those of Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, a onetime Dr. Dre protege who reaped a nine-figure payday from the sale of Vitamin Water to Coca-Cola, rounds out the top five in a tie with Cash Money Records cofounder Bryan “Birdman” Williams at $100 million.

Methodology
In order to form the list, we followed the same procedures we use to calculate the list of the world’s billionaires (released today) — valuing current holdings, looking at past earnings, leafing through financial documents and talking to a bevy of analysts, attorneys, managers and other industry players to find the nitty-gritty details. We considered only performers, which is why hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons isn’t on this list.
Though other hip-hop artists including Lil Wayne, Pharrell Williams, Rick Ross and others — not to mention pop sensation Bruno Mars, who penned Travie McCoy’s hit song “Billionaire” — frequently speak of ten-figure desires, we kept our list to five because of the lack of information available on the fortunes under $100 million.