Credits
Letter from the founders:
Our theory is that we can make our culture more interesting by enabling people to play in the media the way that publicists do.
We originally started building Fame Game as part of an art project to investigate the growth of celebrity in our media. We wanted to figure out whether there was more room for interesting art in mainstream culture, and determine whether more people could use the tools of celebrity and spectacle to publicize their work. We also wanted to help sponsors and patrons see returns on their investments in creative projects.
The result of this investigation led us to develop a social network for brands, creatives, and influentials in
Along the way we met up with Tatiana Platt, who sought us out after discovering an early version of the website and joined our team as a founder. Tatiana brought in expertise as a patron of the arts, businesswoman, and insider to society. Our collaboration has been an inspiring example of how business and art can co-exist and work together in this city – the type of collaboration we’d like to encourage with this website.
Right now, Fame Game is populated with profiles of people who go to parties that support culture in NYC. These parties generally combine three different elements: brand sponsorship, famous guests, and a cultural celebration of some sort — usually the launch of a new fashion line, film, philanthropic effort, art opening, etc.
We hope to encourage more interesting celebrations of this nature by using this network to promote new ideas and events. The features that we’ll be developing over the coming months will allow the community to promote their work with pictures and video.
In the mean time, keep playing the fame game in the real world. Get whatever it is you do out there in the public, generate controversy, push yourself on journalists, send a signal out into the media space and see how the network reacts. And try to keep it spiritual if you can.
All the Best,
Seth, Jose, and Tatiana
co-founders, Fame Theory llc
Foundation
Jose Serrano-Reyes spent four years as an economic forecaster for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, engaged in the day-to-day trend analysis and trades that set and carry out the free-market intervention agenda that stabilizes the world’s credit, currency, and capital market systems. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, and was awarded an undergraduate fellowship at Yale University for his research in cultural theory and economics. In 2004 Jose was admitted to Columbia University’s architecture and policy schools where he pursued individualized graduate work on media, social systems, and game theory. In 2005 he found more friends.
Seth Aylmer has been making films since high school in Maine, where he was awarded a Level 1 grant from the NFAA for his short video “The Reel Feel.” It was showcased at the Smithsonian and garnered him a Presidential Scholar of the Arts award. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Colby College with a degree in Philosophy. He has been living in New York City since 2004, working with art, media, and the internets.
Tatiana Platt is a well known Internet executive and entrepreneur in New York City. She is an angel investor in Internet based start-ups, and serves as a corporate advisor on new media branding and programming strategy. She is a former Senior Vice President and Chief Trust Officer of AOL, where she pioneered the development of Web 2.0 standards on social networking. She has also become a key voice in the online industry, working to shape the interactive policy debate in the U.S. and overseas. She is active in philanthropy, has lived and worked all over the world, and speaks six languages.
Management
Jen Novak most recently worked for a large New York-based private equity and venture capital firm focused on software, Internet, and new media investments. Prior to that, she spent some time as a research analyst for a Wall Street based investment firm. Jennifer graduated cum laude with high honors from Harvard University. There, she earned a degree in Modern History and Astrophysics with a special concentration in organizational management at NASA.
David Katona is an associate within the structured finance group of a leading global asset management firm. David began his career at UBS in their summer associate program, from there he went into investment banking working as an Analyst on capital raising, buy and sell agreements and mergers and acquisitions. He received a B.A. in Political Science with a concentration in Economics from Bates College in Lewiston Maine.
Roger Saad most recently was a corporate associate for a leading full-service New York City-based law firm. His practice covers a wide variety of corporate transactions including joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic investments. He has also focused on securities offerings including initial and secondary equity offerings and high-yield bond offerings. Roger earned his Juris Doctorate from the University of Chicago Law School. Prior to attending law school, he graduated with honors from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Joan Tom is an emerging markets analyst at a large multi-strategy hedge fund in New York City. Her work at the fund encompasses participating in the sourcing, structuring, execution, and post-closing management and tracking of private deals across the capital structure in developing markets. Prior to that, Joan spent two years at Goldman, Sachs & Co. as their first program analyst in their Fixed Income, Currency & Commodities Legal department. In addition, Joan is a mentor and Co-Director of Event Fundraising for Minds Matter, a non-profit mentoring program for inner city high school students in New York. Joan graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 2005 with an A.B. in Psychology.
Code
Tim Schwartz curated digital events and exhibits for the Museum of the Moving Image, created in-museum interactive experiences, and built online exhibitions for the Museum. Additionally, Schwartz is an Adjunct Professor at Parsons School of Design where he teaches the course ‘Visualizing the Internet’. He received a B.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University and has spent time studying architecture and design.
Michael Frumin was the R+D Technical Director of the Eyebeam Open Lab, where he guided and developed creative technology projects in the public domain. He began his career in original and creative technology-based research while working on advanced networking protocols as an undergraduate at Stanford University. After school, he was a founding member of a team of hackers using their quantitative skills to find proprietary, novel real-time sources of qualitative information for hedge fund managers.
Pete Ash studied at Massey College of Creative Arts in Wellington, New Zealand, graduating with a B.A. in Industrial design. Since graduating, he has taught classes in both Industrial Design and Visual communication at the University, worked on grant-funded collaborative projects with faculty, and freelanced for design commissions.
Jon Sajdak (The Warren Creative)
Jason Eppink
Product
Ryan Brown most recently worked as an assistant at IAC in the Programming Department. At IAC he researched market specific build and buy opportunities on the internet while helping the newly formed department grow and stay abreast of industry trends. Prior to that he worked at J. Walter Thompson as an Account Coordinator, working on television, radio and internet campaigns for Welch’s, Unilever, and others. He graduated with a B.A. from Skidmore College in Literature and Philosophy
Advice
Cindy Gallop is the former chairman and chief marketing officer of of Bartle Bogle Hegarty New York. Gallop built BBH from scratch to more than 130 employees, and perhaps even more importantly, she created a successful agency that won both business from serious clients and creative recognition. High-profile campaigns for the likes of Levi’s, Johnnie Walker, and Rolling Stone, and Axe deodorant put the agency on the map. Other clients like Pfizer, Sony Ericsson, Smirnoff, Baileys and Bulgari followed. She has been named “Advertising Woman of the Year” by Advertising Week.
Gregory Sholette is a sculptor, multi-media artist, and a founding member of the artists’ collectives Political Art Documentation and Distribution and REPOhistory. He is co-editor of the books Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 and The Interventionists. “Sholette has long been a catalytic presence in contemporary political art, including art designed to gather, document and distribute alternative knowledge about networks of power and control in urban spaces.” (NYT)
Lewis Hyde is a poet, MacArthur Fellow, and author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, an inquiry into the situation of creative artists in a commercial society, and Trickster Makes This World, a portrait of the the kind of disruptive imagination needed to keep any culture flexible and alive. Hyde is currently at work on a book about “cultural commons,” that vast, unowned store of ideas, inventions, and art that we have inherited from the past. He is a founding director of CreativeCapital.org, a venture philanthropy that supports artists “open to changing how they market themselves”.
Douglas Rushkoff is author of ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture, including Media Virus and Coercion, winner of the Marshall Mcluhan Award for best media book. He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries - The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance. He has just finished Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, a HarpersBusiness book applying renaissance principles to today’s complex economic landscape.
Duncan Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, head of the CDG Collective Dynamics Group and author of the book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. Starting in the fall of 2007 he will join Yahoo! Research, and will lead their research in human social dynamics. He is currently exploring the “role that network structure plays in determining or constraining system behavior. He holds a B.Sc in physics from the University of New South Wales, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University. Watts is also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute.
