Creative Economy : Featured Stories

If you've got a startup ready or revving, but don't happen to live in the investment hotbeds on the East or West coasts, it can be a challenge to fund your dreams. Enter crowd-sourced funding. Once pretty much limited to artistic projects like new bands, Kickstarter and its cousins are becoming the recourse of choice for a wider and wider array of baby businesses.

Mike Fitzsimmons and John Grider, AKA Broken Crow, explain how the Irrigate initiative helped get their intense, stylish animal images up on a University Avenue business--helping that business to stand out during light rail construction.

Saint Paul's music-loving mayor wants a city with a scene--a dynamic downtown with the special energy that only art and music provide. Last Thursday he shared some successes, some hopes, and some rock-concert memories with The Line.

Our yearly onstage carnival of the odd, the eloquent, the poignant, and the perverse is over for 2012. Bill Kelley was in the audience at the Rarig Center and Intermedia Arts to record six of the 163 shows that took the Fringe stages between August 2 and 12. From a raucous burlesque version of a classic TV sketch to Chinese dance to a surreal Dust Bowl fable, here are images of performance at its edgiest.

How are Minnesota and the Twin Cities doing as film production centers and locations? There have been some major disappointments recently, but new moves give us reason to hope we can lure Hollywood back.

What can the Twin Cities learn from other communities' success with municipal broadband? For one thing, that "bright cable" has a bright future. For another, that every city's situation is different.

The massive renovation of the Minnesota Orchestra's home is far from over, but that doesn't mean we can't tour the completed Orchestra Hall digitally.

Every organization that wants to make a buck wants a social-media presence. But do you have any idea what the Facebook fan page, the Twitter feed, the Foursquare ID really imply for your business? Pioneer social-media onsultant Jennifer Kane knows, and she compares it to parenthood.