Technological innovations and changes in consumer demand are causing massive shifts in the media landscape. The arrival of the tablet as a primary media consumption platform is pointing the way to where TV is going. The proliferation of smartphones and mobile applications, the rise of social networks and new forms of distribution that breed new business models all combine to create a tremendous opportunity to reinvent the pillars of media. At bMuse, we build companies and products that reshape the way people create and consume media. New technologies can radically change how media is produced or distributed, but what makes media valuable remains the same: great stories and insightful information. Media either tries to move you or inform you. Technology is what creates or carries that message. You can’t have one without the other.

In the past, media was siloed by technology: print, radio, TV, film. But the future of media is immersive, multimodal, and ubiquitous. Digital bits are digital bits. They don’t care if they are carrying bits of music, bits of video, bits of text, or bits of software. Modern media experiences blend all of these together artfully and seamlessly.

The way technology products and companies are built today is also changing. The time and cost to design, build, and ship products has shrunk considerably over the past few years. Startup founders are taking advantage of this structural shift by building products at their kitchen tables before they even seek funding. But startups are one-off experiments. We’ve built an entire digital studio system at bMuse that scales product ideas into viable standalone businesses in a replicable manner.

bMuse takes advantage of these shifts to develop immersive technologies which make possible new media experiences. Simply put, we use technology to reimagine media.

bMuse represents a new model in corporate innovation. Using a studio model, we incubate products and companies aimed at recasting video, publishing, healthcare, gaming, education, and entertainment for the digital age. bMuse is the studio, and each product or company is the equivalent of a production.

We are currently incubating a dozen companies at different stages of development, including TouchCast (an interactive video platform), ReToy (hybrid digital-physical toys), lm/nl (gaming studio), Vast (music and entertainment), Knomadic (tablet publisher), Paragraph Shorts (tablet fiction), 3D360 (miniaturized 360° video camera), and Takes (mobile video).

bMuse brings to the table hands-on expertise across emerging media domains and a production system to turn products into companies. Over the years, we’ve developed a technology stack from electrical engineering and industrial design to software programming and integration with Web services. We can go from prototype to scale overnight because we’ve done it repeatedly.pairing them with strategic customers and partners.

Our model is extremely efficient. bMuse employs 50 people worldwide, with revenues exceeding $3 million in 2012. Revenues nearly doubled last year, and the company has been profitable since launching three years ago.

One of bMuse’s core competencies is the ability to accelerate product development by tackling multiple disciplines in parallel. Our wide-ranging engineering teams across the world can develop apps on all mobile and desktop platforms (iOS, Android, Mac, Windows 8) and we are often able to reuse software components from our code library. Underlying all this is deep expertise in backend infrastructure on the LAMP stack and Amazon Web Services.

We also have in-house industrial design, electrical engineering, marketing, legal, corporate development, and content creation. This allows us to tackle problems from all sides at once instead of focusing on them in a serial manner. By working in parallel across disciplines, we’ve successfully figured out how to fold the time required to get highly-polished products out the door. For example, the recent Elf Yourself app that Magic Mirror made for OfficeMax took a few weeks to develop and launch in time for the holidays. By mid-December, it broke into the top-10 free iPhone apps.

The bMuse studio offers many shared functions to each portfolio company, such as sales and marketing, legal, corporate development, and hands-on strategy. All startups want two things: lots of people to use their products and to get paid. We help bMuse companies achieve these goals by pairing them with strategic customers and partners.