In Durham, NC the food trucks have been a big part of the city's revitalization. It is, oddly enough, an area with plenty of vacant business space, but I believe the food truck owners here value the shorter time to launch, the lower start-up costs, and perhaps they find the perceived barrier to entry to be lower (in truth, I've seen some vendors go brick and mortar, and it took them a great deal of effort to get it rolling).
In some areas the food trucks form synergistic relationships with bricks and mortars; a local brewery that doesn't serve its own food, hosts them every night and the entire area around it has become "The Spot" with 4 new businesses opening in the last year.
Having moved here from New York, I'm familiar with the situation there as well. There aren't as many swaths of urban "blight", and there is already a good amount of foot traffic so the benefits don't feel quite as dramatic -- but then I didn't work in midtown (where the food offerings are so so bad).
And as I assume it to be the case in most other food truck culture centers, many of the Durham trucks have used their mobile success to bootstrap a traditional brick-and-mortar shop (e.g. The Parlour, Monuts, Cocoa Cinnamon.) Allowing entrepreneurs to experiment with minimal risk can be an inexpensive and effective way to build a local economy.
many of the Durham trucks have used their mobile success to bootstrap a traditional brick-and-mortar shop
We're seeing the same thing in Seattle, as well. Some of my new favorite restaurants started life as food trucks and have moved up to more traditional quarters.
I agree entirely. In the case of TED the thing they are "selling" is their curatorial expertise. Nice stage, website, etc, but some of the talks would be great filmed in a shed. In that case, if we doubt their curation the value vanishes.
It's not clear to me why an enterprise like TED would feel growth offered any upside at all (and yes, I read the article). Smallness and exclusivity are virtues, and thanks to that great website the world certainly is not lacking for ways to access their ideas.
If they really only care about motivating and inspiring people then why not offer small grants for others to start their own independent, unaffiliated TED-like events. These events might even thrive without the scarlet letter X -- denoting second-class citizenship in the World of Ideas.
As a Drupal dev of several years, my team recently started working on a rebuild of our sites (magazines/blogs) in a custom node.js framework.
I appreciate certain notions embedded in Drupal, still: abstracting away technical requirements, flexible data models (content types), huge number of pre-existing modules that cover a tremendous range of cases. Still I found the modules mostly served as guides to create our own custom solutions, and less as plug-in-play options. I was really able to build some good functionality, abstract enough for the core elements to be shared between 6 websites, with superficial theme-level changes for each.
That said, anything awesomely written performed so abysmally that the great work really felt like it was a waste in the end. In that sense, Drupal strikes me as a true dead-end. The basic heart of the app, and elements of the philosophy make a beast that is bad for anybody with skill who wants to feel good about what they've done. Other criticisms would be the excessive integration of administrative-type functionality with end-user functionality; an almost incomprehensible (Fields) system for building custom data extensions; and the big one for so many here, the tight-coupling of the database with the code everywhere, which is part of what makes it so slow and a nightmare to develop with.
As to job security; I suppose I have that, and I often get offers to work on Drupal projects beside my main employment, but I find the work so lacking in joy that I need to charge punitive hourly rates.
For a certain type of project I'd definitely choose Drupal over Wordpress. Still, I wish there was some middle-ground. A more performant CMS, ready-to-go for small-to-medium size vanity or content projects, that doesn't make the insane compromises Drupal does to be "user-friendly" (read: code-averse).
In some areas the food trucks form synergistic relationships with bricks and mortars; a local brewery that doesn't serve its own food, hosts them every night and the entire area around it has become "The Spot" with 4 new businesses opening in the last year.
Having moved here from New York, I'm familiar with the situation there as well. There aren't as many swaths of urban "blight", and there is already a good amount of foot traffic so the benefits don't feel quite as dramatic -- but then I didn't work in midtown (where the food offerings are so so bad).