Tribeca, whose name derives from an abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street," is a neighborhood in downtown New York, most noted for its annual film festival and historic industrial constructions converted to lofted live / work spaces in the '60s and '70s.

One of those spaces is now the home of FiftyThree, a group of designers, developers and entrepreneurs founded by a group of Microsoft Research veterans that worked on the secretive Courier project. As Small Empires turns a new page and takes a look inside the colorful world that birthed the hit app, Paper, see how FiftyThree develops design-minded software that aims to help regular humans communicate their ideas effectively and beautifully.

FiftyThree believes that blank canvases all too often freeze creativity rather than inspire it; so they aim to lower the barrier for entry for "creative" production and show that any idea can be worth expressing pictorially. In this episode, meet the minds behind FiftyThree and an educator that is using Paper to both present ideas and encourage students to develop theirs through the art of digital drawing.

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