Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
This is where things are unlike traditional companies. There are teams of programmers who, in the case of CityCoins, release open source code for other developers to use. Using this code, anyone can make a user interface for interacting with CityCoin protocols, and if someone makes a robust enough user interface, or add value some other way, they can charge fees.how do companies who run all these platforms make money? like the ones you just linked to, who runs them and how are they compensated for running them?
So the programmers operating the bidding pool I was in, the largest pool for the first round of NYCCoin issuance, took a 4% cut of the total contributions, around $8,000 in total split among them, plus whatever contributions they made to the pool themselves.
But really the people making these things probably have a good balance of STX to spend on bidding for citycoins as they are minted.