Necessity and Invention the 2.0 Way
When you’re young, communicate with a lot of people from around the world, take pictures to document your travels, and need information now, what do you do? You team up with like-minded individuals, make a prototype, buzz the blogosphere, and watch the world light up to your idea.
Meet the fresh-faced founders of Zoomr, Yelp, StumbleUpon and Meebo.
Things common to all of them:
- They are all under 30.
- They shared ideas on blogs and, thanks to word of mouth, became well known.
- They created products that filled a need in their own lives.
- Zoomr creator Kris Tate wanted a way to share pictures that wasn’t Anglocentric.
- Meebo co-founder Seth Sternberg wanted a way to consolidate many IM accounts into one.
- Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon says, “The general idea was how to discover really interesting information without searching for it.”
- Jeremy Stoppleman of Yelp wanted to share local information online.
If you make things work like these four, Forbes will talk about you and investor-angel Ron Conway will hold your hand. If you fail, big deal. You can always apply for a job at Yahoo or Google. Trying is what is key.
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Eric said,
on March 30th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Zooomr is a great concept. The only beef I have with tools like these is the ease with which criminal minds can use this to their advantage.
“Casing the joint” now becomes an easy task because you can look for a location and get pictures of the surrounding area along with pictures of the intended crime scene.
Or how about this scenario? A jilted lover or weirdo “stumbles upon” the intended target, grabs some “useful” information from the site, cross-checks it with zabasearch, searches for the location using zooomr to visually inspect the target’s location and checks out yelp for regular hang-outs?
Aldo said,
on April 2nd, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Hmmmm…sounds like an intriguing movie concept…