I was going to post this last week but we hadn’t secured the domain name yet and then I forgot! Here it is nonetheless:
Dilan and I have been doing lots of brainstorming over the last couple of weeks and among the ideas we have looked at, one really stood out: The vision we have is to provide a microblogging platform for discovering, sharing and discussing events and news.
Ok, so that sounds like pretty blue sky thinking. What we want to do is provide an events aggregation website with the added feature of being able to microblog about a specific event you are attending. This idea spawned from all the Twittering that has been going on during SXSW. Our line of thought was that maybe there’s a better way to collect all the twitters about an event like the infamous key note by Zuckerberg, so everyone can join the discussion on a single thread. You can kind of do this on twitter, by using hashtags and tracking them, or setting up a user account for the event and @replying to that user, but twitter isn’t events focused, which is beauty of it - you can twitter about anything.
We came up with a working title - “Scoopler.com”:
With this new idea to work with, we did some more networking and threw it out to the usual OpenCoffee crowd in order to get some feedback…
So far so good - we did a bit of tweaking and everyone we have spoken to thinks the idea has some legs, including some potential investors. We even managed to (somewhat unintentionally) land our first pitch on Thursday, with Promethyan Labs, a seed fund that “has just recently been established to work with ambitious young entrepreneurs to help them build great companies” in the words of Rupesh, one of the partners. The pitch went very smoothly considering it was our first one!
–UPDATE–
I finished the first version of our Business Plan last week but it was a bit too long so we’re trying to boil it down to 10 pages. We also just submitted our application to Y Combinator, which is a seed fund that give startups the initial capital and guidance they need to turn an idea into a company. Auctomatic and Snaptalent are two UK companies who have gone through YC already and have been given some great opportunites as a result. In fact, last week, Auctomatic announced that they have been acquired by Live Current Media for $5M in cash and shares - Congrats to Kulveer, Harjeet and Patrick. It just goes to show there’s hope for us all!
Next up: Mini-seedcamp on Friday… I really need to start blogging more regularly again.
P.S. My twitter is @AJisThinking.
Entries (RSS)
April 6th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I like your idea and look forward to seeing how it progresses, keep on posting
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:37 am
I think you may be second to market with this idea…a website called Shyftr has launched in Beta…caused some controversy in the blogging world, but Scobleizer and Louis Gray like it…seems you’ve hit on an idea that may turn out to be the next big thing on the web…
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:49 am
@gurpreet I saw shyftr a few days ago. It seems to be concentrating on sharing feeds rite? I haven’t had a chance to try it out properly but it doesn’t look quite the same as Scoopler. Check out my latest post, we’re focusing on creating a Digg for microblogs!
April 27th, 2008 at 4:23 am
Dont worry about shyftr. It seems to be following a different path and more importantly, not evolving fast enough in what it does anyway(development cycles are too slow by looking at progress made as detailed in blogs, online, by product iteslf etc. etc.).
Build fast using a agile/XP based on RAD principles and in no time scoopler will become leading. It is not starting first in a race that is important, but how fast you can run.
Any comments etc. or further queries mail me at babulmiah at yahoo dot com.
Thanks,
Babul.