Since I've become involved in the web 2.0 / opensource community here in Dallas, I've met many very creative, innovative, and driven people with great ideas that I'd like to do a "feature" on; their names are (in the order I met them): Brandon Cotter, Blake Burris, Chris St. John, Mike Orren, Dave Copps, and Jim Young.
Brandon Cotter was introduced to me by Sejal Desai, a founder of STARTech Early Ventures. Brandon is the founder and CEO of a company called Viewzi, which is all about making internet-search more fun, sexy, and engaging; think what the iPod did for music, and thats what Brandon's company is going to do for search. He demoed a prototype for me and it's really, really cool, even if he said the final product will probably be very different. Without giving too much away, lets just say that Viewzi will make search much more than just the "starting point" to the rest of the internet that it is now. Brandon gave me some very good advice for entrepreneurs that I'd never heard before anywhere else: "look at the goals you want to achieve as mountains, and climb the smaller mountains first." That statement is deceptively simiple; seems like a no-brainer, but not for an entrepreneur who has literally become his idea. It was many weeks ago that we had that conversation, but at the time my business model was based around trying to compete with a little company called DoubleClick. That was a big mountain. I have since found a smaller one, but thats another story.
I met Blake Burris at an event called MobileDevCamp Dallas (here are some pics of him at the event). This was basically a place where techies and non-techies (like me) came together to collaborate on creating applications for mobile phones that dont currently exist. It was a ton of fun, and I got to hear all about Blake's project called GoalCamp. It's an idea born of his own company called Corazon Labs. The concept for GoalCamp is simple: its easier to achieve our goals, whether athletic or not, when we "train" with others. For example, I've been trying to gain weight for years, but I've never had anyone to be accountable to, so I haven't gained any weight. Blake is trying to learn a programming language, and GoalCamp would allow him to 1) find people who are trying to do the same thing to "train" with, and 2) consolidate and simplify the process of tracking progress. So in Blake's own words, it would be the first of its kind as a "social training tool." He's planning on introducing it very soon, so get on the mailing list so when '08 rolls around you can acually keep your new year's resolution this time.
I actually saw Chris St. John (pics) at MobileDevCamp but we didn't meet formally until an informal "geek" lunch a bit later. Chris is a veteran "entrepreneurial software engineer," and divides his free time between his new baby girl and a project he calls day tripr. My knowledge of day tripr is very limited, but I can't speak well enough of Chris. Like Blake, Chris has given me way more time than I deserve, and has volunteered to help me get a handle on the technical stuff so I can find software developers without multiple mouths to feed. Needless to say, I've very excited to be working with him in any capacity.
I met Mike Orren for lunch for the first time at Peggy Sue's. He is the Founder and CEO of Pegasus News, which is the best thing to happen to news since the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Not only is Pegasus' reporting highly relevant, rich, and cool with its blog-style prose, the website itself personalizes the content you receive so you get exactly what you want, and nothing you don't. Look out for this company to start trends in other cities as well, if Pegasus doesn't do it for other cities first.
I'm going to hold off on Dave Copps because I'll be doing a longer piece soon about some ideas that we both have in common, but for now I'll tell you that he's working in semantic search and is the Founder and CEO of Pure Discovery. He is currently presenting at a conference on recruiting and gave a great interview here.
Finally, we have Jim Young. Like me, Jim spent many amazing summers at Camp Longhorn growing up. Jim is founder and CEO of Jambo. Jambo is a service that operates from your mobile phone that allows you to search for and "detect" anyone with a mobile phone in your area (whether that be a coffee shop or a city) that happens to be a member of your "directory" (i.e. high school graduating class, professional organization, business, etc.). You don't have to be a techie to understand the implications this could have for social networking. Jim had some very wise insights for what I'm doing, and there may even be potential for our two companies to work together in the future, so keep up with Jim's progress and see if you can get your business or organization to implement Jambo; it will make it much easier to "run into" your friends more often, especially when they're in other cities.
So, thats it for now; next posting will be about why you do what you do and what that has to do with everything you do.
