My new mirco-startup is aiming hyperlocal
During the past 6 months I’ve been holding back on my blogging about startups as I’ve been trying various ideas for a new startup of my own. After a few misses, that I’ll not talk about here, I think I have come up with a sustainable idea.
Hyperlocal was a somewhat big buzzword in 2009 and as many websites are becoming more location-aware, location will become even more important in 2010. So far hyperlocal services such as EveryBlox, Fwix and Outside.in have gained some traction mainly in the US, but in my home country of Finland there are currently no such services.
I believe there is a need for consumers to find relevant information about things happening around them, but that need is not being fulfilled in a comprehensive way (at least in Finland). In Finland I see almost every week that a new or existing website tries to fulfill a part of the equation so from a consumer’s perspective, there is more local information, but it is very fragmented. Therefore I decided that I wanted to start exploring the possibilities of hyperlocal and location-aware services by building an aggregator. Paikallinen.info was born.
Currently Paikallinen.info aggregates news, and information about restaurants and services from the biggest cities in Finland, so calling the site hyperlocal is a bit of an exaggeration, but that is the ultimate goal. It is currently very difficult to retrieve any local information beyond city-level in Finland, but I see that this will change in the future. The site in it’s current form serves as a platform for adding more information from various sources later on.
From the US-based hyper-local services I see EveryBlock as the most interesting, but I will not try to copy them, but to find a solution that fits the Finnish market. We are behind the US by 1-3 years, so there is time to find the best working model. As for monetization, I believe there is real value in location as a context for advertising. In the beginning the site will include contextual advertising through Google AdSense. Affiliate marketing (still underutilized in Finland) will follow soon.
As I’m not going to leave my day job in an ad agency just yet, I wanted to create a very lean startup, that requires minimal investment. The first version of the site was created in four hours on top of Wordpress. After some more tweaking over the holiday season, I have created a site that I see as enough for a so-called minimum viable product. It could also be called a minimal viable product as there is some work needed to enhance the visual representation of the site at a later stage. I really want to get critique and ideas from users to guide the development of the site, so point your browsers to Paikallinen.info and give your feedback there.
Aggregators Are Around Us, Will Proliferate
During the past six months I’ve become really interested in news aggregators. Techmeme is the first thing I check after email in the morning and it has helped me a lot in finding out what people are discussing about technology right now. It has saved me hours of time and I’ve come across stories I would have missed otherwise.
Of course Techmeme has its problems. Tristan Louis wrote about Techmeme myopia - Techmeme highlights stories that are being discussed right now, but it cannot distinguish between rumor and news or a personal clash between bloggers and really disruptive innovation. But I’m fine with that. It would be great is Gabe Rivera could develop Techmeme so that It could tell the difference. I hope he does, but it will not be easy.
What, on the other hand, is easy, is creating an aggregator around one topic and then cloning it to handle something completely different. That’s what Rivera has done with celebrity gossip, politics and baseball.
A new entrant (at least new to me) to the aggregation game is Loud3r. They have created aggregators to handle such diverse topics as sneakers, dogs and motorcycle roadracing. The most interesting to me are Found3r (about venture capital) and Buzz3r (about internet business & technology). These sites do not quite get to the same level as Techmeme, but they produce somewhat different results, which is always welcome. And I also like that they reveal the score they give to each story and how it is counted from three variables: quality, community and buzz.
In conclusion, aggregators are all the time easier to create, they are easier to copy and they will continue to become a very big part of peoples’ lives. Currently aggregators like Techmeme and Buzz3r are used by only a handful of people, but as aggregators develop to get better results they will eventually be used by the masses who have no time or will to go through the noise.
[Techmeme discussion: Techmeme Myopia]
[Loud3r via Friendfeed by Scoble]
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