Daniel J SaitA PODCAST ABOUT THE NEXT REVOLUTIONS IN TECHNOLOGY
Predicting Our Future is a tech podcast that envisions the future through a serial entrepreneur’s eyes. Andrew Weinreich, inventor of the first social network SixDegrees, and founder of seven start-ups, interviews leading entrepreneurs to predict massive opportunities for the next generation of start-up founders to change the world. Here we present the original audio podcast with an introduction below, click the image above to start the podcast.
Building A Smart Home Product? Think Crowdfunding
The Origins of Crowdfunding
Both Kickstarter and Indiegogo are part of what is commonly referred to as ‘crowdfunding’ sites, and my personal relationship to Kickstarter is not one that I enjoy repeating. I met Perry Chen in 2007 when I was introduced to him by Sunny Bates, a long-time friend and Kickstarter’s first investor. While Chen’s initial idea was around getting fans of bands to fund the bands’ music, he quickly came up with this idea that people would pay for a product in advance simply because they wanted to see that product created. He offered me the chance to invest and I turned him down. Why would people devote their time offering to buy products that didn’t exist? I’ve done a fairly good job in my career in sizing up entrepreneurs and the opportunities in front of them. But here’s a story of a company that I badly misjudged, and it’s because I didn’t appreciate the dynamic behind the vision and how vital it would become to the future disruption of so many industries.
From an entrepreneur’s perspective, it should be obvious why a platform where you can visually or verbally describe a future product would be appealing. Why waste time on building something that people don’t want when you can ask people ahead of time whether they would buy your product? For those of you who haven’t used Kickstarter or aren’t familiar with it, that’s exactly how it works. You can browse products that people want to build.
And if you like what you see, you can commit to buy the product if and when it’s ever built. What surprised me was that, in a world where you might think every conceivable product is available on Amazon, there are still lots of products people are willing to pay for that are yet to be conceived. As it turns out, there is a huge audience that is excited about browsing for products that don’t exist, perhaps because they’re excited to peer into the entrepreneur’s mind or because they’re excited about the possibilities, thereby encouraging a new class of entrepreneurs to dream and rely on their prospective customers for financing.
So check out the podcast, we hope you enjoy it!
Andrew Weinreich, bio
Andrew is one of the leading lights in global cutting-edge tech founded SixDegrees is 1997, the online company was the first of its kind to enable users to identify relationships with people they know and then query for people they didn’t know through established connections. The concept was based on the Six degrees of separation theory by Stanley Milgram. SixDegrees was the first social media network to allow users to create a profile, show their friends list, and search through their friends list. Andrew authored the first patent on social networking, “Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system,” commonly known as the Six Degrees patent, which secured the social media network’s software code.
Since selling the site for £125 million, Andrew has gone on to set up a further 6 companies including MeetMoi, the first location based dating site and Xtify, ‘the first geo-notification API that powers ‘persistent location,’ allowing a user’s location to be extracted from a mobile device on a periodic and continuous basis’ Xtify was acquired by IBM on October 3, 2013.
I Stand For, a technology solution to transfer political fundraising online with content management and community solutions and Joltage, an infrastructure services business devoted to building out a global network of Wi-Fi hotspots.
All of Andrew’s business creations have had one thing in common, they have all been considered ahead of their time, often the very first launch in a given field, so who better to help us predict what is coming next. Ce Pro is delighted to be able to present this series of poadcast from Andrew and we hope you enjoy them.