Get Hypersocial!

It's been a while since I last posted here, being terribly overwhelmed by exams and coursework at the moment. However, I couldn't miss this year's last session at E-Club! Tonight's event was hosted together with EUTIC (Edinburgh University Trading and Investment something) at a new venue: good old Appleton Tower instead of Business School. The event was OK, not good and not bad either. Started off with some guy talking about bonds, found it somewhat boring, I'm not into finance at all. That was followed by a few very successful retail entrepreneurs including Shaf Rasul (another Dragon from Dragons' Den) talking about their life stories and a new venture called Big Offers - that bit was interesting. Unfortunately, I urgently had to reply to a few emails during their presentations and as a result couldn't take any notes, so no story, I'm afraid. On the other hand, I started writing this post, hence should share something interesting (-ish? Will you find it interesting?).

I'll talk about one thing that occupied my mind for quite a long time now and, more recently, piles of A4 paper sheets and a few MB's of memory on my hard-drive: one small start-up idea. No, I won't post my business plan  (well, I don't have one yet tbh) here or opportunity assessment, just a very brief summary of what it is. It's called Hypersocial, not a final name though, but rather something I've written at the top of a one-page document where I for the first time decided to summarise the idea, the core concept of which was born two or three years ago in an argument with a good friend of mine over imperfections of democratic system and how bad it sucks sometimes, but that's out of scope anyway. Much more recently I decided to turn this concept into something that could be used as a real web-service one day and provide real value.

Any business idea has to start with a problem, so called user pain, and a solution that is sought to fix it. In my case it was information on the web and the way I am interacting with it. Same as everyone, I like reading interesting articles and watching cool videos on YouTube, but it's often so hard and time consuming to find it because:

1. There's too much rubbish (irrelevant and useless data) shared on the Internet (especially if you think about social media).
2. There's a lot of information that is actually "cool" and "interesting", but just not for me!
3. Finally, often I don't know what I want (Fuck man, that's a big one!)

So, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have some online resource that knows what you want and aggregates information into a news stream, that is specifically tailored to your interests? That's the first problem which is concerned with getting information.

The second one has to do with giving. What do you get back when you share something good with your friends and the world? Well, I get comments sometimes when I post in this blog and, to be honest, they make me happy. Same thing with "likes" and comments on facebook, @mentions on twitter etc., but, strictly speaking, these don't carry any persistent, long-lasting value, something I could monetise or at least look at and say "Yeah, I've done [that much] good for this world".

So, the system I have in mind, and hopefully you will see one day in your browsers, is a social (hyper-social!) network that knows what you like and gives you that, connects with people that you find interesting, gives a strong incentive to share good quality information with the world and rewards for doing this, even with real-world money! Plus some other cool features not mentioned here. However, there's a catch (there always is!), so one thing to watch out for is: hey, it's gonna be highly addictive!

How is that going to happen? Well, I can't really tell you everything just now, so stay tuned. Although probably next time I'm going to post something here is not going to be any sooner than after a couple of weeks.

Thanks for reading!