Kicking off the new year

In the new year, I suppose I should start blogging about making this happen.  I've had a very good start that I'm excited to share.

I've put together designs and have received great feedback from everyone I've shown them to!  There's still more design work to do, and some tweaks to make based on feedback, but it's been gratifying to hear positive things from friends who want to help.  I'm looking for anyone else who wants to see what I have now and contribute their feedback -- just reach out on facebook.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to finish designs and make a demo/pitch video of the system in action (or what it would look like if it were real).  That should allow me to raise my first round of capital and begin attracting a CTO-type person.  In the meantime, I'm interviewing development shops that can build a prototype.  Anyone who knows any good developers should also let me know.

The first quarter of 2012 should prove to be very exciting!  I'll try to blog regularly to keep people up-to-date on what I'm up to, and I'd love whatever help anyone can give!


For more info:

• Introduction: "This is for everyone who thinks...."
• Technical description

This is for everyone who thinks...

• Today, people know less about what is going on in the world, though there is more information available than ever before.
• The truth is drowned out in the news.
• For the world to work, everyone needs a balanced view of what's important.
• The wrong news is over-sensationalized.
• People get dumber for reading news today.
• Democracies cannot work if people are uneducated.
• It is technology's time to help solve this problem.
• It's everyone's time to help solve the problem.

Most people continue to have the following challenges:

• They have a hard time discovering news they want to read
• They have a hard time getting through all of the news they've found
• (It sounds like you either have too little or two much news, and only one of the above problems, yet people typically report having both problems!)

The trend today is to "personalize" news:  Does this solve the problem or just make it worse, where people just hear from others just like them?

We've done research into what people need in a newsreader.  We need to do more work and we need to build something that will be successful (not just like Google Reader, where some people use it, and almost nobody really likes it.)

There is no one gimmicky way to deal with this issue.  This calls for something much larger than just a silly newsreader startup.  It requires a movement.  Today is the day you can become part of it.

More to read:

• Technical description
• Who's involved