One of the great things about the Internet as a place to do business is that just as you think innovation is grinding to a halt, new ideas spring up in the oddest of places, triggering a fresh wave of products and competition. It can be brutal, but it can also be fun. I’ve been following Fred Wilson’s Blog for a year or so now; his commentary isn’t too breathless about the technology and focuses more on how it will impact our lives. Fred’s a VC, so he has a slightly different perspective on things, but in his recent blog, the Golden Triangle, he talks about the three mega trends that will influence the web over the next few years: the social web, the mobile web and the real-time web. For me, it brought two things spring to mind: one, that we are in the early stages of the next big wave of innovation and two, Jiva Tech will be right in the middle of it, given that our products leverage the emerging social and real-time elements of the Internet. As I said, its going to be brutal, but it should also be fun.
Stuckspace is the homework help space. With teenagers currently expected to produce over half a billion hours of homework a year, we thought it was time for them to get a little help. Stuckspace is a collaborative space where you can post questions that they you’re stuck on and peers can post tips, answers or links that help. Like Yahoo answers, but much more focused. It leverages a technique that has proved successful in the workplace: if you don’t know, ask someone who has been there before.
Without help its easy to become frustrated and needlessly discouraged from schoolwork. Parents can sometimes help, but our research has shown they’re frequently unable to assist. Or you can look at static web content, but that’s generic. Or you can turn to friends via IM, but that’s a small pool and subject to all those insecurities about not getting it.
How many times have you heard that? Maybe not in those exact words, but it’s immensely valuable to get just a snippet of good advice from someone who’s been there before, who’s an expert in the field or maybe just has an informed opinion. How many times does it help when answering a hard question or making a tough decision? That’s not to run down its bigger-sized counterpart: a lot of advice. But that’s easy, you ring up an expert and you go and spend plenty of time getting it really right. There are people set up to do this, just Google it or open the yellow pages.
But a bit of advice? If you’re a real specialist and you’re paid to give advice, you want to give lots of it. You’re probably paid by the hour and its better for you to hand out your advice in big dollops of time. It just isn’t economic to do it in small quantities. But hold on a minute, uneconomic to do it in small quantities? If we can work out a way to make micro-finance and micro-payments viable, why can’t the same be true for micro-advice?
Watch this space. With a lot of hard work and a bit of inspiration, we think we may have a way to make it economic to give & get ‘a bit of advice’.