Living in the old world

Few days ago I read the story of Excite told by Joe Kraus in “Founders at Work” (great book btw). He mentioned how each time a new medium appears, no one knows how to use it properly and they start copying the old one instead:

“When a new medium comes out, it adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old medium—which fails, and then the more appropriate models get figured out. For example, all the television programming in its early days looked like radio. It was literally the same guys reading the radio program on television, and it was extraordinarily boring. And advertising was radio advertising—the announcer reading the ad.

We too (Excite) adopted the business model of the prior medium, which was print.”

Joe’s statement was about a business living its days back in 1998… 10 years ago. And you may think: We have evolved a lot. We now have Facebook and Twitter. We passed that!

Well… we at uberVU believe this not to be true. We moved from print to desktop. And from the desktop to the web… but we are somehow locked in the desktop and print world. We are very frustrated on how a lot of start-ups and big companies alike replicate classic mediums on the web. We have a dozen companies doing online word processing (with a twist), online spreadsheets applications, bookmarking tools and many… many more. The same with video. And social networks. What’s the deal in having a bunch of friends you mostly know in real life, anyway? (Poking is more fun in real life too). We don’t deny that evolution has happened. Content democratization is good thing… but we are are only beginning.

It may be a crazy goal: but we are trying to solve some of this issues. You will see it when we get there!