net startup

as many of you know, yesterday was NetCamp's big day. And also Net Start Up's big day. I only found out that i'd present something at Net Start Up a few days ago, when Cosmin told me he had registered a tiny bit of our way bigger Trendspotting project. I knew we didn't really stand a chance to win, cause we could only present an idea, without too many plans, numbers or technical info to support it, and i cannot stand losing, but, still, this time i prefered to go for the experience. And i'm really glad i did, because it really was interesting. Even though I hadn't been that nervous before a presentation for ages, and i had a constant feeling that i didn't belong there and that i'd just embarrass myself (which i probably did).

Cosmin and I talked about our need to understand local young people's online behavior, as well as its dynamics at a larger scale, so we can permanently be in tune with what's hot for them, what their internet pathway looks like and what the emerging trends are from this point of view. In brief, we need to constantly understand the relationship between young people and online, so that we can be relevant to them on one hand, and predict the future on the other hand. So we presented a sort of an online research application that monitores the online activity of a certain user (by user i mean one of members of our trendspotting network, who obviously gives us his/her permission to do so), focusing on the user's pathway on blogs, youtube, flickr, twitter, last.fm, and so on (further generating statictics about the network's behavior). Pretty much like an Analytics for users, instead of websites. Of course, that's just a tiny part of something quite complex that we're still developing, but we were really curious how this thought sounded like to people who actually know what Internet is all about.

All in all, it was nice to be part of something that gathered many different enticing ideas, especially since there seemed to be a lot of enthusiam around local valuable net startups. And i also took it as an incentive, because the whole experience made me realise how many things i need to learn about the online environment. The big winner was Vladimir Oane, who presented CaptainGo, an online hotel booking system, while the other finalists were Catalin Tenita, Alex Brie, George Lemnaru and Emi Gal (congrats, guys!).

Thanks to Cristi and to Dragos for the great event. And to Bogdana, for cheering me up.