More of our ideas, actually implemented…
I wrote a bit in a previous post titled “We are always behind the times it seems” how competition in the “real world” has been a bit or a startling realization for me during the course of this, my year long entrepreneurial sabbatical from Olin. During the first month of the leave that a group of six Oliners have undertaken, we came up with dozens of ideas, some of which we felt were actually worth pursuing, except for the fact that not all six of us were passionate about them.
Fortunately, we now have an idea we can all feel motivated about and work hard for. Alyshia talked a bit about our education-related, middle school-focused software tool called LearnMeld in the last post.
Well, it turns out there are MORE of our ideas from a few months ago that have just been turned into actual web startups. What this means is that they’be been in development for a year or so, and had we decided to make those website, a yearlong endeavor itself, we would have been saddened to see our idea already implemented, and all our work gone to waste. Sometimes a newcomer to the web space might be a clunky tool that nobody will use, but I don’t think the two website that we just found fall into that category.
Our first idea:
Emotional Tagging of web content, something we’d seen partially implemented in unique ways through the work of Jonathan Harris, an artist and computer scientist that makes online art that “captures the world’s expression.” If you haven’t seen his work, check out his TED talk about the “emotional world of the Web.” I personally love both WeFeelFine and Universe, two of his projects. In any case, our idea was to try and implement this notion of emotional tagging to something like music. Now, Pandora’s Music Genome project is close to what we were thinking about creating, but Pandora is mostly (to my knowledge) focused on musical qualities of music, and picks music in this way. We wanted to use emotional qualities, mood, tempo, to drive musical choices and allow users to browse and listen to music based on a desired emotional state. You could conceivably trace your way from “Angry” to “Flustered”, across “Independent” to “Free” and then to “Empowering, Emotional, and finish with Stirring or Motivational. Imagine listening to music by tracing a desired emotional profile! We thought it would be interesting anyways. Well, there is a new player in the web scene called Musicovery. While they don’t exactly allow you to “trace an emotional profile,” they very nicely allow you to select and browse music based on mood and dance qualities, as well as more standard means like time period and genre. I’m a fan, though Pandora stil holds a special place in my heart, it just isn’t as good at discovering new music, and I like to compartmentalize my Pandora stations nicely. This tool is designed to take you from Pop to Disco to Latin music, all with the same mood. No more need to fine tune my station to specific artists and songs anymore. Different mental models for different times I want to listen to music!
Our second idea:
Categorization and recommendation of movies by way of mood, emotion, director, themes, etc. While recommendation engines are nice, we wanted a better way to track and navigate through movie preferences in a more social and open way, ideally bringing in such qualities as actors, directors, and thematic elements. You don’t JUST like Forest Gump because it is partially about the military, or because it is set in the past. You may like it because it has Tom Hanks, and that is enough for you. Maybe you really liked the theme of growing up and overcoming the odds, or found the movie particularly motivating and moving. Well, there’s a new web startup called Jinni in beta right now that looks to do just this. (Not exactly, but still.) Check it out! 
That’s it for now,
-Marco