Qajack - First Date

I read a lot about stealth start-ups, which kinda sounds like a start-up crossed with a ninja Vincent Price, which is plain weird.

Shouldn’t you want to tell everyone you can about your start-up? Excluding the long game of the semantic web which would seem to be Artificial Intelligence, then I think I’m pretty safe in saying let’s focus on using existing technologies and build on the rise of the social web to create new businesses.

To my mind we’re at a heady confluence on the web, video/entertainment merges with social networking and search still dominates, even as the results become increasingly spamish and irrelevant. Micro-blogging and You Tube compels us all to crave the attention of our communities.

But there is so much NOISE. So much CRAP, so many purported opinions, so who do we trust?

At Fat Man we set about trying to answer that question. It began as an idea we could potentially pitch to clients, an interactive video community platform. Along came Seesmic and Viddler, but for us, something was still lacking.

There is nothing compelling me to commence a video chat or start a short form video stream of consciousness, or add a video comment. Compulsion is a necessary driving factor when thinking beyond the tech/early adopter community.

As evinced by Lord Techcrunch’s first foray into video comments, many people think ‘why video rather than text?’ and the answer seems to be ‘just because’.

Where’s the filtering? How do I judge the merits of one video comment over another? Given the time I’ll need to invest to look at them versus read text, this would seem like a pre-requisite.

So our thought process went something like this:

Video gives greater accountability (no hiding behind a username)

Create the first useful ‘video’ game

Gaming is compelling. Combine gaming and video and we have the necessary ‘compulsion’ to want to interact with the application. Digg is a game, the game of social news aggregation.

But where’s the strategy? What if I could use my points/rating to gain more information necessary to me, to influence and attract the correct responses? Kinda like Poker replete with Jokers and Wild Cards.

The Top 10 Deepest Caves In The World is not something I want in my hand, it’s not going to gain me much influence or relevance.

But QUESTIONS, we all have questions for which we desire answers, it’s why we Search. But rather than let the Digg effect (if you’re lucky) or a faceless spambot (if you’re evilish) help a particular site gain in the search rankings, why not let a real person in a real video provide you with the answer you’re looking for? If they can’t or no one has answered your question yet, pose it to the community and set a reward.

So after late nights debating virtual currencies, social networks, relevance, respect, video and gaming we came up with Qajack, the first really useful ‘video’ game. We’ve taken video gaming at it’s most literal sense, this isn’t Grand Theft MXIV or Halo 9.

It empowers you to make a game of what you know using video.

It enables you to use what you know to meet other like-minded people.

It keeps me up at night.

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