Am I going soft? Thursday, November 09, 2006
My colleague and I went along to WebWednesday last night, nr Regent St and by chance met up with our favourite "young" entrepreneur, Keiran O'Neill. Whilst at Bath University, Kieran founded funnyvideo.com which he recently sold and has another business targeted at the Playstation community. In 8 days time he is launching another site targeted at the Playstation 3 community. These sites have done well in part because of his self-taught SEO skills which get him very high search engine rankings.
We first met Kieran back in June when Mike Arrington from Techcrunch had a party in London. Kieran and 2 of his friends had travelled all the way up from Bath (they are still undergraduates) i order to network at the event.
Aside from having "get up and go" and biz about him, Kieran is also great to involve in discussions in which people are giving us their elevator pitches at events. Having run a business, he's very sharp at picking over the pitch and identifying where the value is (or not).
Anyway, last night I was enthusing about my evening at BBC Backstage widgets and telling Kieran and my colleague about the great widgets that had been built - really cool radio player; neat BBC World news reader etc. When I'd finished, Kieran looked puzzled and said "so how do they make any money from that then?" And I realised, I must be getting soft - I just thought they were simply great apps and didn't care about the commerce end, and for most of the developers (some were submitted by businesses) neither did they.
posted by John Wilson @ 8:43 AM Permanent Link
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