Hello and welcome to Kiobo! We would like to begin this blog by thanking all of you for your continued feedback and support. After seemingly endless conversations with our users, we feel that Kiobo is as much your creation as it is ours. Our goal is to continue evolving in the direction you take us, so please feel free to send us any comments or suggestions that you might have. We will always be grateful and receptive to your guidance.
We are very excited about the initial launch of Kiobo. Though to be perfectly honest, we are also quite nervous. The process of venturing off into the unknown has been equally nerve wrecking and exhilarating. Needless to say, this is only the first step in the creation of something that we hope will take on a life of its own. Kiobo will probably look very different once we implement your suggested changes and improvements. Where it we end up is, to a large degree, completely up to you.
We will use this Blog as a means of holding up a candid conversation with you on a variety of topics ranging from our philosophy and vision to the latest updates and enhancements we make to Kiobo. We will also post information that we find interesting or relevant to our mission. In other words, we plan to use this blog to communicate whatever is on our minds!
Since this is our first entry, I think it is appropriate to begin with the story of Kiobo’s creation. Kiobo was born from the recently popular theory of the wisdom of crowds. This term is a bit cliché, as it has become a buzzword here in Silicon Valley; however, the power of the phenomenon it describes is no trite hypothesis. The gist of the concept is the following is that a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals, even experts, within a crowd. (taken from Wikipedia, which appropriately functions according to the theory of the wisdom of crowds) The concept was made popular by James Surowiecki in his book entitled “The Wisdom of Crowds.” Prominent examples of the use of the wisdom of crowds include Google, Wikipedia and countless prediction-markets (best example I can come up with are the way odds in sporting events are set, by people acting individually)…
Why go into such detail explaining this concept? Well, one of Kiobo’s central goals is to harness the collective intelligence of people browsing the Internet. This is not our only goal, but it is underlies the basic functionality of Kiobo.
Like all entrepreneurs, we have a number of lofty goals:
- We are helping people make more meaningful discoveries that will make browsing the Internet more fun and worthwhile.
- We are enabling Web browsing to be a social activity by making it interactive and real-time.
- We are developing a platform where people can share and express themselves by simply…well, being themselves.
- We are connecting people who demonstrably exhibit common interests and passions.
- We are helping you to visualize and understand what is happening on the Internet.
And, quite honestly, we are listening to you, leveraging your collective wisdom in our search to discover new means of creating value for our users by connecting them to the hidden community behind their browsers. We want to make the Internet a slightly smaller place by simplifying it, showing you “what’s up.” Que Hubo? We’re going to show you: Kiobo.
Stay tuned. Thanks again for your support!