Personal Media

I recently appeared on TV to talk about 121nexus, our political application 121campaign, our dating application Shall We Meet Again, and Personal Media™.  Personal Media™ is really what this company is about and so I want to elaborate on what we mean by that more in this blog post.


On the TV program, I talked about the evolution of the web.  Web 1.0 was the "Read Web" where you could read information on the internet.  Anyone have a GeoCities webpage back in the day?  Web 2.0 is the "Read/Write Web" where you can not only read information but also "write" or publish information.  Blogs erupted onto the scene as part of Web 2.0 which added vasts amount of information to the internet. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are all great examples of Web 2.0 websites where users can publish statuses or upload photos and videos.  Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are also well-known social media companies.  In fact Web 2.0 and social media are almost synonymous.


So what's next for web?  What will Web 3.0 look like?  That's certainly a point of debate. However many focus on the needs that have arisen out of Web 2.0. The results of Web 2.0, users being able to publish content, are that there is a tremendous amount of content and information on the web today.  This is problematic because users now have difficulty trying to find information and make sense of it.  That's why many believe that Web 3.0 will be focused on making information relevant to users by curating the content or personalizing the information.  Here is a good explanation of Web 3.0 concepts where the author, Amit Aragwal states Web 3.0 will be about the semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization, intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.


We agree with the assessments that personalization is going to be a big part of Web 3.0. In fact, we believe that our platform is the perfect example of what is next for the web -- Personal Media™.  We believe in it so much, that we have in fact applied for a trademark on the term which is why you see the TM symbol with the words in this blog.  But I digress, Personal Media™ means serving content and information (media) to individuals on a person to person basis, changing it to meet the personal preferences of a given user.  Instead of sending everyone to the same content, you curate it or configure it to be relevant to the individual. 


With our platform you can customize what your clients, customers or even friends see when you bring them on to the web.  Because Personal Media™ is tailored to the individual it's going to be more engaging than the static, generic content that would normally be viewed by them. 


Personal Media™ -- it's for business, for politics,  for YOU!

121CAMPAIGN Manifesto

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” – George Bernard Shaw

The quote from Shaw well illustrates the core principle that we believe in with our 121CAMPAIGN product -- exchanging ideas is a good thing.  We want to make it easy for political leaders, groups and constituents to share their ideas with one another.  We believe that the more that ideas flow between individuals and groups, the better our democracy will work.

121CAMPAIGN is nonpartisan.  Any group or individual may use the platform, regardless of their political affiliations.  

We are removing the barriers to political discourse -- with our platform you don't have "opt-in" (register your email, create an account, share your personal information) in order to add your voice to the conversation.  

We believe in an equal playing field.  We make our service affordable so that even small campaigns can use it. 

We expect small-minded people to attempt to impose political affiliations on our company but will remain undaunted in our mission to provide a nonpartisan platform to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas.  

We Will Redemocratize Democracy!

The Drawbacks of Online Dating

Online dating is iffy.  People put up pictures and answer questions about themselves, but no one knows how accurate those are. Then when you finally decide to make the jump from just communicating online to meeting in person, there's that awkward period of trying to discern which of the people in your agreed upon location look the most like your date's picture (assuming that picture is not outdated, blurry, or just plain not them). Yepp, making the transition to the real world from the digital one can be quite the leap, especially if you haven't met before. (For all you Disney buffs: no, once upon a dream does not count).

According to Forbes, it takes 7 seconds to get a first impression in person. Over the internet is a different story. If only there was a way to get that first impression and then retreat back to the safety of online messaging until you had built up enough of a connection to meet again in person. That way, you already know (well, your gut instinct does) if you're interested or not.

If only...

Pride and Preliminaries

The 121nexus team had a blast at Pride this Saturday, where we ran a beta test of our campaign solution by distributing three hundred cards for Congressman Cicilline. The results are still coming in; we've been surprised to notice that we're getting new users accessing their personal landing pages for the first time even today, three days after the event.

At the last minute, we also decided to distribute some of Foster's old dating cards to drum up interest for Shall We Meet Again. Since Foster isn't looking for a boyfriend, though, we had the codes redirect to this comic instead, which is half teaser-trailer for the Shall We Meet Again release, half an experiment in different ways to explain our technology. We hope that graphically showing the cards in action will allow people to quickly grasp what exactly we're trying to do.

This week, we'll be working on adding some features to the campaign platform to allow the distributors of the cards to customize landing pages more quickly, and on reintegrating the old Shall We Meet Again site into our new code base. At the end of the week, we should be compiling our results from the Pride test, which will hopefully help us refine our approach to 121campaign-ing.

Foster and Albert are finally emerging from grant land today, so it's time to get started!

Gear Up

The intros and the set-ups are over, so it's time to get to work. And we definitely have work to do.

Our goals:

1) Apply for an NSF grant by the end of the week, showcasing the potential effects of our personal media solution in multiple markets. 121 technology facilitates a passive connection paired with human-augmented personalization to make true one-to-one connections without requiring you to log in or store everything you've ever done online (creepy).

2) Have 121Campaign completely up and running in time for Pride this Saturday, where Congressman Cicilline will be using our technology to reach out to his constituants. This test is incredibly important for us, as it will be the first time we will get real data be able to say for certain what our open (people who open the links) and conversion (people who follow up by clicking the calls to action on the landing pages) rates are. We will be at the event and handing out the cards ourselves, so we can also get user experience, at least from the distributer end.

3) (Hopefully) get the ShallWeMeetAgain site functional on a demo level so that we can distribute ShallWeMeetAgain cards at Pride and generate interest for the site.

I mentioned we have one more day to do this, right?

Wish us luck!

The New 121Team

There are a lot of new faces around the 121Nexus offices recently. In just two short weeks, we have officially brought the team from its initial two co-founders up to eight people with our plethora of interns. Let's introduce them!

In order of appearance:

Lydia- started 5/29 and will be acting in the role of project manager. She's a rising senior at Cornell University majoring in operations research engineering and will be on the development side and the business side. So far, she’s done market research on the online dating market in the US and Japan, come up with a costing model for our upcoming Japanese dating application, redesigned the blog, worked on the website redesign team, and written two blog posts (including this one).

Haley- started 6/4 and will be acting in the role of chief designer. She’s a recent grad of Cornell University where she majored in physics and will be working on the development side and the design side. So far, she’s created a mascot for our Japanese dating application, worked on the website redesign team, redone the blog header (like it?), and prepared all of our new graphic content.

Jed- started 6/4 and will be acting in the role of business lead. He’s a rising junior at Cornell University (sensing a trend yet?) majoring in applied economics and management and will be working on the business side of the company.  So far, he’s prepared a preliminary pro forma, done market research on the political campaign market and the dating market, and gone over all of the company expenses.

Nicole- started 6/4 and will be acting in the role of lead front-end programmer. She’s a rising junior at (you guessed it) Cornell University, majoring in information science, systems, and technology, and she will be working on the development side.  So far, she acted as the primary coder on the website redesign team.

John- will start 6/11 and will be acting in the role of chief marketing/PR/campaign liaison. He’s a rising senior at Brown University (switching it up) majoring in international relations, and he will be working on marketing and public relations. John is also an intern with the Cicilline campaign, and will be helping our company coordinate with the campaign.

Neal- will start soon and will be acting in the role of lead back-end programmer. He’s a rising sophomore at Cornell University majoring in computer science and will be working on the development side. He will be working with us remotely and his first project will be building an API for us.

We’re very excited about all these new members and can’t wait to see where the company can go with all this new talent behind it.

We Love RI

There’s no doubt about it, the city of Providence has been great for 121Nexus.  The culture here breeds idea sharing and trying new and innovative things: perfect for a start-up. Just two nights ago we had PechaKucha right here at the Betaspring office. A PechaKucha is when people get 20 slides, with 20 seconds per slide, to talk about whatever they want. Anyone can come and watch, and anyone can present: the talks and slides are uncensored and un-juried.  It actually started in Tokyo as a way for people from different backgrounds with different interests to come together and generate new ideas together.  The event has since spread all over the world, and Providence is in third for the most PechaKucha events, at 38 as of May 30th.

And it’s not just the culture. The city officials truly want start-ups in Providence to stay and succeed.  Considering our political application, this is great for us. Even without it, having the politicians where you work support your cause and actively try to help you is huge.  The city of Providence is committed to working with HUD to allocate funds from development to give to budding companies, just like us, to encourage job creation.  Yesterday all of the start-ups graduating from Betaspring were invited to a press conference at the mayor’s office and recognized with citations for their help generating jobs for the city. Here's the link.

This push to help start-ups prosper in Providence is given even more of a boost by Rhode Island’s size.  The small size works to our advantage, where everyone is only one to two degrees of separation away. Entrepreneurs can then quickly secure meetings with the people that they need to get feedback from in order to build a great product and business.   We could not be happier with Providence, Rhode Island.