eBay Aquires NYC Start-Up Hunch
Mike Arrington broke the news that eBay aquired Hunch, a personalized recommendation service. eBay’s plans for Hunch involve helping improve the company’s shopping recommendations to users of the auction site.
Chris Dixon, founder of Hunch and a well respected angel investor, wrote on his blog about six months ago, something that really resonated with me, and is worth revisiting.
“There are two kinds of people in the world”
“You’ve either started a company or you haven’t. “Started” doesn’t mean joining as an early employee, or investing or advising or helping out. It means starting with no money, no help, no one who believes in you (except perhaps your closest friends and family), and building an organization from a borrowed cubicle with credit card debt and nowhere to sleep except the office. It almost invariably means being dismissed by arrogant investors who show up a half hour late, totally unprepared and then instead of saying “no” give you non-committal rejections like “we invest at later stage companies.” It means looking prospective employees in the eyes and convincing them to leave safe jobs, quit everything and throw their lot in with you. It means having pundits in the press and blogs who’ve never built anything criticize you and armchair quarterback your every mistake. It means lying awake at night worrying about running out of cash and having a constant knot in your stomach during the day fearing you’ll disappoint the few people who believed in you and validate your smug doubters.
I don’t care if you succeed or fail, if you are Bill Gates or an unknown entrepreneur who gave everything to make it work but didn’t manage to pull through. The important distinction is whether you risked everything, put your life on the line, made commitments to investors, employees, customers and friends, and tried – against all the forces in the world that try to keep new ideas down – to make something new.” – Chris Dixon
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Diget – Social Media Meets Financial News
Financial and business news has long been the domain of eminent organizations like The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and more recently, Bloomberg. However, the growth and array of financial content on the web has been staggering, making the task of managing and consuming this content an ever more daunting task.
That’s where Diget is designed to fit it. Diget is a community edited financial news site with links and opinions from around the web. It enables anyone to submit content, share their opinion, and discover new insights through the power, and leverage, that comes from community driven content.
Diget is designed to help users quickly evaluate the top stories from a wide-array of news sources, share their opinion, and rate the content for other users. The main aim of the site is to add a social slant to financial news, so that anyone can better understand, engage, and share the most relevant and compelling content.
Many visitors to the site will only be interested in the latest and most popular stories, while others will help edit, rate, and discuss these stories, adding value to the content, and sharing insights in the process. Social media helps users sift through content and personalize their experience. That’s what makes it compelling. It also helps users better engage with content, through a social lens that helps sort and personalize the content.
While sharing links to content on the web is nothing new, it still has the potential to become a much more mainstream activity. In fact, I believe, the simple act of sharing content with others has incredible growth potential. Specifically, content that is category focused, frequently updated, and community edited.
Diget is aimed at users who are rabidly interested in the economy, investment, and global business, and have an opinion to share on their area of interest. It’s the community that drives the debate. And let’s be honest about it, predicting the economy, and how to survive during tumultuous times is always open to debate.
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Well, You Gotta Have a Dream
Starting something is always easier than finishing it. I think it’s simply a reflection of the fact that we are all creative by nature. We all love to think up new things. We all love to dream. No matter how big, nor how small.
It’s also because, I believe, due to the nature of change. Making a change is easier than making the change stick. Certainly much easier than the long, arduous hours that come with ensuring that the change has some legs to it.
I’ve started something new. Something I’ve been thinking about starting for some time. I just wasn’t sure how to make it into something real. Idea, check. Dream, check. Plan, check. That’s the fun part. Tinkering with your idea. But it doesn’t make it a reality. That takes work. Work when you’d rather be playing. But that’s the nature of change I guess.
The new site I’ve started is called Diget. Diget is a community edited financial news site that is a fun and informative way to stay on top of what’s happening in finance, the economy, technology, business, and investment trends. Diget is a community driven news site where anyone can submit content, discuss and debate it’s value, rate it, and share their personal insights on what’s going on in the economy and finance.
We are living in uncertain economic times. The world is becoming increasingly complex. Exponentially. My dream is that Diget will help anyone interested in what’s happening in the world of business, finance, and technology, better sift through content, and better make sense of what we see happening in global markets.
Well, you gotta have a dream. Otherwise, how else is it gonna come true?