Venture Idea #2 - TwitterWire

Someone build this please. The Idea: A system that acts as a tweet router. The first application; Micro Press Releases.

On one side, Business owners would sign up with their twitter accounts and supply some basic information about their business.

  • Name
  • City
  • Date Founded
  • Industry ex. Tech-Web-Social Network
  • Stage ex. Pre-seed, funded, established
  • Number of empoyees range
  • Annual Revenue range

On the other side, anyone can sign up with their twitter account and select the types of companies they would like to receive news about. ex. I would pick all tech startups in Ottawa and Toronto, Digg, Google, and Apple by name, as well as any alternative fuel companies.

Let's assume this venture is called TwitterWire. The domain is taken, but nothing is hosted there. I already checked.

You would then follow user twitterwire on Twitter and automatically receive all twitter wire news releases that meet the criteria you selected. This makes for a great way to keep up to date with all the happenings in the business/startup world.

To the right is a screenshot with a mockup of how the tweets could be displayed. These two tweets from Devshop and Shopify(1st and 5th tweets) would appear because they matched the criteria I selected, without me having to discover and follow them myself. At the top is how you would submit your own micro press release.

Step 1: Build the site to allow twitter users to submit their business and subscribe to other business' feeds. Build a system that follows everyone who has registered and upon receiving a tweet from them, fire it off to anyone who's listening criteria matches the tweeter company.  Twitter wire tweets would be nothing more than a headline and a link.

Getting startups to sign up first would be a great starting point. There's nobody more willing to share information about their company.

Business' get to broadcast their news. Everyone gets to easily keep up to date with what's going on. Everybody wins.

Step 3: Profit

maybe5 goes mobile

I've been on a mobile web kick lately. I'm really starting to see how the mobile/location aware web can unfold over the next 10 years. To get started, I figured I'd spend five minutes getting maybe5 mobile. I came across MoFuse. They claim a mobile version of your site in minutes. Really? Just minutes?

Actually, it took about 4 minutes, and that's including the time it took me to add another CNAME entry to my DNS server so you can access it from m.maybe5.com. Even DNS changes are fast nowadays!

At first glance, it seems like a really nice product. The site looks good on my BlackBerry and their iPhone widget(I hate that term) looks pretty slick. Here it is below so you can see for yourself.

Between MoFuse and the wordpress mobile admin plugin, I can manage and view my blog all from my BlackBerry.

The evil Mr. Burns-like figure at Fido is slobbering over the new money they will make from my increased data usage. "Excellent."