Anything You Can Do…
One of the top five rules of starting a company is that if you have a good idea, 50 other people have had it as well and a half-dozen are working on making it a reality (actual numbers subject to change on a whim). We knew that. What we didn’t anticipate is that they were working on it within a couple miles of Jectiv HQ.
Fortunately, DisrupterMonkey — whose Head Monkey we finally had a chat with earlier today — is going after a different market and has pretty different goals. Nonetheless, one might say that the core of their target technology is — mathematically speaking — a strict superset of Jectiv’s. The downside is that the way they’ve framed their problem is bloody ambitious, and will be Hard to solve well. The upside is that if they do it — and it sounds like they’re pretty much doing everything right, and are pretty bright guys to boot — then it could not only be significantly useful, but could actually shift the direction the web is taking. Or, at the very least, give the Semantic Web quite a little run for its money (but that’s another post).
And they have a mind-numbingly cool logo. We’re jealous.
Jectiv’s a bit more targeted. Technology-wise, we’re only biting off a specific piece of what they’re going for — which is in some ways the same basic thing, really, just stripped down to its essentials — but sometimes it’s the simple stuff that has the most impact. And, like I said, we’re using it in a pretty different way; even if both companies succeeded, chances are they’d never become competitors.
Quite possibly the two companies will be able to help each other out here and there. Or at least steal each others’ ideas over lunch (muhuhahaha).
Assuming funding issues don’t prevent them from having a chance to play the game in the first place, which would truly be a shame. But then, that’s a dance for which Jectiv will get to try out its moves in a few months…
October 8th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Thanks for the vote of confidence. Fun times are ahead!