After months of hard work we are ready to give the world a taste of Wikwikit! Go to Wikwikit.com and start enjoying our short, straight-to-the-point definitions of thousand of concepts. If you’re using a mobile phone, we got you covered, too.
Right now, Wikwikit offers the most basic stuff: look for definitions and read them in seconds. Review article drafts so that we can include them or reject them. That’s it. No sign-up required.
Some time ago I wrote about using components to found a startup. Since then I have been looking for other best practices for newly founded startups like Wikwikit. A very interest concept I stumbled upon is “the Lean Startup”. In this post I’d like to present this concept briefly and in very simple words.
Wikwikit is a platform for User-Generated Content (or UGC), like Youtube, Wikipedia, Flickr, and many other Internet sites. The term is a little bit old by now (according to Wikipedia, it entered mainstream usage during 2005), but it’s never too late to learn interesting things about it, some of which I will try to explain on this post.
Christoph Magnussen, who has been coaching us in the last months, recommended us a book called in German “Kopf schlägt Kapital“, which in English means “Head beats Capital”. The book explains in a structured manner many things we already believed to be the right way to found a start-up. The Wikwikit article about the learnings I took from the book would be: “To be competitive, flexible and efficient from the beginning, outsource everything but your core business, and do it smartly”. On this blog post I’ll tell you a little more about the book and how we’re using these learnings to develop Wikwikit.
An empty encyclopedia is useless. Therefore, Wikwikit’s success depends on the engagement of our community creating and improving articles. This is a challenge not only for us, it affects all other internet services based on User-Generated Content (or UGC). Many studies have demonstrated that not every internet user contributes in generating internet content. In fact, the vast majority of internet users are “lurkers”, i.e. they generate very little or no content at all, being mere spectators in the web.
We are looking for 10 to 20 friends to help us with a secret assignment that is very important for the development of Wikwikit. To thank those who participate, we will give them a gorgeous mug with our even more gorgeous logo! Just send us an e-mail to theguys@wikwik.it and the first ones will be invited.
We are looking for a Co-Founder. Yes, we’re not looking for an employee, but someone who shares the risks, the pain and the glory with us! We want you to help us become what we want to become in far less time than we’d do without you. Do you have what it takes to be part of the team?
Within the next days we will have Wikwikit ready to launch in closed beta. For those not acquainted with internet slang, a closed beta launch means giving access to our site to a small number of users who get to play around and give us some feedback or tell us about any bugs they find, so that we can be better prepared for the “real” launch (a.k.a. – you guessed it – open beta). The site has already most of the basic features, and it’s working quite well in our tests. Many advanced features, like the possibility to add articles to glossaries, are not implemented yet, but we’re on it and you’ll see them on the site gradually. Read the rest of this entry »A couple of months ago we read an interesting blog post at The Next Web about a Dutch foundation called send.a.message.
The foundation, based out of Amsterdam, works in collaboration with Palestinians living near the wall dividing Palestine and Israel. The concept is simple, you pay $30 to have a message of your choice spray painted on the wall, and a high res photo of the ‘art work’ is sent your way.
We´re happy to present you our brand-new blog! Here you´ll find the latest news about Wikwikit and some posts with ideas about interesting subjects (mostly internet-related since that´s what we love and talk all day about). Most importantly, through this blog we will be asking you about what you think of Wikwikit, what´s cool, what sucks, what would you like to see here and so on. So, comments are very welcome and we will be glad to answer any question you may have!
