The Jason Salas Experience

Last night during my company's Christmas party I enjoyed a delightful conversation talking shop with Jay Shedd, the CEO of the local DoCoMo installation.  As we each beat our proverbial chests by running down various entrepreneurial ideas we've come up with over the years, I mentioned several of the R&D initiatives I've got in the hopper, including a Web 3.0 application I've recently been mentally cobbling.

I passionately described a mobile service I'm keen on building that leverages artificial intelligence and embedded devices to allow a user to capture a headline, image or video of a news event on their cameraphone, which then queries a semantic database and returns hyperlinks to text, audio, image and video exhibits of all coverage of that event from sources throughout the world (mainstream media as well as the blogosphere). 

The app would smartly recognize the context in which the inbound media was submitted and sniff out appropriate matching entries, sensitive to the time they were stored so the user gets an up-to-the-second experience of how the world's media corps, old and new, is covering and responding to various events. 

Think of such a framework, I postulated, as a powerful archive of constantly updated/logically organized data, masked behind a stupidly simple front-end.  Google News meets Compare Everywhere meets Techmeme.

I'm fortunate that Jay, having a technical green thumb, was able to follow along for most of my dissertation, although I know I lost him when I started in on the need for data-describing-data semantics as the next generation drivers for software as a service platforms.

"And you think you can do this?" was the executive's penultimate response, followed by, "Jason, so what are you doing here on Guam?", implying that such ideas would be more successful in the lucrative rolling hills of Silicon Valley.  And he's right, of course.

But while most would-be idea-mongers might leap at the prospect of being the beneficiary of such an ad hoc endorsement to launch the Next Great Platform in the Mecca of the technical frontier, it bums me out that I can't take such ideas to profitability in my own hometown.  Location, location, location.

What am I still doing here?  Yeah, I get that a lot.

// posted by Jason Salas @ 10:19 PM