Flickr Co-founder Caterina Fake Launches New Startup
Caterina Fake, who cofounded Flickr with her husband Stewart Butterfield in 2004 and sold the popular photosharing site to Yahoo in 2005, today announced the launch of new startup called “Hunch.”
In a blog post, Fake describes Hunch as “decision-making site, customized for you.” She said Hunch will get to know its users by building a “taste profile.” Then, based on the answers to ten or so questions, Hunch will provide a customized answer to a paralyzing personal predicament.
“Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly,” Fake writes, a bit tongue-in-cheek. “What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What toe ring should I buy?”
Fake warns that the site is still in at an early stage of development, “Right now it’s like visiting Wikipedia in 2001,” she adds.
The site plans to make money through referral fees for products and services. There will also be an API that developers can use to build their own services. “You can, say, write a program that figures out how special you are, or a Facebook Nemesis finder,” Fake suggests.
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I thought the time for startup’s that didn’t have a business plan was over, isn’t it?
But, I guess Twitter is still going strong (although why that is, is beyond me).
Why would anyone ask a website why they need to buy a car (let along a Porsche). It sounds like this could be a complementary service to Google. Has everyone forgotten the furor that arose a few years ago when Gmail came out? It seemed everyone was so concerned that they were going to be reading your mail and then displaying ads! Guess it’s no big thing now. We certainly don’t seem to have many inhibitions to sharing our most personal data with websites.
Not really an original idea, though. The site http://www.decide-now.com has been running a similar spoof about decision making for many years.