Harriet Smith Windsor is my best friend. Harriet is the Secretary of State of Delaware. A few weeks ago she certified the Certificate of Incorporation for "Zorap Inc.". Zorap is my new venture.
Zorap, the company, is purely virtual. The company headquarters is a rack at the Internap Data Center in San Jose. It is chock-full of servers, switches, power supplies, wires and other stuff.
Employees use VPN connections to commute to work in the morning. The data center holds our precious source files, a build machine, as well as our production web servers.
We use a Google business account for e-mail and hosting our homepage.
Payroll is done through Paychex.
We have a wonderful and insightful angel investor who invested in our seed round.
So, what does Zorap do? Zorap, the technology, is the next step in online presence. I
t is the first technology that actually lets you "be on the web".
Web experiences, by and large, involve a person (you) interacting with content that was created at some point in the past (a website). Zorap, on the other hand, allows a person (you) to interact with your friends or colleagues on the web. It's just that simple.
When it comes right down to it, there are few choices for live human-to-human communication on the web. Here is a list:
- Tools like Skype or AIM which let you communicate over the Internet - but these tools aren't actually part of the web, they are stand-alone programs. You have to sign up, download them, install them, run them, and then "call people" (telephone style) to see them or hear them. You can send instant messages, but text is a limited form of communication.
- There are chat sites, but anonymity makes these pretty chaotic and adult-oriented.
- There are conferencing products, like WebEx.
- There are plenty of games, but games don't offer the ability to express yourself - they just let you play the game.
What if you just want to get together with your friends online? THAT'S what Zorap is all about.
I don't want to say too much more at this point; I have intentionally cloaked the project in an air of mystery. It is not a good idea to spill too many beans until we are up and running. (by the way, you should beware of paragraphs which include the words "air" and "beans")
As you could probably tell by my hyper-sparse entries on GarageEntrepreneur, I have been pretty busy with Zorap. We have written a lot of software, and soon, we should have a beta sign-up form on our homepage.
Stay tuned!
Oh Man, What is it?? Tell me tell me tell me! I won't tell anyone, swear!
Posted by: Eric LoBue | July 20, 2007 at 02:59 AM