Today I want to talk about one of my favourite Internet start ups. It is called Metaweb. Metaweb was founded in 2005. To my knowledge it had two rounds of investment (all together about 60 Million US Dollar) and it was bought by Google in June 2010.
So why do I love metaweb? Well they started to work on a really important and great problem using modern technology to solve it. Up to my knowledge they did not have a direct business model. They just knew that solving this problem would reward them and after gaining experience on the market they would find their busniess model.
The problem metaweb was solving
We are lucky. modern and great companies have very informative videos about their product.
I also love the open approach they took. Freebase the database created by metaweb is not protected from others. No it is creative common licence. Everyone in the community knows that the semantic database they run is nice to have but the key point is really the technology they built to run queries against the data base and handel data reconciling. Making it creative common helps others to improve it like wikipedia. it also created trust and built a community around freebase.
Summary of the business model
- openess
- focussing on a real problem
- learn with the market
I know it sounds as if I was 5 years old but I am fully convinced that there is an abstract concept behind the success of metaweb and I call it their business model. Of course I can think of many other ways than selling to google how to monetarize this technoligy. But in the case of metaweb this was just not neccessary.