Aloha,
Not too long ago, I was in California. I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to visit friends and family, but I was able to see a few people I’ve known a long time. While sitting with one of them in a cool spot, I said “I should leave a VoiceMarkr here.”
My friend said “What’s a VoiceMarkr?”
He knew I was the CEO of a company called Iwahai and we had made an app called Iwahai - but even though most of my last 12 months have been dedicated to rebranding and rebuilding that app into a much better product called VoiceMarkr - my friend had no way of knowing that. It seemed remarkable to me.
The reason why was because of my perspective. I live and breathe VoiceMarkr these days. I think about it almost all the time. I imagine new uses, new ways of using it, features that we should include, ways to brand it, ways to protect our users and our business model - so for me, my friend saying “What’s a VoiceMarkr?” was shocking.
I think it’s like that in the USA right now for lots of people who are invested in one political ideology or another. They live and breathe it - they know that the bad ideas of the other side will lead to something they imagine to be much worse. They have a perspective that they are heavily invested in. They know lots of things that they assume everyone else knows. I’m using the word ‘know’ in a loose sense here, a subjective sense. The believe they know - and that’s as far as I’m willing to go.
My point is that people are operating under a huge set of assumptions, the biggest of which is that the person they are talking to already ‘knows’ what they ‘know’. Perhaps the key to solving all the problems in our country is to stop assuming that anyone ‘knows’ anything - and maybe even to be open to the fact that what we ‘know’ might be outdated, incorrect, or even just plain wrong.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn this into a political screed. Like most of the country, we were happy to see the results tallied and to hear a definitive winner announced in the US election. We look forward to a brighter future.
Back to that assumption thing though…I took the time to explain what a VoiceMarkr was to my friend and his reaction was “That’s a lot cooler than the Iwahai thing you told me about before…” So, in the spirit of that - I’d like to tell you what a VoiceMarkr is - rather than continuing to assume that you know.
A VoiceMarkr is a collection of data that is anchored on a map. When fully developed, a Voicemarkr (VM) will be able to include nested voice messages from multiple users, text data, photos, links, and even video. VMs will be organized in a taxonomic structure based on collections and topics. At some point, we envision each user being a topic that is made up of VMs and collections of VMs. Imagine a multi-media craigslist where the users all control their own data and the community monitors and protects the collections and topics that matter to them. That’s what a VoiceMarkr is…
Pretty cool, right? Well - before you rush over to VoiceMarkr.com - we aren’t there yet - but we are getting there. At the moment we are building the architecture for this grand endeavor and creating the code, data schemes, and security measures that will make it viable. Still, if you want to try out the most basic version - it’s available. If you haven’t already downloaded it - I encourage you to do so. Create some basic audio VMs, set up your account…and have fun.
Aloha to you all.
I hope you all have a wonderful week.
Christopher Damitio
CEO - Iwahai, Inc.
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