Homo Viator

Sorry to have once again been lazy on my posting. The reason for it however is my non-lazyness on other fronts. Together with my loooong-time friend Alex and within the terrain of Zeitbild, we are in the process of creating a website that should become the most innovative site Germans have seen to date. Alright, easy tiger, don't get ahead of yourself here!
But seriously, we are planning to incorporate innovative internet functionalities that currently simply don't exist in Germany and so far are mostly restrained to alpha or beta phases in the US.

At the moment we are a small team: Alex and me, Jan (Junior Art Director), Sebastian (Senior Art Director) and Viet (producing the shows for us; yes, this will be a Video-Platform). We are still looking for programmers and this proves to be the biggest current challenge. But today we have a round table with eight potential programmers (Web Developers with skills in Ajax, PHP, Red5, CSS) and so we hope to be ending our search for good talent tonight.

At the moment it is too early to blog about the core features of this site, since you never know who is listening. ;-)

It is an exciting time and we hope to be able to overcome the second biggest obstacle in the future: Financing. Since this site will have a heavy video component, it will also be quite expensive to produce and run. For now we are creating a prototype that will work, but have a limited set of functionalities and that won't be able to handle a lot of traffic. It should be ready by the end of this month. In August I will venture off to Mongolia for some long needed vacation and when I come back start selling show and channel formats to potential partners (thinking of Zeitbild clients here) and also approach some VCs for equity financing.

And yes, we are also working on my new blog, which shall become an integral part of the promotion of the site.

This is how zzzze Gerrrrmans celebrated their victory just across my apartment:

Love the idea behind the project of 6billionothers, which seeks to create an archive like account of peoples' dreams, fears and concerns at the turn of the 21st century. Researchers and historians of future generations may be thankful. The site feauture lots of videos from the developing world and it somehow brings back memories of my travels. Faces and languages that I have seen and heard but was never was able to truly understand. The short stories of the peoples' lives are translated on the site, which makes it ever more appealing. Have rarely seen anything so human on the net. The design is fantastic as well.