Introduction

Hello, my name is Ben Pedersen. Before I begin I would like to go around the room and get everyone's [name and] area of expertise so I know who I am talking to.

Now that I know more about all of you, it seems fair that I quickly provide my own background. I am an entrepreneur and a developer. I graduated from the University of Minnesota in May 2012 with a bachelor's of science in economics and minor in management. While I have a formal education in business, all of my computer knowledge has been self-taught. Currently, I am the sole founder of a web start-up called Okeebo.

Value Proposition

Content

Investor Perks

• Be involved with something big
  
  • Non-linear organization of content is in the future of education. The Gates Foundation's Next Generation Learning Challenges awarded a $249,000 grant to Odigia to create a non-linear biology textbook called BioBook.  1 textbook, a quarter million dollars. Okeebo is a platform where any number of non-linear books can be created.
    
  • (business plan part?)
  • (social notetaking?)
• Help develop vocabulary
  
  • With Twitter you compose tweets, and you tweet at people. Be involved in the process of creating a similar vocabulary for Okeebo. Book, write, etc. don't quite capture what Okeebo does.

Display passion for the business and industry

Content

Okeebo Stream of Consciousness

So what is Okeebo?

When I hear this question, I want to talk about all the goals and aspirations I have for Okeebo. To allow people to share their ideas and show how their different thoughts make up those ideas. For people to experience these thoughts and ideas in a personalized way, to be an active player in the experience. For remote content to be impactful. To facilitate the transition from remote to in-person when needed because in-person moments can have the biggest impact. Yet we often waste in-person time doing things that remote could have accomplished more efficiently. To learn from our peers and to establish communities around ideas. These are the broad motivations behind Okeebo.

But it doesn't really explain what Okeebo is.

So shortly put, Okeebo is a web publishing platform. Put a little less shortly, it's a platform to publish content on the web.

Okay, cool. That's essentially what WordPress and Twitter are as well. That's good company to be in, but it's a rather vague description.

Well, how about I explain away using Twitter and WordPress as base points.

Twitter has done an excellent job of using digital technology to increase the impact of short-form content. Though perhaps micro-form content would be a better phrase considering Twitter's famous 140 character limit. But to expound on the idea of their successful digital design, Twitter has made it extremely easy to share ideas with a wide audience and to do it on almost any device, with particular success on mobile devices. In fact, the 140 character limit was chosen specifically to work with text messages on phones without Internet access. Due to this and other great design choices, Twitter has over 100 million daily active users. In light of this, it might be fair to say that Twitter has revolutionized short-form content. And here is where I want to make a contrast. Very little innovation has happened on the other end of the spectrum, long-form content. This is the space that Okeebo is exploring.

Which segues nicely to a discussion about WordPress and blogs. It could easily be argued that WordPress is the premier blog site, and it is such a robust tool that, if I remember the statistic correctly, about one in four websites are created using WordPress. Now despite the cultural shift Twitter's micro format has caused, blog posts are still short-form content. To illustrate this, most short stories are over 1000 words and