Jan
20
2010

The Next Big Thing – KickApps

So, I have a big announcement in Grant Cerny land.

In the beginning of any given year there are all of these prophets, false- and otherwise, who rally to make predictions for the upcoming year.  What they’re all looking for is the “next big thing.”

I had a few ideas about what the next big thing for 2010 would be, which informed my judgment as I found myself personally preoccupied with my own next big thing since December 2009.   Fact is, last December I made the very difficult decision to part from the AOL mothership, wherein I’ve grown, and built, and helped build, and where I loved and was loved by many, for the past 5 1/2 years.  My decision is a personal one; I am as bullish for AOL as ever, and even today spent an hour on AOL Music’s CD Listening Party devouring the new RJD2 album… AOL’s leadership and strategy is strong, and as a leaner, now-public company, I believe AOL will thrive.  But I knew that for me, even so, there was a “next thing” banging around in my head, and I took some time to think about what was a “next big thing.”

Many options suggested themselves to me, including major media, startups, consulting, and entrepreneurship.  I put my toe into a few of these options in the past month.

Where I landed, though, was a somewhat familiar place — KickApps!  I’ve been working with Mike Sommers and Alex Blum over the past few years to try to find the right cocktail of KickApps with AOL, and so already had a great understanding of the platform and the people.  After some quick thought, it made a whole lot of sense.  Yes, starting in February I’ll be joining up with the KickApps team to push the next phase in the social media revolution.  I couldn’t be more excited.

KickApps is positioned with the platform and the capabilities to superserve all web publishers including enterprise to entry-level brand marketers, small business owners, individuals and communities of all varieties, with all of the core publishing, social, and media capabilities needed, with no need for an IT staff to stand it up.   In addition they have already fostered a huge developer community – critical to expanding reach and innovation.  And there is much more potential as well in connecting inter-community data with connected, non-KickApps datasets.   KickApps has done a hell of a lot in the past 3 years or so but I’m looking forward to doing a lot more.

For those who know the focus I put into working on data availability and community engagement (AIM integrations in Streampad with Dan Kantor, the Music Usage Database, message boards & comments social syndication, 3rd party delegated authentication, Love.com) and the real-time web (Love.com, Relegence-powered newstreams, etc.) over the past year and change, know that for me, the “Next Big Thing” on the Web really is enabling the global brain of social consciousness to be more quickly and consistently connected – to increase the saturation potential in the world we all live in, and to deliver to each one of us tools enabling us to extract the most from our four dimensions of experience –  semantic relevance, social relevance, geospatial relevance, and timeliness — with maximum effectiveness in minimum time.  The NOW Generation is now, like right now, or as my South African ex-housemate Erich Maritz might have said some 12 years ago, “not just now, but now now“.

For right now, I’m confident that I know what the next big thing is – and ready to make it bigger.  It’s an irresistible opportunity to join with a very talented team, with a very effective and proven platform, and be a part of what I am sure will be a great success in 2010 and beyond.

Written by Grant in: Knowledge Management, Video, Work |

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