CrowdFound.com – The People Powered Web Discovery Engine Launches

Australian-based web entrepreneurs Joe Olejnik, Gareth Saunders and Steve Olejnik have for years talked about wanting to start their own business and finally they have taken the plunge.

The result is one of the first human-powered “best of the web” discovery engines – CrowdFound.

“We first started looking at ideas in 2004 and identified a number of opportunities. But the thing that really inspired us to turn our talk into action, was the success of others with similar ideas, like YouTube,” Joe Olejnik says.

The result is a website which harnesses the power of the crowd to let users bring together the best of the web on almost any topic on just one site.

“CrowdFound is a people-powered content discovery engine combined with social networking and social book-marking applications,”
Gareth Saunders says.

“At the same time, CrowdFound also provides users the ability to communicate and network globally with people who are interested in the same topics.”

Joe Olejnik says: “We identified the lack of ability to find high quality content on specific subjects all in one place as one of the biggest problems on the internet.

“Sure there are search engines and directory listings, but it’s not all in one spot and quite often search results provide too many non-relevant and / or outdated results which are poorly organised due to all the clutter that is out there.”< “Also we recognised that many of the large social networking sites where people come together to chat are very general in nature as opposed to being centered around specific topics people are really passionate about.” In contrast, on CrowdFound topics are clustered under logical categories and subcategories – it’s the users who then decide what content is submitted. This content is then rated and ordered through collaborative agreement to decide what stays and what go’s based on good old democratic decision making – the users vote. The more votes the particular item receives the higher it goes and visa versa. “The beauty of this is that the content stays fresh – in today’s fast moving world, what might be hot today is old news tomorrow,” Joe Olejnik says. There are other useful functions and features. For instance, CrowdFound users can create their own personalised lists where they can store their favorites. Gareth Saunders says “we built this function because what the crowd likes may not be what individual members of the crowd like.” Steve Olejnik says: “We are just starting to develop the ability for social networking between individuals from all around the world to come together on topics of interest – this is amazing as it then allows for views and knowledge to be shared amongst interested users globally in real time.” The CrowdFound team is now working around the clock on improving the concept with what they say are ‘a few innovative twists’, at the same time they are also preparing to seek investor funding. “Our next key milestone is to start approaching investors to secure seed round funding so that we can turn our vision for CrowdFound into a reality” Gareth Saunders says.