Crickets Chirping

First, go check out neighboroo then come back.

Background

I met Travis Chow a few years ago while helping another guy out with a new business idea here in Austin. The project was a computer vision system for an interactive pool coach. I wrote a DirectShow filter that tracked a cue ball using a Hugh transform and determined direction and velocity from changes between video frames. The idea was sound I guess, and the guy demo’d it to some people at a coin-op game conference in Vegas but somehow it wasn’t really the kind of thing Travis and I were really interested in.

So we left that project and joined forces to do something more compelling: tackle the mountain of paperwork it takes to get drugs approved by the FDA. Hey don’t knock us for tryin’. We dove in headfirst, learned way too much about clinical trials, developed a prototype document management workflow portal type thing and nearly got someone to buy it. Unfortunately the customer dragged their feet, and negotions went longer than we could take. Travis and I ended up abandoning it in favor of paying gigs, splitting ways in the process.

Old Friend, New Company

So I’ve been in Austin ever since then, but he moved out to Silicon Valley. Last night we chatted on the phone to catch up and talk about what we’re working on these days. He has a new project: Neighboroo. I remember back when he was still in Austin, Travis was working on a side project mapping real estate. But at the time the closest thing to Google Maps (which didn’t exist yet) was MapPoint web services, and you had to pay for that (dearly, as I recall). Fast forward a couple of years, add Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, and viola. Like it was just waiting to happen.

Neighboroo has more than just real estate information though- it’s got demographics like income level, crime rate, political affiliation, you name it. And the point isn’t just to aggregate data from third parties- Neighboroo aims to be a source of first-hand knowledge of local details through the guroo program.

Anyways it’s great to see an idea come to life like this. Kudos, Travis!