These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School Fall edition. The Black team, formed by Antonio Melé, is presenting his project, Reutiliza.me.
There are a lot of mainstream web services offering amazing ways to socialize and share information. Every day there are hundreds of new web services and hundreds disappear, but that hardly affects us. Why? First, because most of them offer a very similar functionality. If one service disappears we can just use a similar one (for example, Pownce users now using Twitter). Secondly, and more importantly, because those services are somehow similar to mainstream media: most of them offer the same use for all of us and meet common needs instead of particular ones. The same way, mainstream media focuses on global topics and trends often not as relevant for citizens as local concerns, which affect their lives to a greater extent.
The term “hyperlocal” was coined by the journalism industry to refer to the news coverage of community-level events. Those events can be related to specific neighborhoods, blocks or other small geographic locations. “Hyperlocal media” treats local topics offering relevant information to the communities living in those locations. Nevertheless, the social web has not achieved that point yet. Users need and demand services which are helpful for them in a local manner; what happens locally is more relevant for them or at least it affects them more.
We need to develop web services related to local needs. There are already some start-ups leading this way: EveryBlock is a local news website created by some of Django core developers and acquired by MSNBC for several million dollars. It offers news and information down to the neighborhood level in 15 cities of the United States. Users can type in their address, neighborhood name or ZIP code to view nearby news coverage, civic data, photos, blog entries or even restaurant inspections — and all get updated throughout the day. The information users can track with this service is significantly different from what they can obtain with any of the mainstream media services. EveryBlock helps communities with their local needs; that is the added value.
With Reutiliza.me we aim to create a service that allows people to get rid of things they don’t want anymore and get others they need offered by people near them. We want to create an hyperlocal service that makes people’s day-to-day easier this way.
