Dave Elchoness

Entrepreneur

I want to change the world.

Tagwhat, Airbnb, Hotel Tonight, Foursquare, DoubleDutch

Most frustrating: Development always takes a bit longer than you'd like, for example.
Most rewarding: Seeing others enjoy the product you've worked so hard to create.

Some think that an idea makes a business. It does not. You need to work, execute, refine, execute, refine, etc etc.

You need to throw out things you might like to make a better product and business.

Overnight successes are notable for their rarity.

Entrepreneurs are, by definition, a bit ahead of their audience. Cool doesn't cut it. You need to cure a severe pain or your audience probably won't care.

After practicing law and serving as an IT executive at a Fortune 200 company, I decided I wanted a change.  

At about the same time, 2007, social media was beginning to emerge.  To put it bluntly, I fell in love with it and the promise of making the world smaller through digital interactions.  I began speaking to audiences about social media, virtual worlds, and other emerging technologies.  I even tweeted the birth of my son in 2007 (much to my wife's dismay). At the time, no one in my family or extended network had any idea what Twitter was - this was pre-Oprah, of course.

In 2007 and 2008, I spent a lot of time developing virtual worlds and even won some awards in the space.  To me, virtual on-line environments meant greater workplace collaboration and cohesion, despite physical distance.

In 2009, however, mobile caught my eye. Why? Because unlike virtual online environments, which require a suspension of belief in real life, mobile could bring the Web into our real lives in context.  The Tagwhat team was born when we began experimenting with the Layar augmented reality platform building the very first layers including Wikipedia, Flickr, Yelp, and others.  I even spoke at the Layar launch event in Holland in 2009.

In 2010, we decided to build our own platform and the first Tagwhat, an AR-based a geo-notes platform was born.  Although groundbreaking - we integrated various feeds into this Tagwhat on a geo-basis for people to interact with in context - much of thethe content being produced by the community was not terribly meaningful (e.g. "my mom lives here".)  So we continued refining.

In 2011, we decided to make the transition from augmented reality as an interface, to geo-tagging content that would be necessary to fuel any future location-based computing system. We began to integrate rich multimedia content at places. Tagwhat was recognized for its unique and powerful content to location platform and signed numerous publishers to the platform. The value proposition was making Web content available in context to mobile users' location and interests.

Now, we are about to launch a very unique real-time feed that culls actionable business content from social networks.

The vision of connecting digital and physical to improve the lives of mobile users is coming together.