Nouveau Niche - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, Oct 30, 2000 by Mark Frauenfelder

Meet Cory Doctorow: Disney freak, science-fiction novelist and self-described "happiest geek on Earth." His peer-to-peer dream is to help obscure artists find their audience.

IT'S EASY TO SPOT CORY DOCTOROW at the bar of the Beverly Hills Trader Vic's. Among the surgically rejuvenated matrons, sunburned tourists and Hollywood machers, he stands out in his retro clothes, horn-rimmed glasses and Drew Carey crewcut, drinking virgin mojitos and playing SimCity on his Handspring Visor.

Doctorow, 29, knows as much about tropical drinks as the bartender. Ordering another round of mojitos for both of us, he rattles off the ingredients: "Bar sugar, crushed mint leaves, crushed ice, lime juice, and club soda." How does he know that? "I bought a 1947 copy of the Trader Vic's Bar Guide at a yard sale in Toronto for $2!" he boasts. No rum? "Not tonight. I'm driving to Disneyland after dinner:" He'll use any excuse to come to Southern California (like the digital music conference he attended here last week) if it means a chance for him to make a pilgrimage to his mouse-eared mecca.

Doctorow has a thing for Disneyland. As with his obscure knowledge of Cuban cocktails, Sputnik-inspired wall clocks and dumpster-diving for high-tech recyclables, Doctorow is obsessed with the Magic Kingdom. The backgrounder he passes around to VCs describes him as a "Disney freak." He lives in Toronto, but owns an annual pass to the Anaheim theme park, owns the URLs enchantedtikiroom.com, piratesofthecarribean.com, hauntedmansion.com and mrtoadswildride.com, and scours eBay daily for Disneyana. His business card looks like an old-fashioned Disneyland E-Ticket, labeling him "the happiest geek on Earth."

Why so happy? Two reasons. First, after years of writing for obscure science-fiction magazines (even the world's biggest science-fiction magazine is obscure -- can you name it?), Doctorow won the prestigious John W. Campbell award for his collected body of short fiction. Second, Doctorow is giddy with the prospect of being "wildly oversubscribed" for the $15 million in second-round funding for his company, OpenCola, which he and 25-year-old John Henson started in 1999. As chief information officer of the open-source software developer, Doctorow believes he will make it possible for consumers and creators of niche media to make a living without resorting to temp work and sponging off parents.

The company's flagship product -- also called OpenCola -- is a peer-to-peer file sharing and search-engine technology that's a little like Napster, a little like Gnutella and a little like SETI@Home. With 50 employees scattered between OpenCola's Toronto headquarters and its new San Francisco offices, the company hopes to solve what Doctorow claims is "the real problem of this millennium: resource discovery, finding the good stuff. Because everything is out there and available, but how do you find it?"

According to Doctorow, three domains of knowledge exist: the stuff you know, the stuff you know you don't know, and the stuff you don't know you don't know. The stuff you know is like, 'I know how to make brownies,'" he explains. "The stuff you don't know is, 'I don't know how to make nut brownies,' and the stuff you don't know you don't know is there's another confectionery you might like better than brownies." It's this last bit OpenCola offers users. "That's the critical problem," says Doctorow. "How do you find the stuff you don't know you don't know?

Doctorow thinks he's got the answer. Still in alpha, OpenCola (which, depending on the mood Doctorow is in, stands for either Collaborative Object Lookup Architecture, Cows Orbiting at Low Altitude or Cory On Lotsa Acid) is a free, downloadable application that, like Napster, resides on a user's hard drive and links to other OpenCola users' hard drives. The big difference is that it keeps track of users' Web searches and selections, anonymously sharing that information with other OpenCola users who make similar searches.

Here's how OpenCola works. Say you enjoy reading about rock climbing. You'd install an OpenCola program on your computer and feed it a couple of rock climbing articles, or simply type in some keywords, such as "flapper," "hang-dogging" and "dirt me." OpenCola will construct a software robot (sort of a single-purpose search engine) that goes onto the Net to dig up stuff that matches your criteria. It does two kinds of digging. First, it fetches files from the Web just like any other search spider. But the robot goes one step further by looking for other users' OpenCola robots looking for the same kinds of things you are. Then, your robot grabs files the other users have fetched and found worthwhile. In other words, you benefit from the decision-making of the other like-minded OpenCola users. It's like a Web-size version of Amazon.com's "people who liked that book will like this book" service.

When you get the results of an OpenCola search, you can click a button to "reward" the robot for finding good files, which encourages it to bring you similar documents, or click another button to "punish" it when it finds bad files, which will teach it to stop dragging that kind of trash into your computer. This information is then shared with like-minded users on the OpenCola network and can lead to interesting surprises, says Doctorow. For instance, your robot will eventually start to bring you documents that aren't about rock climbing, but which have been pegged by other climbers as good.