WaPo Invests In Ex-Jobster CEO 's Social News Site
When last we heard of Jason Goldberg, he was out of his CEO role at Jobster: He'd helped the Seattle-based employment site raise $48 million, and he'd generated plenty of headlines. But he hadn't figured out how to make the company a player in the online job market. Or how make it profitable.
Now Jason is in New York, trying his hand at another crowded field: He's starting socialmedian, a social news site. Jason describes socialmedian as a sort of cross between Digg and a personal feed reader, but won't go into more detail than that. We took a very quick look at a very rough alpha version of it and couldn't quite see where it's headed.
But the Washington Post (WPO) is already convinced: The paper's Washington Post Newsweek Interactive group has invested in a seed round. Jason won't say how much the Wapo guys have invested, but said he's halfway through raising the round and doesn't need much money, as his team consists of himself and 9 developers in Pune, India. See rule #2 at his blog.
We're still really really early with the product and our model is low-budget rapid development.
We've got an alpha live with about 200 users now after just 5 weeks of dev and we're going to throw it out there very quickly and just dedicate ourselves to living off of user feedback and iterate is quickly as possible.
Personally, I don't think there's all that much Digg to it all. I like to call it more of Facebook for real news. We're trying to take a fresh approach to a big problem that a lot of folks face: How best to discover, organize, and share the rapidly increasing volume of news and information out there.
If anyone is interested in being an early user, all you need to do is register on our blog at www.socialmedian.com. We'll be moving the actual product over to that url soon too.