Web 2.0 startup Buzka
Buzka is a web 2.0 start up from Perth, co-founded in 2006 by Raphe Patmore, Jinnan Cai and Lynton Beaumont-Bilsby, with Gerard Caulfield as their Lead Technology Engineer. In 2007 Buzka won the ANZA Technology Award for ‘Hottest Technology’ and their patent-pending social search technology was presented at DEMO08.
How did you guys meet?
Prior to starting up Buzka, the founders ran a multimedia studio, Modus Operandi, and one day decided that it was more rewarding to work on our own project.
Tell us a little about Buzka..what does it do?
Buzka helps friends and peers to share favourites with each other using just one button. Buzka solves the problem of turning all those links we send by email into a useful and organised collection of favourites that we can share. It’s about making our favourite things easy to share.
Where does the name come from?
Originally, the name Buzka comes from the obsolete French word Busquer – meaning to seek, thus Buzka means to seek and collect. Buzka also means kisses in Polish.
What makes Buzka unique?
Buzka is free to use and lets you “share and save” with just one button. We don’t use tagging because that just gives you a long list, but allow you to rank and organise favourites using folders. It’s possible to use Buzka to organise favourites for yourself or create collections to share with others. Buzka’s social search also helps users to discover favourites shared and organised by their friends and other members.
What was involved in creating a product like this?
A lot of perseverance and hard work. When we started work on Buzka we had an idea and as we progressed we realised that there was so much we didn’t know. As a result our journey so far has been one of continuous learning, from the industry, our peers and through feedback from our users.
What advice would you have to younger designers entering the industry?
ne useful resource we have benefited from greatly is access to industry mentors. I would highly recommend younger designers to seek out the support and advice of more experienced professionals in their industry. Be respectful and willing to learn and you’ll find that most are more than willing to help. A good mentor can give you a lot of confidence and open doors.
Links:
www.buzka.com
Download Firefox plugin here
Top balloon image with kind permission from ms4jah.
