It was 6 years ago when we decided to start TOOTCORP. Mazen, George and I were incubated at SYNTAX. We had a 1 year old telecom company called Olivoice that focused on VoIP as a technology to provide discount calls to Arab Americans in the US. We used to sell Vonage-like routers (CPE units) that were tied to monthly calling plans.
TOOTCORP started when we were thinking to attach value-added services to Olivoice subscribers that kept them in touch and in communication with what is happening in the Middle East, or precisely the Arab World. We then started to think, why don’t we start a blogging engine, a podcasting platform, and a photo and video sharing platform. Ahmad Humeid went into spiriting out the vision of these platforms, backed by visual prototypes that till this day I find amazing.
The idea became too sexy to us, and we decided to converge all our VoIP business into a web media business that focuses on self-publishing tools. And here we were. Mazen, Ahmad, George and I on the verge of embarking into a new venture. We called up Wael Attili to join, and he gladly hopped on board.
Ahmad was insisting we launch something fast. The easiest was to launch TOOT (itoot.net), which is a blog aggregator. In 2005, RSS was still new, and of course RSS made it possible to aggregate those amazing blogs that TOOT till this day aggregates.
I remember sometime around this time 6 years ago, Ahmad Humeid and Jad Madi, our only developer back then, pulled off several nights designing and coding the TOOT site. On new year’s eve of 2006, at possibly the first hours of 2006, TOOT was finally launched. Ahmad and Jad at SYNTAX office alone. I remember being a bit noisy in the office, and a bit playful. Ahmad and Jad were totally serious. At one point, Ahmad politely says to me: “Kareem, we are trying to get this done. Be quiet. We need to concentrate”.
I think till then, I did not know what I was going into. I did not know what blogs are exactly. I did not know any blog but 360east.com! I certainly did not know what RSS is. All I knew on the 1st of January is that we launched a blog aggregator that aggregates 40 something blogs, and that TOOT had a blog.
Quickly, I started catching up on this stuff. The reception of TOOT in the blogosphere was great. Bloggers started adding the “i’m on toot” badge, and more bloggers were asking to be added. Many asked why they were not added, although they requested to be added! Suddenly, the question of quality, selection, objectivity and fairness all popped up. How do we decide which blogs to select? What are the factors that play into our perception of a quality blog? Are we being objective? Are we being fair to the people?
Roba Al Assi joined to help us answer all these questions. We would all meet for hours every week discussing these questions. We all read a lot of blogs back then. Roba did most of the heavy lifting. She read literally all the blogs on TOOT everyday till this day, and never failed to handpick the daily featured posts.
We would also spend hours thinking of the next iteration on TOOT. Sadly, after 6 years, nothing has changed on TOOT (http://itoot.net). We got busy with IKBIS.
The story of IKBIS is an interesting one. I still have more to say about TOOT. But for now, this is only an intro.
I am going to try to share as much as possible some of the experiences I passed through at TOOTCORP in a series of blog posts, and the lessons learned. It’s time to reflect. Many times this will be my personal view on things, and not necessarily other founders of the company.
Let’s see :)
