How it all started:
The first Room I have ever built was meant for personal use only, and the reason I built it, was the fact that I wanted to access all of my favorite websites and apps from one single place, which in my mind the room was ideal for, because its visual and interactive! But as I started using it for personal needs, my peers started asking questions and expressing a desire to have their own rooms full of stuff they needed. This is how the idea was born.
"In reality we all have a room in our real lives, and we have things in there, and each one of these rooms is different because of the nature of who we are as individuals," was what we thought when brainstorming ideas with my co-founder John Gonzalez in our university dorm, we thought there should be a better way to acces and organize daily internet resources in a more intuitive and personalized way, so we thought of applying the room concept and sharing it with people.
In the process:
There were many challenges, which also created a lot of opportunities. We wanted to allow people to setup their rooms in a way where they can choose their own items (products they like) and populate them with content (music, videos, articles) that they are interested in. So restarted with design aspect of the platform, and got into a situation were people thought we were either a game or an interior design tool. However as we slowly analyzed our data, we saw that those people that turned into our daily power users were coming back to their rooms for content they have saved there. And identifying that group and their needs we invested our resources into creating ways for people to click on TV and get freshest videos or click on the newspaper and read latest news. All coming from curated resources or personally added links.
So what is myWebRoom today:
So, recently we have added curated feeds inside each item, where people could discover latest news, videos, music and even cooking recipes inside their food item. But we have a way to go farther and allow people to customize their feed to an extent that any url can be turned into a live stream of content weather its news or shopping. This way the rooms will finally become both useful and beautiful. We have over 700,000 Unique users, who created rooms and use them for content consumption and organization.
Wanted to share our story and vision with you. I'd love to hear your feedback!
Artem, Founder
Grabr
myVR