Former Mashable editor-at-large Ben Parr is ready to share a few details about his new startup. He’s raising a small seed round, so he created a posting on AngelList, and he also talked (vaguely) with me about what he’s been up to.
The company is listed as The Peep Project, but it sounds like that’s just a temporary stealth name. The listing describes the product as “your intelligent assistant.” Now that’s probably a description you’ve heard before, so the posting also says, “We are not building Siri.”
Specifically, Parr tells me that he’s not focused on natural language technology. Instead, he’s interested in “information management.” The company’s first product, he says, will make sure “you receive the right content at the right time.” He also says most other products treat the Web as a filing cabinet, and he wants to do something different.
If this sounds a tech-heavy project for a blogger, well, Parr has a technical co-founder — Hilary Karls, who was a senior software engineer at Sociable Labs. The pair says that they plan to expand the team soon. Oh, and Parr is learning to code. (Karls reports that “he’s doing pretty well.”)
Parr joined Mashable in June of 2008, where he built a huge social media following. When he left in November, Mashable said he had been fired. Parr announced last week that he was starting a column at CNET, but it was clear that would be a part-time gig, and that his yet-to-be-announced startup would be claiming most of his attention.