At over 260 million users LinkedIn appears to have the professional CV and business connections market place fairly sown up. There are other players, such as Viadeo and Xing, but they have struggled to get the same global traction. Out there in the business social networking niches, Dribbble and Behance have developed good platforms for designers. About.Me are in the personal profile space, but it’s pretty static stuff. Other like Zerply went for the online CV, and SkillPages are after… skills. So it looks crowded, right? Well, Somewhere doesn’t think so and it starts its campaign today, billing itself as the “Visual Platform for Sharing Your Work”.
After spending months securing the somewhere.com domain, the site is now live, but plans to remain invitation-only while they develop their product. Functionality for teams to share their work and development for mobile platforms is being developed. The company will also be looking to bolster their 5 strong team.
The startup today also announces three new angel investors in Somewhere. The new angel investors are Jon Froda, co-founder of Podio (sold to Citrix in 2012), and Lee Bryant and Livio Hughes, founders of Postshift and previously Headshift (now a part of Dachis Group). Thomas Madsen-Mygdal is Somewhere’s founding angel investor and chairman (he was previously chairman at Podio which sold to Citrix)
Somewhere’s pitch is that many people think visually and most social platforms (unlike perhaps Pinterest) don’t work that way. And that’s a missing link in business social platforms.
Justin McMurray, Somewhere’s co-founder (formerly of the UK agency madebymany), says “the static nature of CVs and LinkedIn profiles act like a straight-jacket. Nowadays the real story of your work is much richer than a record of jobs.”
That may be the case and I can see it working for people who are switched on by this kind of interface. However, as as someone who would rather the platform do most of the work for me, I found having to tag an image to every question the site asked of me gradually rather tiresome. But that’s just me.
He thinks the 21st century is less about looking for a ‘job’ and more about finding like-minded others to collaborate with. I can see that this visual interface may help with that.
He might have a point and it’s something that may well appeal to millennials more than LinkedIn’s somewhat drier – though clearly effective – approach.
Getting the domain is a story in itself. The founders found the guy who had owned the domain for 17 years and it took 8 months of negotiation to secure it.
You can find me over here.