Arthur Goldstuck has posted an interview with me on his popular Thought Leader blog - AmaBlogoblogo. He mailed me some questions a few weeks ago and finally got round to posting the interview. I think it went quite well - Thanks goes out to Arthur.

Here’s some words from his article:

He describes himself, disarmingly, as an “ambitions young entrepreneur workaholic with a passion for the internet”. Which, as we all know, is shorthand for: “Want to build the next Google and will destroy the internet if that’s what it takes.”

So far, he has succeeded in destroying the productive working hours of those who ventured on to the internet for innocent pursuits like researching their next car purchase. Instead, they landed on his social network with a difference, ZoopedUp.

This is like a Facebook for cars, but without all the distractions. Your profile pic is your car, your friends are cars (granted, they do come with owners), your blog is about cars and your applications are engine modifications.

And then there is the car blog itself. Aside from being a good advertisement for why tag clouds are usually such an eyesore on blogs, car blog is punted as “the auto news blog featuring new car reviews, concept cars, F1 news and modified car talk”.

But Charl has also found several other ways to mimic the watercooler, that one-time arch-enemy of productivity (see also Windows Solitaire, Facebook, etc).

The key weapon in his arsenal is Blueworld, a social-networking site that predated Facebook’s arrival in South Africa by a few months (It was first built in 2003 as a conventional website). He acted as strategist, designer and marketer, all in one, explaining that “workaholic” label.

Carry on reading the interview here

He also lifted the lid on a niche social network we launched a few weeks ago, Gay Peers, which is the best piece of code we have put on the net thus far. We teamed up with a Gay Magazine, Wrapped, to build an exclusive gay social network featuring three levels of privacy - public, private and exclusive - which enables users to control what on their profile is accessible to other users e.g. shared media (blogs, photos, vids) or personal information. The gay market is HUGE online - In our research into niche social networks we discovered serious activity on gay destinations. Market leader ‘GayDar’ has over one million monthly subscribers and GayRomeo, which is a free service, has over 40k users online at any given time.

We plan to monetize our gay network with a monthly subscription fee model but only after a few months (years) until we have serious traction.

Finally, my “South Africa’s Top Startups” article will be published in this months Intelligence magazine. It should be on CNA shelves already…

Disclaimer: I also blog on Thought Leader, sometimes.