There is a seemingly endless stream of videos across the Internet, but a Guilderland native is hoping to make finding the best videos an engaging and simple experience.
Eddie Pierce graduated from Guilderland High School in 2010 and then attended Boston College, where he graduated a year early with a business degree. During his sophomore year at Boston College, he spent time doing community service for a course, and it opened his eyes to the disparity of opportunities some children face.
“It showed me a different side of the educational opportunity with what some children grow up … compared to what I have,” Pierce said.
A 10-year-old boy Pierce met through the Big Brother program allowed him to see how strong of an influence parents have on their child’s success. He also realized how much he enjoyed helping improve someone else’s life.
This led him to pass up a private equity firm internship after graduating from college to start his company EnlightenU, which is an e-learning company aiming to inspire curiosity and a passion for learning. The company focused on helping low-income adults to find better paying jobs through demonstrating eagerness to learn and advance their skills.
After watching of hours and hours of online video to curate for EnlightenU’s e-learning branch, Pierce realized there should be a better way to find quality content.
“YouTube just has so much content available, and we kind of think of it like a search engine for video,” Pierce said. “We have this information overload right now, and there is so much content being produced.”
This led him to create www.sawwit.org, which is a website aimed at changing how people discover videos online.
“I love the concept of building something and creating an idea and making it into something real,” Pierce said. “There are so many good ideas out there that people have coded up that haven’t seen the light of day because nobody knows about them.”
User-submitted videos in each category on Sawwit are voted up or down to determine what’s worth someone’s time to watch. Videos receive community approval to move up to the top of the page, so a user’s favorites feed is constantly changing to include the latest popular videos.
The same happens for videos in each of the site’s categories, with all videos ranked on the percentage of positive votes it receives, rather than the amount of votes. This could allow for new videos to quickly rise to the top.
“It focuses on quality over popularity,” he said.
Some of the categories include sports, music and science, but users can create any category not already added. New users automatically see the most popular categories, but can customize their favorites feed through adding or removing categories.
Pierce readily admits his company isn’t aiming to “reinvent the wheel,” but rather improve upon what is already being done. He refers to Sawwit as the “Reddit for videos.” Reddit is an online forum where users often post links to articles, images and videos.
There are some key differences between Reddit and Sawwit, besides only videos allowed on the latter. Reddit focuses on ranking the best current news, so no matter how many “up,” or positive, votes a post gets, it will be dropped from the front of the website after a few days, Pierce said. The web design is also rather dated, he said, with Sawwit using a minimalistic and modern look to attract users.
YouTube, he says, is where people will go to find videos, but Sawwit is where videos are that other people have already found. The limited amount of channels on YouTube is also not user curated, as opposed to anyone being able to post to a new category on Sawwit.
Pierce built the initial version over six days after teaching himself how to code and design a webpage, but he just recently launched the second version of the website with an improved user interface.
“It is pretty amazing what you can do with one person and how much you can learn by yourself now,” he said. “Everything is on the Internet and you just have to kind of find it.”
He also just kicked off an Indiegogo fundraising campaign, which can be found at www.indiegogo.com/projects/sawwit for those interested in donating. The money given through the campaign he plans to use to help market the website and further develop it.
Over the first month Sawwit was live the website gained 4,000 users, but after gaining traction to around 50,000 to 100,000 users, Pierce said he hopes to reach out to investors.