The Next Web

Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!”

Written on April 4, 2008 – 4:06 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist

Jessicah Mah is a 17 year old serial entrepreneur and blogger who started her first business at 11 years old and a dedicated server company at the age of 13. She is now a sophomore in college but still loves starting businesses.

Mah expressed a common complaint on the web: We have so much clutter and there is no good to sort through all of it. There is way too much information and our e-mail inbox is cluttered with hundreds of unread or unanswered e-mails. Mah wants her mom’s and boyfriend’s e-mail to be on top instead of the latest spam e-mail.

Relevance is key because whether we like it or not, the web is all about me me me: “It’s all about me, we are all self absorbed and we want the internet to be about us.” Scoble may not agree with her because this morning his keynote focused on the value of his network and the value of his friends.

Friends are key to Mah’s idea of the future of relevancy on the web. Your most most desirable friends are those who share the same interests and search results should model more like a buddy list. Mah admits that this all sounds so simple, giving users relevant data, but the current crappy recommendations show is that it is not. Search and recommendations should focus more on tracking the relations between people in order to provide relevant results.

Mah showed a great amount of energy on and off stage while we are nearing the end of the conference. However, her talk was somewhat shallow by stating common problems the every day web user is dealing with. What are the solutions and how would these change or impact the web? Hopefully Mah can use her great energy to provide us with some more in depth observations next time. At her age, she has her whole future ahead to start a new business to contribute to a less cluttered web. We are looking forward to it.

I hope you like that post!

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Jessica Mah, thenextweb2008

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TheNextWeb2008 Update: A 17 year old entrepreneur

Written on March 21, 2008 – 6:28 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

In only 12 days The Next Web Conference will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We will post short daily updates about speakers, initiatives and events here.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college AND one of our keynote speakers next week.

She is the editor of Startupism.com and the co-founder of Shockapps.com. As of recently, she became a TEDster. Her blog details her adventurous journey through school and entrepreneurship.

She ran a successful hosting business when she was 13 and now that she’s 17 year old she’s planning to start ShockApps.com and retire at age 25 as a millionaire. She keeps a personal blog over at JessicaMah.com

Here is an interview with Jessica at SXSW 08 with Julia Allison:

Want to hear The future of the web according to teenage serial internet entrepreneur Jessica Mah? Reserve you ticket before it is too late!

entrepreneur, Jessica Mah, sophomore, teenager, thenextweb2008

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