Silicon Valley startups blog

This is an article that appeared today in Wired Italy. It was written by Staff Editor, Maurizio Pesce, and was published in Italian. The English translation is below. You can see the original story here.

Banjo, the fastest startup in Silicon Valley

The first night of the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014, I was thinking about how to show the story of the Opening Ceremony in a different way: not the usual gallery to go to during or after, nor the usual embedded live stream. There were not a lot of alternatives around.

Until I remembered Banjo.

(Above: Banjo team)

If you’re not familiar with it, Banjo is an app that aggregates content by topic based on location: every day, an editorial team selects the most important events to follow and displays them on the homepage. As I write, for example, I might choose to scroll through all the content related to football friendlies, the Rio Carnival, the protests in Kiev or the situation in Crimea (two different feeds, not a single disorganized fray), but also concerts like the Dropkick Murphys in Birmingham, Queens of the Stone Age in Sydney and so on. And if I want to see something different, I can always do a search for other events or places to see what people in that location are tweeting. For example, I usually go to see what they are sharing in Genoa, for the sake of keeping in touch with my city.

Anyhow.

Some time ago I had the pleasure of meeting the CEO, Damien Patton, in person. At Mobile World Congress last year, we had a nice chat and since then we have kept in touch. Banjo is much more than a second-screen app: “You can’t see everything using only the TV, and sometimes the event that you want to follow isn’t on TV, ” he told me. “And you can not grasp everything on social networks, because they do not take you to the location, and because even if you know what to look for, there are simply too many things – and I do not even want to talk about hashtags: every event has 50 different hashtags and you never know which will be the best to follow. How do you put together all the information that is shared online in real time, then? You can’t. ” And you never will. Here is where Banjo and its magic come into play.

Let’s go back to last month.

I was saying I remembered Banjo. My idea was to ask them to collect all the real-time content, in order for us to be able to offer a live feed of the event through photos and videos posted on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Vine by those who were actually at the stadium. The feed streaming on my smartphone could be shared on social networks with a link: so perhaps an embeddable link could also be created. So I opened Facebook chat to ask where I could find that code. I was thinking about something similar to what Banjo did on NBC, but that would be inserted directly into an article for Wired.it.

Damien is a direct and accessible person and is completely different from what you would expect from the boss of a company that is growing fast, pulling in millions of dollars in funding, and being approached by Google today and by Twitter tomorrow. You may also have heard him tell the story of Banjo at Wired Next Fest, if you happened to be in Milan a year ago. So I write to him on Facebook: “Can I embed a feed of Banjo in a WordPress page?”.