Kim E Gokce | Atlanta, GA
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The Power of Connections
Kim Gokce is President of Excognito, Inc., a privately held Georgia corporation. Since 1997, Excognito has helped both small and large clients exploit Internet technologies in support of business objectives.
Kim attributes his personal passion for Web technologies to a life-long obsession with being connected. Put best in his own words, he said:
"When I was a kid, my favorite toy was my grandfather's Trans-Oceanic
shortwave radio. I would spend hours listening to broadcasts from South America and Europe imagining the exotic locations and pretending to understand the announcers."
He continued, "When France Telecom's MiniTel dialup network became available in North America, I could not believe I could search the Paris classifieds for an apartment from my computer in Atlanta as I planned for my graduate study in France.
When the Web became widely available in the '90s, it opened the way for me to turn my passion for information sharing into my profession."
Though Kim still has his grandfather's Trans-Oceanic as a cherished momento displayed in his office, he spends more time on the Internet these days and has recently sought ways to apply the latest in web technologies to civic causes.
"Like many people, I longed for a way to apply my professional skill to the betterment of my community. It occurred to me that the Web was the perfect medium to amplify the communication efforts of every community's volunteers."
"On the low end, I found many web site providers targeting homeowner associations, local charities and the like, but these solutions were usually postcard sites or top-down communication tools for management. On the high-concept end, the Web has fostered citizen journalism sites like NowPublic.com or NewsVine.com that cover world events but these are just unique ways of sharing the same news as provided by the television networks or news portals like Yahoo! or CNN.com"
"Nothing I found provided the community news or information I craved as a concerned citizen, a homeowner and a parent - what's that building going up over there? What's going on locally for fun Saturday? What's happening in the neighborhood school? Is there a religious or spiritual community in my area I can related to? What were all those sirens about last night?"
In a classic case of meeting an unmet need, Kim set about the task of delivering the service via CommunityRadar.com.
With an excited tone, the civic-minded entrepreneur explained: "Community Radar is built on the latest in social news sharing technology. I took these readily available, open source technologies and married them with geocoding technology. That is, the ability to associate and filter information by location. The result is a self-service community blog that allows all members to leverage one another's information gathering and sharing ability. It is simple and anyone, anywhere can use it."
In addition to getting the benefit of highly localized and specialized news, CommunityRadar.com members get the added benefit of their own personal blog. All member contributions are tracked back to them and are available on their own blog page. They can share this blog page or a RSS version of their home page anywhere else on the Web. This feature allows members to show their "good citizen" bona fides to their neighbors and colleagues.
Kim noted, "Think of your CommunityRadar.com contributions and member badges as the Information Age's Kiwanis Club or Civitan lapel pin - it establishes your credibility as a person with a stake in your community."
Kim attributes his personal passion for Web technologies to a life-long obsession with being connected. Put best in his own words, he said:
"When I was a kid, my favorite toy was my grandfather's Trans-Oceanic
shortwave radio. I would spend hours listening to broadcasts from South America and Europe imagining the exotic locations and pretending to understand the announcers."He continued, "When France Telecom's MiniTel dialup network became available in North America, I could not believe I could search the Paris classifieds for an apartment from my computer in Atlanta as I planned for my graduate study in France.
When the Web became widely available in the '90s, it opened the way for me to turn my passion for information sharing into my profession."Though Kim still has his grandfather's Trans-Oceanic as a cherished momento displayed in his office, he spends more time on the Internet these days and has recently sought ways to apply the latest in web technologies to civic causes.
"Like many people, I longed for a way to apply my professional skill to the betterment of my community. It occurred to me that the Web was the perfect medium to amplify the communication efforts of every community's volunteers."
"On the low end, I found many web site providers targeting homeowner associations, local charities and the like, but these solutions were usually postcard sites or top-down communication tools for management. On the high-concept end, the Web has fostered citizen journalism sites like NowPublic.com or NewsVine.com that cover world events but these are just unique ways of sharing the same news as provided by the television networks or news portals like Yahoo! or CNN.com"
"Nothing I found provided the community news or information I craved as a concerned citizen, a homeowner and a parent - what's that building going up over there? What's going on locally for fun Saturday? What's happening in the neighborhood school? Is there a religious or spiritual community in my area I can related to? What were all those sirens about last night?"
In a classic case of meeting an unmet need, Kim set about the task of delivering the service via CommunityRadar.com.
With an excited tone, the civic-minded entrepreneur explained: "Community Radar is built on the latest in social news sharing technology. I took these readily available, open source technologies and married them with geocoding technology. That is, the ability to associate and filter information by location. The result is a self-service community blog that allows all members to leverage one another's information gathering and sharing ability. It is simple and anyone, anywhere can use it."
In addition to getting the benefit of highly localized and specialized news, CommunityRadar.com members get the added benefit of their own personal blog. All member contributions are tracked back to them and are available on their own blog page. They can share this blog page or a RSS version of their home page anywhere else on the Web. This feature allows members to show their "good citizen" bona fides to their neighbors and colleagues.
Kim noted, "Think of your CommunityRadar.com contributions and member badges as the Information Age's Kiwanis Club or Civitan lapel pin - it establishes your credibility as a person with a stake in your community."