Applying for 1,75 million NOK in funding

Mediebruket, my small single-employee-company, has applied for 1,75 ,million Norwegian kroner (290,000 USD / 204,000 EUR) at Innovation Norway to help fund nearly half of the estimated cost of the pilot project with the working title "As long as".

Photo by: orarewedancer / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I have estimated the cost for the first pilot-phase to be about 4 million Norwegian kroner. This involves employing developers and buying web development services.

The goal is to use new methods, by combining aggregation and journalistic manual filtering and production, to make niche web content more valuable.

One of the ideas involves collaborating with local media to make them more visible on the web, and increase their web traffic, especially to the kind of local niche stories that tend to lose attention in competion with the tabloid stories intended for the masses. A similar idea is launched in USA, and is called Wiki-City. But this will only be a part of our project, and we will take it much further.

As a part of being transparent, I will reveal more and more details about the project as it evolves. So far I've received a few more additional ideas, useful advices and links from friendly people on Twitter.

The main phase of the pilot period will be in 2010, depending on the funding. But the idea will be launched as a project, regardless of the funding. It will only have a different character and take some more time as we will have to sell more services as consultants alongside to finance our project.

Hopefully Innovation Norway will give us an answer in September 2009. After that we will recruit a web developer, and a web editor/content developer.