Photo: Jeff Kravitz via FilmMagic
Heads up, Larry and Sergey. Hammer is about to come down on you.
Stanley Kirk Burrell, better known as the ‘90s hip-hop icon with the baggy, shiny pants and a cocksure, can-do attitude, has shaped for himself a 21st century media image steeped in cult allure: spectacularly imploded pop star, mixed martial arts talent manager, cash-for-gold TV spokesman—and tech entrepreneur. People have responded. More than 2.25 million follow him on Twitter.
His latest venture is WireDoo, a Web platform that Hammer announced at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. Hammer describes it as a “deep search” or “relationship” engine. Rather than just return “the 10 blue links” of keyword-based results, he explained in an interview with summit co-producer O’Reilly Media, WireDoo will also display more tangential data culled from Web indices, public data, and social media. A Zip Code search might net local school statistics and home prices, for example.
It’s not Hammer’s first swing at Google. In 2008, he launched DanceJam.com, a video site meant to bite into YouTube’s share of the choreography-obsessed audience. It appears to have fallen into disrepair; videos from 2010 lead the homepage.
Still, lest any skeptics out there need reminding, he’s not one to quit.
