Flickr Founder Caterina Fake's 'Hunch' Comes Out Of Stealth Mode
This story was written by Tameka Kee.
Add one more social media startup with a tongue-in-cheek name to the roster: Hunch. In a blog post, Flickr founder Caterina Fake revealed some details about Hunch, the site she joined as Chief Product Officer last year after she left *Yahoo*. Fake calls Hunch a "decision-making site, customized for you." Essentially, users plug in their info, then ask the site questions like "should I buy a Mac or a PC," and it uses the aggregated data to help answer them.
Hunch will eventually be able to pull in data from "similar" users to serve up better answers, but the core function is to give people a single decision-making resource. And that could mean cutting out traffic to various product review sitesparticularly since Fake listed affiliate sales deals with online retailers like *Amazon* as one of the site's revenue streams.
The fact that the team already has a business model that includes money other than advertising likely attracted Hunch's investors: undisclosed backers have already invested $2 million in a first round of funding, per VentureBeat. It's still not up and running yet, though. Fake told readers to sign up for the invite-only beta, with the full site launching "in the coming months."
Photo Credit: caterina
By Tameka Kee