The Vision: We Are All Connected

A lot has happened in the world in the last couple of years. Slowly and then suddenly: we’re all connected. It isn’t a computer on every desktop, as Bill Gates predicted.  It’s a mobile phone in every pair of hands — with more computing power in one device than in the computers that sent a man to the moon in 1969.

By the end of last year, there were seven billion people on this planet. Guess what? Six billion of them have mobile phones! Five billion of these devices are feature phones, or what we call not-so-smartphones.

The ability of these phones to let us talk to each other in new ways is just beginning to be realized. We never knew how actively we would be connecting with each other, or how, but now we are getting a pretty good idea. It’s going to be on mobile devices, at least for the next 10-15 years.

But are we really connected? What would it look like if we really were finding each other and collaborating with each other?

So that’s our vision: It’s of a world of people who feel in control of their own destiny. And begin to take responsibility for our collective destiny. WhoElse uses technology to overcome the very human separateness that in many ways technology originally creates, and helps give people back their sense of sovereignty.

How? We’ve developed a way to make those  not-so-smartphones smart. The people have always been smart, but the poor and historically disenfranchised haven’t had equal access to goods and services, or to each other. WhoElse, riding a wave of local empowerment, technology distribution, and greater transparency, now changes all that. As William Gibson said, “The future has arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed.” WhoElse is a future distribution equalizer.

And that’s why we started this company. WhoElse exists to do one thing: take advantage of the fact that we are all connected and use that advantage to equitize power to the people. Everybody else is treating each mobile phone as just a mobile phone. But what if we could text, or even speak, our needs up into the cloud, and when there was a match to those needs, a message came back linking us to that match? That’s what we’re going do to.  At the end of the day, Google only brings you a Web page. WhoElse brings you people who meet your needs.