Monday, March 12, 3:30 & 5pm, Hilton Austin Downtown
MC Hammer used to spend his time hanging out with Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. Twenty years later, the rapper-turned-tech-expert is kicking back with Silicon Valley’s personalities and next-generation tech minds, trying to unearth the tool that will eventually wrangle the Internet’s endless amount of information.
“It’s about having different applications for different enterprises,” states Hammer from his home in Tracy, Calif., an hour east of Oakland. “We’re not just talking about consumer and search. We’re talking about a tremendous amount of data – data that needs to get organized so that we can become more efficient.”
Hammer (given name Stanley Burrell) believes he’s found his solution in WireDoo, a search engine he hopes will compete with top dogs Google and Bing. He didn’t provide information about the site’s public launch but says he’s working daily with developers and programmers.
“Take governmental data that’s out there and unorganized and not kept in an efficient manner,” he says. “If you see person X going through various airports at various times and you have all that data available, why can’t you – on a security level – make all that information available to help airports become more secure? That information’s available. We need to organize it such that it’s easily searchable.”
Hammer says WireDoo will level the Internet’s great playing field while other search engines come up short. To him, the Web doubles as a modern-day Wild West: lawless and free, but woefully short on organization and structure.
“The Internet allows you to tap into a global database of endless information,” he says. “If you don’t know something, go out and research it. If you can access research, whether it be medical information, financial information, or political information, the Internet connects you to all this intellectual capital that you can utilize to better enhance life and society.
“If there’s data and information out there in the world, I can access it and utilize it to better my cause. You can’t put a value on that.”
This article appears in March 2 • 2012.