Volunia The Volunia project closed (see the company side below). The technology side: With Volunia I have tried to shake the technology world by changing the way we see and navigate the web (each web site is viewed under a city metaphor, and the navigation model becomes visual and much more informative), and how we socially interact with people during our search and navigation process. It’s been an amazing technical journey, building world-wide big data systems from scratch, developing innovative algorithms, interfaces, server backends, industrial-scale performance systems, social analysis, real-time massive data handling, and a wealth of other topics. This new multi-million dollar social search engine, built for world-wide audience and localized into the 12 main planet languages, has stirred huge interest and media impact all over the world already in its public beta phase. For descriptions of the Volunia project (in its first stage of development), see for example: Search Engine Land’s "Volunia, A Social Search Engine, Says The Web Has Come Alive" Search Engine Watch’s "When Will Social Search Engine Volunia Deliver its Quantum Leap" The company side: At public launch time, the creator has then been kicked off his own project by the funding venture capitalist, who wanted to take full control of the company (including the CTO position...!). Result: years with no innovation, no marketing, nothing, bringing the company to failure. (As an aside, general piece of life advice: despite your enthusiasm and good faith, never trust anybody, as you never really know a person. Beyond words and appearances, you can really find anything, good but also bad. Always shield yourself not 99%, but 200% from the legal viewpoint.) Back to the Volunia project: the (only) positive side is that after the legal struggle, the creator is at last going to get back the whole project code which, time allowing, will be soon made open-source, so to let other people freely reuse the wealth of code and algorithms developed at the time. Stay tuned for the code, and good luck with your ideas!