Andy Halliday

Larry's World

Telling the Story of Our Lives
19 minutes, 8.8mb, recorded 2006-05-11
Andy Halliday
Larry Magid speaks with Andy Halliday, founder of OurStory.com about his company's new social networking site that allows individuals and families to share and unfold the stories of their lives.

OurStory is the first company to deliver a site specifically designed to let people capture, organize, archive, and share the stories, images and insights of their lives and the lives of the people who matter to them most. OurStory makes it easy to preserve stories for future generations, explore one's own personal journey, or create complete, media-rich biographies.

"Our special purpose is collecting the great stories of our life," said OurStory CEO Andy Halliday. "We have a timeline that lets you collect stories and share them everyone around you, illustrate them and archive them so it accumulates into the story of your life."

OurStory goes beyond other social networks such as Myace and Flickr to create an easy, fun and rewarding place where individuals can compile their own stories or collect stories about parents, grandparents, children and friends. OurStory makes it easy to collaborate with family and friends on their story collections and then share them with a select number of people or the entire OurStory community. The stories, illustrated through words, pictures, videos and voices can also be preserved for generations to come in heirloom-quality books, on DVDs and as broadcast-quality media.


Andy Halliday, founder and CEO of OurStory.com, has nurtured the vision that has led to OurStory for more than twenty years. The idea was already developing when Andy attended Harvard Business School; it continued to gain clarity as he launched his career in retailing, entertainment and technology.

Andy's strategic roles as Entertainment Group President for Edison Brothers Stores and as Co-Founder and President of Simon Brand Ventures, a division of Simon Property Group (the nation's largest retail mall developer), honed his passion and expertise in creating innovative and memorable consumer experiences, and prepared him for his executive roles with leading technology companies including Excite's Electronic Commerce Group, contact.com, and In-Q-Tel. After co-founding Open Field Software and leading business development for Spoke Software, Andy felt that technology and timing had aligned to the point where he could finally realize his vision to create an innovative and compelling consumer service for capturing and sharing life stories.

Andy founded WisdomArk, the company that developed OurStory, in early 2005, and recruited (assembled) a team with a potent blend of technical and consumer marketing expertise and proven track record of building and growing consumer web services. The team built and launched the user-acclaimed Alpha version of the service in 2005 and a greatly enhanced Beta service May, 2006.

 

 

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