It’s the candid moments in life that make it all worthwhile, you say? Capture them with a camera phone and post ‘em to the web. That’s the advice of Jade Charles, Kaua‘i High School graduate, Internet entrepreneur and computer genius.
It’s the candid moments in life that make it all worthwhile, you say? Capture them with a camera phone and post ‘em to the web. That’s the advice of Jade Charles, Kaua‘i High School graduate, Internet entrepreneur and computer genius. The 27-year-old former football star and son of Roberta and William Charles Jr., has developed a new mobile phone picture blog – or Moblog – called www.textamerica. com.
The Website gives anyone with a penchant for taking candid pics and public exposure, a venue for the universe to see, along with text.
But it’s not just fun and games. News companies are using his companies techniques to develop their own moblogs to allow their audiences to interact. And who knows: with the way technology is moving, a Pulitzer-prize winning picture might one day come from a camera phone pic posted to the web.
Textamerica is a four-person company out of San Diego, Calif. In just two years, their site has become the largest moblog on the Net, Charles says, with many thousands of hits each day, and hundreds of thousands of registered members. Thanks to the camera phone craze, Charles and his company have garnered a lot of attention from national media, including a mention on ABC News, and write ups in Time Magazine and the New York Times.
“All the media attention has helped us grow without spending money on advertising,” Charles said. “I’ve been surprised that so much of it has been centered on me in particular. It’s focused on the company normally.”
Charles has his own personal moblog about beer, called beer.textamerica.com. “Drinking beer is more of a social thing, and the stuff that surrounds it is quite worthy of a picture,” Charles told the Times. Since leaving Kaua‘i in 1995, Charles has attended the University of Hawaii, played running back on the UH football team, and earned a degree in Electrical Engineering.
Today, he’s a technological polyglot, expert in a variety of computer programming languages and technologies including Oracle, SQL Server, Action- Script, Visual Basic, .NET/.Net Compact, Symbian, Unix, C/C++, C-Shell, JavaScript, Perl, J2EE, J2ME and SMS/MMS. Charles started his first business at the age of 19 and since then has helped build several successful small businesses. He moved to San Diego from Kaua‘i to take advantage of the greater and more advanced computing opportunities on the West Coast. Charles married wife, Nicole, three years ago and they have a two-year-old daughter, Kekoa. He said he’d like to be able to return to Kaua‘i to live “three months each year.”
