A Kenyan Man in The US Launches "Twitter of Dreams"

Some people dream of starting the next Twitter. Kim Muhota hopes to start a Twitter of dreams.

He is the founder and chief executive of REMcloud, a start-up that on Tuesday plans to formally launch a would-be social network based around stories people experience while they sleep. Like Twitter, users of the site post snatches of text, in this case brief accounts of what they dreamed.

The site, among other things, responds with an automated interpretation of each dream, based on the analysis of individual keywords in the text. That information comes from existing databases offered by Web companies, Muhota says. (Existing sites that focus on dream interpretation include Dream Central, DreamForth and Dreamanity).

A more unusual element of REMcloud, Muhota says, will be the interactions people have over dreams. Friends of a user, for example, can rate dreams the user posts or post their own interpretations of them. (Dreams can be posted publicly or limited to a circle of followers, Muhota says).

Muhota sounds even more excited about the kind of insights that can be gleaned once large numbers of people start posting dreams. Many dreams are based on elements of news events or disasters, such as the recent rescue of the miners in Chile, he notes. REMcloud plans to show “trending” dreams about such events and celebrities.

Such dream data can be used to produce what Muhota calls Dream Mosaics, or graphs of what people around the world are dreaming about at particular times. For example, REMcloud could post numbers of people in different cities, say, who dream about earthquakes over a period of time, such as in the wake of a specific quake, he says. “It’s almost like tapping into the collective consciousness of the globe,” he says.

Muhota, who is based in the Washington D.C. area, was previously the founder of a now-defunct company in the social lending market called Pertuity Direct. He says the inspiration for REMcloud came from his young son, who used to share his dreams with his parents each morning. Dreaming “is this very innate behavior,” he says.

How will REMcloud make money? It may use advertising very selectively, Muhota says. But a more promising source may be premium services, perhaps with professional dream interpretation by professionals, he adds.

Like all social networks, the value of REMcloud–particularly as an indicator of what the population is dreaming about–will remain largely hypothetical unless it reaches a critical mass of people actively using the site. Dream Mosaics, for example, are “going to become more powerful as we get a larger sample of dreams to aggregate,” Muhota says.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/10/19/remcloud-opens-online-field-of-dreams/