A pair of Lansing residents have started up their own Lansing-centric news aggregator website,
Yakimbe.com.
"Stuff was missing," says the site's founder and CEO, Jesse Woodruff of other news sites
web coverage of Lansing. He would use popular story sharing sites such as
Digg and
Reddit, but they lacked a local focus. "[Local] things were not getting press," he says.
Yakimbe is similar to Digg and Reddit, in that users can submit links to news stories from around the Internet. These stories can be given a "thumbs up " or "thumbs down" vote.
There is just one catch: local stories only.
"There are plenty of places for national news," says Woodruff. "We want to get a conversation going about these topics."
Woodruff met co-founder and CTO John Bruce at
Lansing Community College, and eventually the idea of Yakimbe came up.
"John's an excellent programmer," Woodruff says of Bruce, who built the engine that drives Yakimbe.
The beta testing launch for Yakimbe was March 5th—the same night as
Ignite Lansing 3.0, which Woodruff and Bruce both attended. At the event, the pair handed out fliers with a special code that allowed visitors to create profiles on the site. After creating a profile, they could submit their links.
Yakimbe is now open to everyone.
Source: Jesse Woodruff
Writer:
Daniel J. Hogan
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