A new company from the son of Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Shaul, called PlayBuzz is giving BuzzFeed a run for its money.
In general it is not easy making a name for yourself when your father is a famous or powerful person such as a world leader. Add to that the dishonor of being the son of a convicted felon who was found guilty of corruption and abusing his office.
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But that is exactly what Shaul Olmert, 39, has done. He is the CEO and co-founder of PlayBuzz which is an Israeli Israel-based viral media platform. The company, which is less than a year old, has already shot to the top of Facebook’s list of most posted websites on its users’ timelines. It has reached the number two spot with 7.6 million posts right behind Internet titan The Huffington Post.
Its Facebook page already has more than 835, 000 likes.
PlayBuzz is an open network for end users, publishers, bloggers and brands to create and share playful content items such as quizzes, lists and polls.
The company asserts that by using its free authoring platform at playbuzz.com/create, every web site editor or contributor may author a new item on their topic of choice. After completing the authoring process, they may embed the newly created item on your website, using a JavaScript embed code or a WordPress plugin.
While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it sometimes is nothing more than a rip off. The idea behind PlayBuzz is basically a knock off of BuzzFeed which must have the owners of the other company fuming.
But since the inception of the World Wide Web, unoriginal ideas have made companies a fortune. Google was far from the first search engine and its G Mail was certainly not the first free e mail service.
As Olmert told Mashable when asked about this, “I can see the similarities that you’re talking about. I would say that BuzzFeed is one of the pioneers of playful content, and they’ve done a great job in establishing large publishing operations around playful content. Other than that, we’re not really very similar businesses. We have different platforms, different objectives. They’re growing their editorial staff. They’re making movies.”
