One of the odder bits of news to emerge from this week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco—okay, the oddest—is that rapper MC Hammer is launching a search engine.
Wait, it gets funnier. He's calling it WireDoo, which sounds like something we wouldn't want to touch, regardless of whether MC Hammer says we can or can't.
But before we all have too many laughs at the expense of the entertainer who briefly made baggy harem pants popular with men, consider that MC Hammer has pretty much displayed superlative entrepreneurial abilities his entire life, starting from when he parlayed a busking act in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot in the 1970s into a job as a clubhouse assistant and batboy for the Oakland A's.
MC Hammer also managed to sell a whopping 50 million records worldwide despite rapping skills charitably described as merely adequate to compliment his real talents, dance and promotion. And let's say it again—he made baggy harem pants popular with men. This is not a fellow whose business acumen should be taken lightly.
Nor is Hammer is a newbie to the tech scene. Like fellow entertainer-turned-tech investor Ashton Kutcher, Hammer has become a fixture at tech events like Web 2.0 and Tech Crunch Disrupt in recent years.
Hammer, born Stanley Kirk Burrell in Oakland, Calif., says WireDoo will not be an attempt to compete with mainstream search engines like Google or Bing, according to reports.
Instead, the still-in-development WireDoo will "add relationship information to search results," reports The New York Times. Sounds a little vague, but gist is that if you search for something like a car, what you'll get is a bunch of information related to cars like insurance offers and consumer safety ratings.
Maybe we're missing something, but it seems like MC Hammer wants to create a search engine that cuts out the part about helping searchers find things they asked for and just spams them with adware instead. In other words, Yahoo!
We kid, we kid. Perhaps WireDoo will be a roaring success. Hammer certainly understands that you can't win in technology unless you're in the game. But he also indicated that he's well aware of the value of a diversified portfolio in a start-up environment where just one big win is like winning the lottery.
"No one is playing for singles anymore," he advised the Web 2.0 crowd.