New Haven Independent

Victor Wong surely hopes so. He and some fellow Yale undergrads, along with cohorts at Harvard and Stanford, have spent the spring immersed in a torrid quest to develop the Next Big Thing in media innovation.

They’ve formed a company, written code, and chased customers and financial backers for a two-part plan to help new-generation media pay the bills.

Wong, an energetic undergrad from L.A., made his pitch Monday to a class of graduate students at Yale School of Management who happen to be taking a course on how to develop new business models to support quality journalism in the Internet age. (Full disclosure: I co-teach that course along with Stephen E. Taylor.)

Wong aims to enable “mom and pop” businesses, which often can’t afford the rates of larger print publications, to advertise on the new breed of “hyperlocal” Internet-only news sites. (You’re reading one of them.) His company would also help aggregates of small news publications within the same city sell joint advertising.

Click on the play arrow on the video at the top of this story to watch Wong describe the opportunity he sees. Click here to view Wong’s PowerPoint presentation.

PaperG hopes to accomplish the first goal through “flyerboards,” a new technology that mimics kiosks or bulletin boards with flyers. A strip of low-cost, shrunken “posters” — for time-sensitive events, like store sales or public events — would appear on the side of a homepage, for instance. The reader could see one that looks interesting, click on it, and have it appear enlarged on the screen. (A larger version of this, not tailored to hyperlocal news sites, operates on the Yale campus. Click here to view it.) Click on the play arrow to this video to watch Wong introduce the flyerboard idea.

“People want local information,” Wong said. “That’s what we’re giving them.”

Wong’s company also seeks to “offer print-advertising opportunities at independent local newspapers in general, which includes
colleges” for national advertisers. Through both a proprietary publishing platform and a specialized database, PaperG hopes to outmaneuver the Google behemoth in steering, say, distributors of new major-studio movie releases to just the right niches. Click on the play arrow to this video to watch him discuss this idea.

There’s more to the strategy that, like any would-be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, Wong is keeping close to the vest. Is Wong on his way to the 3.0 Hall of Fame? Comment below, or e-mail him here.