Case Study of Caribbean Culture: The Question Has Changed!

Let us reflect on the North American landscape in 1999 for Caribbean people.  The questions were as follows

1. Who is out here in this city from the Caribbean?
2. Where do we go for entertainment?
3. How do I get a slice of home away from home?

Trini Jungle Juice.com (TJJ) and TO-lime were the early sites that set out to answer these question and more importantly share this information.  It was done in an innovative way using new internet technology.  It was new at that time to the audience of 150, 000 people turned in.  This was 10 times better than any solution at the time.  You can find out where to go in each city and get your local taste of music, clubs and community. This has really allowed communities outside the Caribbean to thrive and we have seen the growth of Miami, DC carnival and many other smaller carnivals come to life.  The Caribbean community choices have changed from 1 event per night lets say in Miami Carnival to about 6-8 events to choose from per night.  This is an insane amount of growth and change in a short space of time.

There was also a second set of cosmic changes that have been happening at the same time.  In the last 10 years the technical landscape has changed.  Faster internet speed and cheap computing devices have allowed many new websites to model successful leaders.  Their idea of innovation is to take the benefits to users and remix the original content and designs to give a new look and feel.  It is the same concept but evolved.  The biggest game changer was facebook.  This created micro communities of friends or promoters have grown their own personal communities for their local cities for free.  This crashed many of the small players in the game since the reward of owning and hosting a website was not enough to meet the costs of the content. That is right contrary to popular belief original content does cost money because it cost to send a trained person to get the real scoop on the front line.

What does all of this mean?  Fundamentally the questions have now changed as the landscape has changed. The questions are now

1. Which is the hottest event that I should go to?
2. In the plethora of information, beside my friends, who do I trust ?
3. Where do I get the best education and entertainment content for Caribbean People?

The next generation of the evolution is going to be the sites who can best answer these questions.

Stephen Choo Quan