What is Qoorio?
Qoorio is a new app that is designed to close the ever-growing ‘knowledge gap’ by connecting curious individuals and creating a community of people who are willing to share and learn from each other.
We’ve all heard it said that everyone has a book in them, or a great business idea. That may be true, but good ideas need help to succeed – and for all the information available online, the best help still relies on conversations with people with real experience and knowledge to pass on.
But not everyone has access to the publisher or the investor that is actually going to help them make those ideas real – and ‘just Googling it’ isn’t going to solve that problem.
With Qoorio, people can search through thousands of topics and individuals – whether you want to learn how to monetise your business idea, or how to improve your gardening skills – connect with other users, meet them for coffee, chat online or arrange a phone call as a way to learn from them.
By tapping into the knowledge, experience and wisdom of others we can fuel personal and business growth – and yes, create a better future.
Why is the difference between information and knowledge important?
It’s important because although we often think of information and knowledge as synonymous, they are very different things.
While information can be incredibly useful in answering “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when” questions, knowledge is about answering “how” or “why” questions.
Technology – via companies like Google, Wikipedia and a multitude of others – has given us virtually unlimited access to the world’s information. Unfortunately, technology alone does not provide answers for vital “how” and “why” questions. Human experiences, rather than facts, are the source of knowledge.
As a result, knowledge is not distributed equally throughout society. This is the ‘knowledge gap’ that Qoorio is solving – providing routes to find the answers to questions that you can’t find on Google or Wikipedia. The questions that don’t have straightforward answers.
Where did the idea for Qoorio come from?
The idea actually came from a first-hand experience of the knowledge gap.
Gabija, co-founder of Qoorio, and I both live in Vilnius in Lithuania. Despite it being quite a small city we realised that, despite each having a wide network of people we knew, our social bubbles rarely overlapped.
We also realised that while Gabija’s network was full of people from the art world, and mine more in the tech and startup space, there were a lot of occasions where these two very different groups needed each other. People in one group lacked the knowledge found in the other group and vice versa – but it was hard to make these connections proactively.
So, we thought of creating an app that helps to make these connections more easily, rather than leaving them to chance.
That’s where the thought of creating Qoorio started – we quickly saw the potential for creating a universal network of humans that allows them easily to learn and to share from each other their perspectives, insights, learnings, and mistakes.
How important is the human element of Qoorio?
Human connections are incredibly valuable, because when we are talking about how and why questions the answers are heavily dependent on context. Often there is no single answer to such questions.
The answers tend to reveal themselves through sharing stories and learnings from new or difficult situations that people have experienced in the past. As such, conversation is vital – it allows you to far more easily see different perspectives that were unavailable to you previously.
There is also another side to this. Qoorio users share their time through video calls or a chat – and they can choose to offer their time for free or a fee which goes to charity. So the app has an extra layer of human context – not just as a great way to cultivate genuine meaningful social interaction, but also to do some good.
How do you see the business growing in the next five years?
As a company and brand, we believe that the focus on “doing good” and making a positive impact on society is set to expand exponentially. We see Qoorio at the centre of that trend.
Platforms like Wikipedia have made objective and factual information accessible to everyone. But, now it’s time to make individual experiences and knowledge available to everyone.
Connecting individuals to be able to share and learn from each other is a good and meaningful goal, and if we can amplify the positive impact by enabling individuals to easily donate to a charity too, then that’s even better.
With this in mind, we fully expect to see open knowledge sharing grow as a sector – with a massive explosion in the number of topics and subject matters that this sharing economy will support in the next few years.
Closing the knowledge gap is our long-term mission – and we are already growing rapidly. Indeed, it’s amazing to see how people have embraced the app, even in the current crisis.
We activated a Covid-19 support community to help beat the negative outcomes of quarantine – offering home exercise advice, home working advice, career advice as well as nutrition, cooking and other wellbeing measures.
Although it is a worrying and challenging time it goes to show that technology can have a positive impact on our lives when we need it most.
We genuinely believe that Qoorio is one of the tools that will help people create a better future together.
