As someone who spends her life around entrepreneurs, I've seen every type imaginable.  But sometimes you have the pleasure of getting to know an entrepreneur who takes creative thinking to the max and does more than simply start a business--he changes an industry. Such a person is Tom Grasty, who is probably one of the finest graduate students I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Tom comes out of the field of journalism, an industry that is struggling to adapt to the onslaught of citizen journalists who tweet, blog, and YouTube their way alongside (and often in front of) the mainstream press.  But even Tom and his partner Nonny de la Pena couldn't have predicted that their collaborative video editing platform, Stroome, would play a role in the revolution taking place in Egypt.

Stroome is derived from a Dutch word "stromen," which means "to move freely."  And that's precisely what this collaborative editing site does.  It facilitiates the movement of ideas, perspectives, and content freely among people by enabling the user to upload videos, share clips, then mix them up and mash them out.  Stoome gives journalists and journalist wannabes the ability to collaborate in real time on a video.  And that's precisely what happened when Tom and Nonny received an email from an Egyptian man named WilYaWil who works for a non-proft that, in his own words, has a "mission to enable young people from the West and predominatly Muslim socieities to have cross-cultural dialogues using new media technologies."  In a great post that Tom did this week, "Will the Next Revolution be Stroomed?", he talks about how a planned Skype call with WilYaWil got sidetracked by the start of the revolution and how when the Egyptian government blocked Twitter and Facebook, he and Nonny were able to quickly create a group on Stroome called "Egypt Protests" to give the protesters a global voice.  When the government shut down the Internet for five days, they lost contact with WilYaWil.  But then he resurfaced on February 9, happy to report how he was using Stoome to capture and share all the excitement in Egypt.

After Mubarak stepped down, WilYaWil SKYPEd  back to thank Tom and Nonny for their "remarkable tool."  "The ability to collorate and work together with video.  No one is doing it. It's revolutionary.  It's going to change things." For Tom and Nonny, there could be no better endorsement of the product they had devoted so much effort to develop.  If you go to Stroome.com and type "Egypt" in the search bar, you can see some of WilYaWil's videos.  We live in exciting times, full of opportunities to make a difference.  Tom and Nonny have definitely done that!