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| Photo Credit: ActionButton.org |
Bono has spent almost as much time traveling the world on behalf of his
humanitarian projects as he has with U2. So it’s no surprise that his
eldest child,
daughter Jordan, has taken a leaf out of Dad’s book with her first big project. Jordan, 27, is head of her own Brooklyn-based tech start up, Speakable,
which last week launched its new product – an “action button” that will
appear on news sites which allows readers to instantly respond to
stories they are reading on a page either via a poll, signing a petition
or donating to the story’s relevant cause. Companies that have already
signed on to include the action button on their content include the
Huffington Post and Vice. Hewson told CBS News that the idea for the product came to her after
reading about the heroic Pakistani schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, who was
shot multiple times on her school bus and miraculously survived. The
article, Hewson said, linked to a petition to support the education of
girls worldwide, but she never clicked. It made her think that if the
petition was right there on the page, it would have been easier to take
action. “I never clicked on the link,” Hewson told CBS. “Ten minutes later, I
thought, ‘If I’m not going to sign this, who will?’ I started to think
very seriously about the barriers that exist to taking action and
engaging with content. If we make it faster and easier to affect the
things people care about, it will be more likely that they will actually
do something.” Bono is not involved with Speakable, which raised $2 million earlier
this year. “My dad is a good resource, but I try to keep him away from
the company as much as possible,” Jordan told
Fortune. But his influence is clear to see in his daughter. “From a young age, I was always attending interesting events or
conferences or interesting parts of the world. My family did an
incredible job of educating us, of trying to keep us balanced in terms
of what we saw in our environments,” Hewson said. This generation, she feels, wants to make an impact, and the action button will allow them to do just that. “Millennials have different expectations of digital content,” she
said. “They want to do more than read headlines — they want to change
headlines.”
Irish Central Photo Action Button
