Shekhar Kapur Announces Qyuki: A Social Network For Stories Shekhar Kapur, the Indian film director who made the Oscar-nominated "Elizabeth," said he had an epiphany about six years ago that storytelling was going through an upheaval because of services such as YouTube, Facebook and Google. That realization, he told me on Wednesday, led him to start work on Qyuki, which means "because" in Hindi, a social media site where people will be able to collaborate on stories that could take the form of video, audio or something else. His partner in the venture is A.R. Rahman, the celebrated Indian musician who became a global sensation for his work on "Slumdog Millionaire." Cisco Systems, the networking company, is an early investor in the project. "It came from my fear of becoming a dinosaur," Mr. Kapur said during an interview at the annual conference of Nasscom, India's technology industry association, in Mumbai where he spoke later in the afternoon. I suddenly woke up one day and realized the ground is shifting beneath our feet. Mr. Kapur said a team of 25 people in Bangalore are developing Qyuki and he expects an early version of the network to go online in April or May. The site's initial target market will be India but people from other parts of the world will also be able to use it. So, what exactly will it do? I asked Mr. Kapur if the site would essentially be a mashup of YouTube and iMovie, the Apple software that allows people to edit and create videos. He said it would be "more than that," describing it as the digital equivalent of a rainforest that grows and evolves through the interplay of different life forms, or in this case media and human imagination. The site, Mr. Kapur said, would circumvent gatekeepers like movie studios, record labels and even celebrity brand names like himself and Mr. Rahman. "While we start off with brands," he said, meaning himself and Mr. Rahman. The idea is that you can be the biggest brand. That sounds similar to the goals of the people who founded YouTube, as this recent New Yorker story about that site reports. But does the world really need another social network? Facebook and YouTube already do a brisk trade in videos, music and stories of all kinds. Others like Storyful aim to be the home of "cooperative" journalism. Many others who have tried to play in this space have been left behind: MySpace, which positioned itself as a music specialist, has faded, as even Rupert Murdoch, whose company paid $580 million for the site, recently acknowledged. And Friendster, the original social network, has become a gaming site. Mr. Kapur said that he thinks Qyuki will be different than those other networks and noted that even now many overlapping social networks like Twitter and Facebook complement each other, rather than directly competing. The threat to his new network won't come so much from other networks but from its own shortcomings, he said. "The danger is that you don't get it right," he said, "that you can't engage people emotionally in what you are doing." How will Qyuki deal with demands from governments like China and, increasingly, India that want to control speech on the net or restrict it by excluding anything that could be considered remotely offensive to a specific group? Mr. Kapur said that Qyuki would not be available in China initially. In India and the rest of the world, it would have a system to remove offensive content along the lines of what Facebook, YouTube and others have. "You don't let everything on," he said. A team of lawyers are also working on a system to address copyright concerns. The Economic Times reported on Wednesday that Cisco had invested about 270 million rupees ($5.5 million) in Qyuki, but Mr. Kapur said that number was incorrect. He said he could not disclose financial details. Cisco declined to disclose how much the company invested in Qyuki. In a written response to questions, Pratik Bose, a senior corporate business development manager at the company, said Cisco invested in Qyuki to help create "a technology platform that enables conception of different kinds of content." Mr. Kapur said the site would probably make money from some combination of three sources: advertising, subscriptions, and sales of products and services. Mr. Kapur, whose last feature-length movie, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," was released in 2007, said he plans to seek public input into a movie he has written about water set in the future that he has yet to shoot. He said he plans to put the script, production design and other plans online for people to comment on and suggest changes. He doesn't plan to crowd-source that film like Ridley Scott did with "Life In a Day," but Mr. Kapur said he is interested in working on a project like that, too. "The Mahabharat was crowd-sourced over centuries," he told his Nasscom audience. But then with the creation of the Gutenberg press, we had the power to publish our stories. But we could not publish a never ending story so we came up with the three act structure. Now we are going back to never-ending stories that are crowd-sourced. Neha Thirani contributed reporting.