Let's explain the term 'Vifinition' with an equation: videos+definition. Quite simple, right? It might be simple but this start-up is pretty interesting. It lets you define a word with a video. You can submit that video to Vifiniton and other users can rate the video too.

Most content on the site can easily be shared with friends through social media. Vifinition's founder Hameed Ahmed explains that Vifinition doesn’t restrict its definitions to only famous people and popular culture: “Vifinition welcomes all kinds of inside jokes that can be shared amongst friends,” he says.

The amazing thing about Vifinition is that the video need not to be actually related to the word defining it. The creativity lies in linking words to videos that initially might have been totally unrelated to each other.

We have Hameed to tell us more about this awesome start-up. Catch his exclusive interview with us below with a hilarious video at the bottom defining the phrase 'fake friend':

Hameed, please introduce yourself to E-junkies.

I’m originally from Finland and went to college in the US at the University of Rochester where I studied English. I used to play squash on the Finnish National Team and then on the varsity team at Rochester. I graduated in May and came back to coach Rochester’s squash team and take classes at Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business. During the past years I’ve been running several sports-related websites and working as a reporter for the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
























Can you explain the concept behind vifinition.com and tell us how you came upon this idea?

After countless nights of writing news stories to different sites, I often thought to myself: couldn’t there be a way to give users more responsibility in creating content? I then saw a friend of mine act in a way that was very typical of her and I thought that if I had that behavior on video, it would define her better than any other definition or description. With these ideas in my mind, I spent the summer in Finland and sat down with two of my friends, Ottomatias Peura and Pete Saarnivaara, and together we created Vifinition.

The concept behind Vifinition is very simple: Allowing users to show their creativity by letting them link words or phrases with videos that initially might have had nothing to do with each other.


How is vifinition.com different from the media section on urbandictionitioary.com?

While Urban Dictionary has always been based around verbal creativity, Vifinition is a dictionary that is purely dedicated to videos. UD eventually added the media section that allows users to add videos and pictures next to the definitions. They actually added the section while we were designing Vifinition but we knew we were creating something different – we wanted videos to speak for themselves.


How do you think that vifinition.com can revolutionize the way that people create video definitions?

There are a couple of video dictionaries out there that are very official in their own way. They usually have someone actually reading out loud definitions in front of a camera or they concentrate on the accuracy of the definition by showing an actual video of the definition. Vifinition’s initial idea was not to be too serious. So videos don’t necessarily have to be accurate with the defined word or phrase; they can be sarcastic, funny or clever – you name it. Also, it’s a fully crowdsourced dictionary with as little administration as possible. So when users add something, it’s immediately up for voting. And the voters make sure that the definitions are accurate – well, or at least enjoyable.


Tell us about some of the difficulties you encountered in getting vifinition.com up and running.  

Initially we were trying very hard to make it clear for the users what kind of material we wanted on the site and how we wanted to shape the site. After thinking about these things for way too long, we realized that it’s not in our hands to decide any of that. In the end, we just decided to go live with the beta version and gather as much feedback as possible from our users.

Now the biggest challenge is getting the word out there and getting as much traffic to the site as possible.


Tell us about the most interesting experience you had from the conceiving stage to having vifinition.com go live.

I’ve never done anything like this before so to be honest, the whole process has been really interesting. I’m very happy I was able to turn an idea into something real and hopefully something that will keep on growing. So far the feedback has been positive and supportive and that motivates us even more to keep on improving the site.


What are your future plans for vifinition.com? Do you plan to add any functional enhancements? If yes, then what?

Our first goal is to make Vifinition the number one video dictionary in terms of traffic. As to functional enhancements, we want to make Vifinition as sharable as possible and make it as easy as possible for users to submit and share their own vifinitions. We want to integrate it better with video services like Youtube and Vimeo. As of now, people have to copy & paste the URL to the submission form (which isn’t that hard) but we want to make it even simpler. We’re also hoping to expand and make it possible for people to share videos in other ways.


Keeping your experience in evolving a startup, in perspective, what is the one most valuable piece of advice that you would like to give to aspiring online startups?

As cheesy as it sounds, just do it. It’s easy to talk about ideas you have but it’s another thing to make it happen. We had no idea how the site would be received but we just wanted to see what would happen. And that’s what we did and we’re glad that we did it.


Do you have any message for E-junkie’s readers?

We hope you enjoy and contribute to Vifinition. We are extremely excited about this and would love to see it grow. The site is only as good as the users make it.

Here’s also an example of a short and funny vifinition that hopefully makes the concept behind the site clear.

Vifinition of Fake Friend: