Ambitious Web startup smacks of teen spirit

The founders of Web on Weels are not old enough to buy beer, but that hasn't stopped the callow trio from creating an entirely original Web app that might be as revolutionary as Yahoo or Netscape -- when they get it to work.

Peter Elias and Martin Shen, 19, are college students, and Will King is a 17-year-old high school senior.

That's younger than Jerry Yang (25) when he started the project that would become Yahoo!, or Marc Andreessen (21) when he began work on the Web browser that became Netscape.

The Milton, Mass. startup, officially known as Weels Corp., showed off its supercharged drag-and-drop tool at the DEMO conference last week.

Their free service deconstructs a Web page into its basic visual elements: icons, images, bits of text and even embedded YouTube videos.

The point of the app isn't to turn Web pages into jigsaw puzzles for users to re-arrange. Rather, Weels aims to boost users' productivity by letting them control their Web browsers without once having to touch their keyboards.

Drag an image onto your friend's name on Windows Live Messenger and they will immediately get an instant message with that picture attached. Or drag a city name onto the Google Maps icon that appears when you hover over the Web on Weels' toolbar in Firefox, and you'll quickly get a map of that location.

Users can even drag the name or even a picture of a product onto the Amazon.com icon, and launch the corresponding product page at the online retailer's Web site.

[ See Web on Weels in action in this screencast demonstration. ]

Web on Weels is in private beta today. Users can sign up to demo the service at Weels' home page, using the registration code "DEMOFALL."

Unlike other less-ambitious consumer startups at DEMO, Web on Weels is aiming for the fences with its first at-bat.

"It's a very big idea that we are trying to do," said Elias, Web on Weels' spokesman and CEO.

Web on Weels hopes to surf on top of two coming waves: the move to Web-based computing, and the rise in touch screens, tablets and other non-keyboard dependent PCs.

iPhones and upcoming Windows 7 PCs with touch screen support are weaning users off the keyboard, as will the much-rumored dueling tablet PCs from Microsoft and Apple.

So are media center PCs, which are connected to a television many feet away and controlled by a TV remote control or a mouse like Logitech's MX Air that, as its name suggests, can be waved around in the air.

Wunderkinds 2.0

Web on Weels' founders are no accidental entrepreneurs. Elias started a Web development company half a decade ago, when he was just 14 years old. Elias has also managed a Boston-area summer computer camp for teens, where King was the Java programming teacher.

Elias and Shen met as freshman last year at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. The school has been hailed for its entrepreneur-focused curriculum, which requires all first-year students to work on their own startup companies.

The idea for Web on Weels grew out of an annotation app that Martin, a Toronto native, had thought up in high school.

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