JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – For close to a week, Jacksonville tends to look a lot like Silicon Valley, with thousands of creators flocking to the River City from April 7-12 for the One Spark Crowdfunding Festival.
It is a chance for hundreds of inventors and creators to share their ideas with the world and hope to get the funding they need to bring those ideas to life.
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"This is TalkIt. It's a brand-new social media network that lets you use your voice instead of texting," TalkIt founder, Curtis Ceballos, said.
Ceballos said TalkIt is the future of social media and that it already has companies like Google and Apple interested in investing.
"All you have to do is press any message you want and you can actually play and actually hear the message," Ceballos said.
Ceballos describes the app as a voice-only Twitter, where messages can be sent to groups of friends or seen on other types of social media around the world.
Ceballos' son Ryan said the app has more than 250,000 users and growing.
"People love it. I was just talking to a garage attendant and he knew exactly who we were and he was completely blown away," Ryan Ceballos said.
The Ceballos aren't the only creators blowing people away. A nationwide student textbook trading company called Textbook Boomerang is as well.
"How it works is you start off by listing the books that you have and listing the books that you want, and the smart algorithm that we've developed matches students across the United States," Textbook Boomerang co-founder, Bradley Tomlin, said.
With creators like Ceballos and Tomlin being just the tip of the iceberg, Wednesday promises to be an exciting day with the fullness of One Spark available for everyone to see.