Written on March 12, 2008 – 12:30 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This week we’re interviewing Josh Tabin, founder of PrismaStar. That’s a Czech software company that uses a patent-pending consumer-profiling technology to help consumers find products and services, personalized to their own individual needs. Basically they want to save you the hassle of navigating through sea of mass market advertising and mega stores. Their site is rather overwhelming, due to truck loads of information. So I’m glad Josh took the time to participate in our weekly series to explain what his company is about and how he developed it.
How did you come up with the idea of Prismastar?
“It’s really simple; I couldn’t find the products I wanted and searching for product information online was more frustrating and time-consuming than helpful. No results found, too many results, non-relevant results, too much scrolling, too many pages, bad data etcetera etcetera. And I wasn’t the only one having these problems. So, for more than three years we researched how people really make decisions and created AnswerOil™. Now people everywhere can make better and faster decisions when AnswerOil is deployed on their Websites, in-store kiosks, and even mobile applications.” (more…)
I hope you like that post!
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Written on February 14, 2008 – 3:57 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Video Advertising service Overlay.tv has just launched (press release) in beta. The service provides (registered) users with tools to add content to existing movies in a new layer. Content means arrows, images, drawings, random stuff they find online and insert with a bookmarklet and, more interesting, advertisements.
These advertisements are supplied by one of the 700+ affiliate partners that Overlay.tv has deals with. It is an interesting model and so far it seems to work out. I looked at a few examples expecting them to be littered with ‘interesting’ content but people seem to behave, so far. Here is an example of a Sex and the City movie which has been enriched with a few links to ecommerce sites selling clothing, shoes (yep, Manolo Blahnik!) and The Complete Series (A link to Amazon).
In time you will share the referral fee 50/50 with Overlay.tv for all goods sold through Overlay.tv. But not during the Beta. Right now Overlay.TV will donate all referral proceeds to charity. Lets hope the Beta doesn’t take too long!
On your lunch break? Then watch their 70s inspired promo movie. It is not THAT funny so don’t waste too much time on it:
Written on February 8, 2008 – 3:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When online marketing expert David Sadigh from IC Agency asked the LIFT08 audience who used the Internet in 1995, he was surprised by the huge response. “In 1995 it used to be a tool for geeks”. The situation has obviously changed, since the Internet is a mass medium now. “Even dogs are about to go online” Sadigh joked (no response this time). That makes it interesting for sales, he said. But the striking thing about the Internet is that the content is the same for everyone, yet we’re all unique and have our own wishes.
Because the content is not adapted to their needs, 98 percent of the visitors leave commercial sites without buying. Yet business pump in 35.5 billion dollars in online marketing on a yearly basis to attract visitors to their site. “Imagine if you had a store where everybody walks in but nobody is buying anything - you would definitely fire the person whose running the shop. Then why do we accept this on the Internet?”
As you might have guessed, Sadigh had the answer to this shocking question. ‘Internet isn’t really born yet”, he said, it’s a new medium, sort of like a 2 or 3 month old fetus”. So because of its new character, we’re not yet focusing on things like customer experience. Well, actually we just started, since Sadigh confronted us with this phenomenon. He urges companies to decode the visitors’ intentions and personalize content according to the decoding. Just like Amazon already did in the early years with the personalized recommendations. It’s just that Sadigh wants us to take it to another level.
How can we do that? What can we personalize? Some suggestions made by Sadigh:
- Intentional targeting, display a specific product related info related to an engine search on that specific model. When somebody searches for family vacations in Italy, you don’t show just a classic Italian picture but go for the family-eating-at-a-big-table photo.
- Geographic targeting
- Event targeting, like showing product info related to a current TV campaign.
- Behavorial targeting, when people buy something on your site, they’re probably there for the third time. So keep track of their surfing behavior and adjust the product related info to that
To be honest with you, I find the numbers Sadigh mentioned shocking, but his suggestions don’t sound revolutionary to me. Maybe he sees them merely as a way to prepare companies for the REAL personalization, or the techniques needed aren’t available yet. To give it a positive twist at the end: things can just get better.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
