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Is the world ready for Grabbit?
Could the world now be ready?
In 2009, along with a group of bright, energetic team members, I founded a startup called Grabbit. in a nutshell:
Grabbit created a new web services platform, for social media publishing and subscribing, real-time content consumption, and highly targeted social shopping. The Grabbit Social Commerce system matches content, people, and the products, services, and brands they want, all based on recommendations from both Grabbit and from the people in their social networks. “As much as 25% of retail e-commerce is based on automated recommendations such as Amazon’s “Recommended for you” offers.” (Gartner Group)
Grabbit’s analysis of users, content, and content consumption results in very timely and highly personalized product, service, and donation recommendations. Grabbit starts by analyzing content items using keyword analysis, tag analysis, and semantic analysis and embeds matching social commerce offers in that content. Grabbit’s optional social tools add the ability to analyze profiles, behaviors, and preferences of users and their friends to increase the ability to the match offers and recommendations to content and people.
In short, the beauty of the service is this: collect all of your streams (email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email accounts…), SAVE them all from inception (they are “yours” after all), back them up, and efficiently be able to sort and search across all of them. Like Google Desktop, but sequestered to your own files, not hidden files like many people were suspect of with Google Desktop and other services like it.
Overview:
Grabbit™ aims to become the leader in real-time stream management and in the monetization of real-time streams. Grabbit has developed a rich “stream browser” that helps with tasks such as stream aggregation, content filtering, friend management, and more, making it compelling for people to use Grabbit as their primary real-time stream. Grabbit gives users access to personalized streams from Twitter, Facebook, news, blogs, email and other content sources any place, anytime. Grabbit runs on smart phones (iPhone, Palm Pre, Android), the web, and TV to provide an integrated multi-platform system that allows people to view, send/receive, and manage ongoing real-time updates and alerts across a wide range of social networks, information, media, and commerce.
Grabbit leverages the high level of user attention and interaction given to real-time streams by offering vendors and service providers the ability to make highly targeted and personalized offers directly to consumers using Grabbit’s revolutionary new Real-Time Direct Marketing™ and e-commerce system. The profit potential is enormous.
Opportunity:
Grabbit leverages the major new trend of people spending significantly more of their attention on real-time online streams of short or summarized information.
More and more information from the web is being streamed to users in real-time. Twitter is credited with igniting the shift from browsing relatively static web pages full of information to browsing a real-time stream of short snippets of information, shared among a social network of friends. Now many other web services, including Facebook, Google, and AOL are jumping on the bandwagon by offering real-time streams of information to their users. The value of such companies is high, with FriendFeed recently selling to Facebook for approximately $50 Million.
But, more than just social networks are delivering real-time streams of information. The move to smart phones such as the iPhone has created a bumper crop of applications that deliver summarized real-time information that is well-suited for the small form factor of smart phones. Some of the many examples of these smart phone apps on the iPhone are iPhone mail, Google News, Bloomberg News, and many e-commerce smart phone micro-sites such as Amazon’s.
The massive popularity of receiving and sending small amounts of information is indicative of today’s “short attention span society” in which there is more competition for an individual’s attention than ever before. Delivering summarized information in real-time streams helps people cope with the massive amounts of information available, and the resultant information overload. The real-time nature of streaming services offers an immediacy that is appealing and attention-grabbing. For many people, real-time streams are the “new” news.
But the popularity of these real-time streaming message services has created some new problems: keeping track of all of these real-time streams, and keeping track of friends and associates on various social and business networks. It’s inconvenient to have to check all these streams individually, for example, logging into Twitter or using a Twitter app to participate in the Twitter stream, and then having to do the same for Facebook, AOL, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc. It’s also difficult to keep track of and manage various friends who may be on one or more of these various social networks or other online services. Furthermore, all the messages create a lot of “noise” and it is difficult to find and focus on what is most interesting and important.
Despite the enormous popularity of Twitter, it has had trouble developing a viable business model. Other similar services face the same problem. There is both a real need and a major opportunity for a new system that can effectively monetize the attention of people browsing real-time streams of information.
Grabbit’s Solution:
Grabbit solves these problems, and more. For the user it aggregates all of their social network streams into a single stream, the Grabbit Stream. Other services such as FriendFeed provide limited solutions, but Grabbit takes real-time stream management to a new level with its rich “stream browser.” Grabbit not only consolidates many different types of streams, but also helps users with tasks such as managing alerts, messages, friends, and subscriptions. Grabbit gives users the ability to add many different types of real-time streams, updates, and alerts – e.g. email alerts, news alerts, blog alerts, alarms and reminders, shopping alerts, and more – across a broad range of social networks, information, media, and commerce.
Because aggregating all of that information into a single stream could create its own information overload, Grabbit lets users instantly filter their streams in a variety of ways to focus on specific information or people. Grabbit also gives users a powerful set of tools for managing friends, contacts, and groups of friends and other contacts, across a wide variety of social and business networks.
For marketers, Grabbit offers a new platform for real-time direct marketing and e-commerce that is highly targeted and personalized. Grabbit leverages the specific interests of each individual user based on detailed analysis of the content within their stream and their friend’s streams, behavioral analysis, and explicit information users provide in their profile and on other areas of Grabbit. Ongoing interests that are actively subscribed to and viewed in a user’s stream are more powerful for targeting active buyers, and more effective in generating impulse buys, than the more passive and unpredictable interest levels represented by search engine marketing or other types of advertising.
By aggregating a comprehensive array of information sources into a single, manageable stream, and delivering a unified service across phone, web, and TV platforms, Grabbit provides more value to users than its competitors. Grabbit profits from this value exchange via its innovative real-time direct marketing and e-commerce system, a major revenue source that other social messaging services lack.
Grabbit’s system connects buyers and sellers in real-time, allows users to purchase items immediately with a single click, and eliminates significant inefficiencies inherent in traditional advertising. Grabbit offers a large inventory of products and services directly to users through its extensive affiliate/partner network. In addition, Grabbit features a self-service vendor interface (similar in concept to Google Adwords) that lets anyone offer products or services directly to consumers. Grabbit provides direct payment methods via credit card, PayPal, and phone billing, thus allowing sellers to close and complete sales, and maximize the potential for impulse buying. The efficiencies of Grabbit’s system provides benefits to both consumers and marketers, and maximizes Grabbit’s revenue and profit potential. Annual revenue from this type of service could be in the $100M to $1B range.
Service Description:
Grabbit Service: Grabbit is a free service available on smart-phones, the web, and TV that provides consumers with a powerful new type of browser for real-time streams of information and a set of tools and utilities for managing content, alerts, and networks of friends and associates.
Grabbit helps users send and receive real-time messages and updates to and from people in any of their social networks, as well as receive and forward updates from a wide range of information sources including:
- Social networks: Grabbit imports friends and aggregates updates from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc., and lets users manage both their updates and friends
- Email: users can get alerts when they receive new mail, and can filter alerts by sender or keywords
- News: Grabbit provides a “personalized news stand” where users can discover and subscribe to a large number of news sources from major news outlets to special interest news, and filter news by keywords, news sources, etc.
- RSS/Atom feeds: Grabbit users can subscribe to any RSS or Atom feed, get a summary delivered to the user’s Grabbit stream, and then link to the full content
- Blog updates: Grabbit can notify users when a favorite blog has a new post, and provide a summary
- Alarms/Reminders: users can program alarms and reminders to appear in their Grabbit stream at specified times
- Shopping alerts: users can get notifications from eBay about auctions, from Craigslist about new posts, and about products and services they are interested in buying from other Grabbit partners
- Grabbit Deals: users can subscribe to particular categories of deals and offers from Grabbit’s partners
Grabbit is designed to be multi-platform and available anywhere, any time, on your phone, the web, or TV. Grabbit will be offered in the following formats:
- Smart phones: an application for smart phones, initially the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Android. Other phones will be supported via a dynamic web interface for the phone’s browser
- Web site: the Grabbit web site will provide the easiest way for users to perform advanced tasks such as creating filters for feeds and emails, importing contacts, organizing friends into groups, etc.
- Grabbit stream web widget: allows users to place their customized Grabbit stream on almost any website
- Grabbit deals web widget: Allows users to place a widget on any web page to offer deals from the Grabbit real-time direct marketing system based on specific keywords, meta tags, or content related to that page
- TV: Designed to work on gaming platforms such as Wii, Xbox, and PS3. Eventually a version for set-top boxes will be developed as that market develops
Grabbit Discovery Center: The GrabbitDiscoveryCenter is a real-time personalized portal that helps its users discover other users, new real-time content, and real-time commerce. Accordingly, the DiscoveryCenter is composed of three main sections, the People Finder, News Finder, and Deal Finder. Each user’s DiscoveryCenter is a personalized micro-content portal, drawn from editorially-selected items most closely matched to each user’s interests. This matching is based on the user’s viewing history, online usage, profile, and metadata, as well as a friend recommendation system that draws on data such as analysis of other user’s social networks, content usage, reputations, marketing responses, and system interaction. Whereas existing portals focus on web content, Grabbit specializes in helping display, organize, and recommend friends, and real-time streams of content and commerce.
Grabbit Real-Time Direct Marketing and E-commerce: Grabbit’s powerful revenue engine is a sophisticated platform for real-time direct marketing and e-commerce based on a number of technologies including a distributed data repository code-named the “Deals Database.” The Grabbit Real-Time Direct Marketing system makes offers to users based on detailed profiling, content analysis, behavioral analysis, and other metrics. Offers are provided to users in a compelling yet unobtrusive, soft-sell, opt-in manner that doesn’t clutter up or otherwise interfere with the user’s Grabbit experience.
Grabbit’s Real-Time Direct Marketing system uses this advanced content and behavior analysis to provide a very high degree of targeting, which is used to present users with marketing messages, special deals, e-coupons, and other e-commerce offers that are precisely targeted to that individual’s current interests. Users who register a payment method with Grabbit (e.g. credit card, PayPal, phone billing, etc.) will be able to purchase items directly from the Grabbit application on their phone, on the web, or from their TV.
Team:
CEO: TBD
Fred Davis, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer: Fred has a long string of publishing and technology successes. Fred was on the founding teams of a number of startups including Wired, CNET and Ask Jeeves. Prior to that Fred was a top executive at Ziff-Davis Publishing where he served as editor of PC Magazine, PC Week, MacUser, and A+, as well as running and leading the industry-leading product testing laboratories at those publications. Fred has been named one of the most influential people in the industry by several publications in both the U.S. and Japan, and is listed in Who’s Who in America.
Lisa Padilla, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer: Lisa has been helping businesses like Apple, Intuit, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Datek, Clorox, Levis and Drugstore.com reach consumer customers and partners with effective marketing campaigns for over 15 years. She has led product launches and corporate marketing for companies in technology, financial services, entertainment, travel, sports, news, gaming and other industries. Lisa’s strategic and hands-on experience offers specialization in advertising, search marketing, social media strategy, micro-media and channel marketing. Lisa is also the host of Lisacast.com.
Danilo Black, Development Partner: Grabbit is working with the world-renowned design and development group, Danilo Black. In its 20-year history in media, Danilo Black has helped many major news organizations successfully convert their print brands into digital hubs. Roger Black has designed many of the publications you are familiar with today such as Newsweek, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Readers Digest, and many major web sites such as MSNBC.com and Discovery.com. Danilo Black brings considerable expertise and development p rocess helping us deliver a world-class product design and user experience.
Grabbit presently resides on Github, awaiting it’s next development and distribution partners. If you are interested in getting involved, in management, fund raising, engineering or as a partner or customer, please contact us.
Hadoop There It Is!
What is Hadoop? It’s a relatively new open source data platform with what appears to me to be a new flush of energy (still 99:1 male to female ratio, which says to me that there is something new and nerdy about it).
CEOs and engineers and a few PR people, trailing like jet streams behind them are walking the yellow floor, reminiscent of the yellow brick road.This year, the show is covered by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, with a second studio and floor discussions intended as 1-to-1 interviews.
So what is the promise of open source data?
If you ask VMware, they will show you how to virtualize the Haddop platform.
If you ask the Open Knowledge Foundation, they will offer you a helpful Open Data Handbook.
If you ask Jessie Lichtenstein at Wired Magazine, they will warn that open data may “simply empower the empowered” and more aspects need to be taken into consideration.
If you ask the Open Data Center Alliance, lead by “a steering committee of senior IT executives from BMW, China Unicom, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., National Australia Bank, Terremark, Disney Technology Solutions and Services, and UBS. Intel Corporation serves as the organization’s technical advisor.”
If you ask Hortonworks, who yesterday announced “enterprise-ready features built on the most stable Apache Hadoop distribution to date”, and also the sponsor of the Hadoop Summit 2012, they’ll make an argument just by showing you testimonials from customers in their partner programs.
If you ask Cloudera, a company who has been around since the clouds were just forming, they will give you their ideas about Hadoop, I found this helpful.
And, if you ask me, I’m pleased that there are multiple data storage platforms in the game. Competition sometimes relieves entropy, a characteristic ever-more frequent in the economy. Hadoop at first glance, looks flexible and current.
Which open data platforms compute in your mind?
Curation duration
All the rage in fashion this winter? Curation*. Tool after tool after tool. Splices of networks, filters by geography, interest, type of media or time of day. I turned on a self-publicizing service called Paper.li not too long ago. There are readers, there is sharing, but there are few ‘subscribers’ so in my eyes they must be missing a few things.
Here’s a sample publication I put together for Themeefy (bummer they probably have to pronounce that correctly for people). It was quite a bit of work figuring out how to ‘simply’ put it together.
http://www.themeefy.com/miniature?tid=47205
For some people, curation is what they hear in the hallway at school or work. For some, it’s Twitter from 7:00 to 7:10 am. For some, we rely on Facebook or other destination sites to use their own algorithms to determine what’s ‘important’ for us. They use things like ‘most shared’, ‘most discussed’ and ‘most liked’. Often what’s most discussed is not what is most important or interesting to me, however, or even you, so that fails in a lot of ways too.
How much time are we spending curating each day? Doesn’t this defeat the purpose?
* Why do I have to add the word “curation” to every dictionary in every program I have? Certainly curation has been a word used in other industries for many years.
Lisacast.com Daily – Interesting news in…
Lisacast.com Daily – Interesting news in tech today! http://ht.ly/5wpN6 thank you @partnerup @mchammer @thenextweb @nprnews and @aparanjape
Describe lisap in three words!
threewords.me is a service that allows people to sum other up with three words. I like the idea. we need more simplification in software.
You can try it here:
How would you describe Lisa Padilla in three words!. – via threewords.me
Anticipatory web services
The Anticipatory/Predictive/ Intention Web
We all have silent little conversations with our computers, don’t we? Admit it. “No, that’s not what I meant.” “Go back.” “Are you still alive?” We talk to them like they are pets. We hope they will understand a few words we give them, knowing we will have to remind them again and again to get down off the couch, to stop eating slippers, to sit. We talk to other things too, lots of things, that don’t talk back with us.
Computers (software, web services), however, enable more complex discussions and as technology is taking hold of more and more of our time, there exists the early inefficiencies of any major change. The creation and distribution of information online, your information, and that of everyone else remains for the moment at a pivot point, balancing between traditional media control and a rising of consumer-driven content. The time is ripe for a significant advancement* in the “anticipatory web.” A change in the user experience is about to come.
Sit. Stay. Good Web.
It’s fair to say I have spent a lot of my life on computers, on software development, and the marketing of each. Five years ago, my attention centered on connecting companies with their customers primarily by paying for lead information, casting test advertising nets into the Internet ocean, and mitigating their adoption concerns (i.e. understanding why they wouldn’t buy.) Now, working on our own software (finally) at Grabbit I am thinking more about the intelligence of software to understand a user’s needs, preferences, patterns, etc. (all without endangering their trust.)
The complex equations of algorithms combined with the implicit behavior and data given to us by the user will help developers create next-generation software systems that anticipate more fully who you are and what you want from an end-user perspective. We’ve seen baby steps in this direction for many years online. Auto-fill forms, “keep me logged in” buttons, and so on. But software can take a big step — a step that produces interaction.
Companies can address product or service concerns, or open public discussions about other issues concerning their customers and by doing so, anticipate what user’s want (importantly) based on use AND explicit feedback, for instance. In turn, customers can offer – by way of behavior or explicitly-given feedback – additional information about themselves. Also, because of periodic down economies, lack of capital and simple software that provides basic information, many software companies (especially internal divisions of large corporations and underfunded start-ups) circumvent market research, focus groups and other comprehensive testing techniques for the web services and pay for it in adoption or poor press.
* The term Anticipatory web is not in any way a ‘new’ term. Q. Why now? A. Product and service providers have conglomerated into several the major categories. They have matured enough to offer partner programs, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), and support for these. Concurrently, web service developers are creating sophisticated programs to anticipate consumer behavior, therefor unlocking revenue for many of the software companies who will have otherwise failed. Happy customer. Happy company. Happy investors.
Have an example to share? I’d love to hear about it!
Jeff Robbins, from Lullabot on Drupal (Podcast and Interview Transcription)
Recorded during an earlier interview.
Related blog post.
Drupal is often referred to as a content management system but it’s also a web framework. It’s basically a PHP web application framework in the same way that Rails is a web application framework for Ruby, Drupal is a web application framework for PHP. But it’s really focused on CMS that’s built on top of it but it’s really, really flexible. And so there are all these modules out there that can add, basically sort of fundamentally change the way that Drupal works.
Lisa Padilla: Hi, it’s Lisa Padilla. Welcome to Lisacast, another episode. Today’s guest is Jeff Robbins who is Co-Founder and CEO of Lullabot. And for those of you who don’t know Lullabot, Lullabot is all about Drupal and Jeff is going to talk a little bit about that. Jeff Robbins, are you with me?
Jeff Robbins: I am, are you with me?
Lisa Padilla: Yes, that’s great. Could you also just say before we started that you do your weekly Drupal Podcast on BlogTalkRadio?
Jeff Robbins: No, we do it a little more home-brewed, yeah, no, we –
Lisa Padilla: Do you guys edit first before or do you do live shows?
Jeff Robbins: No, we do a lot of edit. We do a lot of editing and make ourselves sound smarter, although, I guess there is only so far that we can go with that. But yeah, the live thing is exciting, it’s very exciting.
Lisa Padilla: Yeah, I still get excited right before shows start and I think it’s because of the live act and because there have been a couple of times when I interviewed Rafe Needleman, he was actually tied up with his toddler and he was a few minutes late and so we just started without him. But it does offer spontaneous conversation to start to and maybe the show goes the different direction. So there is that. But you are here and let’s talk about you. Let’s jump right in and talk about your background.
Jeff Robbins: Okay. What would you like to talk about?
Lisa Padilla: Well, our listeners here might not know that you have an always been an entrepreneur that you’ve had around in the music industry.
Jeff Robbins: Well, I guess, yeah, just sort of a different type of entrepreneurship I guess but yeah, my sort of previous career was as the front person for a band called Orbit. We were on A&M Records for most of the 90s and did the Lollapalooza festival and had top 10 modern rock song and stuff like that. So, yeah, did that. Well, I started a web company, I actually worked at O’Reilly in like 1991, ‘92, ‘93 when the web was kind of coming into being and I actually started one of the first web development companies. But when my band got off for the record deal, I was happy to go do that and stop explaining to people what the Internet was and why they should have a web site and that kind of thing. Everyone eventually figured out what the Internet was and why they ought to have a web site. But meanwhile, I was playing rock shows.
Lisa Padilla: Yeah, that company was Liquid Media in 1993, right?
Jeff Robbins: Yeah.
Lisa Padilla: So, you have done quite a bit of web development too and have done Ringo Starr site, is that right?
Jeff Robbins: That’s true, yeah, I got to spend some time talking to Ringo onto the phone and helping him with his various technical computer problems. He is a lovely man.
Lisa Padilla: You must have started with music then, and how did you come to start at O’Reilly?
Jeff Robbins: I just was doing various temp jobs to, I was playing in my band and was looking for jobs that were paid well but didn’t tie me down too much and I ended up getting a job, a temp job at O’Reilly doing illustration work for some of their books. And they liked me and I really liked them and so they kept me on and I worked there probably two or three years or something like that till I left to go do the web stuff which happened relatively briefly and then my band got signed.
Lisa Padilla: And it’s no coincidence probably that you have authored a book under the O’Reilly name?
Jeff Robbins: Yeah, our book is called Using Drupal. It’s the first O’Reilly book about Drupal and they came out just about a month ago, something like that. It’s been selling very well. It looks like we are going to do some more stuff with O’Reilly. I am not quite sure what yet but we were having a good time together.
Lisa Padilla: Okay, and this book is really wonderful just from a person who is interested in learning new web 2.0 class systems but having a limited amount of time and meeting to get the biggest thing out of that for my time. You really turned around my thinking on Drupal and something that looked daunting to me and I had heard colleagues that cursing not having in-house Drupal specialist and then hearing sporadically that somebody would pick up a book and figure it out and sort of inspire me to drill down to that book, and now I am total convert.
Jeff Robbins: Oh that’s great, yeah, I mean that’s kind of why we started Lullabot. So, my band got robbed in 2001 and I started building web sites with my wife who is also an O’Reilly author, Jennifer Robbins. She has written Web Design in a Nutshell and Learning Web Design. And so, we did Ringo site and kept building other sites. And eventually, I was kind of looking for something to kind of integrate the needs of all these people that I was building sites for and I ended up finding Drupal in building a big web project using Drupal. And it was really frustrating, there is a lot of promise in Drupal, there is a lot of hoops and dreams and it’s really cool, there is all these modules, there is like I don’t know probably I haven’t looked recently but last time I looked, there were about 3,000 different modules for Drupal that like various I don’t know pick a web feature and there is a module for it, there is eCommerce and buddy lists and rating systems, and whatever is out there, tutor integration and there is modules for it. But when you actually sit down to do it, it’s not always really clear how to do it, which modules to choose, what’s the best way to do it, or any of that kind of stuff. And I basically got about half or three quarters of the way through the project that I was doing, I mean this is years ago. And I had no idea how it’s going to finish the project and [Full article]
Daphne Kwon, ExpoTV (Podcast and Interview Transcript)
Recorded from an earlier interview.
Please read my blog post as well.
You are listening to Lisacast on BlogTalkRadio.
Lisa Padilla: Hey good evening, it’s Lisa Padilla. I am Lisacast and I am back on BlogTalkRadio after a couple of weeks without doing a show truly; this is good news. With me today is Daphne Kwon who is the CEO and the co-founder of ExpoTV, and in a minute I will introduce her and we can get to a discussion with her. She is at the Dow Jones VentureWire Consumer Technology Conference today and I am sure she is going to tell us a little bit about that too; maybe she is doing some interesting things there. I have myself been to that conference and found it fascinating, interesting mix of technology companies and leading companies and large entertainment companies and all in all a pretty high caliber group of attendees and speakers and press and whatnot. Daphne has some experience in TV herself.
(Informal Talk)
Lisa Padilla: While I am doing that, I will tell you a little bit about her background. She was Chief Financial Officer of Oxygen Media which is very interesting in that she has done a lot of work with mergers and acquisitions and I think that combination of business experience as well as television industry experience is very interesting. Okay now I have got her back here. Daphne, are you with me?
Daphne Kwon: Yeah I can hear you.
Lisa Padilla: Great. Well thank you and welcome to BlogTalkRadio, we are excited to get to talk to you once more.
Daphne Kwon: Yeah it’s great to be here and currently I am so important that you pulled yourself out of a few weeks hiding just to come talk to me. So thanks for doing that.
Lisa Padilla: I did. You got me excited again about talking to people. We have been working so hard on our own site here, we launched a new homepage today also BlogTalkRadio has a couple of exciting announcements coming next week, and so I am ready to get talking again. You know let’s build and then talk about it. So tell me, your background Daphne nicely supports the work I am talking about that you have done with Oxygen Media and Disney and as you might want to tell I guess a little bit about ExpoTV. But then I would like to jump into sort of what you found most useful about your experience before this as applies to running ExpoTV which is a great site, I love your site.
Daphne Kwon: Thank you so much, thanks for saying that and congratulations on your own product development, I think that’s fantastic you are one of the entrepreneurs. I think that, and I appreciate your question actually about my background because it’s something that Expo is actually very proud of, are the type of people that we attracted to our company. Generally you know thumbnail of what we do is it’s a YouTube crossed with consumer reports. So basically we are very purpose driven on product information and what we say is we are dedicated to illuminating consumer experiences. So we have about 200,000 product video upload reviews that have been uploaded to us. So there are these 1 to 3 minute clips of people everyday Joes who are uploading video testimonials about products that they own and it can be positive or negative. And they are very authentic, very sincere because you have to show your face you know you create a profile page, you have to show the product, you have to demonstrate it. And these are products that these people spend money on so they have a very different prospective than an expert like a Di Fino and all of those perspectives they are really valid however we think someone who spent the money on it also has a really valid perspective.
Lisa Padilla: Right. Taking the time, has been inside the instruction booklet, went through the whole process of setting it up or testing it or what have you, right?
Daphne Kwon: And also saw how it sat on their kitchen counter you know that it was too big or that the keeper board was too little and their baby didn’t like that because the strap was in its way. And so there is lots of things that I think an expert misses because they are not using it on a day-to-day basis, they can only guess how someone might use it but they are not using it themselves and that’s a whole level that I think is only complementary to the experts that we go to for their advice as well. [Full articles]
Elad Yoran, KoolSpan (Podcast and Interview Transcript)
Recorded during an earlier interview.
I was lucky enough to interview KoolSpan at the RSA Conference. Elad Yoran, Executive Chairman, joins Lisacast to discuss TrustChip technology and recent financing of $7.1 million (What? I thought there was a recession!.) KoolSpan’s crypto engine is a self-contained authentication, encryption and key management platform. That’s right, I said ‘crypto engine’. Tune in to learn more.
BlogTalkRadio
Lisa Padilla: Hi, and welcome to the show today. This afternoon, we are broadcasting, we have this BlogTalkRadio at the RSA Conference in San Francisco where Elad Yoran who is from KoolSpan is going to talk to us a little bit about their technology and the crypto engine and a recent about financing that the company received that was announced this week I believe. And Elad, are you with me?
Elad Yoran: I am with you Lisa and delighted to be here.
Lisa Padilla: Thank you. I am sorry to cut you off as our show started. But we were talking a little bit just a few minutes ago about the significance of receiving some funding in this day and age when the economy is purposively a bit shaky or we are supposed to be concerned. I think we still see a lot of activity around technologies that really shows some values. So, maybe you can talk a little bit, Mr. Yoran, about your background and your post as a chairman of KoolSpan and about your recent funding.
(Informal talk)
Elad Yoran: First, there was an article on the front page of the business section in today’s new York Times that talks about Silicon Valley funding being impacted by the economy. And so, I think that getting funding today well may be a little bit impacted by the economies for companies with strong prospect. Funding is still available. And for us, in a personal sense, getting the funding was critically important and that it enabled the company to go forward and do the things that it needed to do in order to meet the demand for its product for the TrustChip. So, we raised $7.1 million. It’s a significant amount of money and the lion’s share of the funding will go towards things like demand fulfillment as well as of course to continued research and development.
Lisa Padilla: And so, if you get one step back anyway in this sort of way the groundwork for products, when it started and how it started.
Elad Yoran: Well, KoolSpan was founded five years ago by a gentleman by the name of Tony Fascenda. He is actually the company’s CEO and media visionary in the world of wireless and mobility. He has been an entrepreneur for the last 35 years and has developed paging systems and two-way paging systems and handheld forms long before our it became really a consumer market or a market in which every person really had a wireless handheld device like a cell phone. So he has been doing this for years. And sometimes I joke around with Tony and tell him that it took somebody with his background and his perspective on mobility and wireless to come up with a solution as innovative for the security industry. So it is really an out-of-the-box and creative thinker here.
Lisa Padilla: And give us one example of how like TrustChip would be implemented, what’s your case study about that.
Elad Yoran: So, if we think about what cell phones are today, they have evolved a long way. Cell phones aren’t just for making telephone calls, I mean they are really little computers. And we use them for today a wide variety of applications, obviously still to make telephone calls but also for e-mail and for all of the PDA functionality. And now, we see all kinds of other applications rolling out into the cell phones. Now, the thing to keep in mind is that cell phones were designed to be mobile, they were designed to easy to use, they were designed to be a lot of things, just not secure. And now that, we are using cell phones to do so many things, of course one of the most important of which is still making a telephone call that security has to be elevated and brought into the equation. So it’s not just about mobility and ease of use, all those things are still critical, but another critical dimension or characteristic that we have to add to that list is security. And so, you have to question what’s an application, I will give you a very simple one that we all do every day and that’s making a telephone call. When we make telephone calls on landline phones, we have very strong sense that the conversations we have are secure and we know who we are talking to on the other end and we know to a great extent that the conversations are not being eavesdropped. [Full article]
