www.ehow.com

By Greg Boudewijn, eHow General Manager 

eHow is a rich content website where professional experts and people with expertise can come together and share their knowledge to create and contribute to a growing library of “how-to” information.  Every month, more than 7 million people visit eHow to learn how to do just about everything.  eHow has more than 50,000 articles and is growing by the thousands each month thanks to its easy-to-use publishing tools, which enable professional experts and members to express their knowledge through text, images and video.  Video is becoming an increasingly important medium for how-to information and eHow continues to focus on building its user tools and video library.

The eHow website is more than just a reference library where users can find comprehensive and useful how-to information.  eHow fosters a conversation between readers and experts through a robust set of social network tools that launched in April 2007.  Readers can share their thoughts and expertise through ratings, comments, person-to-person messaging and community forums.  They can also build a network of friends around their interests.  Putting a face behind each piece of content lets eHow add depth to the readership experience.  Finding useful how-to information is important, but connecting readers to experts and creating a dialogue is invaluable.

Beginning in June 2007, eHow breaks precedent with the rollout of its Writer Compensation Program.  For the first time in eHow’s history, people who contribute to eHow, both professionals and non-professionals, will be compensated for their written articles.  Membership in the eHow community is free, after which users can instantly enhance their profiles and begin contributing content.  Members joining the Writer Compensation Program will start earning money from their enrollment date on any new articles as well as their existing articles.  Compensation is based on a per-article basis and an article’s earning potential can be based on a combination of several elements, including the amount of times it has been viewed and its category.  The more useful the articles are to the reader, the more money members can make.  eHow’s Writer Compensation Program will eventually include video, but for the time being eHow is concentrating its new feature on written how-to articles.

eHow was originally founded in March 1999 with close to $30 million in funding.  At that time, the company employed 200 professional writers and had a team of 25 engineers.  By 2001, eHow’s library contained thousands of accurate and helpful articles.  The combination of professional writing and major advertising across radio and television briefly made eHow one of the Internet's top ten news and information sites.

Despite the increased brand awareness and popularity of the site, eHow was not profitable and was forced to declare bankruptcy.  In 2001, IdeaExchange.com bought eHow out of bankruptcy with the hope of charging eHow’s readers to access its how-to articles.  Unfortunately, eHow remained unprofitable and was sold in 2004 to Jack Herrick and Josh Hannah.  Approximately five years after the company was launched as a 200-person operation, Herrick and Hannah and one other person maintained the eHow library of thousands of articles themselves.

Between March 2004 and April 2006 eHow traffic increased from 250,000 to over 4 million visitors per month, which attracted the attention of the founders of the yet-to-be-formed Demand Media, Inc.  Demand Media was subsequently founded through the acquisition of eHow and a handful of other companies.  eHow is one of Demand Media’s top media web sites and leverages the company’s core proprietary platform, which fuels user-driven publishing and community development while dynamically optimizing properties to maximize advertising revenue.  eHow’s vision and focus is directly aligned with its parent company’s core strategy of empowering the user, creating distribution channels and compensating them for content.

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www.siderean.com
By Bradley Allen, Founder and CTO

The information value chain is changing rapidly.  In today’s network-centric enterprise much of the critical information is unstructured, often resides outside the enterprise and is not readily managed or controlled in the traditional IT sense.  Additionally, dynamic online information is exploding. Users want to contribute and have a choice in filtering and managing it. Information aggregators are gaining mind and traffic share with subscription and advertising dollars following those eyeballs.

Users continue to struggle with discovery of and repeatable access to the information they need to make informed decisions. Furthermore, enterprise, web and user-generated data and content are converging, and this is making discovery and access even harder. Search alone is inefficient, insufficient, and usually unacceptable to meet the more demanding requirements of the enterprise. Ultimately people want to see the full scope of information available, find what they want, discover what they didn’t know but should have and choose their own ways to filter and share information.

Siderean’s flagship product, Seamark Navigator, allows enterprises to give their users a unified view of what is available, allowing them to zero in on relevant content, find and follow relationships and share discoveries with others. This is a huge leap forward in making information actionable, benefiting enterprises by reducing costs, enhancing revenue and managing information assets more effectively.

Traditional search simply doesn’t show users the scope of available information. Guided navigation provides users with some scope, but only along fixed views predetermined by marketing or IT.  Relational navigation, pioneered by Siderean, allows users to see, explore and contribute to the full scope of available information. No other vendor in the information access market can deliver this capability today.

Siderean currently has 24 customers in total, with the focus being the media and publishing, high technology and federal markets. The company’s lighthouse accounts in these markets are Elsevier, Oracle and the National Security Agency, respectively.

According to IDC, enterprise information access software is today a $1.2 billion market with 21 percent CAGR, growing to $2.5 billion by 2010. Navigation accounts for about 10 percent of this market today. As search becomes increasingly commoditized, the navigation segment will grow to dominate the category over the next five years. Siderean is in the enviable position to lead that market with the definitive solution for navigation.

Relational navigation has revolutionized traditional search by allowing organizations to intelligently locate the information they need to make good business decisions. Siderean’s solutions aggregate data from structured and unstructured sources and organize it, allowing users to navigate content from a “bird’s eye” perspective – a big picture view of all the information available – to drill down to the “bug’s eye” view – the specific dataset users are looking for. This gives knowledge workers a high-level perspective, suddenly letting them discover things they don’t know that they should know. Ultimately this ability to discover unexplored information adds significant value to the individual knowledge worker as well as the enterprise at large.

Siderean’s patented relational navigation technology provides meaningful labels that reflect the concepts relevant to a domain. These labels are represented as “metadata” and are either created manually or assigned automatically to documents or other resources. Relational navigation systems have the characteristics of being coherent and complete. This provides an advantage over traditional search which typically produces long lists of results with very little context.

The heart of Seamark Navigator is a patent-protected relational navigation engine based on W3C standards for the semantic web. Delivering immediate time-to-value, it scales to tens of billions of relations and has out-of-the-box integration with multiple search engines, content repositories, databases, Web services and feeds. It is the first enterprise-class application to deliver the benefits of Semantic Web technology. 

Our management team, led by myself and Michael Schmitt, president and CEO, is distinguished by its long experience in growing enterprise software companies and delivering bleeding-edge software products and solutions to large enterprises. Backed by leading venture capital firms Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures, Allen founded Siderean in 2001.

Company In Brief

Company: Siderean Software, Inc.

Market category: Information Access

Headquarters: El Segundo, CA

Direct employees: 22

Contract employees: 12

Year founded: 2001

Management Team

Michael Schmitt, President and CEO, former CMO, Ariba

Bradley Allen, Founder and CTO, former CTO, TriVida (acquired by Be Free)

Jack Berkowitz, VP Engineering, former VP Engineering, Cerebra (acquired by webMethods)

Brian Anderson, VP Marketing, former VP Marketing, Avamar (acquired by EMC)

Ivan Ivankovich, CFO, former CFO, YellowPages.com

Michael DiLascio, Director Sales, former VP Sales, Tucana

Robert MacGregor, Chief Scientist, former Senior Project Leader, USC ISI

Posted: 4/4/07

www.thinkpassenger.com

By Justin Cooper, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing

Most forward thinking marketers would agree that the advertising and marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years with the dawn of web 2.0 and the powerful influences of social media.  As more and more consumers embrace social media as a way to communicate with each other, marketers are clamoring to tap into this relatively new medium and its vast influence.  Perhaps the greatest marriage of social media and marketing can be found in the engagement of targeted consumers with an established brand in a collaborative process of “co-creating.”

Passenger (www.thinkpassenger.com) has built upon the idea of co-creating by redefining collaboration to bridge the communication gap between businesses and their most valued customers.  This rich, interactive experience is about meaningful relationships that turn dialogue and on-demand access to opinions into actionable insight.  The ability to capture and gain a clear understanding of the human context in which these collaborative activities take place will drive business innovation and growth while empowering your customers.  Passenger’s mission is to make these collaborative relationships possible through an incredibly user-friendly platform.

What is Passenger?

Passenger essentially bridges the gap between technology and everyday brand management by enabling the simple deployment of private brand communities which create collaborative relationships between brands and their most passionate consumers.  The conversations within these communities provide companies with timely, actionable insight, while empowering consumers through ownership of ideas and driving positive word of mouth.  Passenger’s on-demand technology platform (Passenger®) is designed for those companies and organizations that view their customers not merely as a target, but as an integral part of their business process.

Passenger allows brands to take part in the discussions their customers are already having, and not only provides brands with the who, what, where and when of marketing, but also the most important aspect, which is the WHY!  The Why is something marketers have not been able to answer in the past, but now they can with Passenger.

Passenger is delivered “Software-as-a-Service,” which means customers benefit from continuous feature enhancements as well as the flexibility to segment and seamlessly launch additional communities as business needs change.

What are the Benefits of Customer Collaboration?

One inherent benefit of customer collaboration is a brand’s ability to drive advocacy. “Advocates” are those individuals who are fully committed to a brand beyond the typical relationship of brand and customer.  They express the greatest level of involvement with the brand by being active, vocal and proud.  These people have an emotional bond with the brands that they regularly use.

Their lifestyle mirrors that of the brand and they are proactive in talking about their brand experience with others. By engaging its Advocates, a brand will gain further insight into exactly who these customers are, what motivates them, why they make the decisions that they do, who they might influence and why and how they do it. Marketers that are true to the collaborative approach will consistently demonstrate relevancy to each customer as an individual and will ultimately endure the test of time.

Those who choose to embrace customer collaboration will benefit greatly from customers who feel empowered through ownership of ideas.  It gives customers the feeling of ownership which promotes active participation and a desire to accumulate more knowledge about the brand or product.  Those customers who feel more informed have the ability to drive more favorable opinions with their peers; therefore delivering the most trusted and effective marketing practice: “Word of Mouth.”

How is Passenger Different from Traditional Customer Relationship Management?

Until recently, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was the default solution to manage customer decisions.  But in reality, the systems only help manage the marketer’s needs, not the customer’s.  The fragmentation of traditional media has made it increasingly more difficult to locate your customer, let alone catch them at a time when they’re receptive to listening.  Randomly manufactured “opinion leader” teams are not only costly, they also jeopardize the authenticity of the messaging.  Marketers who continue to rent someone else’s customers to talk about their brand are simply ignoring their own customers who continue to remain un-tapped.

Unlike traditional CRM, Passenger identifies and collaborates with key customer segments and leverage socially-networked, existing customers to acquire new customers.  Passenger drives customer advocacy through ownership of ideas and provides the ability to analyze vital customer and competitive insight.  Through this insight we can identify emerging market trends and discover/refine new opportunities in the areas of new product innovation, service ideas and creative concepts.

Ultimately, Passenger can acquire a longitudinal view of customer attitudes and preferences and can analyze how these change over time, something traditional CRM can only scrape the surface of.

Who Is Using Passenger?

Leading brands such as Coca-Cola, ABC Television and Sara Lee are leveraging Passenger to easily deploy private brand communities.

Who is Passenger?

Passenger is a privately held start-up based in Los Angeles, and was founded in 2005 by Andrew Leary, chief executive officer, and myself.  The roots of Passenger stem back to early 2002, when Andrew and I met while developing consumer advocacy programs for one of the world’s largest mobile phone companies.  Over the next few years, we continued to observe the changing marketplace; specifically the proactive role that consumers were taking in both marketing and product innovation.  Identifying a real shift in the consumer dynamic, we brought our collective expertise in customer-driven marketing and pioneering spirit to form Passenger; determined to bridge the gap between brands and their most valued assets—their customers.

Passenger is the leader in on-demand customer collaboration.  Passenger® assists companies with identifying and managing an ongoing dialogue with their most valued customers.  Fortune 500 companies are leveraging Passenger to engage customers in a collaborative environment that empowers the customer, while driving business innovation and growth.

The company is backed by Shelter Capital Partners.  Passenger’s advisory board members include Shawn Gold, SVP, marketing & content of MySpace.com; Daniel Walker, former chief talent officer of Apple; Nelson Gayton, Wharton School adjunct professor; Art Bilger, managing partner of Shelter Capital Partners and Dr. Bahram Nour-Omid, partner of Shelter Capital Partners.

www.thinkpassenger.com

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www.circleup.com

By John Payne, Co-Founder and CEO 

In the past fifteen years email has gone from a techie tool used by engineers, academics and scientists to the defacto method of communication for hundreds of millions of people in all walks of life. Instant messaging has been hot on its heels in the younger demographic and is now reaching critical mass even in the enterprise. With daily emails worldwide totaling somewhere between 50 and 62 billion messages, an almost unmanageable torrent of information flows every single day. While one of the most common and potentially powerful uses of Internet communications is among groups, where it is the most widely used knowledge management tool in existence, email has proven itself to be relatively inefficient when it comes to group communication and information gathering.

What we’ve done at CircleUp (www.circleup.com) is create a social communication service that turbo-charges the email and instant messaging services already in use around the world today. As users ask questions and gather information from groups of any size, they get back a single, organized result that can be used and shared by ALL of the members of the circle instead of an overwhelming flood of emails and IMs. CircleUp is a communications service for real world groups that is built to make people’s lives easier and reduce information overload.

What is CircleUp?

Today, when you ask a specific question of online and “real world” communities you get back a blizzard of emails that often include random answers, distractions and extraneous details that complicate and delay the information gathering, collaboration and decision-making process. The problem today really has three parts:

1. You ask for information, opinions, decisions, facts or guidance from 30 people in a group you belong to, and you get back 35 emails or instant messages to sort through, including tons of “reply to alls” that really gum up the works.

2. You not only have to find and open all 35 emails or instant messages, but you have to painstakingly cut and paste the information you need to get the group information all in one place.

3. And once you have it in one place, it’s buried on your hard drive somewhere it can’t be used or shared by anyone but you!

CircleUp solves that problem with a unique new social communications service that gathers the answers and presents you and the group with a single, organized result that can be used and shared by everyone.

CircleUp is a free service for consumers, professionals and small businesses. There is no charge to ask or answer questions, and no registration, download, or membership required for those who are circled-up. The service uses your messaging credentials as a proxy for membership in a group you already belong to.

Who Uses CircleUp?

• Campus Clubs Use It: Send a CircleUp to 100 people in the campus ski club asking for drivers for the spring trip to Lake Tahoe. Get back a breakdown of who can drive, who needs a ride, and how many snowboards fit on top of each car instead of sorting through a flurry of 80 IM and email responses.
• Volunteer Fundraisers Use It: Send a CircleUp to the 65 members of the committee for the fundraiser asking, “Who can volunteer for the night of the event?” Get back a master list of who will do what, and when, instead of 50 emails and IMs.
• Politicos Use It: CircleUp with 100 local campaign volunteers to see who can attend the big rally, who needs a ride, who can drive and who has a truck or van to haul the really big signs. Get back a single list of all attendees that can be shared by riders and drivers.
• Coaches Use It: Expedite a CircleUp to the families of 20 kids who made the traveling team for the big soccer tournament, asking how many tournament T-shirts they want. Get back an exact list of shirt sizes instead of 27 emails and IMs.

CircleUp Results 

How do I “CircleUp”?

CircleUp was created with the mainstream email and IM user in mind: techie or non-techie, the mom on the go, the soccer coach dad and the president of the university ski club

• Simply ask a question in the “What’s Your Question?” toolbar found integrated in messaging applications such as Microsoft Outlook or at www.circleup.com.

• Then choose a specific AnswerPattern, which determines how the results (answers) will be returned, putting an end to the back-and-forth that often goes along with getting incomplete or incorrect information – while organizing them in one single location. As they say, “If you ask a better question, you’ll get a better answer.”

If you are on the receiving end of a CircleUp question, you will get what looks like a normal email or IM from the questioner - a person you already know within your community. So, if you typically communicate with friends or colleagues through Yahoo! IM or through email, that mode of communication will not change. You will only realize that you’ve been circled up when a Flash-based QuestionBox widget with the sender’s picture appears on your desktop or in a browser to explain the question and collect your answer.

So Sally, who’s getting married, can circle up all the family and friends coming in to town for the wedding to see who needs a ride and what their flight and arrival information is. Then she can circle up her local friends and family to see who’s available to give rides from the airport. And perhaps most important, she can share the details of who needs a ride with the people available to give one by distributing a single tag.

In addition, Sally can select whether the discussion is public (to be shared with everyone), private (just for the circle that is responding to the question) or personal (only accessible to the question author).

Most widgets today are distribution endpoints, a way for someone to take something from his/her site and offer distribution everywhere. As you can see in Sally’s example above, we’re turning the traditional widget model on its head by using the widget as a collection endpoint. CircleUp widgets act as a tool to focus a user on a specific task and gather very specific information or decisions.

CircleUp Makes Group Communication Painless

When we first started CircleUp, our main concern was to make sure that our solution mapped to the problem consumers find most extremely painful –  efficient communication in groups. We’re social animals, and participating in a wide variety of communities is a normal way of life for all of us. Email and IM have become the standard for communications among those groups, whether in sports, school, volunteerism, politics, online gaming, or even business. Our goal is to take the basic, extremely powerful tools we all use today and dramatically expand their efficiency where it counts the most -with the circles of people we interact with every day.

I founded CircleUp along with Doug Tung in 2006 and we officially launched at DEMO ‘07 in February. The company is headquartered in Newport Beach, Calif. and is privately funded to date.

CircleUp: www.circleup.com

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www.answerbag.com

By Joel Downs, Founder and CEO

What is Answerbag?

Answerbag is a leading, independent social knowledge platform and destination web site.  On its web site, users can ask questions, share answers and collaboratively evaluate information, while building a permanent archive of knowledge and experience.  Other sites that share the Answerbag platform – bloggers, web publishers, etc. – leverage the company’s knowledge platform to provide live, social Q&A to their audiences.  Answerbag’s mission is to help people find and share knowledge.

As of February 2007, Answerbag has 100,000 registered members who have asked 125,000 questions and provided over 400,000 answers in 3,600 categories.  It serves Q&A to over 1 million unique visitors per month.

Answerbag Homepage:

What is Social Q&A, and how is Answerbag different?

As the Internet continues to expand into billions of pages, search tools such as Google and Yahoo are showing their limitations.  For a typical search, they may return hundreds of thousands of results, but they are not useful in helping people find opinions, in evaluating the information they find, and they do not let people ask questions about the information they find.  Social Q&A has evolved in order to fill this gap.  Using Social Q&A, individuals can ask questions of each other using plain English, they can share answers and as a group they can evaluate the answers and decide which are best.  Almost 90 percent of questions are answered within one hour.

Unlike other Social Q&A sites, Answerbag archives only unique questions with the best answers to each; it does not allow duplicate questions, so people looking for answers can find them easily without looking under multiple instances of the same question.  Answerbag also allows any questions to be answered at any time, and those answers may be rated at any time, so the best answers will be thoroughly vetted and will filter to the top.  Further, the Answerbag community works together to help identify duplicate questions, spam and other inappropriate content that is removed from the site.

In 2006, Answerbag was the first social Q&A site to add both Image Answers and Video Answers, allowing their members to express themselves in new ways and share knowledge in whatever medium is most appropriate.  Questions like “how do you do a wheelie?” or “how do you bathe a baby?” are very hard to answer using straight text, so Video Answers were added to meet that need.

Answerbag’s target market is anyone who is looking for information.  Like a traditional search application, just about anyone can benefit from the experience, opinions, and archived, vetted answers found on Answerbag.  Its members are 55 percent male, 45 percent female and 50 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34.  Currently, Answerbag’s social Q&A experience is only available to English-speakers.

On average, registered members ask at least one question.  Of those who answer questions, 50 percent answer more than one, and 25 percent answer 10 or more.  People are naturally inclined to share their knowledge, and using their Social Q&A Platform, Answerbag lets web sites facilitate this interaction and give their users additional service and a more engaging experience, thereby increasing loyalty and returns.

What is the Answerbag Platform?

In an effort to open up its database of questions and answers, Answerbag created the first and only Social Q&A Platform that allows other web sites to tap into its active, established community and deep archive of vetted answers.  Through its API, partner sites can read Q&A and allow their users to contribute Q&A directly to the Answerbag database.  Those questions are then seen by any site on the platform, and users of any of those sites may provide answers, providing a true open question-answering community across the entire platform.  When using the Answerbag API, partner sites are charged a nominal fee for making calls to the API, and they can then monetize the traffic however they wish.

For sites that don’t have the resources to take advantage of the API, Answerbag provides a white-label version of their site, as well as a widget that offers Answerbag Q&A in a module that can be skinned to match the partner’s site.  When using the white-label solution, Answerbag can share revenue with the partner, so they benefit from the Q&A activity of their members.

Answerbag Widget:

Answerbag’s Social Q&A Platform is ideal for publishers or e-commerce sites that would like to add community or customer support to their sites.  Using the API, the white-label solution, or the widgets, publishers can share Q&A in any category they choose.  Answerbag’s questions are separated into a taxonomy of 3,600 categories, with categories as broad as “Real Estate” or “Autos” to categories as narrow “Particle Physics” and “Mormon Dating”.  This deep categorization allows publishers to choose relevant Q&A for their users, no matter what vertical they focus on.

White-label implementation of Answerbag:

Answerbag was founded in July, 2003 by Joel Downs and purchased by Demand Media, Inc., in 2006.  The company is located at the Demand Media headquarters in Santa Monica, California. 

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