Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: PC FORUM 2006 (Page 3 of 5)

PC Forum: Behavioral Targeting Goes to the Next Level

Behavorial targeting 1.0 got a bad name, and for good reason. Collecting consumer information without permission was a sure-fire way to get flamed and trashed. It’s not that the hearts of these vendors weren’t in the right place — after all, we’d all prefer more targeted, relevant ads. But, lo and behold, as online advertising has taken off on such a rocket growth trajectory over recent years, a lot has been evolving behind the scenes in this space — including even by some of the original transgressors. I’ve been impressed by what Esther Dyson and her organization bring to helping us understand this 031306behavtarg changing world of advertising. Four of their hand.pngcked participants for this morning’s “Behavioral Targeting 2.0” panel gave us a great overview and quick education on the topic. Don McLagan of Compete told us his company has been doing permission-based behavioral targeting for more than 4 years, and now has 50 terabytes of data under its care. He says his firm is “the eyes and ears of what consumers are doing and saying online.” How permission-based is his service? He says it’s actually not a dual, but a tri opt-in system. Arvind Rajan of Grassroots said his firm began life as an ASP for political organizations but now has corporate clients, due to its understanding of the individual activist. Release 1.0 said in its current issue that it “is perhaps the most effective, most one-to-one marketer” here. Dean Thompson of mSpoke offers a service for online publishers based on what it calls its “adaptive personalization engine,” which lets users manage their own content and ad preferences. These preferences are represented in something the user can see and edit, which it calls “memes.” Dave Morgan of Tacoda also is pushing the notion of showing consumers their own information, and letting them change it. They don’t have a direct relationship with the consumer, but implement their service through publishers. Morgan was quick to remind is that “advertising pays for 99% of what’s on the web.” The newspaper industry, in which he once worked, “is dying because it thought it could sell online subscriptions.” But there’s a lot of room for more growth in online advertising, since he said “40 percent of online search results pages still have no ads on them.” And yet 90 percent of online ad revenues go to just those search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

After the session, at lunch, I ran into the CEO of another “behavioral 2.0” company — Bill Day of When U (formerly head of About.com) — and I asked him for his reaction to the panel. Esther Dyson had even mentioned near the end of the panel that Bill could have been up on stage himself. He said the 2.0 version of behavorial targeting is definitely characterized as being more consumer centric. He said there are three things central to this new generation of the technology: the privacy model (from a technical standpoint), disclosure, and user value — meaning what consumers get in return. In the 1.0 version, he said the latter “was basically nothing.” Regarding his firm’s privacy model, he said they save no data — it’s all on the consumer’s local machine — and they disclose everything. The user value WhenU provides is all about relevancy. His customers include car companies, ABC-TV, LowerMyBills.com, Travelocity, Orbitz, and the firm has a partnership with Overture (Yahoo). “Eighty-five percent of the web is ripe for a new kind of advertising,” he said. “There are large opportunities.” His firm’s model is direct to the consumer, and there aren’t many in this space, he noted. “And ours is the most realtime solution, too” which is critical, he says, because the life of behavioral data is very short — maybe 24 hours. “So advertisers need us to provide the ability to suggest ‘at the moment’.”

Tag:
Tag:

Preview of PC Forum Presenting Companies

The two-minute pitches from the startups that will present this afternoon were great. Lots of enthusiasm and great business concepts. Hard to pick a favorite, but I like the sound of Illumio a lot — a project of Tacit Software, just coming out of stealth here today. “It lets users search each other, search your networks, for what these people know, what they have, and who they know,” said David Gilmour, CEO. He also told me yesterday afternoon that the public beta kicks off with us here. The product will be free initially. He said Illumio is “a Web 2.0 way” to extend his company’s proven collaboration software for large organizations. The CEOs of the five Gallery company (exhibitors) also made me want to get over and spend time with them as well, esp imeem and Bity Browser. Already saw Riya at Demo, and they’ll be a hit here, too, I’m sure.

Tag:
Tag:

PC Forum: How Can Consumers Control Their Own Data?

The first two sessions here on Monday morning, says Esther Dyson, are “question panels,” not answers panels. Read: big, big topics. In the first panel, three startups — Opinity, Root Markets, and Trusted ID — talked about how they can help users actually control their own data, taking that power from the 031306before1stpanel institutions that now have it. But a big takeaway is that all this won’t happen soon. Scott Mitic of TrustedID says he’s personally heard people at these big institutions say that “will happen over my dead body.” But, he says, “the system is broken…when three credit bureaus are selling your info for fraudulent proposes, even though they don’t mean to…and when it’s costing consumers tens of billions of dollars a year… someone must stand up for the consumer.” Opinity will have you pay (indirectly) for a profile it manages, while Root Markets will actually pay you for your data.

Tag:
Tag:

PC Forum: Handling Too Much Choice

The first speaker was Barry Schwartz, psychology professor from Swarthmore College, and author or “The Paradox of Choice,” a book we all got in our conference bag. (One guy who asked a question later said he’s already read it.) Basically, I’ll give you what I got out of his talk and the psycho-babble — I mean discussion — that followed. The Internet gives us too many choices. Check. How can Internet businesses help us? Help narrow our choices. Check. That’s what all the community services, for shopping, tagging, sharing, etc, actually do: as Esther says, filter or constrain our choices, without us having to be be involved in every silly little choice. Check. Therefore community is good, vertical search is good. Check.

Rock on Web 2.0.

(I took a bunch of photos, and I’d share a one or two here, but I can’t decide. No, actually, the Bluetooth in my RAZR phone won’t power on. Hmm, did I make the wrong phone choice?)

Tag:
Tag:

« Older posts Newer posts »