Bryan is a dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur who has bootstrapped WineAlign and been patient and persistent in convincing the rest of the world that WineAlign is a better way to buy wine. In recent months, WineAlign has seen strong growth, suggesting it has started to see hockey stick-like growth. I asked Bryan to provide an update.

Since WA launched, what are some of the biggest start-ups lessons that you have learned?

That’s an interesting question. People assume that start-ups are different than regular businesses, but at the end of the day they are like any other business. The lessons that I have learned over my career are still applicable to WineAlign. Primarily they remain providing a high level of value, service and responsiveness to customers. Staying focused on priorities and applying resource effectively. Creating effective metrics to measure your progress and staying on top of them. Closely managing cash and cash flow, I’ve had to say no more than few times to nice to haves.

With respect to a start-up in the Internet domain, I have learned the following:
- There is no silver bullet for growth. Things don’t go viral. You don’t have 10,000 users on day two. You have to keep plugging away.
- Understanding your customer conversion rates and customer acquisitions costs are critical. If you know it takes $X to acquire a customer you can use that number to make a lot of decisions.
- Google has an amazing suite of free products: Analytics, AdWords, AdManager and Webmaster tools. Use them to manage your business.
- You will always have lots of feedback, as you mature the feedback, while important, is less important than at the beginning of the process. Learn to say no more often as the product matures.
- There are two great government programs available: SR&ED and the relatively new Ontario Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit.

If you had to go back and change anything, what would top your list?

Two things: Software startups are generally run by developers (I am a reformed one myself), who want to incorporate more and more features. These tend to address Wants not Needs and deliver little additional value to 90% of users. Once the core functionality is there, start spending more on marketing. However, when spending on marketing we have found that print ads in traditional media are a waste of money. People have to remember you and then type you in later. When the time is right, a PR program makes more sense.

Can you talk about how WA has powered its marketing efforts? What role does social media play?

We’ve taken a multi-prong approach. Google AdWords has been a great source of customers. Bing is now gaining traction and providing sign ups. By knowing our conversion costs we’ve been able to pay for leads from partners. We use promo codes to entice and track new signups. We also reward members who invite new users.

We’ve done some pretty unique things with Twitter using their search tools and API. We’ve been able reach out to thousands of people in Ontario and let them know about WineAlign. Responses to this out reach have been 99% positive. We have integrated the Facebook LIKE into our site and we automatically forward wine reviews to user’s Twitter streams.

What has subscriber growth been? Has it met your expectations?

Growth has been steady and well below my expectations. Before launch, I was confident that we would have 10,000 users in the first month. With the viral nature of the Internet and the ability to invite friends to a cool new service with a single click, we’d have thousands of users in days. Despite glowing accolades from users it took us 21 months to reach 10,000 users (about 2% of our target market). Growth remains steady at around 7% per month so the number of new users we are adding per month is significant and growing. In fact, we’ve added over a 1,000 users in the last 30 days and have over 11,000.

What’s next for WA? Can you talk about any new features in the pipeline?

We have recently completed support for wines that are NOT carried by the LCBO. This will open up a new world to wine consumers. Only a small portion of the wines available in Ontario are distributed through the LCBO. Mobile is the future. While only 7% of our users have used our mobile website we will be committing more resources to it. Natives apps, barcodes & images are in our future. We want to expand nationally and hope to add another province (or two) in the near future. Expect to see more meet-ups and exclusive events for our community members.

Among the libraries to climb on the digital bandwagon is the Toronto Public Library, which launched a major overhaul of its Web site earlier this year. I had a chance to do a quick interview with Katherine Palmer Director, Planning, Policy and E-Service Delivery, about how the process was done and some of the different things the TPL needed to consider.

When was the last time the TPL updated its Web site?
The last major redesign was 2002, although we have built a children’s section and a Web section for teens. The thing we did do right was we did a lot of work with customers. We did a long usability phase, finding out what they liked about the old site, and what didn’t work. When we introduced the new Web catalog in 2008, we got some good feedback.

What kind of input did you get when putting together the new site?
We got a lot of feedback through beta phase about the new site. We launched in beta last December. We got a lot of good technical folks giving us good feedback about what was working and not working. We were able to make changes such as putting the help screen in the right places, changes to the “Your Account” feature, and search got better too because it’s so complex.

What about social media and the role that it is playing?
I think we were pretty early adopters in using what was available and what we could use with our technology. Now there is so much available to use, we can more easily integrate into the new platform and new technology because it works so seamlessly. It was a great fit to use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

How has social media been embraced by library users?
It’s still an emerging group but it expands our reach. With Twitter, we have had some good exchanges. Facebook is pretty popular, especially when we have some significant offerings in terms of programming, and on YouTube, we have been posting our whole videos of our programming.

Those are picking up speed, and it’s a great opportunity for us. It puts us in the main library Web site context, and we engage with customers directly to share information about programming, answers questions, and provide feedback.

We also have a blog that focused on the Web project. It was useful to track how we worked through the process. We had a high level of transparency. We would hear from people, and post what we heard about it.

Your customers feel they are “owners” of the library. How was that reflected in the creation of the new Web site?
In terms of engagement from a technical level, they were involved. They do have a strong ownership so the very tech savvy wanted us to be innovative, while traditional users wanted to get to the things they needed. The other thing we wanted to make sure to happen is [the new Web site] is a great opportunity to put all of our offerings front and centre. We can put more information available on different screens – programming, recommended Web sites and book recommendations. That is one of the things we are challenged by is growing awareness of our services and getting folks to use the widest range possible.

1. What’s your take on the financing landscape for Canadian start-ups?
There is a lack of good investment options in Canada. Any entrepreneur that’s tried to raise financing here knows that. But the solution to this problem isn’t so clear — it’s a complex problem that will require the slow organic development of a startup business ecosystem.

It doesn’t really matter for us entrepreneurs: all we should be focusing on is building long-term sustainable business models that scale. That’s our job.

2. How do you account for Well.ca’s strong growth?
Well.ca’s growth is entirely based on word-of-mouth marketing — we don’t spend a penny on traditional marketing. The strategy is simple: over deliver on value to the customer, treat them like family, and they will tell their friends.

Our approach to business is important part of what’s brought us here. We’ve always focused on building a culture of doing more with less, we’ve always made sure that we measure everything that we do, and we’ve always poured our hearts into showing our customers we care.

3. Have you made any strategic adjustments or changes that have really paid off recently?
One of the smartest things we’ve done recently is to publish statistics on every line of operational profit and expense to the entire company on a weekly basis. Every single person in our company knows where every dollar goes in our operations, marketing, and staff costs in order to fulfill orders.

At first, this move was a scary one. We worried what would happen if we were so transparent about our numbers. In the end, it was one of the smartest moves we made: financial transparency builds trust and accountability within our company. Everyone knows what they can do to help the bottom line. It makes absolute sense now.

4. In terms of growth, where do you see Well going? Do you have a focus on particular verticals?
One of the unique parts of our business is that there is nothing in our DNA that binds us to selling only health products — our style of being super-nice to customers, our unique software and our distribution model can work in many verticals. In that sense we have a lot of options.

Still, for the time being, we have a lot of health and beauty related verticals that we’re pursuing this very second. Stay tuned for more brands in more categories.

5. Any advice to entrepreneurs looking to grow an online business?
The thing we’ve learned the most is that integrity is the most important thing in building a business. When building an online store, it’s really easy to forget that each site-visitor is a real person. Large online businesses need to look towards small, friendly local businesses on how to establish relationships based on smiles, honesty, and kind words.

At PodCamp in Toronto last month, I had a chance to talk to co-founder Chris Golda, who mentioned that the company had introduced some new tools and raised another round of seed capital. So, I fired off a few questions to get an update.

1. Talk about how BackType is evolving and how BackTweets and BackType connect fit into the strategic vision?

Everything we do aligns in some way with the long-term vision Michael Montano and I have for BackType. The tools we build for comment authors and publishers promote more conversation online. We believe that the thoughts and insights people share through comments are incredibly valuable. An individual comment may seem to hold little worth, but when you look at millions in aggregate there’s the potential to unlock a lot of value. That’s what BackType is all about.

Lately we’ve been focused on extending our support beyond blogs to other platforms and services. For example, we recently added FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit and others. BackType Connect has always been an interest of ours, but it became really compelling after adding FriendFeed and Twitter. Connecting conversations is something a lot of publishers are interested in, and we were in a great position to do it. We built BackTweets to solve a specific problem we were having while using Twitter — we wanted an easy way to track who was tweeting comments from BackType. It’s also very complementary to BackType Connect. After seeing the tweets about a particular article or post, it’s natural to want to see conversations happening elsewhere, on blogs and other social media.

2. How much are you gleaning from how people are using BackType? How is that impacting product development?

We read everything people say about BackType — feedback and support e-mails, as well as tweets and, of course, comments. It’s very time consuming, but it’s definitely one of the most important things we do. BackType Subscriptions was something we built purely based on feedback. Understanding how people use BackType has played a big role in what we’ve been releasing and our plans for the future.

3. Can you talk about the funding you’ve received?

We raised a $300,000 seed round of financing from True Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley with $155 under management. They’re known for their investments in Meebo, Sphere, Automattic (creators of WordPress), and many others, but what really drew us to them is that they really understand the needs of early-stage start-ups and fully support our vision and direction for the company.

4. What kind of business model are you working on? Are investors looking for revenue sources before they commit?

BackType is primarily used as a toolset for comment authors, but it’s also used by companies for customer support, public relations, etc. It follows that our business model will revolve around the latter. Online conversations are an extremely valuable subset of information online that we’re organizing better than anyone else. We think there are plenty of ways to make money helping publishers and marketing professionals be more effective at what they do. We also want to help consumers understand what people are saying about the companies, products, services, and other things they’re interested in. That’s helpful in many ways, especially for those making purchase decisions.

While start-ups with early revenues are becoming increasingly attractive these days, I don’t think revenue is crucial this early. I’m sure there are other things professional investors look at more seriously — more important questions that they want answered. At seed stage, the main reason someone invests in you won’t be the fact that you’re making a relatively insignificant amount of revenue early on.

Technorati Tags: chris golda, backtype

As the new CEO of BMV Holdings, he’s planning on introducing a $40/month flat-rate, no-frills, unlimited talk, unlimited text service next year. And he sees no reason why BMV won’t be wildly successful despite the fact the three major incumbents, Rogers, Bell and Telus, will make his and BMV’s life as miserable as possible.

With Krstajic’s appointment as BMV’s CEO unveiled earlier today, I managed to get him to answer a few questions about BMV and the wireless market.

Who are the people behind BMV?

The original five are Columbia Capital (Washington) M-C Venture in Boston, Charles Road Ventures, Roh Partners from New York, and Ignition. A the new [wireless] entrants called me but when I spent time with these guys, I learned that Columbia and M-C have made startup investment in Nextel, Metro PCS, Leap and Mobile PCS. They have more been there done that in the no-frills market than anyone. Ignition’s Steve Hooper is the ex-president with McCaw Cellular and AT&T Wireless.

So, what’s story of BMV. How did it only spend $53-million wireless spectrum?

The story is here is not Alek is so smart but Alek joined a bunch of really smart guys who did something that is brilliant. How is it possible to pay so little for something so good. G Band is part of the PCS band, not the AWS band. The mistake everyone made was Industry Canada threw it into the AWS auction. Some of the wireless players made calls to big handset manufacturers about whether the G band was useful. They said “no, this is stump spectrum for backhaul or microwaves”. Harry Hopper with Columbia did some research and realized all of the base stations see the AWS spectrum. The next thing they did was see who owned G band in the u.s. The entire G band in the U.S. is owned by Sprint, which traded 800 megahertz spectrum with the U.S. for G Band spectrum. Sprint wouldn’t give up 800 megahertz spectrum if it didn’t think the G Band was useful.

It looks like you’ll be operating a CDMA network before upgrading to LTE. Doesn’t that limit handset choice and make BMV less attractive?

I will buy three of 10 handsets [available] but my plan is not go up market. I don’t care about cameras or Web browsers. I’m more into the low end: $40 unlimited calling, unlimited text. We are trying to be the antithesis of what the inumbents are. The incumbents have unlimited but, which I call the Unlimited But plan. We have no system fees; the price is the price. From all my years with Rogers@home and Bell, I am an expert in customer irritants, and this my chance to build a brand from a concept that people buy from people they like and trust. We will have a brand that is friendly and easy to do business with.”

Is there room for more wireless players in Canada given how Bell, Telus and Rogers dominant the market?

We will not be the big dog but the dog you will not mess with because our cost structure is so low. The worse thing the incumbents can do is preempt our pricing by matching it. I’ll tell them no matter how low you go, you will lose more money and I will only be making less.

Technorati Tags: alek krstajic, bmv, wireless

If we could figure out a way to repatriate him, Canada’s startup and venture capital communities would be a lot better off and a lot more interesting.

Last week, Lindzon unveiled his latest investment, Toronto-based ECHOage, which runs an online children’s invitation service. The premise is pretty simple: rather than having a guest bring a birthday gift, they contribute money online, which is divided between “one meaningful” gift and a charity. It’s the digital offshoot of a birthday idea in which a child brings two loonies to a party – one for a gift and one for charity.

With a lot of the go, I managed to get Howard on the phone last week to ask a few questions.

How did your investment in ECHOage come about?

HL: I was shown by idea, and introduced to [ECHOage co-founder] Alison Smith. I wanted to see if they could prove it out a little bit, it was pre-party. They came back a couple months later with some money raised, and 300 to 400 parties they had thrown – all viral through the Web site. That is when I decided they were on to something – a micro-giving idea for birthday parties.

It resonated with me because I’ve been looking at female-owned and operated businesses on the Web. Women surf the Web so differently than men do. It is the same Web but females and males have completely different surfing behavior. I have been looking to back some female entrepreneurs so this idea seemed simple enough to expand, and it already had some success. I tend not to worry about ideas that can be duplicated as long as they are executing on their plan, and building their brand. It was a real simple business, and we have some ideas to be launched on micro-giving and social network.

The startup investment is volatile these days, isn’t it?

HL: The Sequoia letter, the stock smarket are real events. You can ignore it or try to understand what the new landscape will be like. One advantage is low valuations but at the same time you have to balance low valuations with making sure your CEO has enough skin in the game and motivated in tough times. I think people are acting panicked. I am now saying it is not called for; a lot of people have lost 30% to 40%. That said, there is a lot of deflation in business with laptops, wireless and you don’t need office space. But when you tap into peoples’ nest eggs, it makes for a different world. I am being more careful; not because I like being careful but I don’t want to be the only dumb guy saying things are great.

Have you talked to companies in your portfolio?

HL: I have done that round of calls asking what can I do. I have spread myself pretty thin because I like making a lot of investments. That’s why I gave up stock traing for the headache of sitting in front of a screen. I recently launched a new startup – StockTwits. We just did a small round, and I am 24 hours a day on that. I like to diversify my own things, between running a company, helping with PR and marketing at other companies, adding capital into rounds that want marketing experience, and running my hedge fund.

Talk about Stocktwits. What’s going on there?

StockTwits has had a great reception. We built it on top of Twitter. We can say that is good or bad but I feel like it is all about building a reputation platform because stock message boards that are just broke: all noise, no signal. I am all or saying what you want but let everyone see exactly what you said all the time. People can filter out your noise. I can pick and follow who I want to choose based on your reputation.

I think it is the best idea I’ve ever had. I am really excited. We had 3000 Twitter users the first couple of days, and they all are contributing. We are not supporting bulletin board stocks so you’ve got 7,000 real traded securities so it keeps away the penny stock people.

What’s the business model?

There’s a premium service that we are developing and a tipjoy service where you can give ot people with good ideas. The idea is just find new talent and help it rise to the top – it’s Digg using Twitter with some editors – a group of 10 of us looking for new talent. It is really open Street.com. StockTwits is that everyone sees the news so let’s create something that is what is everyone saying about the news. This is a Twitter-ized Digg version; If it really grows, it is really the Facebook for finance. In two clicks, you can get to someone’s profile, and see who he is. If I like Fred Wilson, I can click on some of the 50 people on his front page.

Here’s a video in which Howard talks about StockTwits:

What is StockTwits? from Jon Labes on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: howard lindzon, startups

At a time when many online companies are retrenching, Blip.tv plans to expand its sales and advertising teams based, albeit cautiously, based on the belief that ad dollars will flow to online video because it can provide advertisers with better ways to reach targeted audiences and, as important, measure how campaigns are doing. To provide some more insight into Blip’s plans and take on online video and the advertising market, I talked with CEO Mike Hudack.

Given the current economic and capital markets environment was it difficult and/or challenging to raise this round?

You have to prove you have a real business; now more so than ever. We certainly started the process before the current economic climate became the current economic climate. It took us no longer to close than we expected but it didn’t go any faster than we expected.

Bain, in particular, spent so much time working to understand our business, working to understand video, working to understand advertising, and looking at every aspect of our business. They did not invest in the market as a whole. They invested in the company. I think that is extraordinarily important. When an investor invests in a company, the bet is that company will be able to weather whatever storm w ill come. The company is what you know and everything else is variable.

Blip has three sets of constituents. We have content creators, and our goal is to make it possible to be an independent content creator to make a show and make that show successful. We do that by providing services of scale to shows that don’t have scale. We work with 37,000 shows and we have scale. We want to expand the quality of services we offer to content creators and offer new services to make it possible for one or two guys in a garage with great idea, talent and determination to make a show that lasts.

One of the specific things we will be doing there is expanding distribution relationship. We have a theory called total potential audience; the corollary to the theory is it’s impossible to gather that audience in any one place. What you have to do is make sure every show in all of the places necessary to reach audience. Right now, we distribute to 20 different places; and we are expanding the list over the next thee, four, five months.

It offers additional value to show creators, and we are working hard to offer more value to distributors. We bring them 37,000 shows, we will be working hard with distribution partners to point out on a daily basis those things most relative to their audience.

We are also focusing on the value proposition for enterprises. We think we are most certainly in a bear market right now. That will impact marketing spend. I don’t think anyone will argue that point. What we are focused on marketing is moving Web video from experimental to proven category. What you will see from marketing is a flight to safety. You will also see flight to value. Right now, Blip can offer marketers one of them most valued-added, most efficient buys you can make. We can find the demographic and psychographic target profile and reach them at the moment they are most receptive to your message.

What’s your take on the online advertising market? Some people think it’s going to be fine while others believe it will decline. What side of the fence do you sit on?

I sit right on the fence. I think both views are correct. There is definitely going to be a downturn in overall marketing dollars that will affect TV, print and the web, and I don’t think there is any way to escape that.

Certain types of advertising on Web less effective and more valuable than others. The banner market, in particular, will suffer. Advertising vehicles that are measurable will be effective and efficient. I don’t think they will grow as fast they would have otherwise but they will grow. Paid search is one category; paid search is valuable in that is it predicated on purchase intent.

You could see decline in overall paid search revenue despite the fact advertisers like it in a down economy, want to use it and just can’t. Web video will do well. UGC will continue to struggle. I don’t know whether if it ever does well but quality whether it is content from networks or content form independent content creators will do well as long as we move forward.

How can independent content makers compete against the major players such as Hulu, which is owned by NBC?

If you look at the network – CBS, NBC, FOX – the historically they cut an interesting challenge. They have a narrow channel to the consumer, and you have to exploit that channel to the utmost at every single opportunity. It is a high opportunity cost because if you put wrong thing on the channel, you can get a ton of viewers and profits but not as profitable as if you put on something else. It leads to programming that serves the largest audience possible.

NBC, Fox and CBS are not institutions designed to create programming to anything other than the widest possible audience, and this creates an opportunity for the independent content producer. Every moment someone watches something directly to their interests, it is a moment they are not watching the big, massive production on a major network. With 51 million videos viewed in September, we are collectively doing almost much as traffic as combined NBC monster on Hulu.

But isn’t online video a fragmented market?

You have to be very good at packaging and combining shows that are meaningfully related to marketers. You have to do what we call the best of both plays. You get the advantage of sponsoring one or two shows directly, and get access to a broader audience by aggregating a bunch of related shows together. The reality is you are getting something you can’t anywhere else.

What kind of advice can you offer to entrepreneurs looking to operate as efficiently as possible?

The first and most important is look at margins and the cost of goods sold. For every unit you ship, it is making you money and not costing you money? It is the most important thing – independent of the employees that you have and rent. Are you getting closer to profitability with every additional unit and not further away?

Blip has always had a philosophy that you hire when it becomes painful but not before. That is why we are only 17 people right now. Right now, in this climate we will be expanding. We will be hiring more people but doing so cautionary and conservatively. If a company is gross margin positive and been conservative on how they hire, now is a wonderful to expand because everyone else is contracting. It is a great time to grab market share, hiring is easier.

Technorati Tags: blip.tv, mike hudack

How come? It’s because the Canadian Real Estate Association has a stranglehold on real estate listings in Canada. MLS/CREA has gone after several upstart start-ups who have tried to finagle their way into the market, including Housing 123.

Nevertheless, Homezilla is hoping to establish a foothold in the online real estate market by doing everything except provide information about real estate properties – at least for now. Instead, Homezilla aims to give home owners and potential home owners in-depth information about neighbourhoods (schools, stores, parks, etc.).

I had the chance recently to ask Homezilla founder Sandy Ward about the Toronto-based company’s plans.

Q: Can you provide some background about Homezilla’s founders?

I am the sole founder of HomeZilla. While I don’t have a background in real estate, over a decade of Internet development experience has taught me the importance of making information available.

Q: So, why create Homezilla? What need/problem is it hoping to fill?

Every time someone looks to buy a house they ask questions like: where is the closest school? Are there a lot of kids around here? How far to a coffee shot? Until now, this information wasn’t easy to find. HomeZilla’s goal is help home buyers save time and be more confident in their home buying decision by providing all of this information in an easy-to-use format. Consumers want more information before they make a purchase; HomeZilla is offering new data to help home buyers.

The market also seemed open to new companies. Canada’s real estate market has been slow to use new Web technology to help home buyers. We saw this
as a huge opportunity to connect and help a large, and realtively, untapped audience.

Q: Whose the target audience? How do you engage people who already own homes?

Our main target audience is the home buyers. Home sellers and real estate agents make up the rest of our total audience. For the next 6 months, HomeZilla will focus on helping consumers in the home buying process. We still have a lot of work to make the home buying process faster. While the focus is on homebuyers, real estate agents will also use HomeZilla to save time when they are researching a new listing.

Q: Several companies have tried to compete against MLS using mash-ups? Do you see Homezilla eventually becoming a house listing service as well?

Without a doubt, at some point in 2009 we will need to have listings to compete with other up and coming real estate sites. Our advantage will come from a combination of our HomeZilla Analytics and our mandate to make the home buying process faster and easier.

HomeZilla Analytics is a set of reports on how and what home buyers are searching on HomeZilla. These statistics can be produced for a province, city, neighbourhood, or even a specific street. The HomeZilla Analytics will be a boost to helping provide context to a listing.

Q: What’s the business model?

The business model is made up of three parts. First, advertising needs to be part of our revenue. Because we have a small, but hard to reach audience, we will charge a high CPM but all the ads on HomeZilla have the ability to be hyper-targeted down to a neighbourhood level.

The other two major pieces of our business model relate to data. HomeZilla has collected unique data from all across Canada; that has value. Also, our HomeZilla Analytics gives unique insights into what is valued by people looking for a house in a certain community. We are already talking with companies in two different industries for the rights to purchase/use our data.

Technorati Tags: canada, homezilla, real estate

QikCom aims to be more than a micro-blogging platform by providing users with a wide variety of add-on applications. Right now, its TabStore features three tools: Competition (a way to track competitors), a To-Do list, and frequent numbers for loyalty programs. The company will open its API for developers to create more applications.

To learn more about QikCom, I threw five questions at founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden:

Q: Who’s behind QikCom and what was the reason/motivation to start the company?

We’re a small group of guys from the Austin tech scene passionate about making great products. In early 2008, we started to realize that the enterprise market could use a secure micro-messaging service, but we didn’t want to stop there so we also conceptualized what is now our TabStore, a marketplace filled with many other great business apps/tabs. Soon after, we quit our day jobs and made QikCom a reality.

Our goal is to dramatically improve enterprise productivity by providing the best business applications in the cloud, starting with the lowest layer (messaging) and then building up an ecosystem of rich business applications that can easily be installed from the TabStore.

Q: Micro-blogging has become a fast-growing communications tool. Why hasn’t it become a corporate staple yet?

Traditionally, IT departments have been hesitant to use cloud applications. I see that trend changing in the next few years and “cloudsourcing” will become more popular, especially if IT budgets decrease.

Q: There’s a growing number of players going after the corporate micro-blogging market such as Yammer and Present.ly? Why shouldn’t you be worried that Twitter is going to turn its attention to the market?

Twitter has been a great success in the personal space, and now it seems they are focusing heavily on International growth and monetizing their existing user base. While they may enter the enterprise space in the long-term, I don’t see an immediate threat from them in the short-term.

Q: Is QikCom looking to differentiate with the TabStore? How do you see it evolving?

Yes, the TabStore is how we’re different from our competition. We plan to give away micro-messaging and admin features for FREE and only charge customers for additional business apps in the TabStore. We see the TabStore evolving into a marketplace for many different types of cool business apps. We built and pre-installed a few examples including ToDo List Management and Competition Monitoring just to give our early customers an idea of what’s possible with the TabStore moving forward.

Q: What’s the business model?

- Free for employees to use
- Free for admins to secure and claim the network
- Additional subscription-based business apps/tabs available via the TabStore

Technorati Tags: qikcom, twitter

Q: Can you tell me about Social Mention’s roots? Who’s behind it and what was the inspiration to create it?

A: The idea for Social Mention isn’t wholly original. The web has a lot of search engines, but the problem is most of them search the “Web”. Conversations today are expanding beyond the Web and, ultimately, beyond the reach of conventional search engines, and into the world of instantaneous status updates, micro-blogs, comments, bookmarks, video feeds, and photo streams.

For years, whenever I wanted to track what people were saying about me or some Web app I launched, I would have to conduct multiple searches every time on Google, Technorati, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious etc. All those services are great, but ultimately it was far too time
consuming. That experience is what inspired me to create Social Mention. Social Mention is currently a solo project but with the great response it’s gotten so far, plans are to build it up.

Q: Tracking social media conversations seems to emerging as a vibrant market. Do you see SM as being on the vanguard?

As I mentioned above, conversation are increasingly moving away from content which is easily-indexed by traditional search engines and towards instant real-time updates and posts. There are lots of great services for tracking social media such as comments and lifestreams
but none that offer a simple Google-like experience. Social Mention offers that Google-like experience for searching the social media landscape.

Q: How does SM work? How are you able to search for such a wide variety of areas from blogs to comments to images?

A: Social Mention works in much the same way a Web search engine works; but instead of searching the entire Web it searches only the most popular social media sources for any given topic. Social Mention has the ability to differentiate various types of content allowing media
to be indexed properly.

Q: What are you doing to get the word out?

A: Like many start-ups, our chief source of growth is word of mouth marketing (much of which we’ve been tracking on socialmention.com). We are currently growing organically while the technology is perfected.

Q: When are you going to update your “About Us” section with some more information?

Soon.

Technorati Tags: canada, social media, social mention