Paul Remer, Keibi CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Nov 15 -- Keibi works with online communities to help them keep their sites clear of rogue images and content. Here’s my interview with the CEO. - Mark Brooks

What is Keibi’s founding story?
Keibi was started by Pierre Grenier who is in charge of our product direction. He had worked at Piczo, which is a social network, and he was on loan from one of Piczo’s investors. He was so excited and overwhelmed by all the user generated content that he started thinking about systems that could be useful for companies that have a lot of UGC on their sites.

Who are your clients now?
We have several clients on the social network side such as Piczo, Bebo, RockYou and also on what we call the brand side, which is Coca-Cola, ESPN, Nokia, and others. We also are starting to attract agency clients, who are helping those brands build out their social media strategies and programs.

How do you work with social networks? How can you help them enhance their communities?
Our system is really designed to help social networks enforce their terms of service. We are providing an industrial strength application the enables human moderation teams to quickly go through massive quantities of UGC and make quick decisions on whether particular content runs afoul of these terms of service.

A lot of dating and social networking sites have groups of people that go through the content and approve profiles. It’s a huge element of what they have to do on a day to day basis. That’s what our system does for them.

So does this work with all communications and also photographs?
Yes, we support all the major types of data including images, animations, videos and text posts. We deal with the videos in a similar way to the images. As the images or videos come in, we grade them against different abuse categories such as pornography, violence, gore and drugs. In the case of videos, we extract frames from every few seconds of the video and run those through our analyzer.

How much would the Keibi solution cost to a typical social network with 3 to 5 million unique a month?
Our pricing is fundamentally based on the amount of content they want to have reviewed. We offer our product on a subscription basis, so it’s a monthly fee and that’s for an unlimited numbers of moderators that need to use it. Also if they don’t have moderators, we’re able to provide turnkey moderation that includes the technology as well as human moderation teams.

Are there any new or recent products enhancements that you would like to tell us about?
We’re finding that an increasing number of our customers want to do more text moderation so love the text moderation functionality. So over the last couple of months we’ve done most of our work in the text area. In the future we’re looking at adding copyright detection functionality into the product as well.