Social Networking Watch

Jim Wolfston, CEO Of CollegeNET.com Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Jan 3 -- CollegeNET helps students raise scholarships. I spoke to the CEO and Founder Jim Wolfston. - Mark Brooks

What is the founding story of CollegeNET.com?
CollegeNET.com today provides scheduling software and admission services to 1300 universities around the country. For a number of years we took some of the success of our company and turned it into a traditional scholarship program. We stated the essay topic and students would write on that . Then we decided who would win the scholarship. In a typical year, we gave away about $25k in scholarships.

After a number of years sitting around like a bunch of gray beards determining who wins scholarships and who doesn’t, we conjured this idea of a social network where students could cite the topics. Then they could write publicly on those topics and vote for each other. And the students with the most votes at the end of each month would win the scholarships. So that was the genesis of CollegeNET.com.

It’s social networking but with this special purpose of choosing topics, persuading others as to your views, thereby earning their votes. In many respects, it’s like conducting a political campaign.

Can you tell me a bit more about how CollegeNET.com helps students more effectively find funding?
There is another aspect to CollegeNET.com. Students can search for colleges by criteria such as tuition costs, proximity to their home, the average SAT score at the college, and so on. Of course there are many sites that also do this kind of searching, but CollegeNET.com also has a scholarship search engine where students can say, all right, I’m interested in basketball and I have a 4.0 GPA, tell me the scholarships that might match up with that skill set.

What CollegeNET offers beyond this is this direct benefit of participating with other students investigating the topics of the day and writing about them and thereby earning votes towards scholarship money. So CollegeNET.com isn’t just a search engine for schools or search engine for other traditionally awarded scholarships, it is itself a scholarship generator.

Can you tell us more about how you seeded the community initially?
It wasn’t hard because students need money for college. We’ve seen the astronomical growth of student lending and that’s in large part due to the tuition gap. The rate of tuition increase has far outpaced growth in the consumer price index here in the United States. So to make up the difference, students have had to turn more aggressively to student loans, grants, scholarships. So as soon as we put the money out there and said “hey look we’re going to give you $15,000 this month”, within a couple of hours people started posting to earn that money. And the site has grown ever since to the point now where we have tens of thousands of students competing for the money. In any given month we have hundreds of thousands of unique users.

How do you make money?
The original intent of the site was to figure out an efficient way for CollegeNET.com to save money in terms of administering its own scholarships. So we achieved that handsomely. We also have advertising on the site. The site is a very popular place for advertisers who want to reach the 18 to 24 demographic without being intrusive.

We also have this very interesting thing that is just starting to happen. Last fall, our first external sponsor of scholarships augmented the $15,000 a month that we provide. Now sponsors can put forward money and can specify extra criteria that the student must meet to qualify for their scholarship. That’s proven to be of great interest and we’re working with some additional potential providers at this point.

What do you have in the works for the next 6 months for CollegeNET.com?
The thing that you’re going to see more from CollegeNET.com is just more money. That is going to come from the sponsor contracts that we’re working on right now. As I said, foundations, other organizations, companies like ours that give out scholarship money are going to mix into their program CollegeNET’s social networking for their college scholarships. I think that is a very exciting development that will benefit everybody all the way around.

George Eberstadt, CEO Of TurnTo Network Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Dec 27 -- Advertising is out, friendly referrals are in. TurnTo helps sites harness the power of the friendly referral. Here’s our interview with George Eberstadt of TurnTo. - Mark Brooks

What is your founding story?
About a year and a half ago I was doing some consulting work for a non-profit organization called The Earthwatch Institute. They enable people go on field research expeditions with top-tier environmental scientists. I was helping them figure out some community features for their website, where volunteers could share photos and keep in touch with other people on their expeditions. But it struck me that the most powerful thing Earthwatch could do leverage their community to build their business and get the word out would be to make sure that if somebody who was interested in learning more about them happened to know one of the nearly 100,000 people who have already been on one of their expeditions, that they would make that connection.

I couldn’t find any tools to help them with that. So I started to experiment with some designs, and the light bulb went off when I realized: hey it’s not just Earthwatch. Any organization where a reference is an important part of building the business can use this. That’s when I thought: this shouldn’t be a one-off project, this should be a company.

How would you describe it?
I call TurnTo a “trusted reference system”. It’s really a network of people who all agree to share with each other their experiences in order to help each other make better decisions. And we’re applying it in the online commerce world right now. In tangible terms: it’s a widget, a bit of code that merchants put on their ecommerce site that lets visitors see if they know people who have experience with that site or its products.

How does it work for end users?
From an end-users point of view, if you’re already a TurnTo member and you come to one of the sites in the TurnTo network, it will tell you whether your friends have shopped there and what they bought. That enables you to know who you can “turn to” for advice just when you need it.

If you’re not yet a TurnTo member you would encounter a link that says “see if your friends shop here”. We use emails to identify users, so we just ask you to put in your email and if anybody in the system has you listed as a friend, we can instantly show you who has experiences to share with you. It doesn’t interrupt your shopping process. Our partner sites like that a lot because even for people who are not yet TurnTo members, we can deliver the trusted reference information without taking them out of the shopping flow. We never take the shopper off the site.

For the partner site, it’s pretty straightforward. They put a little bit of javascript on their pages to render the widget, and what we’re doing behind the scenes is matching up the social network data that the users provide with the commerce data that the partner site provides. And by putting those two together, we’re able to tell a user when someone they know has done something that they’re considering.

How does TurnTo make money?
TurnTo has a very straightforward business model. It’s 100% performance based. When a user sees a “trusted reference” on one of our partner sites and then goes on to purchase we get a small commission on that purchase.

Who are your partners?
The sites using TurnTo now cover a board range of businesses. We’ve got partner sites in the travel space, an electronics retailer, a specialty tea company, pet supplies, a ticket broker, a jewelry company, a company that does online education, a tableware site; it’s really all over the map. Three of our partners are internet retailer 500 sites. We’ve only been live a few months, and the response has been great.

Jon Siegal, Web Personal Assistant CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Nov 7 -- Birthday reminders are nice, but Web Personal Assistant’s application Webgiftr takes gifting a few steps further. I've interviewed Jon Siegal, the CEO of Web Personal Assistant. - Mark Brooks

What’s the founding story of Webgiftr?
Webgiftr was founded in January of 2008 and the reason I started the company was twofold. First, my own personal experiences in struggling to keep up with all the birthdays and anniversaries and gifting events that took place in my life were becoming a chore. Secondly, I wanted to build a company that would deliver web applications which would help simplify people’s lives and make the internet less complicated.

Webgiftr is all about helping people solve all of the issues and challenges related to giving and receiving gifts. Everything from knowing when gift giving opportunities are taking place across your network of friends and family, to helping understand what gifts to get them all the way through to helping plan gift related events.

Would you define it as a social shopping site?
Social shopping is a very broad category. Gift giving, for other people, is a segment within the broader umbrella of social shopping.

Can you walk us through how Webgiftr works from a user experience using the Facebook application?
We’ve developed both a site and a Facebook application and the two work together. On Facebook you can simply add the Webgiftr application and then we help you with the three main areas that I described earlier. We allow you to track your friend’s birthdays, your anniversary and other gift opportunities. People across your network can have access to the calendar and you can also see other people’s calendars. Then we let you know 30 days before the event so you have time to do something about it.

Within the application we’ve created a platform where people can tell what products, brands or restaurants they like. When their friends want to go get them a gift, they can look at that and then we’ll point them directly to the place on the Internet. They can also book a restaurant using the Open Table platform.

Then we’ve also integrated an area that allows you to say what charitable organizations you are a supporter of. Sometimes people don’t want gifts, they want you to make a contribution in their name to their favorite charity.

What product categories sell particularly well?
Over the last few years consumer electronics has been a big seller. I don’t think we’ll see a different trend. It really depends on the time of the year and the event. On Valentine’s Day flowers will probably be popular as well as jewelry.

How does the site make money?
Our site and Facebook application is free. We have a series of relationships with retailers and content partners. When people purchase things from a particular retailer we get a commission for making that referral. Unlike sites where the primary revenue model is advertising which involves keeping users on the site longer, our goal is to help users get things done efficiently and effectively so that they can become better gift givers in the process.

See all posts on Webgiftr

Peter Pezaris, Multiply.com CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Nov 22 -- Multiply is doing rather well. I talked with Peter Pezaris, the founder and CEO of Multiply.com, about the site’s internationalism, their deal with MSN, and about Facebook being inspired by some of their features. - Mark Brooks

What is the founding story of Multiply.com?
We started the company back in late 2003 when Friendster was the king of the social networking landscape. But Friendster and most of the social networking sites were really glorified dating sites.

Myself and my founding partners were at a stage in our lives where meeting cute girls and dating wasn’t really relevant to us. We were kind of moving on to the next stage in our lives. But the idea of 6 degrees of separation and leveraging an online representation of your social network was a very compelling one to us. We just wanted to find something that was more relevant to where we were in our lives and what we hit upon was the idea of communications, leveraging your social network as an audience for publishing your personal content. That is really what led us to found Multiply and we’ve kind of been on that path ever since. When we launched the site in August of 2004.

Who would you say is Multiply’s target audience? How international is the site at this stage?
Our target audience is anybody who wants to share their personal media with friends and family, which extensively could be anyone. But with that said we’re probably most focused on the soccer mom. So getting passed the teenagers and early 20 something who are on a lot of the other social networks and really getting to late 20’s, 30’s and even beyond. As you get older on Multiply you get more active. Our active users are much older than on some of the other sites because its focused on sharing within your personal networks and not meeting new people.

We are extremely international. We’ve got pockets of users all over the world. Our biggest ones are probably in Southeast Asia and Brazil. The nice thing is that unlike on some of the other sites where taking on a lot of international users can kind of diminish the experience for US users, on Multiply that’s really not the case at all because there is no pervasive culture to the site.

So you’re getting all kinds of run for their money in Brazil?
No I wouldn’t claim we’re getting near Orkut in Brazil but they’re a good example of the other model. Their huge success in Brazil came at the expense of their huge success elsewhere. When somebody from the US went to visit Orkut they started seeing all Brazilians and all Portuguese content and that gives them the strong message that hey this site isn’t for me. This is the site for Brazilians. We don’t have to worry about that because your experience is completely dictated by your own personal social network.

What single feature would you say is unique to Multiply and you’re most proud of?
I’m going to say news feed and you might be surprised by that. I’m most proud of it because that’s been the heart and soul of Multiply since we launched back in 2004. Even though you’re probably saying to yourself all sorts of sites have news feeds now I still think ours is very unique because it’s the only one out there that really focuses on driving communication as opposed to just being a different flavor of an RSS feed, that tells you here is sort of things that happened and they scroll off the bottom and they go away and you never see them again.

Have you noticed FaceBook is copying much of some of Multiply’s features over the years?
You know what they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Clearly and its obviously not just Facebook. It’s a different type of experience on Facebook then it is on Multiply. To a large degree we’re kind of email on steroids whereas I Facebook is still fundamentally a social network that is aimed to provide an online socializing/entertaining experience and less so kind of true communication.

Congratulations recently on the MSN deal. Tell us more about that.
It was a fantastic opportunity for us. Microsoft is closing down the MSN group service. They’ve got a new Windows Live group service coming out in the future but it’s not going to be out soon enough and it’s also not going to have feature parody with the existing services. So they wanted to look out for their users and find them a good home. And after a nice diligence period they selected us as their migration partner. So Multiply is the only option for those users to migrate their existing groups to.

What were the main reasons for them choosing Multiply would you say?
I think there were two factors; one certainly was our technical chops. The migration process is not a trivial one. The other factor was just the overall service. Multiply again is not a Facebook or MySpace which I think would have been a big turn off for the audience that currently resides on MSN groups.

How do make money?
We currently have 3 revenue streams, advertising is the biggest. We introduced a premium service about 3 months ago and it’s focused on the permanent archival of high res digital media. If you’re a premium user on Multiply you get to view all of the high res content both yours and the other users. The third revenue stream is photo printing. Right now that is done through a partnership but we expect to grow that business significantly in the future.

How much are you charging for the archive service right now?
It’s only $20 a year.

Is there a cap on the amount of video that someone can upload?
They can upload 5 files up to 200MB in size or 20 minutes in length compared to 100MB or 10 minutes for a free service.

What do you see on the horizon of the next couple of years?
Looking into the future we view ourselves as an end to end media solution. So we want to be there for you to transfer that media from your computer to an online service through the sharing and discussion period, through the archive and storage period to the printed goods period where you make it into a photo print, a photo book, a calendar or a card. So we want to be that sort of full spectrum provider where anything related to your digital media can happen on Multiply. So both in terms of revenue streams and future design decisions I think everything is going to be steered by that overall philosophy.

See all posts on Multiply

      

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.

      

Tom Gerace, Gather.com CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Nov 8 -- Gather.com is a social network for grownups. Here’s my interview with their CEO Tom Gerace. - Mark Brooks

What is Gather’s founding story?
When we launched the company, we focused both on the technology that creates social discovery and a social conversation system. We started off with a key set of relationships in public radio and in publishing to seed the community. We wanted to create a connection between people and ideas. Our vision for the company has always been to enable people to have conversations with their friends, family and colleagues around topics that matter to them. Gather’s goal is to provide a forum for conversations that matter.

How would you say Gather is different from the likes of Facebook and MySpace?
First it’s about who is using Gather. We attract an adult audience. About 30% of our users are in their 30’s, 30% are in their 40’s, 30% are in their 50’s.

The second thing is that our members are focused not just on the quick social things like status updates; they’re focused on having a meaningful conversation and sharing ideas—things that they create themselves. It could be a photo album, an opinion on something they’ve read in the news, the first chapter of a book, a poem or a video.

When you get tens or hundreds of friends that are sharing all the things they find, it really becomes a key way for you to learn and discover. This phenomenon happens offline all the time; Gather brings it online. Our friends are key recommenders of movies, our friends shape our political opinions, and our friends help us to find new products, new experiences, and new places in the world. We rely on and trust those friend recommendations more than we do advertising for sure.

Who would you regard as your competitors?
We think about competitors broadly. Standard social sites are the biggest competitors. We also see some competition in people trying to create their own communities around stand alone blogs.

How does the community make money?
We make money in two ways. We sell standard brand advertising. Companies like Kraft have promoted multiple brands on Gather, as have Nestle, Westin, Amtrak and others. And we see the CPG space growing despite general economic weakness in the financial services sector.

The second way we make money is through engagement campaigns where companies engage their prospective customers in a conversation around their products. We do this through reviews and samplings, which then cascade through the Gather community. If you get 20 reviewers and they’re connected to 100 people each, their thoughts cascade to 2,000 people. So you get real social influences and relevant conversations spreading about brands people love. These engagement campaigns are increasingly popular and it’s something we’re working to standardize by forming an industry group called the Social Media Advertising Consortium with a number of media agencies. We are going to standardize what an engagement campaign means so they’re as easy to buy, monitor, and track as traditional media campaigns have been.

You have some real hallmark advertisers. How have those relationships been leveraged into deals which create awareness of Gather.com?
We engage audiences for our partners by building experiences on Gather. Audience members engage in a persistent conversation around topics of interest on the Gather platform. So at FoodTalk. Gather.com you’ll see a group that exists for the radio show The Splendid Table and it has about 11,000 people sharing their recipes, trading cooking tips, really exploring the food space. From time to time that content is integrated into the radio show. This kind of cross media engagement has a real potential because it allows large publishers to capitalize on the creativity of their audience.

What are your goals and plans for the community in 2008 through 2009?
We will continue to build upon our foundation to create an experience that links people with all of the ideas that their friends, family, and colleagues are exploring around the country and around the world. As Gather continues to grow we definitely expect to expand the experience across platforms. You’ll see us making early investments in mobile. Also we will begin to organize the content geographically so you can access content that is relevant to where you live.

See all posts on Gather.com

Matt Hill, Shopit.com CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 25 -- How can you make money with SNS? Well, one way is to add a shop perhaps.  Shopit.com can help you do that.  I interviewed the CEO of Shopit.com, Matt Hill. - Mark Brooks

Can you tell us the founding story of Shopit.com and how you got involved in this business?
In 2005, when me and my partner Rhett McNulty saw the growth of MySpace and Facebook, we started to look at what some of the bigger e-commerce companies were going to do, to see how they would monetize beyond advertising in social communities.

We quickly determined that companies like eBay and Amazon had big focuses but were primarily built in a walled garden infrastructure and charged fees. So we set out to build a platform that synchronizes across multiple communities and allows people to create stores and/or turn their profiles or blogs into full featured commerce stores.

Today, Shopit is a highly targeted e-commerce ad network that allows people for example from MySpace to sell to people on Facebook. We don't charge any listing and transaction fees so it's been quite appealing and we've grown quite a bit in the past 6 months.

How exactly do you make money?
There are two ways. First we make money from premium a membership subscription which is $3.99 a month. The membership entitles member to advanced analytics for their store, segment their audiences, build customer database, etc.

The second way is from the highly incentivized but non-mandatory advertising fee which allows you to target people outside of your sphere. If you build a store on your Facebook page, all your friends are going to see your products. However if you want to sell to people that are outside of your network, people you don't know, then we are going to advertise your product on your behalf and target people across our network.

How many stores do you have set up so far? What are the top items being sold?
We have probably about 600,000 stores in the network right now with between 5,000 and 10,000 new stores being created a day. Most of the stuff is apparel and pretty much the same goods you would find on eBay.

What is the most unusual store you've seen so far?
I can't comment on that one. We ended up turning that one off. Clearly when you provide a free service to users in any category, you're going to end up with a good cross section of different and interesting things that sort of end up popping up there.

Who would you regard as your primary competition?
We had the good fortune of building a pretty robust platform and moving into this space really early. And as a result of that we've experienced early growth that most of the other people, who we would consider competitors, haven't.

But I do admire some of the other companies in our space. There are some people doing great things in social shopping.

What major features are currently in development for Shopit.com?
Some of them are confidential but the major one is that we're releasing a new web portal, so there will be a new site coming out. We like to look at it like LinkedIn meets Yahoo stores. We're also launching a mobile portal which will allow you to communicate with people who are shopping in your store via mobile, make offers and also perform transactions, all via the phone.

One of our more recent developments was powering the AOL IM application so users can grab a product out of their catalog and insert it directly into the IM conversation and perform a transaction right there.

What are your goals for the service heading into 2009?
We've been a very seller centric business so far. We've appealed mostly to sellers, people that want to sell things and want to list their services or products. Our next phase of our development is going to be very shopping centric.  We are launching on a new social network almost every week this quarter, so watch out for us. 2009 will see the evolution of a true global commerce network, where people across multiple social communities and in countries around the world will conduct trade.  We count on being the leader in making this happen.

See all posts on ShopIt

      

Steven McArthur, President Of Classmates Online, Inc. Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 18 -- Classmates predates Facebook. In internet years, it was created around the time Abe Lincoln was in office. I wonder which site will lead the student and alumni category in another 14 years? Classmates has a few tricks up its sleeve. Business is good at Classmates.com. The site has 50 million members, and grew its paid subscriber based by 41% in the past year. I talked with the President of Classmates, Steven McArthur. - Mark Brooks       

What is Classmates founding story?
Classmates was founded about 14 years ago by Randy Conrads, a Boeing engineer who as a child had grown up in a military family that moved around a lot. When he got to the stage of his life that he was contemplating high school and college reunions, he discovered that there was no easy way to reconnect and network with friends from various educational establishments around the world. So in the early 90’s, he started Classmates as a sideline to his day job at Boeing. As it got momentum, he left Boeing, founded the company and created the first online social network. He grew the business to serve millions of members. Classmates was acquired by United Online in 2004.

Do you regard it as a social network? How is it a social network and how is it a little bit different from other social networks?
Our members interact like on many other social networks. Classmates Media has a significant membership base of about 50 million people. Those people have affiliations that are really about keeping them in touch with the people and the institutions they value from their past from kindergarten through high school to college, work, the military and even neighborhoods they lived in 10 or 15 years ago. It’s really a classic social network where the folks are communicating with people that they very much value keeping in touch with.

We’re really the only place that folks can reliably find a large network of people to reconnect with. There is no one else out there that has the scale of information and the scale of community we have from 10, 15 or 20 years ago. What we offer is almost like your personal history channel where the richness that people have enjoyed across those relationships over time can be recaptured and reconnected.

That’s an interesting point because you’re really helping people connect in the real world as well and have quite a strong events section. Can you tell us more about the event section?
Classmates’ Events & Reunions section grew out of being the premiere place for people to organize reunions, whether those were reunions for school or college or even for families and workplaces. We get a significant number of people who use the tools that we built, such as invitations and photographic records of the reunion.

Has the rise of the likes of Facebook and other social networks affected your business? If so, how?
Classmates has enjoyed record growth in our user base, both free and paid, over the same time as you’ve seen Facebook and MySpace enjoy substantial growth. Any time that there are multiple players promoting the merits of a category, in this case social networking, it benefits all the major players in the space. We certainly do our bit in promoting the merits of social networking to our key audience and others like Facebook do a fine job of promoting and making people aware of the merits to their audience.

Can you tell us what you charge for the site and beyond advertising what makes money for you?
Classmates Media has a very healthy advertising and media business that has been growing. In addition to that we do sell subscriptions. More than 3.8 million of our 50 million active members are paid subscribers. The folks that are paid members get access to a portfolio of services that are primarily based around communicating with other people in the network. We’ve seen our number of paid accounts grow by 41 percent in the past year, from June 30, 2007 to June 30, 2008.

How are you promoting Classmates in different markets?
What we find market to market is very consistent with what we find here in the U.S. If you look at that audience versus some of the competitors you named earlier, we are actually substantially larger in that segment of the market than others. It’s the same in other markets where we play. We find that the older demographic has very different behavior patterns, has a lot of interest in real names, real people, and are really wanting to reach out in a reliable way to reconnect with folks that they have had treasured relationships with in the past.

There are companies in other markets doing very similar things. For example, we acquired a company in Germany a few years ago, called StayFriends, which has been a very successful acquisition for us. We also acquired businesses in Sweden (www.stayfriends.se) and in France (www.trombi.com). And we recently organically entered the Austrian (www.stayfriends.at) market.

What we find is, when you segment the market there is a very rich, very large segment of the market in their mid 30’s and older that are very under served by some of the more mainline players. We found a great deal of success in executing our business model in those countries using local brands that are understood and well respected by that segment of the market in those countries.      

See all posts on Classmates

Kristian Järnefelt, Concilio Networks, CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 4 -- "Concilio Networks" Community Connect Solution extends Internet communities, social networks and Internet voice and chat services to any existing mobile handset.” Cool. Lets see what the CEO has to say. - Mark Brooks

What does Concilio Networks do?
We bring social communities and internet messaging into mobile handsets. We have a solution that allows users of normal existing handsets to import their internet contacts from social networks. We then allow these users to see their internet contacts’ present status and contact them using their cell phone with services such as Google Talk, Microsoft Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. We are currently in beta testing with a solution for Google Talk and we’ll have Facebook and Microsoft Windows Live Messenger support in Q4. MySpace and Bebo are next on the list. Obviously we’re looking at Open Social as well because that’s a great way to catch several flies with one flap.

What separates Concilio Network’s solution from other competitor’s solutions?
Competitive solutions are usually based either upon browsing which, with the exception of I-Phone, do not work all that well; or they use downloadable client applications which tend to have their own set of problems. One of the issues is that you need to develop a specific client app for different handset models. There are always compatibility issues. Then the user is required to download and install a client app which may not be easy for the general population.

What really leverages us is that we don’t have any client applications. We leverage the contact application of the mobile handset and that’s the one application on the mobile handset that everyone is familiar with.

Who are your customers?
We provide solutions to service providers, the most obvious of which are the mobile network operator or the carrier. It’s a server solution and the service provider need only assign a telephone number range and have our gear or our software installed; and they are up and running.

Where are you currently operating?
We mainly operate in Europe, where we have a pilot running with Telefónica Móviles in Spain and a couple of other pilots just about to start, but nothing confirmed yet in the US. We are currently talking with a number of US companies and have already opened an office in Santa Clara, California mainly to work with the US based community service providers. In Europe, it’s a similar sized market as the US, but Europe has in excess of 100 carriers, as opposed to the US where there are just a few very large carriers. We need to get some footholds here first before we have the credibility to get in discussion with the major US carriers.

Tell me your founding story.
The company was founded in 2002, but the real work started in 2004. I got engaged with the company in late 2006. The company was founded by Nokia engineers. We have a combined 100 years of telecom experience from Nokia in just the management team. The idea of doing something where you interconnect between the internet world and the mobile networks is something that has been living for quite some time in the head of our founder and CTO, Markku Rautiola, who is an ex-VP from Nokia.

He founded the company based upon the idea that he could connect internet services with mobile handsets. We believe that the mobile networks are an excellent way to enter the services into the internet. Everybody has them in their pockets. We believe there is a way to create the win-win situation between the consumers and the existing service providers, while leveraging existing infrastructure and billing mechanisms.

In social networking, the big challenge right now is figuring out how to make money. How does Mobile Social Networking fit into the revenue model?
If you want to communicate with people on a PC it might seem like it’s free of charge. Well it’s not. You still have to pay for the DSL line or the Wi-Fi connection at Starbucks. Thus, people get a free service by paying an access charge. Mobile is no different than that. If you want to use Google Talk for placing a call to your friend in a different country using your mobile phone, you are going to be willing to pay for the access.

Now think about Facebook with 150 million users. Let’s say in the US, they would make a rev share deal with a US carrier, where the carrier would provide access to applications on their mobile handsets that people use to communicate with their Facebook friends and interact with their friends profiles. And let’s say these people pay 10 cents a minute on their mobile handsets and Facebook were to get 1 cent of that. Thus, every time someone updates their profile or writes a message on a friend’s wall, Facebook gets one cent from the carrier. And what if only 5% of Facebook members used the app and they average 100 times messages a month. That equates to $7.5 million dollars a month or almost $100 million a year. What is Facebook’s revenue right now? $100 million additional revenue for Facebook would be a big thing I would say.

Daniel Brusilovsky, Teens In Tech Network CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Sep 20 -- I met Daniel at the Social networking conference in San Francisco in July. He runs a young network of thought-leader techies who are available for project work, and for advising on the idiosyncracies of marketing to teens. - Mark Brooks

Daniel, tell me about yourself and what you have going on project-wise.
I’m a 15 year old blogger, broadcaster, entrepreneur and soon to be author. It’s still being written but it’s a series about teens in tech. Currently I have my own podcasts, I have my own blog, I work for a couple of companies and do some consulting. Then, of course, I have my startup.

Teens in Tech is a community for teenagers who want to start podcasting and blogging and producing new media content. And because there are so many age restrictions on sites because you have to be 13 or something like that, there are no age restrictions in Teens in Tech because it’s for teens and by teens.

What inspired the company?
One of the big things that inspired it was a personal experience. I couldn’t find good audio hosting; it was extremely hard to get good hosting for my podcast. I told myself that I would make it easier for the other teens who want to do it. So that’s when I came up with this idea. I called a couple of friends and started working on it, and now we’re launching this month.

You have supportive parents. What do they do for a living?
I do have very supportive parents and I’m very happy for that. My mom is a senior manager at Oracle and my dad is the Director of ASP Services and Database at an HR company that makes software.

What do you think teens want more than anything now, technology-wise?
I can say that there are a couple of things that I would like to see. One of those being free G cards for anywhere in the world that I can access the Internet to email my parents and tell them I’m ok. When I travel, I only get Internet access where there is Wi-Fi. I think it would be great if cell phone providers would give free data plans for teenagers, or to anyone, because staying in touch is something we really need to do, and having to pay something like $80 a month to AT&T for the new iPhone is a ridiculous amount.

What do you see in the future for Teens in Tech?
We want to launch this month but we don’t have an exact date yet because we’re still working out the small bugs. But after that we just want to have teen’s podcasting and blogging and producing new media content where they couldn’t before. This will be a centralized hub for all of that.

Zopa, CEO Douglas H. Dolton - SNW Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- July 26 -- Forget the banks. Who needs credit cards!? Now you can just ask a favor from a perfect stranger and borrow money to buy a car, or consolidate debts. Zopa plays the part of middleman. Here’s my interview with the CEO. - Mark Brooks

What is the founding story of Zopa?
We talked quite a bit about the democratization of finance. We believed that for the consumer getting as a borrower as close as possible to the people who have money, lenders or investors, would benefit everybody. We launched in March of 2005 in the UK.

What is your background? What were you doing before Zopa?
I have been involved in financial services my entire career. I started as a teller at a bank many years ago. I worked in all sorts of different positions in banks. Most recently I was involved with 2 companies that originated consumer loans. So from that perspective as CEO of these two companies I got to see people that needed money and where we actually got the capital to make those loans.

How would you say Zopa is different from the competition like Prosper?
Zopa is the only international social finance entity with operations in Italy, the UK, the US and an office in Japan we can hopefully open soon. Zopa has always focused on safety. One area that we differ greatly from Prosper and Lending Club is that the investors are not exposed to credit losses on our loans in the United States. And even in the United Kingdom and Italy, where our investors are exposed to losses, we underwrite the loans very, very carefully. After 3½ years, we have only 7 bad loans in the UK. We do believe that making a loan is a very tricky and that Zopa has some responsibility in assessing peoples credit risk and ultimately not making loans to people who we don’t believe will repay the loans.

I’m a big fan of MicroPlace. Have you ever considered layering in offerings from charities as well?
Absolutely. What we offer in the United States is the ability for investors to open up Certificate of Deposits (CDs) when they forgive some of their interest and are actually helping borrowers.

Is there a particular country that has really grown more quickly then any other country?
We were the first ever to do this in the world, so when we launched in the UK it was a totally foreign concept to anyone, anywhere in the world. But as the UK population has become more aware and comfortable with our track record, the population has the least questions about how it works. The Italian marketplace launched very, very quickly and the United States were thrilled with Zopa too. 10 or 15 years ago, I’m not sure people would have understood it but today they really get it and they’re very intrigued by it.

Should banks be worried?
No I don’t think so. We are a consumer oriented organization. I don’t think Zopa will ever be making $50 million construction loans for office buildings, for instance. I can see us being a terrific compliment to a bank who is looking for a very consumer oriented proposition. We are already working with credit unions in the U.S. We provide a social networking interface to those credit unions. People come to Zopa because they like the concept and in the process of doing business with Zopa they become credit union customers too. One of the reviewers recently said that Zopa is a win-win-win proposition. The consumer comes out ahead, the financial institution comes out ahead and Zopa provides a service that doesn’t exist anywhere else, where the borrower can see who the investor is that is helping them very directly. That’s all part of that democratization of finance. And I do think that banks will be attracted to that concept of allowing consumers to see what is happening with their money.

What is your long term vision? Where could you see Zopa and the industry being in 10 years time?
I honesty think that the efficiency, convenience and trust that you get with dealing with an entity like Zopa will become more and more attractive to people. I can see this will be a multi-billion dollar business. 10 years from now or so, we’re going to have quite a bit of interactive social finance activities taking place with unsecured consumer loans and who knows beyond where that could go. Transactions involving currency exchange, transactions involved car insurance – that’s another thought, where a group of people will come together and pool their resources to provide the first tier of losses associated with car insurance and then they will buy a blanket coverage to provide a full coverage to everybody. As time goes on, we will see more and more of this democratization of finance taking place with transactions well beyond simply unsecured consumer loans.

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Interview With Nielsen Online, Alex Burmaster

SNW INTERVIEW -- Apr 18 -- Nielsen Online, comScore and Hitwise are kind enough to give us the official industry rankings each month. On occasion we interview their analysts.  Alex Burmaster is the internet dating and social networking specialist for Nielsen Online. Here's the latest news and analysis from him on the market for dating and SNS. - Mark Brooks

How is the growth of the social networking industry effecting the online dating industry?
Alex Burmaster: The growth of SNing in has certainly impacted the online dating industry in the UK. Networking with friends, and friends of friends, has certainly stolen some of online dating's thunder. The sector has pretty much been declining each month over the last year. In the UK it is actually now at a level that it was back at June 2005.

Interestingly, this is not the case in the US. The personals and SNing sectors actually seem to follow the same pattern of fall/growth.

Have the top 3 dating sites extended their lead over the last couple of years?
Alex Burmaster: No, in contrast, the differences between the leading sites in terms of popularity are closer than they were a year ago – both in the EU and the US.

Do you see the market fragmenting, or consolidating?
Alex Burmaster: This is very difficult to predict and one could argue for a case both ways. Volume is the key to the success of online dating so one would think consolidation is the way to go. However, niche's are on the way back in many sectors – particularly social networking, so perhaps fragmentation will be the name of the game

Who are showing the strongest growth here and in Europe?
Alex Burmaster: Over the last year (Feb 07 – Feb 08) these are the strongest growing personals sites in the US…
   
(Nielsen Online)

…and in Europe

(Nielsen Online)

The four sites with no growth figure means they didn't show up amongst the most popular sites in EU in Feb 07 so their growth must have been good!!

How many people visited dating sites in the USA, and the countries that you cover in the EU, last month?
US = 25.8 million
DE = 5.6 million
FR = 4.7 million
UK = 3.6 million
IT = 2.7 million
ES = 2.3 million
(Nielsen Online)

For Social Networking Watch?
How are the major social networks in the USA, growing in the International markets?

(Nielsen Online)

Who are the standouts?

(Nielsen Online)

What social networks are showing the strongest growth potential in the EU and USA?
Alex Burmaster: We think the greatest growth potential will be niche's around a particular area of interest e.g. business (LinkedIn) music (Imeem) travel (WAYN) etc

Are niche networks undermining the larger networks?
Alex Burmaster: We are seeing a plateauing of the larger networks, which is to be expected as they hit critical mass, and we expect the niche's to grow, although they aren't necessarily the cause of the plateauing.

How many people visited social networks in the USA, and the coutries that you cover in the EU, last month?
Member communities category (social networks & blogging)
US = 104 million
UK = 18.9 million
FR = 17.6 million
IT = 15.1 million
DE = 14.6 million
ES = 11.7 million
(Nielsen Online)

TrustPlus, Shawn Broderick - CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Mar 24 -- What's your online reputation? Wouldn't it be nice if you could bring your good reputation together into one place to show it off. Trust Plus can help. - Mark Brooks

What is TrustPlus?
Trust Plus is a Webwide Reputation System. We allow people to aggregate their reputations from online communities and take them with them, wherever they go on the net, whether they’re buying, selling, dating, chatting, researching or blogging. We’ve built a platform that enables sites to use TrustPlus as their feedback system, but what’s really cool is that users can bring their reputation built elsewhere into the site. Just imagine – now you can take your eBay reputation and use it to sell more stuff on craigslist, Amazon, anywhere else you sell.

Walk me through how the process works.
Your reputation is based on three key components: behavior, context and network, and it includes explicit and implicit behavioral information. Your feedback on EBay is an example of explicit behavior. You bought something from me, and I explicitly rated you AAA+++. Implicit behavior would come from a site like Wikipedia. Let’s say you are Joe72314 on Wikipedia.  We base our rating on a number of factors such as how long your edits stick around.

But behavioral data is just one piece of the equation. Just because you’re the world’s best seller of refurbished cell phones, doesn’t mean I should trust your hotel reviews.. And just because I’ve had a good experience with you doesn’t mean that everybody else in the world is going to love you.  So we look at the weight you carry on the network. It may be the case that I’m not very well trusted on our shared network. Therefore, my opinion of you isn’t going to carry much weight. So what we’re really doing is building some interesting data based on people who know you and the people who know them. Finally, people can add to their reputations through background checks and other services.

So how would TrustPlus be used on a dating site or a social network?
The dating sites that we’re talking to want to be able to leverage a 3rd party rating process to allow people to rate each other. So a user will go out on a date and afterwards will be able to rate the person that they dated. What really matters in the dating world is truthfulness - did they look like their picture or was their marital status correct; that sort of jazz.

It strikes me that there’s major potential for abuse here. In the dating business, I can be a perfectly nice person and go out with another perfectly nice person and we can clash like cats and dogs and one of the parties could get very vindictive. How do you prevent that?

We’re not per se in the business of policing what people say about each other. You might have a valid opinion and there’s absolutely no way that I can tell whether your opinion is valid realistically speaking.

So what is important is that the system is architected so that if people don’t behave well, their opinions don’t matter much. If I say you are the biggest jerk that ever walked the face of the earth, my opinion only matters if somebody trusts me. If the network doesn’t trust me, my rating of you isn’t going to be very important. So applying the whole networking component to this exercise really helps to isolate people who behave badly to everyone.

What’s your revenue model? Does the consumer pay or does the site pay?
It’s actually a bit varied. Some of the dating sites that we’re working with are planning to offer ratings as a premium service so when you search for that 5’ 11” blond haired, blue eyed woman, the people with good reputations will bubble to the top of the results list and the people who don’t have good reputations might not even show up on the list. Some sites want everybody to have access to the reputation data and we would drive revenue by selling other value-added services.

Where do you see the online reputation industry going in the next 5 years?
The reputation business barely exists, so doing a 5-year projection might require a little more fortitude than I’m willing to do at this point in time.  But I’m happy to share my opinions. Today reputations are very vertically siloed. You may have a stellar rating on eBay, but be a jerk on a dating site. The two reputations never meet. I think that 18 months from now people will be amused with the fact that there used to be these big silos of reputational information that you had no access to and no control over. Three years from now I don’t think we’ll do anything online without some understanding of the people that we’re working with, dating, talking to or buying or selling with. So I think there will be a reputation layer of the Internet that develops just like there will be a social graph layer and there will be identity layers. All of those will be horizontal; all of those will be owned by the end user; and they will be pervasive.

Interview With LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye

HAMILTON COLLEGE -- Dec 5 -- CEO of LinkedIn, a professional network with 17 million members, was interviewed by CNN Money. Watch the interview. Nye did not comment on rumors that Rupert,Murdoch's News Corp. is in discussions to buy LinkedIn. "We're not planning to go public", Nye said. "We're trying to build a great company that delivers value to its members." FULL ARTICLE @ HAMILTON COLLEGE

Social Platform, Eric Schlissel, CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Nov 30 -- Social Platform provides white label social networks...enterprise strength. Leverage Software, Ning, Pringo Networks, and Affinity Circles are all competitors of sorts. See this Handy Little List (on the right bar, for future reference) if you're interested in Building Your Own social network. - Mark Brooks

Eric, can you tell me what the founding story is for Social Platform?
Yes,  about 10 years ago I founded a company called Geektek. A project came across my desk to build a social network for music fans. I realized that the real value of the project shouldn’t have been only one social network but a platform for building other social networks.

There was beginning to be a lot of demand for social applications. I decided to spin off Social Platform and start writing social application software. That vision hasn’t changed although the software has evolved significantly since then.

Where are you based?
Los Angeles is our corporate headquarters. We have our hosting center in the downtown data corridor. Social Platform’s development offices are in Seattle.

Are the programmers State side or do you use foreign services?
All State side.

So in a nutshell how would you describe what Social Platform does?
We provide custom, white label social applications for software and consulting services for social networking concepts.

And what would be some example clients?
A company called the Perseverance Group uses our software to create mentoring programs for universities. A more consumer oriented example would be Personality Zone which is launching this month. They do the Myers-Briggs personality sorter so they built a social network for people with the same personality type. We also develop internal collaborative communities for Fortune 500 companies as well as provide  trouble shooting for social networking concepts that need a new life our extensible platform can provide.

So you build everything from applications to full blown social networks?
Correct, from the very basic to some extraordinary projects.

How would you compare with the likes of Ning, Me.com and Pringo Networks?
I think Ning and Me are much more consumer oriented and they’re also not brandable. I don’t believe they allow people to create their own networks without the company’s branding. Pringo for instance does revenue sharing if I recall. They don’t provide a top to bottom service. People can come to us with just an idea and we’ll take them and hold their hands throughout the entire process - designing and implementing their social network.  Our business model directly vest us in our clients’ success. We want them to be very profitable. Our platform and abilities are very diverse and flexible. We think out of the box but our software is as far from that as possible.

Our marquee product is an engine called Social Platform Enterprise. It gives us the ability to adapt our software to our clients’ vision.  If a client wants a blog, we don’t have to make it look like every other blog out there. We can use our blog engine to make it look and operate the way they would like. However, if they want a custom module or a custom piece we also write that from scratch for them.

What kind of clients are you seeking?
We work with a number of clients in start ups, established companies in the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 and sometimes internal networks. As a privately held company we don’t rely on venture capital to sustain us. Instead, our success is based on our execution and how successful our clients become. We’re not really geared towards any particular industry. We look for clients that are engaged, knowledgeable and open.

Would you say that the corporate sector, the Fortune 500 who are looking for their own internal social network, is that the most lucrative segment?
The Fortune 500 is definitely a growing lucrative area to be in. As time goes on, we will see a lot more movement in the Fortune 500 and beyond. We are experiencing a great deal of exploration in this segment.

What are the top three web addresses you can give us to get a better idea of an example of some of the services that you’ve put together recently?
Most of our sites are protected by non disclosure agreements that protect our clients’ anonymity or may be HIPAA compliant or a closed corporate community and do not allow for public access however we do have a few that we can offer:
http://www.omotion.net/
http://swagswap.thecubefarm.com - created for headset maker Plantronics, launched in late August
http://beta.personalityzone.com/ - created for the http://www.advisorteam.org/ - in beta, full launch before
the end of 07. This site will import 6 million users from their existing site.

What are your goals for 2007 through the end of 2008 for SocialPlatform.com?
We’re integrating some of the more recent developments in the social world such as Open Social and some of the API’s that have just recently opened. At Social Platform, we’re big believers in the saying that ‘the most connected wins’ so we’re trying to be a better fit for existing websites.

We’d like to build  more agency relationships and business development opportunities where our team has already had great success for a firm of our size. Our roadmap also includes the desire to build on our traction at the enterprise level with the Fortune 500 and larger clients we’ve established. Additionally, we’re contemplating ways to better serve smaller budgets and companies with a starter package that will launch mid-2008. Though we’re completely approachable and accessible to the smaller companies and work with many, we’ve had much more concentrated attention and success at the enterprise level. 

BikerOrNot, James Plouf, CEO Interview

SNW -- Nov 18 --  Everyone and their Uncle are starting social networks these days. James runs HDtrader, a Harley Davidsons classifieds site, and has found a nice niche in bikers. - Mark Brooks

What is BikerOrNot’s founding story?
We started as a classified site for Harley Davidson. It was a project we had been working on for years when the whole social networking boom started taking over everything you read online. We decided that this audience was the perfect group for a social networking site because they already are a natural social network. This community consists of hundreds of thousands of people who stick together and congregate at rallies. It was only natural to develop a social network for them. Luckily for us, there wasn’t something already out there that was specifically made for the motorcycle community.

What’s your background?
I’m an engineer and I also have a degree in journalism. I worked for ten years as a petroleum engineer, with five of those years in Saudi Arabia, North Sea, California, and Texas. I then got a masters degree in journalism from City University in London. Around that time was when the internet started to go crazy and I decided my skills were probably better suited for building websites and not engineering anymore.

When did you start the classified site and what was the domain for that?
The classified site is HDTrader.com and it’s one that was made exclusively for Harley Davidsons. I like to tell people that it’s the only brand I know of that people tattoo onto their bodies. I don’t know of any other similar motorcycle or car brand. So, obviously, this is a very enthusiastic audience. There’s a passion in these people and we decided to harness it.

How is BikerOrNot different from other social networks?
The biggest thing is that we built BikerOrNot from the ground up. There are other social networks that have the basic ingredients of profiles, friends, and the ability to message each other and affiliated groups. All social networks seem to have these basic features. But then there’s us with our custom features that were made specifically for the biking community, like the ability to organize rides among members and being able to search for events and see who is going to these events. These are things that we built from the ground up. Other social networks that try to cater to the biking community seem to use out-of-the-box software. They either don’t have the ability or the know-how to customize their features. I’m not sure which it is, but they all seem to look exactly the same. We’re different because we’ve distinguished ourselves from them.

How did you seed BikerOrNot?
We advertised heavily on HDTrader, which reaches the exact same audience. HDTrader gets about 100,000 page views and 6,000 visitors a day, which gave us an instantaneous source of advertising. We also spent a lot of money advertising on Google AdWords, getting signups, and tweaking the campaigns. Google makes it very easy for us.

How fast is the site growing now?
We’re getting about 160 new members a day. It is growing about 10% a week and has grown every single week. We have not had one single week without growth. We’re now at about 350,000 page views and over 10,000 visitors a day. I think one of our most impressive statistics, though, is the pages-per-visit one, which is in the 30-33 range. And the average time spent on the site is about 15 minutes. So there is some serious engagement from our users.

How do you plan on making money?
Advertising, classified, mostly advertising. We’re counting on enormous page views. Maybe a year from now we’ll be able to focus on targeted advertising. For instance, if you want to reach a very specific demographic, like female Harley Davidson motorcycle riders, we’ll have that information and will be able to target ads made specifically for that group. We haven’t started building that yet, but that’s what I see as our future. You can charge much higher rates when you’re able to target certain demographics. Fundamentally, though, the business plan is advertising.

Have you thought about licensing the technology out?
No, not really. That’s a completely different business model. I really don’t want to lose focus right now from what we’re doing. I certainly wouldn’t license our technology out to competitors. I think the market for a Ning type of tool, out-of-the-box software, is pretty saturated. Ning has done a pretty good job, but to me that’s the easy part. It’s all the other things, such as trying to build something that is specifically catered to your audience and marketing it properly, that are the challenging aspects.

Yonja.com, Kerim Baran - CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 23, 2007 -- Yonja.com is Turkey's leading social network and is based out of San Francisco. Here's my interview with the CEO/Founder Kerim Baran. - Mark Brooks

What is Yonja’s founding story?
I grew up in Turkey and came to the U.S. for college (Northwestern and Harvard Business School) and then work. I worked mainly at technology companies for about 10 years. Right after getting my green card in late 2002-early 2003, I took a little time off and traveled the world. When I was traveling, I used blogs and whatnot to share photos with my friends and family. At that time, people were just starting to use these tools.

When I came back from traveling, I wanted to start my own technology business. At the time, there were only a handful of social networking sites, like Friendster, MySpace, and a little bit of LinkedIn. I realized they were powerful concepts that didn’t require much capital and grew virally. I wanted to create a hybrid of Friendster and MySpace for the European populations.

I had limited funds and bootstrapped Yonja mainly with what I had saved over the years. We never really got any good VC offers that we liked, so we decided to go it alone. In early 2004, an engineer partner and I put together the first, English version and invited my friends to do some QA and testing. Half of my friends were Turkish ex-pats living in the U.S. and the other half were a mix of Americans and Europeans from all over the world. Somehow, the Turks really owned the site and drew other Turks in. From there, it just became a viral success story. The first month, we had about 200 members; the next month we had 4,000; the following month we had 15,000; the following month we had 40,000; and so on. With only an English user interface – we didn’t even have a Turkish version for the first two years – we became the most trafficked website in Turkey probably within two years of launching. Now we have English and Turkish versions and 95% of our traffic is coming from Turkish users.

How many registered members do you have?
We have a little over 4.6 million registered members. Google Analytics has our last 30-day unique visitor count at 6.5 million, mainly because you can visit the site without being logged in. And I think Google Analytics counts IP addresses, which kind of errs on the high side. Right now, we’re getting about 6,000 to 8,000 new members a day. Our traffic, growth, and revenues have all pretty much been doubling every year for the past three years.

How is Yonja different from other social networks?
I think Yonja is different because it’s Turkish in nature and culture. Yonja is a female first name that means “clover” in English. In terms of services, it’s really a hybrid of other social networks, but for the Turkish market. We very closely follow all the innovations of the major social networking players and select and adapt the features and services we like to the Turkish culture. Because we possess the local taste, language, and know-how, we can do this.

Right now, we are by far the most trafficked Turkish website in the world. We serve about 45-50 million page views a day, which is about one and a half billion page views a month. We try to provide all the entertainment and other services that other social networks are providing. We promote Western and Turkish music at Yonja. We contract with local musicians in Turkey and promote them just like MySpace promotes musicians here in the U.S., but we also work with companies like Sony BMG in Turkey and help them promote Western albums. We also have other content, like listings, games, quizzes, polls, videos, and news. We are the prominent social networking site for the Turkish market.

Are you profitable at this stage?
Yes, we’ve been profitable pretty much since the 10th or 11th month. We really operated on a shoestring. When everybody was spending tens of thousands of dollars for colocation facilities, we shopped for the cheapest one. We took out functionality that was too CPU intensive – such as mapping out relationships, like Friendster used to do – so as to not tax our systems.

We were lucky because we were in a market that had less competition than most Western ones. That allowed us to charge for some features, such as excessive messaging, which is part of what made us profitable. Our ad revenues were there, but they weren’t enough. We’ve been working on maximizing the ad revenue, though, ever since and now we have a balanced revenue mix. We operate with quite high margins. We recently did a deal where we exited some of our ownership to a hedge fund, but I still pretty much control and run the company.

Tell me about the new media component.
We see ourselves as a media company. We take our revenues from advertising. I call it new media because we’re mainly on the internet. Beside Yonja, we’ve adapted a couple of other proven Western concepts to the Turkish market. The most important one is our listing service called MetroListe, which is a craigslist service for Turkish cosmopolitan areas, like Istanbul and Ankara. We also have another service called 7inci, which means “seven pearls”, a pearl for each day of the week. It’s a Turkish adaptation of DailyCandy.com. We also have services called Nolyo (“what’s happening”) and Yonjashop, which is a shopping portal similar to Amazon.

How much revenue would you attribute directly to Yonja?
Most of our revenue comes from Yonja at this point. MetroListe and 7inci are free services. We do make some advertising revenues from 7inci, but we don’t really make anything from MetroListe. We do make a little bit of income from Yonjashop, but we have a local partnership and only get a small percentage of the sales from the company we partner with.

What are your goals for 2007 through 2008?
Our immediate goals are to continue growing the Yonja side of the business and the team. We now have about 25 employees in our San Francisco and Istanbul offices, with most being in Istanbul. We want to add more features and services for both consumers and advertisers on Yonja and, to do that, we need to grow our development, customer service,  advertising,  sales, and marketing teams. We’ll probably get into one or two other new services for our user population in 2008. But, that’s it. We’re profitable, but conservative. We wait to see what works in the Western market first and then adapt accordingly to the Turkish market. At this point, we have no plans to launch into other languages or countries. It makes a lot more sense to capture more of the Turkish consumers instead.

Doof.com, Liad Shababo, CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 11, 2007 -- Doof.com combines social networking with games. Here's my interview with the CEO of Doof.com, Liad Shababo. - Mark Brooks

What is doof’s founding story?
In 2005, I started a company called Money Gaming (MoneyGaming.com) that allowed people to play games of skill against each other for real money. The thinking was, if people do it with poker, why not with other player-to-player games. Players could come to the site, deposit money, and agree to play, say, chess for $10 each.

After Money Gaming went live and quickly became big, it became apparent to me that winning money wasn’t the highest motivation for people with regards to playing games online. There are far higher motivations that Money Gaming hadn’t taken into account.

So, earlier this year, I decided to start the concept again from a Web 2.0 perspective by putting together all the fascinating components of social networking along with all our expertise in building a casual gaming platform. Thus, doof was born.

What’s your personal background?
I’ve been working in the internet world since about 2002. I started off as an affiliate for the online gaming companies and very quickly realized there was the potential for not only making money, but also more importantly offering products which would be used. For me, the Web 2.0 side of the internet is when things got exciting. I like the idea of collaboration between different people. I like the idea of media sharing, for example. So, I began to research and learn more and more about ways people could interact with each other online. It seemed that every facet – sharing photos, videos, comments, ideas, etc. – had been done. Except for games. Playing games with each other hadn’t really been worked out yet, especially on a freemium-based Web 2.0 model. So, we worked on developing that idea and, ten months later, happily launched doof.

How is doof different from other social networks?
I wouldn’t really classify doof as a social network. When we were building doof, it was very hard for us to easily get across what it was. We offered a lot of things, like games, tournaments, competitions, media sharing, customization, blogging, and more. It was very hard for me to pinpoint exactly what doof was.

Since we launched a few weeks ago, though, several blogging sites have come across us organically and very kindly written reviews about us. A key phrase that they all used and that I’ve decided to use myself now is “social gaming” since it’s social networking coupled with casual gaming. I think doof is the first, maybe only, site to utilize this social gaming concept with a Web 2.0 front end.

Doof is based fully in a new and upcoming technology called Flex, which is part of the Adobe Flash family. Flex had been used primarily for banking services and behind-the-scenes software, but we very quickly noted its power and realized we could tame it. So, we developed doof from the ground up utilizing this new technology and now have a media/entertainment platform that is second-to-none in terms of vibrancy and richness. Since launch, players have very clearly told us that we offer a functionality that is above and beyond what they can get elsewhere. Users can decide color schemes, sizes, layouts, and backgrounds, and can even upload their own wallpaper. These things were never offered before in online gaming or social networking.

How is the site going?
We turned off the password feature in September, didn’t really make any more marketing calls, and didn’t really turn on any of our paid marketing avenues. And, to be honest, the last few weeks have been a mind-opening experience for us. Turns out, if your product is good, it will spread organically and, before you know it, you will have a user base.

In the three weeks since we’ve launched, we now have thousands of users. People have referred their friends and are really using the software as we had hoped. Even though there’s a financial element to doof with the virtual currency – which not only is an indicator of your skill level, but also can be used to purchase virtual goods and give to other players – we weren’t planning on pushing any of the financial aspects until way down the line. But people began to deposit money on day one. So, it really exceeded our expectations for the first few weeks and we now have very high hopes that our paid advertising, when it commences, will take off.

How do you make money?
When we started this, there were many ways we could have monetized the site, like through subscriptions and advertising. But, as an internet user myself, I am not so into subscriptions and felt advertising was a bit obtrusive and would really hinder the game playing social aspects of the software. So, we settled on the freemium-based business model where the majority of the platform would be free. Anyone could play games, register their pictures and profiles, instant message with other members, compete in tournaments, etc. Certain bits of the site, though, like elite games or specific virtual goods, would be locked down and require ongoing subscription.

Over time, I expect to add some sponsorship to the site. Hopefully, different global brands would sponsor certain events or tournaments. But, for now, freemium is the way forward.

What social networking or social gaming sites have been an inspiration to you?
I think it’s become a cliché now, but I think when Mark Zuckerberg opened up Facebook and allowed developers to really get down and dirty in the code and help mould Facebook’s future was enlightening to us. We had always hoped to have open APIs for 3rd parties to develop, but the level to which Facebook has allowed 3rd parties access and control over the end user experience is really inspiring. I think that’s definitely the way forward. I think once doof has finished its beta stage and we’ve ramped up its marketing and user base, we would very much like to follow in Facebook’s footsteps by opening our APIs to 3rd parties.

What are your goals for 2007 through 2008?
In one of the folders on my desk, I have a project pipeline which spans probably several dozen pages. We’ve got a lot of work to do. My obvious aim is to increase the user base, but it’s also to have global competitions where different parts of the player base will compete against other parts, like the USA versus Europe. We would like to start an atmosphere of competition on the site coupled with social networking. You could personalize your profile, but at the same time compete for your country, age, hometown, or company. That’s the goal – to really ramp up the user base and begin to polarize the audiences so we can create some exciting and pretty fierce competition.

MyChurch, Joe Suh - CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Oct 4, 2007 -- MyChurch.org is focused on helping churches start their own social networks. Here's my interview with Joe Suh, CEO and Founder of MyChurch. - Mark Brooks

What is the founding story of MyChurch?
MyChurch was created out of personal needs. My wife and I had been going to our church for a couple of years and, despite it being a fairly large church, we only knew a handful of people there. We met a lot of individuals, but we didn’t really have any strong connections with them. We really felt an online community could strengthen some of those loose connections we were making every Sunday.

We also never visited our own church’s website. We felt that church websites were really geared towards visitors and not necessarily members. As a member, I would like to have an interactive incentive to visit. I would like to not just download content, but also create my own content, write a blog, share photos, organize my small group events, and interact with my friends. Those are the two personal needs that led to the creation of MyChurch.

How does your service work?
We like to think of it as a Facebook for churches where both individuals and churches have profiles. We provide churches with tools that cater specifically to church communities. For example, we give them a group blog, a resource-sharing board (kind of like a classifieds board), a space for their sermons (audio or video files), and other interactive and collaborative tools.

Who inspired you? Who are your competitors?
We were initially inspired by some of the other more generic social networks. I remember being in love with Friendster back in 2003 and thinking that a church could really take advantage of such functionality. Then, I started seeing churches appearing in places like MySpace in 2004 and 2005. Churches were naturally adapting and gravitating towards social networks and I realized there had to be a better tool to cater specifically to them.

As far as competitors, a lot of the larger social networks have church communities. For example, there are about 130,000 religious groups on MySpace. We don’t necessarily view MySpace and Facebook as competitors, but there are certainly a lot of church communities that exist on those types of sites already. And there are also some direct competitors. There are a number of generic social Christian networks that are trying to be the Christian alternative to MySpace. They’re sort of indirect competitors, though, because our service is focused on the church and not just Christianity in general. So, while other Christian social networks might be gathering Christians together, we’re trying to gather them for a specific purpose and that is to bridge their offline church community with an online one.

Have you thought about starting sites for other faiths?
We’re a part of the Christian church community – it’s our culture and it’s what we know best. We know how to foster communities for Christians. We’ve been approached by those of other faiths – Jewish people, Mormons, Muslims – and we’ve considered licensing our software out, but we haven’t personally considered creating communities for different faiths.

How does MyChurch make money at this stage?
There are two models. The first is your regular advertising model where we try to find relevant advertising for our Christian community. And the other is a subscription-based one. Our service is free, but churches can upgrade to take advantage of extra features and more disk space. Monthly charges for a church are $12 for the extended feature set and $25 for the premium one.

As time goes on, we’re seeing more and more churches jumping onto the subscription model. In fact, our subscription revenue is rivaling our advertisement revenue, which is new and good for us. We’d rather have a site that’s a service as opposed to one that’s just full of ads.

As far as revenue generated, I don’t want to disclose any exact numbers, but it’s a four-digit figure per month, which is enough for us to cover our costs and consider ourselves profitable.

How many employees do you have?
There are just four of us and we’re all full-time. What’s interesting about our site, though, is that we also have this collection of volunteers. They’re members of the site who really want to be involved. They do everything from moderating content to watching out for spammers and scammers to handling church submissions.

There are 300,000 Christian churches in the United States, but we only accept those that adhere to the Nicene Creed and the concept of the Trinity. Most Christian churches accept the Nicene Creed, but some reject it and it’s these latter churches that we don’t want. So, we research the churches that want a page and make sure they’re in agreement with the Christian culture that we’re trying to foster. For that, we need a lot of manual labor to regulate and moderate lists and make sure that the churches that are being added are good churches, real churches with people who we want to invite on our site.

How did you initially promote and seed MyChurch?
We did a lot of things. In the early days, we did a lot of PR. We reached out to bloggers and journalists and we also did an email marketing campaign targeting pastors. We purchased a list and contacted the pastors and said, “Hey we’re creating a space for your church here. Would you like to get started on it?” I think PR was the main vehicle that really drove the growth of our site. The initial buzz generated our first wave of early adopters and we’ve mostly relied on organic growth since.

How fast is the site growing now?
Now, we get about 400 new members and about 50 new churches a day. We have about 35,000 members right now, but we’re hitting a point where we should be getting into the six-digit member registration fairly soon.

In terms of traffic, we get about 3 million page views per month and about 200,000 unique visitors per month.

What are your goals for 2007 through 2008?
By the end of the year, we hope to eclipse 100,000 registered members. We also hope to be in the 10,000 churches range. With some 300,000 Christian churches in the United States, getting 10,000 of them is by no means a majority, but it’s a good threshold to strive for. We just want to continue growing, continue making the service available to more and more churches and more and more people, and just continue on this path of profitability. We’ve been self-funded to this point and we think we can continue that. Hopefully, with the number of both subscriptions and advertisement inquiries increasing, we can continue to be a profitable company in ’07 and ’08.

WAYN.com, Peter Ward - CEO Interview

SNW INTERVIEW -- Sep 27, 2007 -- WAYN is one of my favorite social networks.  I really like the map which shows where I've traveled to in the past, and the mails updating me on new people that are moving/traveling to town. I last interviewed Peter in June 2006. WAYN.com has dropped its paid membership program since then. Here's my latest interview with Pete. - Mark Brooks

How is WAYN unique?
WAYN is unique because it’s a social network that allows you to meet people based on where you are now, where you’ve been, and where you are going. If a Londoner is traveling to San Francisco and would like to see who else from London will be traveling to San Francisco that same weekend, they can log on to the site, run a search, and see which, say, 18-25 year old London females will be there. It allows them to plan their journey in advance.

That’s not the only reason why people use the service however, maybe you’re just interested in seeing who is coming to your hometown so you can show them around and have a bit of a cultural exchange. The core unique selling points of WAYN are location and travel. Rather than saying we are a niche player, I’d say we are a much more focused player that caters to the lifestyles of those who travel.

How many members does WAYN have and where are they now?
WAYN now has 9 million members around the world, 20% of which are predominantly in the U.K. We have almost another 20% in the U.S. and Canada as well. We have members traveling all over the place, but mostly people are still in their hometowns. They don’t travel all of the time.

We had about 4.3 million unique visitors last month. That number has grown from around 2 million a few months back, so we’ve literally doubled our growth in terms of unique visitors.

You no longer charge a membership fee. Why?
We still have a subscription element to the site, but we decided that the key focus for us moving forward is growth. A subscription-based model that limits interaction unless you pay wasn’t sustainable. We need to ensure that we are a scalable and growing business. So, with the help of our Chairman, Brent Hoberman, who has had a lot of experience growing online businesses, we decided to open up the integration and see what happens. We now provide a lot more features and services to all members, regardless of whether they’ve joined or not. And that seems to have been a very successful move for us. Since doing that, we’ve seen our page views per user double and the time spent online actually double also. It’s clearly had a very positive impact on the usage of the site.

We are looking to maintain the subscription element and currently are in the process of recalibrating that model. Those who upgrade will benefit from a number of both online and off-line services and benefits. For example, a U.K. VIP member will receive free annual multi-trip travel insurance across Europe, along with other benefits such as free trials of downloadable language translators and free cocktails in bars around the world.

We’re also building up a network of partners who are interested in providing our large community of traveling members with certain benefits when they come to that particular destination; 2-for-1 restaurant offers, entrance tp nightclubs, free cocktails in bars etc. We see that as a great way of providing the traveler with a number of things to do when they get to their destination, along with the ability to meet the people with whom they’ve interacted on the site. From our research we know that many of our members are interested in that kind of service.

That sounds like a worldwide version of the Entertainment Book.
Absolutely. I think we see the potential in ultimately becoming the most useful travel and lifestyle portal. We started off as a pure social network with a traveling slant, but we are clearly focusing on how we can build that service into something that is much more valuable both online and off-line to our users.

Are you profitable at this stage?
That’s a very good question and we’ve decided to invest more than we’re making. When we changed the model, our subscription element took a big hit and advertising is taking some time to ramp up. The good news is that the advertising revenue that we’re generating is growing 25% month-on-month, so we’re really getting close to the point where we can see the growth in the long run being much more exponential and valuable than where we were before. I think we have taken a short-term step back in terms of revenues but have benefited from the growth and ultimately long-term revenue potential from the business.

Now the site is very international. How are you monetizing abroad?
We use a network of age