5 Questions with Inform.com CEO Neal Goldman
|
Written By Reprise Media | October 31, 2005 | Share This
|
|
A few weeks ago we
told you about Inform.com, an online news and blog search system that serves up content based upon your individual tastes and preferences.
SearchViews recently interviewed Inform’s CEO, Neal Goldman. Read on for his thoughts on adoption of RSS, “everythingitis” and what news publications ring his bell.
1. Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org recently leveled some criticism against Inform (along with Rojo and others) for having too many buttons, bells and whistles - a condition he calls “Everythingitis”. Clearly, you guys have a lot to offer. How are users reacting to all the various features you’ve introduced? Are there some that have posed more of a challenge than others as far as user adoption?
We released an early version of our product to meet the pent up demand of avid news consumers with a real need for high powered news tools. These people, sometimes referred to as “news junkies”, have responded very well to our product. Ironically, the features this group has embraced - managing blogs and traditional media in one place, and tracking specific topics, people, places organizations, industries or any combination thereof, are the same features passive news consumers are finding hard to adopt. However, we recognize that the key to our success is our ability to quickly make our technology transparent and easy to use for all news consumers. By the end of the year we will release a new version with significant ease of use improvements.
2. In a way Inform’s a part of the next generation of online news. What are some of the ways the industry has changed in the past 12-24 months? What trends have you excited? How will the news industry look a year from now?
Print circulation is down - 2004 saw the most significant decline in a decade as more consumers are now reading news online than off. Those online readers are gravitating towards aggregators. People are reading news topically and they want to dig deeper into those topics while getting a variety of sources. Publisher loyalty still exists but in order to deliver, news organizations need to retain their current readers while also trying to reach a bigger audience. Recently there has been a surge in adoption of RSS, however, still less than 2% of internet users subscribe to RSS feeds because the tools are still too “techy” for the average user. RSS adoption is really just an example of consumer demand for more personalized news tools so that they can get the news they want more efficiently. In the next couple of years we think you’ll see great strides in personalization and relevancy for news consumers such as news recommendations based on past usage. Also, we’re likely to see multimedia convergence - video and audio in news.
3. How does your site currently rank your news results? Do you treat the information in Inform differently based upon the source? Why or why not?
Our front page is editorially driven but the rest of the site is automatically generated. On our vertical pages, for example, we rank news stories by what we call clusters. Within each cluster are articles written about the same news “story” written by different publications. The larger the cluster the more relevant we believe it is. Our technology allows us to understand relationships between stories much better than our competition and therefore we have the capability to rank by cluster with precision. We don’t treat the information any differently based upon the sources, only on the frequency of coverage. We believe users know what they want to read, and our job is to deliver it to them more quickly and efficiently.
4. Right now a lot of companies are launching in your so-called niche. What’s going to differentiate the winners from the losers? How will ‘the search engine factor’ (firms such as Inform being bought by Google, Yahoo, etc.) play into this? What have you learned from your past experience with Capital IQ?
There are a lot of companies coming out with reading solutions but what we’re doing is quite different. We think we will succeed for 3 main reasons:
- Experience - This is a group of second time entrepreneurs doing the same thing they’ve had their hands in since 1998 - building a platform to structure unstructured data. Neal Goldman, our CEO, helped built his last company from scratch, unseated several large, established competitors in the brand-loyal financial information business, built the company to over 1000 employees with significant market penetration, and sold it to McGraw-Hill in the fall of 2004. All of this occurred in spite of very difficult market conditions.
- Our Team - In addition to Neal, we have Joe Einhorn who was the first employee at Capital IQ and its initial technologist. Also, we have a talented global team to help us gain traction quickly and affordably. We are believers that math will play a big role in the future of information navigation, and we have a very talented team in that area.
- Timing - Part of the reason we launched in beta mode was we believed the market was asking for a solution like ours. The things that make our platform timely for both readers and publishers is a convergence of several market forces: 1) consumer behavior - branded reading needs to be simplified and combined with typical topic-driven surfing; 2) editorial attitude change - as publishers are moving their content and business online they are increasingly receptive to technologies that generate incremental page views and ad impressions; 3) new technology - programs such as AJAX allow us to do things with data and the user experience that were not possible before.
5. What are some of your favorite news publications? Are you a news junkie? Did you have a paper route as a kid?
Yes I am. I read the WSJ, the Op-ed of the NYT, my college paper and a few magazines. I didn’t have a paper route but I did have an Apple II+.
Topics: Interviews |