The last round of CEO pitches were very good. Here were my favs and not favs.
- Unisfair is a provider of virtual events and virtual worlds for marketing or any other event type that a company might want to run. Gave a great example of the Cisco partner space, a virtual world for Cisco and its key partners and includes a partner pavilion where partners can have a branded virtual space as well as assets and ways to interact with Cisco and the partner via chat, VOIP, Webex etc... brilliant idea. It also has a contact center platform for backend routing and queuing of contact requests. This is a really nice enterprise play. Someone should snap these guys up.
- ImageSpan provides a licensing royalty automation platform. Virtually all royalty transactions are manual - whether it be for content or applications. These guys have a nice web service platform which makes licensing digital content simple... its a managed service for the licensing of content and apps. The CEO did a great job of demonstrating why an eCommerce engine does not fit the bill for licensing transactions and what's needed is an eLicensing platform. Comcast and Adobe are current customers.
- AzoogleAds - is a performance-based Ad network which connects advertisers to highly targeted consumers online. The company has 150mm in revenue and is cashflow financed. Their model is "CPA" (cost per Action) NOT CPM or CPC. The advertiser pays once a transaction is generated. They seem to have a serious optimization algorithm that looks at behavioral, contextual, geo, demo and time of day information to serve up the right ad to the right ad channel. Interesting to me as a marketer because they are focused on conversions NOT impressions. Ed, are you listening?
- Clupedia - clues = opinions, whether they are in posts, ratings, comments, reviews etc... clupedia aims to be an aggregator mainly from partners such as Amazon Reviews (seems like only partner right now), trying to create a metaweb of opinion information. Has decent toolbar functionality to highlight any term and build a rating around that highlight, clues are then propagated out to the web (but I don't see how this propagation works or how I would leverage this, seems like epinions could extend their already strong base of opinions with some functional social enhancements similar to what Clupedia is aiming at. Clupedia is to my way of thinking a social version of epinions.com
- 1020 Placecast - combines demographics, physical locale, proximity info to create a hyper local targeting information for an ad target. Not a compelling pitch. I didnt hear why I should care. They also need to get 'physical' around doing better presentations.
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