RAMP-The Content Optimization Company

Tom Wilde is a widely recognized leader in the field of Internet search and online advertising, and prior to becoming EveryZing’s CEO has held numerous leadership roles in the field including SVP/GM of the Consumer Division at domain portfolio company NameMedia, senior vice president and general manager of MIVA Inc.’s North American division, responsible for both MIVA’s U.S. online advertising network as well as the company’s consumer business, and senior operating roles managing Terra Lycos’ global search & publishing divisions. Tom has also served on the IAB Search Engine Committee and holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

According to Peter Morville, we are “at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet” however as he sees it, “the user experience is out of control,” and “findability” will become the real story moving forward. In a recent post on Read Write Web, Richard MacManus examines Morville’s ideas, particularily his notion of ambient findability—which Melville defines as “the quality of being locatable or navigable.” Ambient findability, Morville contends, becomes more and more fundamental as information overload increases and mobile devices play a greater role in our day-to-day activities.

Morville’s most recent book, appropriately titled Ambient Findability, explores his theories on user experience and information overload. The central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are critical components of the new world order. He further states that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future.

Search is among our most important and complex challenges. As the choice of first resort for many users and tasks, search is a defining element of the user experience. And, as a unique amalgam of content, metadata, technology and design, the search results interface demands intense cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Morville believes that the future will be about something beyond search—and that something is his “findability.” His conclusion is a broad call for greater innovation—the seeds of which he sees in both Google Book Search and EveryZing. As the wealth of information continues to expand and the line blurs between on and offline activity, search becomes increasingly complicated and multidimensional. Business intelligence systems, such as software built to find and sort based on patterns, will need to bring together taxonomies and tags so that browsing and search complement one another and enhance the user experience.

Search is not broken, however the search results leave much to be desired. Meta Data, which is really just “information about information”, will be one of the biggest growth areas this decade in terms of R&D and application development. The Semantic Web vision will only happen when content producer invest in technology and systems to automatically and consistently generate accurate meta-data for their content. This meta data becomes the key to “Ambient Findability” for all content across all formats and all devices.

As EveryZing’s chief revenue officer, Stephen is responsible for all customer facing activities, including business development, advertising sales, and client services. A veteran of the online search and publishing industry, Stephen joins EveryZing from leadership roles at Reed Elsevier, FAST, and Yahoo. Most recently, Stephen was CEO of RB Search, Reed Elsevier’s strategic business unit tasked with developing Reed’s cross-business global search engine and search marketing platform to support over 1,000 RBI and affiliate sites. At FAST Stephen was VP/General manager responsible for all of FAST’s strategic business development initiatives and customer delivery lifecycle. Under Stephen’s leadership, FAST’s revenues grew from $26M to $129M over a three year period, and he was a key contributor to FAST’s successful $100M sale of its Web Search business unit to Yahoo.

Raymond Lau has been leading entrepreneurial technology efforts for over two decades. Prior to joining EveryZing, he was a senior technology lead for IBM’s Content Discovery Services group, which acquired iPhrase Technologies, Inc., a company Ray co-founded. iPhrase was a provider of high value enterprise search solutions to Fortune 1000 customers including Charles Schwab, Staples and CA. Some of Ray’s other entrepreneurial efforts include Handango, a leading distributor of software for mobile devices and StuffIt, the data archival standard on MacOS from 1987 onwards. Dr. Lau received his S.B., S.M. and Ph.D., all in computer science, from MIT. His doctoral work was in the area of syllable modeling for voice recognition.

Bob is responsible for the launch, support and ongoing account management of EveryZing customers. As part of EveryZing’s founding team, and prior to assuming the VP of Client Services role, Bob was VP of Business Development. Prior to EveryZing, Bob worked as VP of Sales & Business Development at BBN Technologies. Before BBN, Bob directed marketing and product management at Teradyne, the worldwide leader in automatic test solutions. Prior to this, Bob started and ran the storage networking product line for Empirix, a spinout of Teradyne and the leading provider of web application and network infrastructure test and monitoring solutions. Prior to Empirix, Bob held sales, sales and product management positions at Teradyne and operations and engineering positions at General Electric. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSEE from Northeastern University.

In the second part of his interview with John Shinal, EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde talks about what he’s learned in a decade as an Internet executive and entrepreneur.

A good company starts with a great consumer experience, according to Wilde, a former executive with the search engine and Internet portal Lycos.

“If that’s high quality and a service to the user, the company usually benefits from that,” Wilde says.

Go to vator.tv to watch the interview or catch the previous segment here.

In a recent post, Video Nuze looks at the growing number of video-based “how-to” websites. The Video Nuze post highlights the logical popularity of how-to videos, asking:

How many of us would rather watch a video of someone explaining how to do something vs. reading a lengthy and often poorly-written guide?

Such sites have multiplied recently as a rush of well-funded competitors clamber for entry into the space. These companies have varied strategies, business models and content approaches. For the ad-supported sites, some strictly show professional videos while others focus mainly on UGC.

Both types of sites are seeing a good deal of buzz around advertising. One of the main reasons there is a lot of activity on the ad-supported side is that how-to videos sites deliver the highly-targeted and engaged audiences that sponsors crave. Great revenue opportunities exist for those sites able to aggregate enough traffic in a given category to attract advertising sponsors.

But with so many competitor sites crowding the space, how can each site effectively draw-in and engage users? With all of this video being produced, how will the companies ensure that when users search—either through Google or directly on their site—the most relevant content is delivered? Video content is at a fundamental disadvantage to text content in that it is largely invisible to Google and Yahoo. To build its traffic, 5Min plans to pursue widgetization, 3rd party distribution and SEO; this will be a good start, but SEO for video is non-trivial. That said, this category of video content lends itself well to speech to text to enable it to “plug-in” to the Search Economy. To succeed, these how-to sites must enable superior search and discovery of their videos. Solid video SEO and positive user experience through straightforward, accurate site search will be defining factors of the sites that manage to pull ahead of the pack.

As globalization increases, technologies grow more advanced and human knowledge expands, we must adapt on an individual as well as a societal level. Our knowledge continues to mushroom, becoming too great to store in our print libraries and, for each person, in our minds alone. As online networks and social sites become deeply integrated in people’s lives, the virtual becomes inextricable from our “offline” activities, communities, and lives. With greater amounts of personal information moving online, we need ever more powerful and accurate search to keep our contacts, photos, videos etc. accessible. Universal search will become invaluable as people take advantage of the free storage capacity the web has to offer for everything from pictures to videos to calendars and contact lists; as our lives and our memories move online, our need for comprehensive universal search will grow exponentially. Web storage—unlike our attics and basements—must be easily navigable.

Storage Capacity

There are a number of factors that point towards the exciting direction of information storage, particularly as it relates to people’s sense of their real and virtual selves and the steady merger of these concepts into one cohesive identity. As Bhavin Turakhia, Founder & CEO of Directi highlights on his blog, Web 2.0 applications act as extensions of our desktops, storage costs are continually dropping, and people now expect nearly unlimited storage online.

The Implications

Dropping storage costs and free space to store data online—particularly within social networking sites—mean that more and more you can store anything and everything about your life at little to no cost. YouTube, Flickr, Facebook et all are already accumulating multiple facets of people’s lives online. The virtual world has grown so that what we do and how we represent ourselves online are now essential components of our identities. A recent report from accustream entitled, “User Generated Video 2005 – 2008: Mania Meets Mainstream” shows that the market for user generated videos grew by an estimated 70% in 2007, up from a total 13.2 billion views generated in 2006. These are videos average people are making and uploading; these are vignettes, pieces of our lives on YouTube. The same report forecasts that the market will continue to grow by 52% in 2008, reaching 34 billion views.

Social networking sites only want to encourage these trends. In a MediaPost article about the coming launch of the MySpace Developer Platform (an initiative in direct response to the success that rival Facebook has had with its own open developer program), MySpace COO Amit Kapur states: “This is a critical year in the evolution of the Internet” describing his focus for MySpace as creating an increasingly “personal, portable, and collaborative Web.”

The Transactive Web

And what about our own personal storage capacity: our memory? MediaPost’s Search Insider blog had an interesting couple of entries by Gord Hotchkiss recently relating to what he calls “transactive memory” and its place in the digital age. As he illustrates, we have different methods for storing our memories. Hotchkiss explains that as some people are better at remembering certain types of things, we have adapted to extend our memory capabilities collectively by using transactive memory. This neurological plasticity allows our brain to prune itself, getting rid of capacities we no longer need while strengthening those that we do.

Hotchkiss raises the questions: What about computers, and, by extension, the Internet? What about search? New technologies let us dump the details of our life on a hard drive or website somewhere and search for it when we need it. In the place of all this memory digital storage is freeing up, Hotchkiss thinks we may develop greater skills in navigating online spaces. We may improve our navigation skills, but more importantly, we will expect comprehensive, powerful universal search technology to make finding all things virtual as easy as a simple click of your mouse.