Alex Iskold was at DEMOfall last
week, but not only to live-blog the event
and do interviews for Read/WriteWeb 🙂 He was also promoting his own product blueorganizer, so I thought it’s only fair to
turn the tables and interview him about DEMO – particularly as blueorganizer was
regarded as one of DEMO’s highlights by both Techcrunch and ZDNet.
Also adaptiveblue has just released a brand new version of the
blueorganizer. New features include the “autobluemark” (which automatically collects
objects from the sites that users visit often), blogs collection with popularity ranking
built in, smart filtering (which brings iTunes-like flexible selectors to the
blueorganizer), a google desktop widget and much more.
Richard: What is your company about?
Alex: adaptiveblue was founded with the vision to build the next generation of smart
browsing and personalization technologies. Our first product, the blueorganizer
extension, is focused on bringing the semantics of everyday objects into the browser to
make users more productive.
Richard: Why did you start this company?
Alex: I have been thinking about personalization and semantics for quite sometime. I
saw that there was a gap between theoretical thinking about semantic web and practical
steps to get to it and wanted to help bridge it. Ironically my previous startup,
Information Laboratory (which was sold to IBM), was focused on the structure of complex
systems like software, power grids and society. So I think that understanding of the
structure can take you very far, but to build truly personalized online experiences you
need to understand the semantics of things.
Richard: Tell us what adaptiveblue has achieved so far?
Alex: We have developed and launched our product in record time – just short of 5
months. We also created innovative and important pieces of infrastructure for
blueorganizer. We leveraged XML and JavaScript to roll out new collections and actions in
a very short time, without having to do JavaScript coding. Finally, we just had an
amazing launch at DEMOfall. It has been a great success and we are very pleased.
Richard: What are your major challenges?
Alex: There are a couple major challenges. Number one is building the user base –
standing out from the crowd. DEMOfall helped us address that in an excellent way. Another
challenge is expanding and growing in the right way. We are here to build products that
people use without expanding to be a 30 people company. Our challenge is to scale and we
are going to address it by being smart about our software infrastructure and
resources.
Richard: What are you going to build in the next 12 months?
Alex: We are going to add more collections like images, video and people. Expect
support for microformats and more smart browsing stuff. We are also planning to start
work and roll out some backend personalization technologies. But we can’t talk about them
yet 🙂
Richard: What is the most important thing for a start up to be
successful?
Alex: Passion, closely followed by people, focus and agility.
Richard: What web sites / blogs do you use / read often?
Alex: Techcrunch, Read/Write Web, Peter Rip’s blog, Headrush. Use Basecamp from
37signals a lot, and cvsdude to store our code.
Richard: Which ‘web 2.0’ things are noise and which are signals?
Alex: Signals are true innovations, noise are clones.
Richard: How did you find DEMOFall?
Alex: We found this show fantastic! The energy and the crowds were just amazing, We got
so much out of it and were very well received. We highly recommend the show to all companies that are launching new products.
Disclaimer: not only is Alex a regular R/WW contributer, but blueorganizer is a
sponsor too.
