Our guest today is Ronen Shilo, CEO of Conduit. Conduit offers publishers another way to engage with their audience: the community toolbar. The Conduit toolbar runs on your desktop (Windows only), and keeps you up to date with the hot-skinny from your favorite publisher.
Before founding Conduit, Ronen started Effective-I, a learning system that categorized, organized, and delivered information to shorten search cycles within an enterprise. Ronen also founded DoubleAgent, the first company to develop a collaboration technology that enabled application sharing over the Internet. DoubleAgent was later acquired by NetManage. He received a BSc in Computer Science from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology).
Age, favorite artist, pet peeve, and when you sleep at night you dream about…?
Age: 48. Favorite Artist: Bruce Springsteen. Pet peeve: The answer “this is hard” or “this can’t be done”. When you sleep at night you dream about: that depends…recently I don’t sleep… but when I do, I usually dream about the most recent issue I am having, either about the business or some other challenge I’m dealing with personally
I understand why a publisher might want to encourage users to download the Conduit toolbar from a business and marketing point of view. The toolbar certainly ensures more “face time” outside of browsing sessions. But how do you know that users want to “be connected” when they’re not actively browsing the Web?
That’s the beauty of our model. We don’t know if users want to be connected so we let them decide. Nothing force them to keep Conduit. But, we do anything we can to make Conduit attractive enough so they’ll have reason to keep it. Whether they are beyond the boundaries of the site or their mind is set on different subjects. Given that we have had over 6 million users indicates that clearly there are users who want to be connected with the publisher of choice.
I’m a bit confused by the references to the Gotuit Toolbar on your site. What is the relationship between the Conduit Toolbar and the Gotuit Toolbar? Can you describe the differences and the uses for each?
Conduit is the hosted free platform used by Gotuit team to create the Gotuit community toolbar. Basically, each publisher creates their own community toolbar, powered by Conduit, and brands it as their own. Gotuit’s community toolbar is driving significantly more video searches and page views through user engagement and retention.
Ok, I think I understand: The Gotuit toolbar pools the resources and popular content of all the Conduit users out there? So if your interest is simply to see “cool stuff”, you would recommend going for the Gotuit toolbar, but if your interests are specific and focused, you would recommend getting the Conduit toolbar of your preferred publisher?
I think you are getting confused with our recent promotion of the Gotuit toolbar - the Gotuit toolbar is a customer built toolbar, just like any other customer toolbar, built by Gotuit for Gotuit end users. The Gotuit toolbar does not pool the resources and popular content of all the Conduit users - it just connects Gotuit users to the Gotuit site.
Conduit allows publishers to create their own toolbar, branded as their own to market to their own customers. Therefore, what the end user sees when they download a toolbar, is not a “Conduit toolbar” but whatever the company is that created their toolbar. For example, Major League Baseball created a toolbar to market to their customers; therefore, as a MLB fan, you could see the offer of the toolbar on the MLB site, you would download it and then on your browser would be an MLB branded toolbar with whatever functionality MLB determines that their fans would want the most - in this case its buttons which include a baseball news ticker, MLB radio, MLB features and more.
That said, Gotuit is just another customer just like MLB. They have developed a toolbar, just like MLB did, that they can offer to their site visitors. They just happen to be the featured on Conduit as the featured customer toolbar; these rotate and at other times other publishers toolbar are featured. We also just recently did a customer press release with Gotuit as they had significant numbers to report on their use of the toolbar. Gotuit’s web developer created their Gotuit branded toolbar and promote it to their users on their site. Gotuit offers a toolbar with buttons for viewing video, tagging video, visiting the blog and more which is to promote their own site to their own users.
How do members interact with their Conduit Toolbar? Can you give an example of how members might interact with each other and the publisher? How is it not simply a “push-style” broadcast medium?
We have over 130,000 publishers, 6 million users, and almost as many unique interactions. Basically Conduit enables a publisher to put the best of his website and his service offering on to his community toolbar. In fact, the Conduit platform enables a publisher to add anything from a booking widget, to a community chat, to a donation icon to drive interaction, commerce, and community for the publishers. For example, If it’s a music site, then users can not only listen to the songs via their toolbar but also read interviews, get blog alerts, chat with other fans online, login to their account, buy tickets. For an airline, their toolbar enables members to get discount alerts and book tickets. For a training school, members can play games, get ring tones, check weather and flying conditions.
I just created a Juxtaviews toolbar and the “wizard” was incredibly easy. From a publisher’s standpoint, it’s mint. But before I dive in as an end-user, do I need to install a separate toolbar for each publisher I want to track or can I use my toolbar to track several publishers?
Yes, each publisher offers a unique community toolbar which the user downloads to interact with that publisher. We are working on a breakthrough solution from a user perspective- stay tuned.
You are an inventor. Can you tell us what percentage of ideas you actually pursue as opposed to those you trash? What compels you to pursue solutions to certain challenges over others? Can you tell us about the “cool musical puzzles” you’ve invented?
I would say that with only less than 1% of my ideas I do ’something’. And something means share it with friends or build a prototype. I keep a file to which I “dump” all kinds of ideas and usually they remain there. The decision to pursue with an idea depends on the state I’m in. If I’m extremely involved with another venture (like the current one) I don’t deal with a new one unless it’s a quick one. I’m aware that I do have some high potential ideas that I know I will either read about them one day as they were made by somebody else or they’ll wait for me.
The musical puzzle - It was almost 16 years ago when my daughter was born. I called it MAJIG (magic jigsaw puzzle). It consist of a board and several jigsaw type puzzles. For example, a jigsaw puzzle of Birthday, dog & Christmas (just an example). The kid - usually a pre-school age, put the pieces together on the board (he doesn’t need to turn anything on, and it looks like there’s no electronic involved) and when the last piece of the puzzled completes the picture, a unique melody associated with picture is generated. “happy birthday” bark of a dog or jingle bell. There’s a US patent for it and you can find more here.
Yes, I’m a new parent myself and it’s certainly led to some “eureka” moments… you often have no option but to be creative. For the software inventions you know you’ll never get to pursue, have you looked into submitting the ideas to Cambrian House?
Actually I wasn’t familiar with them and I’ll definitely look into that. Sounds interesting for software ideas, though many of the ideas that crossed my mind have nothing to do with software….
Thanks for your time, Ronen!