Interview with Fraser Kelton, Director of Business Development for AdaptiveBlue

I connected with Fraser Kelton of AdaptiveBlue last week. AdaptiveBlue focuses in semantic web solution. Their flagship product, SmartLinks, provides an easy for bloggers and webmasters to add more related information on existing content. You could instantly connect your readers to related information: book reviews, similar movies, stock research, music videos - make the best of the web one-click away.

LH: Would you introduce a bit of yourself? What are you responsible in AdaptiveBlue?

FK: I’m Fraser Kelton and technically I am the Director of Business Development for AdaptiveBlue although I like to consider myself a builder. I’m helping to build community and together with them we’re building amazing smart browsing products. I’m helping to build relationships with businesses and together we’re bringing their web site’s visitors tremendous value. I’m also working with the great team at AdaptiveBlue to build strategy and an incredible company.

LH: What was the origin of the company? What’s the biggest value AdaptiveBlue is bringing to web site’s visitors?

FK: Alex Iskold founded AdaptiveBlue because he had a vision for a smarter browsing experience. He believed that taking a pragmatic approach to semantics on the web was the only way that individuals were going to benefit from its potential in the short and medium time frames. Building on the infrastructure that has formed around previous innovations (i.e. APIs, etc) Alex started to build a product that would capture unstructured information, preserve semantics, offer rich support for tagging, and provide a richer experience on the web. Solving all of the challenges online is a daunting challenge, but for many of the verticals that individuals care about most online (music, movies, electronics, stocks)

Understanding objects (books, music, movies, stocks, recipes, etc) allows us to present the individual with targeted actions that they’d want to take for that particular object. we offer contextually correct and personalized shortcuts. we call it a noun-verb equation - we understand the noun (a book) and provide all of the verbs around it (buy it on their preferred website, add it to a book social network like Shelfari, post it to delicious, etc.) because we understand the object these verbs, or actions, are correct for the object - you’d want to rent a movie on Netflix so we give you that option but you’d want to buy an album on iTunes so we present that one when it’s a music album.

LH: About the pragmatic approach of AdaptiveBlue, how does AdaptiveBlue compare with other similar products?

FK: There are a few emerging companies who are exploring ways to leverage semantic understanding to deliver utility to the individual online. Read/Write Web actually just had an amazing post highlighting 10 of the companies. What’s interesting is that some companies are taking what we call the bottom-up approach towards a semantic application - they’re annotating the web with rich data formats (RDF, etc). We think that a better approach is a pragmatic, top-down one. Top-down meaning that we leverage existing information and technology to provide the value. We’re fond of groups like Spock - the vertical search engine, and ClearForest who are, like us at AdaptiveBlue, taking a pragmatic top-down approach because at the end of the day it’s about delivering end-user value and not technology.

LH: Excellent. Do you have a demo on how does this pragmatic top-down approach work?

FK: Users can view a preview on their site. Here’s a list of sites currently supported (we’re always adding more)

LH: Do you have any partnership with the companies that you have provided on the SmartLinks widget?

FK: No. The links that are present within the pane are a collection of the most popular sites online for each object and those that are requested and put forth by our healthy community of users. We’re constantly getting feedback on sites to add, we evaluate each suggestion and where it makes sense and there have been a number of requests, we integrate it. The default for the links is that we monetize them through our affiliate ID, but users can enter their ID for Amazon and Ebay. Other than that, no partnership with the companies.

LH: What is the business model behind this? How does the business model support the operation so far?

FK: Right now we’re monetized through affiliate revenue, although we’re happy if our users want to enter their own affiliate IDs - they keep 100% of the revenue. going forward we may sell customized versions of the technology into online media companies and publishers. We’ve given the monetization model a lot of thought and careful consideration and will be rolling out some exciting things in the new year that should bring even more end-user utility to the products, at that time some of the monetization models will start to emerge as well. We’ve raised venture funding from Union Square Ventures - Brad Burnham and Fred Wilson - and that has enabled us to build out the company and technology to this point.

LH: Will Adapative look into the model of monetizing by connecting advertisers and publishers through SmartLink?

FK: First of all, if we take money for placement of a link in the SmartLink pane we’d identify that it’s a sponsored link. Relevant CPM advertising within the SmartLink is something that we’ve considered, but we’re not implementing it at this time. If we do, we’d explore building in a revenue share with the publisher.

LH: Excellent. Final question, what are the key lessons you have learned working in a startup?

FK: How about four observations?