Content Matters

The first entrepreneur panel of the Previews session included presentations by the CEOs of five interesting startups.

Daphne Kwon, CEO of New York-based ExpoTV was the first presenter.  ExpoTV is a compelling new startup offering user-generated consumer product reviews.  Often described as YouTube meets Consumer Reports, ExpoTV is a social network with more than 200,000 video-based product reviews, each catalogued and tagged.  Their revenue model is based around lead generation via commerce (affiliate links to buy or to find the lowest price) and advertising (branding CPM).  The content is syndicated out to sites like Yahoo Shopping, Buy.com, AOL, YouTube and Smarter.com.  The company was founded in 2004 and has 18 employees.  During 2007, their usage grew from 400,000 videos viewed each month to more than 2 million videos per month. 

The second presenter was Kevin Hutchison, CEO of Health Monitoring Systems, Inc.  The Company provides surveillance of disease epidemics, leveraging information reported by hospitals.  Their aim is to be Accu-Weather for healthcare.  Today, they ware working with 500 hospitals in ten states.  Their customer base is public health organizations, although they see opportunities to sell to healthcare organizations and pharmaceutical companies.

The third presenter was David Sidman of Linkstorm.  Linkstorm has been around for more than seven years, originally founded as a tool for cross-linking in scientific journals.  They have repositioned themselves as a provider of enhanced display ads.  Their banner ads have navigation built directly into the ads, enabling users to navigate to specific links as they rollover an ad.  They have a handful of accounts which have tested the technology and have seen a strong uplift in click-through rates and higher conversions.  Among their early customers for this solution are Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Cisco and Chevrolet.  I still think they will have trouble building a business around getting users to navigate based upon a mouse-over.  I'm also hesitant about a company that is using a corporate name that it can't acquire the URL for (their URL is www dot linkstorms dot com), which took me a couple of searches to locate.

The fourth presenter was John Stuppy, President of TutorVista.com.  TutorVista has received lots of recent attention in the media.  They offer an outsourced model for tutoring school children.  While traditional tutoring is sold on an hourly basis (typically $50-100 per hour or more), TutorVista provides unlimited tutoring for a per-student fee of $99 per month.  In addition to the online tutoring business, they have launched a content business called Edurite, which can custom create simulations, animation and other instructional content.  The third growth leg they are planning is TutorVista India, which will be a set of private schools and test prep centers throughout India. TutorVista has an impressive story to tell.  In two years they have already tutored more than 200,000 students. 

The last presenter was a partner team of Mike Kratzer (President) and Joel Dobrin (EVP) of FeeDisclosure.com.  FeeDisclosure has a straightforward goal - they aim to bring transparency to real estate transactions.  As anyone who has financed or refinanced a mortgage recently knows, the fees are
buried and hard to decipher.  Mike pointed out examples of fees that appear at closing that range from a $250 "email fee", a $75 Adobe PDF fee and even a $75 Patriot Act fee.  FeeDisclosure works with lenders to get them to provide a breakdown of all their fees so that a user can assess the fees before deciding on a lender.  They expect that providers with low fees will showcase this fact which will generate more
business for the lender.  The Company, founded in 2005, has 30 employees, primarily based in India.  Obviously, reports of predatory lending have helped FeeDisclosure gain attention to their product.  At the same time, the reduced level of activity in the housing finance market will not help them right now. 

The bigger challenge, in my view, is that FeeDisclosure only provides part of the solution.  Consumers will want a one-stop shop where they can look at both fees and rates.  I think FeeDisclosure could be an attractive acquisition for someone like Bankrate.

Of this group, I thought that the most compelling presentations were that of Daphne (don't call me Bambi) Kwon and John Stuppy.  ExpoTV seems to have a great concept that brings together many of my favorite business models - community, reviews and video UGC.  And while most video providers are struggling to figure out the monetization, their lead generation model is sound.  I don't know how the business will scale but I really liked what I saw.

TutorVista has the potential to be a huge business.  Their vision is to build a $500 million company within 3-5 years and I think that's a realistic possibility.  Tutoring and test prep are huge businesses, with companies such as Sylvan, Kaplan, Princeton Review, Kumon and others generating revenues in the $6 billion range.  TutorVista could build that segment into a nine-figure business in time.  Meanwhile, the TutorVista India program has immense potential, addressing what is the largest K-12 market in the world.

I will post a summary of the second entrepreneur panel later.  For more coverage of Previews and the SIIA IIS conference, follow John Blossom, the Alacra Blog and Ken Doctor.
If you will be at IIS Wed or Thurs pop over and say hello.