During the fourth session of TechCrunch50, three companies came on-stage and discussed ways to improve advertising, while one company told those in attendance how to streamline email and make it easier to manage email overload.
The session featured five panelists: Entrepreneur, Marc Andreessen; MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe; Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com; Entrepreneur Yossi Vardi; and Ash Patel, Yahoo’s executive vice president of the Audience division. Some of the panelists’ comments are mentioned below each company’s summary.
Burt
Burt’s Copybox is trying to be the “copywriter’s Photoshop.” In order to do that, Copybox attempts to make it easier to create online ads and tailor them to the user viewing them.
Copybox features a “canvas” in its service that lets users input the text in a particular advertisement. To the right of that canvas, the site features variables like “operating systems,” “MySpace,”, and “Weather,” which let the advertiser tailor the text in the canvas based on the user viewing the advertisement.
For example, advertisers can post something in the canvas that mentions Macs. After highlighting that word, users can then click a variable in the right and whenever a person accesses the site on a Windows machine, the mention of Macs will be replaced with a mention of Windows. In essence, the advertisements can be tailored based on who is browsing the site or what’s going on in the world.
Copybox believes that ads don’t talk to Web surfers because of the divide between copywriters and programmers. But with the help of Copybox, copywriters can perform all the programming needs with a simple word processing-like box and a drop-down menu featuring variables that will tailor ads based on the user.
Panelist thoughts
MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and the rest of the panelists believe Copybox has some potential, but would work best with smaller publishers instead of bigger ad agencies, which already have systems they like to use in place.
Yossi Vardi was quick to point out that Google’s code service, code.Google.com could prove troublesome to the company now that it’s easier for programmers and copywriters to work together.
Click here to watch a video of Burt’s presentation
Adgregate Markets
Adgregate Markets connects the world of display advertising with e-commerce. The first in the space, Adgregate markets replaces display ads, which take users away from a publisher’s site and brings them to a third-party store, and lets users buy products featured in ads without moving away from the page.
Adgregate Markets’ product is a widget that runs as an ad on a publisher’s site. If a user views the ad widget and wants to buy the product it’s advertising, they need only to click the description button under the ad and click “add to cart” to buy it. From there, the user can either pay directly in the widget by inputting credit card information or keep buying products via ads elsewhere.
To ensure security, the widget is always secure during purchase. The company said that even though ads can be displayed on insecure sites, the buying process is secure.
The entire ad unit can be created in Adgregate Markets’ service and users can create widgets on-the-fly exactly to the spec of the required ad unit size on the publisher’s page. Once activated, it goes live on the site.
To increase the reach of ads, publishers can “grab” the widget and embed the code into their site. Publishers, advertisers, and Adgregate markets will share all the revenue.
Panelist comments
Not too much was said about Adgregate markets because each panelist agreed on the most important element of any startup: it’s a great idea that will make money and address a need in the market.
Chris DeWolfe at MySpace was quick to point out that Adgregate Markets’ idea could be used anywhere on the Web and has a strong business model in place that would attract publishers and advertisers, alike.
Click here to watch a presentation of Adgregate Market’s presentation
AdRocket
Trying to address what it believes is a problem in email newsletters, AdRocket helps email newsletter publishers better monetize their emails.
According to AdRocket, most email newsletter advertisements are poorly targeted and most users block those ads, so many times, no one sees any revenue from email newsletters.
To fix that, AdRocket aims at working with major newsletter providers like The New York Times and CNET and collect demographic data and keywords from newsletter subscribers. Once collected (it does so anonymously to alleviate privacy concerns), the keywords that are most likely to yield revenue and have ad units available are shown. From there, a score based on the number of ads and the revenue potential is determined and advertisers can input those ads into their newsletters to (hopefully) increase ad revenue.
Panelist Comments
Chris DeWolfe at MySpace and Marc Andreesen noted that there are some “deliverability” issues with AdRocket. How will the company make sure that newsletters from the companies it works with are actually getting to the users?
Mark Bennioff and Ash Patel noted that the size of the newsletter shouldn’t matter as much as AdRocket believes it does. Instead, the panelists believe the company should focus on working with smaller newsletter companies and worry more about larger newsletters as it grows.
Click here to watch a video of AdRocket’s presentation.
OtherInbox
OtherInbox helps solve the problem of email overload. According to the company, it believes that as more people sign up for newsletters, product updates, and countless other services that send emails, inboxes are getting inundated with extras that reduce efficiency.
To solve that problem, users can sign up for OtherInbox (it’s free) and create vanity email addresses for different services. So if you want to receive product announcements from Amazon via email, set up an OtherInbox account called “amazon@yourname.otherinbox.com” and only emails from Amazon will be sent to that address. The same can be done for any place you input email addresses.
When you open OtherInbox, it features folders from every site you signed up with the different emails in a left pane. Once you decide which you want to read, simply click on the email box and you can view all emails sent to that address.
But OtherInbox isn’t just reserved for stores or newsletters. The service lets you create email addresses for anything and can be used to filter your email.
Even better, OtherInbox will soon offer features that can collect shipping notices, receipts, and bill payment reminders, and collect date information from each. Once collected, it will add those dates to Google Calendar, iCal, or any other calendar app.
To block spam messages, OtherInbox uses a “block” button, which will then delete all the spam in a particular inbox and deactivate that address so you won’t get anymore spam.
OtherInbox is currently in private beta, but will be in public beta soon.
Panelist comments
After finishing, Other Inbox received a resounding applause from the crowd, which obviously appreciated the opportunity to filter email into a variety of inboxes.
The panel was dominated by a spat between the company’s creator and Yahoo executive vice president Ash Patel, who claimed similar functionality is already available in Yahoo Mail. OtherInbox’s founder disagreed and said that his service does much more than what’s already found in Yahoo’s offering.
The rest of the panel concurred that it was a good idea and Mark Bennioff said that he would use it for trips to Los Angeles and elsewhere to manage his email and itinerary.
Click here for a watch a video of OtherInbox’s presentation..
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Ash Patel from Yahoo has no business commenting on any startup that offers enhancements to web email. Unlike GMail, Yahoo Mail is still not AJAX’d, has horrible SPAM filtering, still uses folders instead of tags, and still does not automatically stores sent email addresses into your address book.
When was the last time you used Y! Mail? The current version is heavily AJAX-based. It’s all drag and drop, just like a desktop app. The spam filtering has been decent enough for me. Folders vs. tags are not a killer feature for me, since my desktop and phone clients don’t support stuff like that. And the same goes for automatic address storage. I’ll manage my contact book myself, thank you very much.
Tim,
I use it everyday. Whenever I need to signup for a website newsletter I use it. My real account is GMail. SPAM account is Yahoo. I did not know there is a new version available; I haven’t been given the chance to upgrade yet. Until Yahoo can match Google for Mail functionality, they are still a joke to me.
Preferences here depend on those who have their inbox under control (or don’t care…gmail search) and those who can’t figure out how to sort their mail effectively. Of course, the next gmail update will most likely render this moot.
I suppose that guy is entitled to his own opinion. But let’s see how this roll out. Time will tell if he is right or wrong.
–
We’d also launched our startup today, check us out at http://www.adexcel.com
AdExcel is “The Ning for Advertising Networks with more juice in Socialized Ads”..
Let us know what u think
Best,
Darren
Cofounder of AdExcel
Oh Darren you are so sorry, we all see that after you go on and post some more spam on your failure of a web site:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....nt-2462848
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....nt-2463194
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....nt-2463185
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....nt-2463216
Let me help you, with your spamming.
http://www.adexcel.com, owner loves to spam random users on web property he does not owe. Particularly he loves to throw one liners with 4 paragraphs of advertising telling people they launched the next Ning (wow!), when called on it AdExcel CEO apologizes a lot while he is already spamming in another thread.
AdExcel, if you do business with them, you are a moron.
See !? This will cure your 1) Lack of users 2) Lack of funding 3) Lack of good business plan 4) Lack of common sense and ethics.
Much love,
Aleksey
Aleksey - Sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. There are not merely “shoutouts/notices” as the body message was my feedback to the posts but it was my mistake for putting a very lengthy signature/footnote on it.
It was our first day and I guess we got too overly excited.
Nevertheless, I understand it became “spammy” and there are some people who leads a life being less forgiving. Sorry for that and I will make amends right away.
Thanks again for your patience and support.
hehe, i’m accept wiht u !
OtherInbox was the best app of the session for me. It addresses a need that most webmail account providers fail to meet.
this sounds remarkably like spamgourmet.com which has been around for like 10 years.
also how do they monetize it?
there’s a reason Yahoo’s stock is where it is today, and it’s because of a culture of overwhelming DENIAL exhibited by Ash Patel.
Yahoo: your consumer services are middling. Look at Yahoo Real Estate compared to Roost and Trulia. How long did it take Yahoo Mail to upgrade after Gmail was introduced? I’d suggest you STFU.
If you’d like something that reduces email overload with Yahoo! Mail today, Boxbe can help you. It’s made my 8 year old Yahoo Mail account usable again.
Disclosure - I’m a product manager for Boxbe.
Cheers,
Randy Stewart
OtherInbox seems like a terrific idea but I’m wondering about a potential fatal flaw.
If I can literally create *any* email address for my otherinbox “domain”, can’t a spammer literally blast that domain with any number of randomized strings as a prefix? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?
For instance, if I got the domain @techcrunch.otherinbox.com, can’t a spammer send a million emails using a million random prefixes?
How does it stop this?
They talked about it in the video. Give it a watch. It’s discussed towards the end.
Just re-watched and you’re right–they kind of gloss over it but I’ll have to wait and see. I’m really rooting for this to work well!
(The UI needs a lot of love though)
OtherInbox concept is very similar to mailinator.com
Yup… that’s the first thing I thought of. Otherinbox just put a nicer wrapper on it.
advertising 101:
adnetworks need inventory
inventory=yahoo+google at 90%
Ad networks are everywhere. premium inventory is scarce and on the rise.
The future is in AdLocations. “Vertical Locator Channels” to postion content in a strategic social nichea fashion. Find, build or acquire a custom platform network of these channels and you might be on to something.
http://www.killerstartups.com/.....or-network
Marrissa from goog- states search is 90% solved, where does that leave us.
search is solved . Location is Not!
May be I missed something but OtherInBox idea is neither original nor new one. A couple years ago the same idea came to mind and I spent some time googling web and it turned out that my idea was neither original nor new one but it was 2 years ago. The major flaw of this idea is that your otherinbox.com domain can be easily blocked by any web site that requires user’s e-mail during signup process.
OtherInbox seems like kind of a hybrid between a disposable email service like http://www.disposeamail.com and gmail’s tagging feature like mytag+username@gmail.com. Of course, if all websites would actually allow a plus sign in email addresses (it’s in the official RFC…), OtherInbox’s concept would not be necessary. I hope it turns out to be a great product like I think it may be.
It will probably be a yahoo mail feature now! Do none of the Techcrunch50 presenters feel there projects could be copied or stolen?
Sounds good . Webmob-ad, is a new start-up that just came out . It is a pioneer in the automation of mobile and web advertsing by creating the only self serve and fully automated marketplace for CPC and CPM advertising . It supports all types text ads, banners and video ads.For publishers , it offers the highest split of earnings you can find out there and much more. It caters to web and mobile Publishers and Advertisers . Web and Mobile Publishers can earn money easier than ever and registering is FREE. Please check it out : http://www.webmob-ad.com
wow this is a cool contest.. *thinking of a cool entry*
GMAIL anti-spam and organizational tools work fine for me.
Yahoo Mail? Personally I think it’s rude for anyone to use them (or hotmail, etc) as when they send messages they include ads for the receiver. I stopped using my Yahoo account except for a few spammy things YEARS ago
I’ve just been playing around with OtherInbox. Great concept, although I believe they could have simplified the execution and maybe shorten the current email address length (yourname.otherinbox.com to yourname.oibx.com etc.)
I was impressed by Adgregate Markets. Simple idea solving pain and increasing revenue for both sides of the equation - publishers and advertisers. Their challenge will be the chicken and egg situation of needing advertisers to get inventory, and vice versa. I can see them doing it though - TC50 is such a good launch pad and if they can keep that momentum into some deals with retailers they could be well on their way.
Our prediction market is currently forecasting them at 9% chance of winning the best in show award, third after Akoha and OtherInbox http://www.hubdub.com/m15609/T.....st_in_Show
I’m not really sure how this sentence about Adgregate Markets could possibly be true:
“To ensure security, the widget is always secure during purchase. The company said that even though ads can be displayed on insecure sites, the buying process is secure.”
If the ads appear on an insecure page, then anyone in between the server and the browser could modify the ad’s code and add a line to secretly send the credit card info to evil.com.
Has Adgregate come up with an alternative to HTTPS to ensure the integrity of a page during transmission? Even if they have, that’s a terrible idea, as security is the one arena where innovation almost always leads to problems. In this case, the state of the art is to use HTTPS on web forms that request confidential information and to post those forms to HTTPS urls. Anything else means the information is ripe for the picking.
It is just https in an iframe, chill out.
Two points:
1) From their presentation and the demos on their website (at http://www.adgregate.com/web/showcase/ ), it’s Flash, not an iframe.
2) Even if it was HTTPS in an iframe, that wouldn’t be secure because the iframe is inside an HTTP page. If I control a router in between the server that uses Adgregate and a browser, all I have to do is change the iframe’s src attribute to “https://evil.com/fake_adgregate_ad.html” and I now control everything about the transaction, including where the credit card number goes. Similarly for Flash, I could change the url for the flash object to “https://evil.com/fake_adgregate_flash.swf”.
HTTP is inherently insecure, and I worry that companies like Adgregate are going to teach users that entering confidential information into HTTP pages is OK. It’s not. Never will be.
People will not feel comfortable giving their credit card info into an ad/widget - they can barely be convinced to click on them 1 out of 1000 times.
It occurred to me on my ride into work this morning how truly ridiculous Adgregate’s “secure transaction from an insecure page” claim is. A lot of really smart people have been trying for literally over a decade to solve the problem of securely submitting information from an HTTP page, and no one has solved it. No one.
I’m probably hyperventilating, but this feels like the kind of technical error that could sink a company. I have to imagine that if Adgregate requires that their publishers use HTTPS, then (a) they wouldn’t get any publishers and (b) they consequently wouldn’t get any investors. If they don’t require HTTPS, then they are setting their publishers up to get hacked by man-in-the-middle attacks, which will happen as soon as their ad network becomes at all successful.
On the other hand, if they truly have a way to securely perform a transaction on an insecure page, they should patent it and license the IP. It would be an easier and more profitable business model than creating a new ad network.
is otherinbox a real company or are you kidding? that is the most absurb already-done idea i’ve seen in years, excluding countless email anonymizers and alias services (from gmail and others)…unreal. how do you pick these companies? is it simply the ability to pay their own airfare?
I like Adgregate Markets. The guy did a good sales pitch. However, there are things which i do not like about their product.
1. Advertisers pay for advertising so that the viewer would go to their site and see all different products instead of just one displayed on the page.
2. How many banner of that size is on a website? One or two may be? And the cost of those banner size are crazy expensive. Ok let’s look at this page at Techcrunch for instance. We have 10 square box advertising space. 2 large one and lots of google adwords. So how are we suppose to read in the 10 small square box? Do we have need a magnifier apps now? (may be that’s a good idea).
3. For pages that scroll down as long as this page are mostly bloggers site. Normal site are build so that the users does not need to scroll that often and now you will ask the owner of a site to take out all the google adwords and replace it with a big banner?
4. Lastly, look at the adds here at this page. Which one of these ads do you think you can click like Adgregate and buy a product or sign up or whatever Adgregate can do.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea. I just think it needs to fine tune before it can really tap into reality or otherwise they are just going to be in a very niche market of advertising. I wish they do well.
Seriously, they just re-invented Mailinator.
Yahoo Mail totally has Other Inboxes functionality. It’s called AddressGuard. I use it all the time. It’s not well integrated in the Mail app, but it works fine. As such, I can’t see ‘Other Inbox’ being bought out or competing with Y!.
I worked on silverfeed.com which is similar to otherinbox.com. I believe this is one of the best solutions to the spam problem.
I don’t think any one thing is the only solution but this sort of “aliasing” (i.e. using vanity email addresses for different services) is an easy and great service that sits between spammers and your primary desktop/server anti-virus or spam solution.
Been playing with otherinbox. Love the idea because I certainly have the need for it. I know it’s early and all, but it seems very buggy to me. I can barely get half the features to work and haven’t been able to get an email in or out in the last few hours.