Bloggers love to have widgets and badges on their sites that communicate their personal brand in the form of interests, causes, and affiliations. Korean startup SealTale is tapping into the widget craze by making it easy for bloggers to create widgets that express their affinity to particular interest groups and products. The TechCrunch50 finalist lets bloggers pick “seals” which typically shows the logo of a particular product or band or movement. They can also create their own seals.
When a seal is clicked on, it flips around to show an RSS feed made up of posts from other blogs that have seals with the same tags. In this way, blogs can connect to each other and send each other traffic based on common interests. The tags can be edited to to customize the feed. The seals also work across social messaging sites such as Facebook and Tumblr.
On the back of each seal, along with the feeds there are targeted ads (also based on the tags). And the seals themselves act as advertisements for commercial brands. Companies can offer seals and program the feeds with news, events, and other information they think will strengthen their bonds with brand enthusiasts.
The seals could be particularly effective as marketing vehicles for bands, movies, and other content. They will support music and video, in addition to text feeds.
Expert Panel Q&A:
Conway: How big is the market size, is it available today?
Chae Myungjin: Our service applies to all the services like Myspace and Facebook. It is like Google AdSense.
Conway: How long has the product been available?
Myungjin : It’s been available for 6 months in Korea, we have 20K users, 200K people who have come in.
Don: What is the revenue model?
Myungjin : We earn money from advertisements. Two ways. One is brand seals and product seals. Another way, which is an advertisement through the seal book, in the info tab they can upload advertisements in the form of feeds.
Calacanis: They can claim the seal, correct. If somebody made a seal for an iPhone, the company Apple could then buy it and put the proper information in?
Myungjin: Yes.
Calacanis: Judges, would you invest?
Conway: We’d have to see how the product took off and acceptance in other countries
Vardi: What he means is if he knows it is a success, he will invest.
Hirshhorn: It is obviously great eye candy, a way to say these are the brands I am interested in. Other than the interface I don’t know how different the delivery stem is.
Video:
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/2162007
Other Coverage:
TC50: Sealtale offers a personalized way to declare brand loyalty Venture Beat.
SealTale – New Widgets For Your Blog (?) #tc50 techgeist.
SealTale.com – Icons That Express Who You Are Killer Startups.
TechCrunch50: SealTale Makes Using Widgets Easy and Profitable Trends Updates.
Korea Based SealTale Enables You To Design Your Own Widgets Pulse2.