Building A Vertical Ad Network Powerhouse: Glam Media CEO Samir Arora (Part 2)

SM: Was Rae a successful venture for you? SA: Rae did well. We created navigational applications for Apple, then PCs, and later worked with Wells Fargo and American Express. Interestingly enough, they introduced us to a small company called Mosaic. Once I saw what Mosaic was doing, I knew we had the legs to deliver

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Building A Vertical Ad Network Powerhouse: Glam Media CEO Samir Arora (Part 1)

Samir Arora is a serial entrepreneur with a history that includes Rae Technology and NetObjects. Aside from being chairman and CEO of Glam Media, he is chairman (and founder) of Information Capital LLC. Glam Media offers a self-coined ‘vertical content network’ platform. The Glam Media network includes over 400 publishers, all of whom receive an

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Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 8)

SM: What is your distribution of workers? How many people are in Corvallis and how many people are in Barcelona? FM: We have 9 different offices in the world with 150 employees. Sixty-two percent of our people are in the States, the rest are in Europe.

Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 7)

SM: Having raised $55M, do you think that is too much money? FM: Initially some people thought it was too much. Now we are very happy we closed on that amount. SM: From the point of view of valuation and return on investment as well as in terms of what you can sell a company

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Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 6)

SM: Let’s say I am wearing a blue shirt which works really well with my skin color. Are you able to figure out that somebody who looks like me likes to wear shirts that are a particular shade of blue? FM: If we have a picture of you we can find at least 25 relevant

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Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 5)

SM: Let’s say I am wearing a blue shirt which works really well with my skin color. Are you able to figure out that somebody who looks like me likes to wear that shade of blue shirts? FM: If we have a picture of you we can find at least 25 relevant attributes, include what

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Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 4)

SM: How do you make your recommendation software portable to mass utilization? FM: We have been working on something we call “Business Solutions”. The objective is to provide the recommender as a service for third parties. They can easily get recommendations integrated into their websites by utilizing our hosted platform. This is very cost effective.

Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 3)

SM: Had you already built an initial version of the software by the time you received your first round of funding? FM: At that point and time we had launched our first version of Recommender as an online service. We separated the Recommender engine from the final product since the very beginning. However, the best

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