Exclusive Interview with SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta

Earlier this week we wrote about the updates and funding announcement from SezWho, a reputation management service. Check out our SezWho review along with others from Web Teacher, Webware and VentureBeat. To learn more about where the idea came from, how it's marketed and monetized along with what's coming next, I spoke with Founder and CEO Jitendra Gupta. The transcript from our discussion is below.

Allen: Can you provide a brief bio about yourself?

My name is Jitendra Gupta and I am the Founder and CEO of SezWho. I have over 13 years of experience developing and managing software products. I started my career as a software engineer in the EDA industry where I worked for Xilinx and Viewlogic Systems (acquired by Synopsys). In 2000, after obtaining my MBA, I joined Siebel systems as a Product Manager for Siebel web platform - the platform used for all Siebel applications. I left Siebel in April 2005, to join InQuira, a search company, as Director of Product Management. At InQuira, I managed the company's flagship search product. I am the author of our company blog and occasionally contribute to the ReadWriteWeb blog.

Allen: What's SezWho?

SezWho is a distributed context, rating and reputation system for social media sites like blogs, forums, wikis, video/picture sharing sites, discussion boards and anywhere else where people collaborate on the web. SezWho is focused on delivering benefits to all stakeholders in social media interactions:

• Readers can easily separate quality content from uninteresting content.
• Contributors get recognized and rewarded for their efforts by building portable credibility.
• Site-Owners benefit by having a more engaged community and get additional traffic based on SezWho's unique contributor-oriented content discovery system.

Allen: Where did the idea come from?

The idea came to me when I was looking at support forums for Linux and ending up having a terrible experience with finding quality content. There would be so much noise sprinkled between nuggets of quality content. This made a lot of quality content go to waste. I thought the best solution to the problem would be to organize the content on site on an additional user dimension and introduce and ratings and reputation system. Once we started on it, it became clear that there is an application for a service like ours in a number of different social media sites like blogs, photo sharing, video sharing and pretty much anywhere there is user generated content.

Allen: How does the service work?

The SezWho solution has three main components:

1. SezWho Plug-ins: These plug-ins allow users to rate contributions, access profile views and highlight useful content through an AJAX interface. These plug-ins are available for a number of social media platforms like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, social book marking sites etc.
2. SezWho Server: The SezWho plug-in calls a web service on the SezWho server to update the latest posts, comments and ratings. The SezWho server collects the latest interactions and calculates and sends the new reputation scores. The server also servers up the collected data as user profiles to the browser.
3. SezWho Web Portal: The SezWho web portal allows users to register and manage their public profile. In addition, it displays public profile information on users and statistics for bloggers and contributors.

Allen: Why should a blogger install your app?

SezWho is designed to deliver value to all stakeholders in social media interactions. Please see the table below:

Allen: What does the SezWho team look like?

We have a team of 9 people that is made up of 6 engineers (split over US and India), 1 marketing, 1 business development and 1 User experience engineer. Some of the team members are part-time contributors.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

We don't have any direct competition but we are most closely compared with reputation services like RapLeaf, TrustPlus, Venyo or community services like MyBlogLog, Others Online or comment replacement services like Intense Debate or Disqus.

Allen: Why do you believe SezWho is a better choice than the competitors you listed above?

We are different then most of the existing reputation services because we focus on reputation in the sphere of social-media. While other tend to focus more on eCommerce side of things. In addition we have a patent pending reputation algorithm which we developed with top researchers in the area…This algorithm imitates the way reputation gets transacted in the real world. E.g. in real world a positive rating from a well known person carries a lot more weight than a recommendation from somebody of less repute. Similarly we ask users for their identity at the time of rating and then use their reputation to assign proper weight to that rating. This makes our system very robust and hard to scam.

We are better than reader based communities like MyBlogLog and OthersOnline etc. in the sense we provide value to all the stakeholders in a social media interaction – the reader, the contributors and the site owners – while providing right incentives to all to improve the conversation.

We differ from comment replacement services like Disqus and Intense Debate is that we are not looking to be a commenter community like ID or Disqus...We are focused on providing value directly to the site owner with tight integration and not drive traffic to other sites for profile views etc. We think the site owns the community.

Also we leave the comments where they are rather than take over the comments from the site. As such we see ourselves as a service to improve comments (and other social media interactions like video sharing sites and forums etc.) rather than a platform FOR comments.

To be honest we are really not mutually exclusive with comment replacement systems...Both ID and Disqus have a built in reputation service but we are working with other commenting platforms (that compete with ID and Disqus) to provide reputation services to them. It is also conceivable that sometime in the future we could provide a reputation and rating service even to ID and Disqus...We are simply focused on being the best rating, reputation and context service for the social web.

Allen: How do you monetize SezWho?

We are planning to offer several value added services like community analysis and SLA based services, that we are going to charge for.

Allen: Can you provide some stats about who is currently using your service, top types of documents, etc?

We have over 120K users and are on over 350 sites and ramping up fast. We expect with the introduction of Red Carpet and Badge widgets – new ways to communities to incentive participation, our adoption rate will only increase.

Allen: Can you provide some of the elements of your marketing plan?

We are planning to work with individual social media sites and aggregation sites to drive adoption.

Allen: What's coming next from SezWho?

We are working on supporting other platforms like Wikis and Forums…in addition to enriching our blog offering by enabling ratings of posts.

Allen: What are the most important things that a startup must have to be successful?

I think the most important thing for a startup to succeed is to have a good team. Also a big idea has a way of motivating people to help and give more than their 100%.

Allen: Which feeds are you reading these days?

I read of a lot these days. Besides CenterNetworks, I read RWW, TC, GigaOM etc. I am also a heavy user of TechMeme. Another one of my favorites is apophenia...

Thanks for your time Jitendra!