Interview with Alex Iskold, Founder/CTO AdaptiveBlue

Written by Allen Stern - October 18, 2006

The team over at AdaptiveBlue have received a ton of press since the DEMO conference last month. I wanted to find out more about AdaptiveBlue the company and BlueOrganizer the product. Even more importantly, I wanted to ask about what Web 2.0 life is like in New Jersey and inquire as to what has worked with marketing the BlueOrganizer product to help you with your web app creation. So I caught up with Alex Iskold, Founder and CTO of AdaptiveBlue.

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Allen: Can you provide a brief bio?
Alex

Alex: I am the founder and CTO, with 12 years of experience in software industry. This is my second startup, the first called Information Laboratory. We made a software analysis tool called Small Worlds. That company was acquired by IBM in 2003. I also recently worked as a Chief Architect at the leading grid computing company, DataSynapse, where I helped build GridServer and FabricServer virtualization technology. Through my career, I've been very passionate about complexity science and technology. I enjoyed building ambitious complex software, which exposes simplicity inside complexity.

Allen: What does AdaptiveBlue do?
Alex: AdaptiveBlue is smart browsing and personalization company focused on innovative tools in web browsing, attention and personalization space. The company was founded in early 2006, you can learn more about our vision and principles here: http://www.adaptiveblue.com/about.html

Allen: What is the BlueOrganizer?
Alex: The BlueOrganizer is a smart browsing extension for Firefox and Flock. This is the first product that we developed at AdaptiveBlue. The BlueOrganizer brings semantics of everyday things like books, music, movies, wines and restaurants into the browser. By focusing on semantics, the BlueOrganizer helps the users to be more productive and to get things done faster and better. The BlueOrganizer also focuses on making web sites and web services more accessible and easier to use.

Allen: How does BlueOrganizer know that a page is a page about a movie? (from your demo movie)
Alex: The BlueOrganizer uses unique dynamic parsing technology that we developed at AdaptiveBlue. There are two different ways right now for it to recognize the information on the page. First, it knows about product pages from many popular sites like Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, IMDB, CitySearch and so on. When the user navigates to such page, the BlueOrganizer dynamically loads the parser for this page and knows how to find information specific to the type of the object the user is looking at. The second technique that we use, involves Amazon eCommerce API. This is used on pages that do not have structured information. For example, on a movie blog you can highlight a title of a movie, then right-click and select 'bluemark!' from the context menu. This works because the BlueOrganizer first analysis the page and determines that it is a page about movies. It then queries Amazon eCommerce database for information about this movie.

Allen: How do I as a developer maximize the BlueOrganizer functionality on my web site?
Alex: This is a great question, and very timely one too! In just a few weeks, with the release 2.8 to be precise we are going to open up the BlueOrganizer for developers to extend it. There are will be three extension points: BlueOrganizer Actions, BlueOrganizer Collections and BlueOrganizer parsers. I will talk more about each of these in the next question, but basically the developers will be able to write custom parsers for any site.

Allen: What is the technology behind BlueOrganizer?
Alex: The BlueOrganizer is a blend of a classic desktop application and a web site. It is written in Mozilla XUL, JavaScript and XML. We have a bit of PHP on the backend and use MySQL. We also use quite a few Web Services. Most notably, Amazon S3 is our primary data storage. We also user Amazon eCommerce API, Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us and many other APIs.

This is also a good place to talk about interesting technical stuff inside the BlueOrganizer. We have created JavaScriptBeans support, similar to the classic JavaBeans in Java. This allows us to load Actions, Collections and site Parsers dynamically. For example, each of the actions that you see in the Tools menu, is not hard wired into the BlueOrganizer. Instead, these actions are read on the startup from adaptiveblue.com. So This allows us to roll out new actions without asking the users to re-install the extension. Similarly, Collections and site parsers are read dynamically, so we can roll out new stuff over night. We will be releasing architecture of the BlueOrganizer along with tutorials for how to make new actions, collections and parsers in a few weeks.

Allen: Do you use Microformats with BlueOrganizer?
Alex: Not yet, but we will be soon. Right now the objects that we collect, like movies, books and wines do not have microformats. We are working on People's collection as well as Events and other things that have microformats. So very soon, the BlueOrganizer users' will be able to have enhanced experience on all pages that feature microformats. On the related topic, we are engaging with the community to develop standards for data representation in the Attention space. You can learn more about attention community at http://www.attentiontrust.org and you can read my thoughts on what should be the attention architecture on my blog.

Allen: How do you plan to monetize (if you do) BlueOrganizer/AdaptivebBlue?
Alex: We are a business, so we are definitely working on monetizing the BlueOrganizer. I am happy to share with you a few of our revenue ideas. The first one is affiliate revenue. Every time when a user buys via BlueOrganizer from an affiliate site we make money (so if you like the BlueOrganizer, please do not forget to do that :). We are also planning to charge sites to be integrated into the BlueOrganizer, and we have started these discussions with a few sites already. Beyond this, our revenue streams are still secret, but I can tell you that they all focus on personalization.

Allen: Can you speak about your marketing/PR activities to gain users for BlueOrganizer?
Alex: We are happy to share, and hope that others will find this useful. We quickly realized that traditional PR is not going to be helpful, and that mainstream publications are not going to drive the traffic. So instead we approached web 2.0 blogs starting from Brian Benzinger's SolutionWatch and Sid Yadav's rev 2.0. We also were lucky to be mentioned and then later interviewed by Emily Chang's eHub. We also actively blogged and commented on different blogs that resulted in a fair bit of individual posts. At the same time, I also started writing for Web 2.0 magazine and Read/WriteWeb blog. This was a great exposure as well as excellent opportunity to learn more about the space. All this culminated in us being selected to launch at DEMOfall. This was an amazing experience that also propelled us to the next level. We got favorited by TechCrunch and ZDNet. That followed by more press and interviews, including this one.

Allen: What does the AdaptiveBlue team look like? Where are you based?
Alex: We now have 3 engineers, one designer, one QA person and myself. We are all in different locations from New York to Paris.

Allen: Being based in NJ, do you find that hinders you against other competitors based in the Bay Area?

"If anything, I would say that it is an advantage not to be in the valley, as it keeps the reality check on all the time."

Alex: Not at all. I do not believe that geography matters. What matters is people, ideas and execution. If anything, I would say that it is an advantage not to be in the valley, as it keeps the reality check on all the time.

Allen: Do you see offering a version for Safari or Internet Explorer?
Alex: Right now this is not in our business plan. We believe that Firefox is THE browser of the future and we'd like to contribute to its success as much as we can.

Allen: Is BlueOrganizer for the mainstream or the tech market?
Alex: We think that it is for both. Smarter browser should benefit everyone. In terms of bringing the best web services right to the user's finger tips, we think that this approach clearly makes web 2.0 more accessible for the main stream.

Allen: How has the feedback been since your launch at DEMO? Any stats you can share?
Alex: As I mentioned above, the DEMO was simply amazing. We did a good job presenting the BlueOrganizer and VC, press, thought leaders and users were very positive and very encouraging. Since DEMO, we have grown the user base a lot. We can't disclose exact numbers, but look at our progress on Alexa to see that we have been doing very well (remember we are not a website, we are an extension, so people download it and then comeback to the site for tutorials, etc.). You will be seeing some other effects that DEMO had very soon.

Allen: Where is AdaptiveBlue going in the next 1-2 years?
Alex: We are going to ramp up on the BlueOrganizer features. You will be seeing Images, Video and People collections soon. Also, support for microformats is coming soon. Many new other collections, including much asked for Travel will be available soon. Longer term we are going to be building other related technologies in the personalization space. Our next product is going to be called BlueSyndicator and that is as much as I can tell you now.

Allen: Where is the browser going in the next 1-2 years?
Alex: Hopefully, the browser is going to be smarter. I think there are two broad axises here: productivity and semantics. I applaud the features that found today in Flock. They make a lot of sense and boost people's productivity, by simply putting a better interface and bring web services and web concepts right into the browser. The second aspect is semantics, is just long overdue. This is what we are trying to solve in the top-down way via BlueOrganizer. Not sure if the top-down will be the way to go in the end, I have nothing against the bottom-up semantics if people actually do it (i.e. microformats everywhere), but I am convinced that one way or another we are heading towards semantics-rich web experience.

Allen: Which web apps do you use on a regular basis?
Alex: We use Basecamp as our project management tool. Its nice and simple. I also use Gmail and Google Calendar a lot.

Allen: What do you think are the most important characteristics that are needed for a startup to be successful?
Alex: Passion, People, Focus, Speed.

Allen: What would you say is the top thing you have learned since you started AdaptiveBlue? positive or negative?
Alex: I sold my last startup in 2003, and boy, did rules of the game have changed! Everything moves with unimaginable speed. I love it!

Allen: Anything else to share?
Alex: We are just starting to build smart browsing, personalization and attention technologies at AdaptiveBlue. As a young company in the space, we always reaching out to the users and community for feedback, suggestions and discussion about what we should be building, please send us your thoughts.

Thanks Alex for taking the time for this interview. You have an interesting product and I am certain the CenterNetworks users have learned something about BlueOrganizer and hopefully some marketing do's and don'ts.

If you would like to participate in a conversation on CenterNetworks, or if you have any comments or questions, let me know.

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Interview with Alex Iskold, Founder/CTO AdaptiveBlue

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