Interview with Zemanta CEO Ales Spetic

Last month we reported on Zemanta’s launch of a rich email widget for Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Today I met with Zemanta CEO Aleš Špetič while he is in NYC on business. Ales tells me that very soon they will launch their email widget for the Outlook and Thunderbird email clients. They have also opened an office in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn.

Zemanta’s goal is to bring together relevant databases and help enhance content across the Web and in email. They use a variety of databases including Amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia, Last.fm and Crunchbase. I’ve noted in conversation that Crunchbase should probably be paying Zemanta for all of the free SEO-rich links Zemanta provides.

Zemanta uses "entity extraction" to determine what terms and phrases they should offer suggestions for. They are currently at about 80% accuracy rate and are working on continuing to improve the accuracy and Ales says this piece is very expensive as it requires a lot of machine computing power.

Zemanta offers the links I noted above along with the ability to add related links to content. Related links can come from anywhere and are basically randomized and there is no weight to the links so that a link from a lesser-known blog may show up while the category leader isn’t displayed. A link from Mashable or CN will never appear as an option inside the content of the story, only as a related link.

Ales says they have 30,000 active authors and are a 10 person team with 8 people at their headquarters in Slovenia and 2 people in NYC. They are funded by two venture capital firms in London and Union Square Ventures here in NYC. They began working on the product in mid-2007, raised their first round in January 2008 and launched the product in March of 2008.

We spoke about Zemanta’s business model and Ales noted that they will use a combination of highlighted stories/links and affiliate links. They plan to go to media organizations and offer to "highlight" a link in the list of links that are presented to an author. They also are working on getting paid from affiliate revenue.

We concluded our chat and Ales shared another stat about Zemanta usage — a 41% retention rate which is measured six weeks after widget installation.