HEX!O
Startup/business
California,
United States
http://hex.io
Business model
Adoption of the service will be accelerated by providing a much more efficient link shrinking service than the market currently experiences and by seeding developers with open api and free access to drop-in code libraries, gadgets, widgets, plug-ins and scripts enabling instant benefit and easy program access and adoption.
Revenues
Substantial recurring transactional revenues will be generated from
real-time target marketing data delivery via web service, display,
radio, television and web advertising. Targeted customers are business
and web advertising channels.
Competitors
The best known competitor is Tiny URL http://tinyurl.com/
(90M+ urls equaling >1.5B redirects monthly). Organic growth to
date, no brands and non-commercial. There are a few other players in
the market but none with a focused commercial business model.
The real possibility now exists for a market sweeping roll-up to address this untapped gold mine of intelligence.
Competitive advantage
HEX!O is the first to offer intelligence and opportunity to the business community from this free consumer experience and provides it in a simple supported utility form factor with real sales benefits realised from fine tuned targeted advertising.
With a short cycle-time to implementation, the HEX!O service results in increased customer satisfaction and improved experience which translates into a wider adoption and migration from competitors.
Heuristic algorithms are continuously refined by the natural service growth and increased harvesting of real time data which in turn perpetually increases the value of the data.
Top 20 FAQ's
1. Why did you found this startup?
It was an epiphany of sorts enhanced further by my having a deep
understanding of ranked relevant content targeting and link redirection
protocols which helped serve the recognition of the utility, ubitquity
and adoption of shortened urls.
Further to that I had long been distilling various ideations surrounding customer-value arbitrage, lambda calculus based multivariant matching algorithms and recurring revenue transaction based web-services.
This in turn led to the creation of use-cases and the scoping of requirements to fill a real need which in turn led to the development of the current scalable solution that adds in that value.
2. What problem does your startup solve?
HEX!O facilitates and finely tunes the delivery of relevant content and advertising whilst simultaneously providing utility to the consumer in the form of links that don't break and can be repaired should the destination page change over time.
Additionally the cloud-utility form factor provides the level of reliability sought by commercial software developers and expected by mobile operators.
3. Who else agrees that this problem exists?
Every user of twitter and those who typically ignore banner ads. Additionally though most site operators understand traffic patterns to a degree HEX!O will further provide a back-end login and dashboard to allow the analysis of complex demographic and psychographic profiles of those usage patterns.
HEX!O does not address a new problem, it addresses an existing problem better than the competition but more importantly it extracts the hidden wealth that sits within the data that flows through these type of services.
TinyURL has been around since 2002 and has seen organic growth year on year of 100%, the problem of long URLs will increase as more and more intelligent API web services and mashups present themselves.
4. Who else is trying to solve this problem?
Though there are several short-link redirection services, there are no known providers of such an intelligent dataservice however it stands to reason that the likes of a Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft would be researching this "enhanced intention targeting" to further optimize their offerings.
5. How big is this market? How big can you get?
The largest link shortening and redirection service (TinyURL.com) has only 90M url's and yet redirects to 1.5B targets monthly. This service and all others absent any intelligence.
The upside potential of HEX!O is quite spectacular assuming successful backing and market penetration.
6. Who is your ideal target customer?
Online:
Twitter, Friendfeed, JaiKu, IM Vendors; Google, Yahoo, AOL and
Microsoft, Mobile network operators and proxy server developers.
Offline: Magazine and Ad Agency advertising sales leadership.
7. How do you plan on reaching them?
Leveraging industry buzz, reputation and social network connections to recruit a board of advisers consisting of key executives at target customers by communicating HEX!O's value proposition including a revenue sharing plan with an url-growth multiplier.
Usurping existing link-shortening relationships and forging new implimentations with face-to-face facilitated development integration by providing clear and compelling key performance indicators in the form of a real-time executive dashboards that sell the value of the value-focused partnership.
Partnering with advertising delivery system vendors and over time with browser developers, search engines, directories, mobile operating system vendors, protocol standards groups, major consumer sites, media portals and ad agencies to create collateral link rewriting dashboard widgets, metrics mashups and protocols.
8. How do you make money?
Automated Licensing & Subscriptions
All services built on our API are to be "discoverable" using Web
Services Definition Language (WSDL). Our web services shall automate
the establishment of service and acceptance of terms for recurring
revenue billing management and collection of subscribed web-service
transactions providing target market demographics to licensed
advertising networks.
Premium advertising network subscription levels provide tiered access
to target market demographic, psychographic, geographic and other link
data.
Future premium subscription based service shall provide license to
operational data store (ODS Cube) extracts for custom Online Analytical
Processing (OLAP) processing.
Subscription fees for advanced link management including dashboards,
reporting agents, custom domains and vanity links (eg. Jeep).
Pay-per-click and revenue share on click-throughs and conversion rates
with uplift multiplier for performance value over historical.
Premium subscription for affiliate sales usage such as ClickBank and Commission Junction.
Future patent licensing revenues.
9. What prerequisites do you need before you can start generating revenue?
Complete IA and UX for dashboard for reporting and analytics see our POC example: http://hex.io/de
Develop basic collateral and organizational business development team.
10. How much capital has already been invested?
$20,000.00
11. What's your "skin in the game"?
Contributed intellectual property, $20,000.00 plus six months sweat-equity.
12. How much capital do you need to get to first revenues? To get to breakeven?
$150,000 to first revenues and $250,000 to breakeven.
13. What are you going to do with the funding?
Hire resources to create, evangelize and develop libraries. Launch RIA based customer-value centric KPI dashboard. Solidify contracts and begin IP portfolio development.
14. What are you going to do with the 50,000 points?
Unsure of options at this time certainly leverage VenCorps network.
15. What are your goals?
Achieve
a > 1 Relative Market Share (RMS) in urls and redirects in 18 months
with momentum to then achieve a > 3 RMS in 24-36 months or less.
Short-term goals include polishing interface and completing backend web services and migration to cloud architecture.
Securing several letters of intent and executing a pilot implementation
with at least one major advertising network and one major social
network.
Establishment of internal controls for corporate governance and milestone driven key performance metrics.
Complete UX design cycle. Finish developer API. Provide free
facilitated integration with Web 2.0 apps such as Twitter, Seesmic,
FriendFeed etc.
16. How do you scale?
Use of contract development services for conversion to Google AppEngine and Amazon's Elastic Cloud.
17. What is your sustainable competitive advantage?
Patent defensible self refining data analytics and targeting algorithms.
18. What key hires do you need to make next?
Business Development Executive
19. In addition to capital, what else do you need to be successful?
Longer URL's more Mobile clients and customers who demand better user experiences.
20. Assuming you hit all your targets, who do you think would want to acquire you?
Nokia, Apple, Google, Sun, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL or Motorola
Management Bio
Summary
Founder is Bob Stewart, former CTO at; $1B Motorola Internet and
Networking Group, Internet Incubator CMGI, Directory and Mapping site
Zip2, Media-Metrix Top-25 Portal MyWay.com, Bioinformatics ASP
CyberMedica, and John Sculley's Orweillian data mining company Verified
Person. Bob is also author of the SaaS SDLC http://OpenSDLC.org
Robert E. Stewart, Sr.
Founder
LinkedIn Profile
"I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end." Abraham Lincoln
Mr. Stewart is currently Chief Executive Officer of ESRIA, Inc. located
at the heart of Silicon Valley in San Jose California. ESRIA develops
Enterprise Scale Rich Internet Applications (ESRIA) for software
(Adobe.com), Web 3.0 (SearchMe.com), Fortune-1000 business
(Fidelity.com) and high-profile media consumer sites (Disney.com).
Mr. Stewart served Malcolm Baldridge award winning Motorola's $1B
Internet and Networking Group, during his tenure the head of Motorola
quality named him Internet Chief Technology Officer while he personally
earned Motorola's highest information technology ranking of Strategic
Advisor Technical Analyst for his role in directing cross-functional
teams to develop highly secure and federally audited Internet-centric,
encrypted communications systems.
Mr. Stewart was Chief Technology Officer for John Sculley's Verified
Person deep background screening concern located in New York City where
he led, reorganized and outsourced development and quality operations
to India. Bob web-service enabled Verified Person's multi-terrabyte
data warehouse service providing market arbitrage efficiencies which
effectively catalyzed hyper growth for their customers.
Stewart was also Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of CyberMedica
Stewart was the original Chief Technology Officer and a Vice President
at CyberMedica before he purchased the company's intellectual property
portfolio and remaining assets in 2002. CyberMedica improves
responsible research around the world and participates as standards
provider of peer-reviewed infrastructure platforms for technology to
deliver secure open-systems for collaborative scientific research for
biotech and pharmaceutical discoveries worldwide.
Prior to CyberMedica, Stewart was an investment advisor with a number
of venture capital firms in North America and Europe. He has also been
involved, both as an investment advisor and a transition manager, in
substantial M&A activity including a $220M acquisition from
BellSouth and a $290M acquisition from Compaq (now HP).
Stewart also earned global recognition as Chief Technology Officer for
CMGI's portfolio companies Zip2 and MyWay.com, which was ranked a
'Top-25 Portal' during his tenure. Stewart was responsible for all
aspects of software and platform development, operations, engineering,
research, corporate information technology and product technical
delivery for CMGI's personal portal business units where he managed a
worldwide staff of over 180 professionals.
Bob's
entrepreneurial spirit started several technology services companies in
the early nineties. Before that he served for several years as the
Production Director of then family owned, national magazine (American
Angler) and book publisher, Northland Press, Inc. which he joined
shortly after serving the Marine Corps following his completion of
studies in Management Information Systems (MIS) at the University of
New England.
Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved.
IP and defensibility
IP and Defensibility
Having spent 40% of my time in IP councils offices prosecuting patents
as CTO of Motorola's Internet and Networking Group I am confident there
are ample opportunities to build a strong portfolio to create
competitive barriers on the general approach and achieve multiple
issued patents in the U.S. and other major countries in Europe and
Asia, comprised of many claims that broadly cover the entire value
chain of this invention, along with various trademarks and service
marks to protect this brand.
Additional discussions possible under non-disclosure agreement.
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