Browsing the Web with Power.com's iFrame

Bambi Francisco interviews Steve Vachani about Power.com's iFrame feature and its growing virality

Power.com is a social networking utility which currently allows people to log  into their Myspace, Orkut, and Hi5 accounts at the same time.  Within Power.com you can send messages to friends in multiple networks and at the same time update your photos synchronously throughout your accounts. 

In this interview with Bambi Francisco, Steve Vacchani, CEO and founder of Power.com talks about its iFrames feature which allows you to browse the web while still logged into Power. This interview is the second in a five-part series with Vachani. See other interviews below.

BF: Steve, Let’s talk about iFrames, also known as intelligent proxy.  Do you count that as a pageviews for Power.com and put adds on there as well?

SV: We don't count that as a pageview.  That pageview is the pageview of the site the user is visiting.  We look more at how much time a user is with us everyday.  A typical active user spends anywhere from twenty minutes to one hour with us on each visit.  The reason is they are visiting multiple sites and doing many things.  Naturally, it's very similar if you think of Windows and the applications.  A user is always logged into Windows, and from there they use their applications.  So when a user signs into Power, they are logged into Power, and from there they use all their different sites. 

BF: I guess to the extent that there is an advertising component here, I'm wondering, because you do have that layer is there an opportunity to sell there?

SV: We have no interest in touching or affecting the advertising of the sites that the users are using.

BF: Of course.

SV: We do have a strong relationship with our users and therefore we do have opportunities to communicate with them through our toolbar and also on the start page when they come to Power.com

BF: How many views are you getting on that toolbar?

SV: Right now, everyday we generate about 150 to 200 million impressions per month. 

BF: How many impressions per view of that toolbar? Are you counting multiple impressions per view?

SV: Each session I think a user has about 30 pageviews.  So, about a half a million visits per day.

BF: You have 5 million users.  When exactly did you launch in Brazil?

SV: We originally launched the service for Orkut users.  Orkut is the largest social network in India and in Brazil.  We had launched that over a year ago and we started with very niche social networking applications.  Applications for messaging across sites.  Applications for users of Orkut to interact with other sites they use.  We have then added, recently added Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, and also the MSN Instant Messenger.

BF: What percentage of the 5 million users are Orkut users?  Would you say the majority of them?

SV: A larger percentage were Orkut users, but in the last few weeks we've had significant growth in Facebook, MySpace, and Hi5.

BF: What do you attribute the viral growth to? 

SV: We have two forms of virality.  If you remember Hotmail, every message a user sends contains a one line add saying the message was went from Hotmail.  One of the most popular applications our users use are internetworking messaging messages.  So you can write messages to five different sites from one place.  So our millions of users are sending messages, and each message they send gets marked that it was sent from Power.  So their friends find out about Power and become active users themselves.

BF: How effective is the campaign you've had: "the first 100 people to invite who bring 100 new friends to Power.com earn $100 dollars."  How effective has that been?

SV: We've only introduced that in the last week but the response has been quite good.  I think that our early users who are already loyal and active users are given yet another reason to bring their friends into Power.

BF: How many people did that then?

SV: Well, we've just introduced that in the last 5 days.

BF: It's a hundred dollars sort of as an incentive.  So, I wonder what sort of the demographic is?

SV: I think one hundred dollars is good for anyone.

BF: What is your demographic?

SV: Our demographic has been very broad but tends to be active social networking users.

BF: Power users.

SV: We refer to them as Power users.  But as we continue to increase new functionality and features...

BF: What percentage of the people on social networks would you consider Power users.

SV: Michael Arrington from TechCrunch pointed out in his article that there are 50 million people in the US who are actively using Myspace and Facebook.  And probably another 20 million that are actively using Linkedin.  I think anybody that uses more than one site is probably an active Power user.  Or anyone that uses one site significantly, but they just want to be the influencers.  And typically the influencers are the top 20 to 25 percent of users.  If you say that today in the world there are maybe 500 million people using social networks.  We're targeting really the top 100 million users that are actively using social networks initially.  But I think the value is not only really to those people.  It's really to anybody that has an email, an instant messenger, a mobile phone and a social network which these days is almost everyone. 

BF: I've been speaking with Steve Vachani, he's the CEO and founder of Power.com