Add to iTunesRan Geva - CEO Omgili
Summary
In this week’s episode of Read/WriteTalk I sit down with Ran Geva, the CEO & Founder of Omgili. Ran shares with us how he can up with the idea for Omgili and some of his viision for the comapny moving forward and it’s related business model.
Links from Interview
Transcript
| Sean Ammirati: So, before we jump into all that, could you just give us a little bit of your background? | |
| 00:41 | Ran Geva: Sure, of course. Before I became the CEO, I was just an entrepreneur. Usually we dealt with peer-to-peer technologies. I created some applications like Peer2Mail that enables you to share files over emails and some other applications that have to do with peer-to-peer applications. Actually, you can see it at rangeva.com. |
| 01:21 | Some of them are spyware related and MalWhere which detects interactively with Google. It detects malware on your computer. And after developing software, I started thinking about developing something more than peer. And then I thought about Omgili. Each of my software had a forum inside, support forum. |
| I found it lacking a central search feature, search engine forums. This is when I thought about Omgili and as I went through it, they extended not only to forums but every other discussion based site. It could be a Q&A site, review sites where people discussed. Even mailing lists and user groups are included. So, this is where Omgili going to be. | |
| Omgili started about a year ago and recently we received a seed funding from Pitango which is a Israeli VC. And we received it six months ago and we started working hard.Sean Ammirati: Great. So, you’ve been around for a year and had VC funding for six months. How many people are part of the company at this point? | |
| 03:01 | Ran Geva: We are four people working full time.Sean Ammirati: And all in Israel? |
| Ran Geva: Yeah.Sean Ammirati: So what’s the entrepreneurial community like in Israel these days? | |
| Ran Geva: Actually, it been like always. It’s very vivid and alive and many new sites, many new startups are cropping up everyday. And a lot of new technology is being invented here. But I do see change in the atmosphere and the way that people relate or think about new technology. I think the dot-com implosion made people start thinking more about usability and real features and the real needs before they started developing some sort of a company. | |
| 03:41 | We are just trying to create something that will cause a bit of a stir, get money and hopefully, we’ll get somewhere. Today, I think it’s majority of the VCs that are demanding for entrepreneur to come up with solid financial business plans before they invest. So you do see, you know these more mature companies because they are backed by more mature VCs. |
| Sean Ammirati: That’s a nice evolution, I think, happening everywhere which is good. So, actually, you set the transition. What is the business model behind Omgili? | |
| 04:36 | Ran Geva: Well, Omgili has two hats, actually, even search engines as you can see. There’s search engines for searching information. If you want to hear opinions. If you want to find a solution to a problem you might have many questions have already been asked and you can find the answers there. |
| If you want to go to a trip or a vacation and you wanted to hear opinions about the place. You can even get it. It’s a user-to-user, a place to find out what people are saying about anything. So, that’s the business to consumer part. On top of that we are already building an insight research system. | |
| So, we have millions of daily discussions indexed which have valuable information for everyone who wants to get to check it about information in it. And if it’s a product or if it’s a brand, if it’s a just a field of interest and you want to learn what people are saying about it. If it is statistically or semantically, we developed a real time tool online and to extract the insight. | |
| 05:44 | That’s what we’re working hard on these days. So, this is just the second half of the business way, the business side. We would sell it to business and for everyone interested in the field of marketing or information of the market here or is interested in. |
| Sean Ammirati: Interesting. Okay, so the first half is advertising, I assume? Search engine advertising? | |
| Ran Geva: But that’s not the main business. Other than I think it’s nice, it’s cool. Omgili is getting popular on many users using it. But we are focusing now, because we already completed the first cycle of development on Omgili. | |
| 06:29 | We are only four people. We are focusing high on the research part. Of course we have a load of features that we had kept buried and hopefully, we’ll get there soon.We are all working on the research part of the technology. |
| Sean Ammirati: Right, so that second part the research part, where you’re focused now, is that subscription based then? People pay a subscription fee or how will they get it? | |
| Ran Geva: It will be a different plan for a different kind of business. If it’s a person who is interested in it, he won’t be able to. Pricing is not set yet but we are planning to make it very accessible to the long tail. Today, if you want to order research or something, you will have to pay thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for a research that you will probably be getting about three days to three months. It depends on what you are looking for. | |
| 07:34 | With Omgili research, you will probably get in real time and the budget, depending on what you want, will be much, much lower. Of course, the source is from the Internet. Unlike tradition researches that you get information but you don’t get resources from where the conclusion came. |
| Here we give all the access to all the resources from where we extracted the insight. And keep pointing to the discussion like if there was a problem with the new iPhone. The battery, I don’t know and Apple is interested in knowing about any other problem. They will see the actual discussion from where we extracted the information. If it’s good the project is on. It’s very, very important for a company to know what’s being said about it. | |
| 08:39 | Sean Ammirati: That makes sense. So, there’s these traditional researchers with someone like Nielsen for example. Who would be certain traditional researchers that you’re kind of disrupting their business model? Who would be some examples of companies that do that? |
| Ran Geva: Nielson recently bought, acquired completely the Nielsen Biometrics which was an Israeli company. It researched many blogs, which is the kind of information that we do work with but it’s a different kind of media. I may give you one too many. We run forty. Sometimes you get your clients but basically you are a reporter. | |
| 09:31 | Whereas as it unfolds, it’s a a medium of many, too many. The information you get there is different from blogs. So, we are focused on discussion based sites and we do have the ability to do research on blogs as well. But as far as we know, the ability of Nielsen and other companies like Symphony and other companies who do research deeply and understand the structure of a discussion is very limited. |
| We have developed a patent-pending system that can analyze discussions. For it’s part, it can discriminate between the title, the topic, the date, the reply, where the text is located and so on, a generic way. It doesn’t have to be specific for a specific forum. We developed it in a generic way. This way we know how to understand the parts of the discussion and it helps to analyze the data. | |
| 10:39 | On top of this, we know how to apply some semantic and statistical analysis automatically, in real time. Whereas in Nielsen, they do have automatic tools but they do have analytic full genomics. We have no competition with them. We could be a complementary tool. Researchers can use Omgili to analyze, to be guided. |
| It will never, in my opinion, replace the traditional research. It’s like an added feature to a calculator for mathematician or a ruler for someone else. It’s a tool. It will never replace human insight, of course, but it’s an additional tool that will help you to be directed to the right area, to know where the problems are, the good things. The sentiment where people are speaking off, the good sentiment or the bad sentiment. | |
| 11:46 | In timeframes and revolutions between hours and days, you can go to your computer and just check yesterday or this past week and see and compare it for a previous periods and see what changed, what was the topic, what was the surrounding topic around your field of interest. And then just you can go and investigate the vast amount of information really, really quick. Especially with our tools that we have developed. |
| Sean Ammirati: Right. Okay, so, Nielsen is not a good comparison. Are you selling this product yet in the marketplace, this research tool? | |
| 12:39 | Ran Geva: No, not yet. It’s something I see as really awesome. We have a working prototype but it’s in alpha. Nielsen is different because of two main things. First, they are really concentrated around blogs and they are user interface. They have professional analytics who analyze information and produce a very deep and thorough report where they are doing all the work for the user. It is amazing, great work but it takes time. |
| If you want to order a report, first it’s very expensive. Second, it will take you days or a few months to create this report. Marketers and anyone else who needs the research the market can use our tools to extract information quicker. We try here to analyze discussions and to go over, let’s say, even 10-20 discussions and to understand the there is quite some information. | |
| 13:59 | We see if there if someone says something useful for you about a product, it’s very time consuming. You get tired really, really fast. With Omligi research, you are covering thousands of discussions and our system will be able extract and pinpoint any issue about the product. If there is something that the people or talking more around your product. |
| We give the sentiment about your product, the atmosphere around your product and then so on. For example, one of the examples I like to give when you try one of the components of our system which is the bubble. Which bubbles some terms around the term. We enter the word, the famous word Viagra. | |
| 15:04 | Many times Viagra is beautiful stem. In time, we notice over a time period, we notice big words will jump out of the screen, namely jet lag. When we went to further investigate it, how Viagra is related to jet lag, we discovered people saying in phones that Viagra is very helpful for jet lag, if you are taking Viagra. |
| After you land, it will help you to get rid of your jet lag. It is helpful information for marketing a pharmacy company who sold or manufacture Viagra. They know that people will be using it. They can promote it, they can condone it. They can do whatever they want. That’s something that I didn’t know and I don’t think they knew that. | |
| 15:56 | On the basis of this premise, anyone with a product can find out the uses, what are people talking more about, around the thing they are interested in. So that’s one of implication. |
| Sean Ammirati: That makes a lot of sense. I know you that you are on Alpha Internal offer right now, but have you met with any marketing departments or anything to get feedback from them at this point? | |
| 16:37 | Ran Geva: We made a trip there three months ago, just to learn needs and to become open-minded. We just asked questions and filled their needs. One of the major needs was a way of targeting the system. Many, many companies know the information is out there. They are much more open for harvesting information from it. |
| They know user-generated content sites are a majority of work in finding information and insights of products. But they have no tools to go over them. They can go and do a search on Google or Omgili and will usually find discussion 2,3,4,5 and read them. But the amount of the volume of the discussions out there are astonishing. | |
| 17:21 | You won’t be able to handle it manually. So you have to have a tool that will give you direction and pinpoint issues about whatever you’re looking for. This one is where we come to. So, in regard to Nielsen or Symphony or other companies whose dealing with online research, it’s a compliment tool. It will only help them and currently, we do not compete with them. |
| Sean Ammirati: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Any surprises? Is that sort of what you expected to hear when you sat down on your trip to develop needs or anything that surprised you? | |
| Ran Geva: Actually, we did think probably building Omgili from that need. I started thinking, “Hey, it’s a great place to uncover information and see what people are talking about before it gets to the newspapers. But when I sat down to start developing Omgili, I found that it will taking me a lot of money to recruit people and computers and so on, to cover enough information. | |
| 18:36 | So, it’s not always a search engine because search generally is considering hardware but I started small and I experimented with new technolgies. We developed a crawler and I talked about then afterwards when Omgili started getting good reviews and so on, I got approached by some VCs and came out with an investment from Pitango where we did decide to explore this field of research. |
| Of course, you search the search engine. It’s very, very rare or very important for us to continue to develop and market thoroughly because we do think that we crawl discussion based sites and we don’t want just to peek. So we want the ones that get us to be popular. So we will build trust to those discussion based sites. They will gain from us crawling them. | |
| 19:49 | The many, many search engines crawling the web and they all take bandwidth from the sites. We do want Omgili to be a really, really good tool for the user to drive profit to those. They are our bread and butter so we do want Omgili to become a very popular search engine to benefit whoever is indexed at the beginning. ut the research part is where we thought that… |
| I bet you if you want to know what people are saying about your product or product you’re working on or interview or an idea, it’s very interesting. So, I developed a software or when I built Omgili, they were very interested what’s the first thing about Omgili. What people are saying about Peer2Mail. What people are saying means a lot. I couldn’t find the tools to do it really well. | |
| 20:40 | Sean Ammirati: Interesting. We’re visiting a lot to the alternative search engine like this. So, obviously you just received an award on our site AllSearchEngines. What has been the biggest surprise for you running an alternative search engine, that part of your business? |
| Ran Geva: Well, at first it was very difficult. When an entrepreneur comes to a VC, there’s a common mistake. You know there’s a market. The search market in my case and you see that the demand is in billions of dollars. And you’re saying, “If only we had chance to present from this market, I will be a millionaire.” | |
| 21:34 | So when you approach a VC, never use this approach because it’s stupid because that’s not the only idea to get the percentage. Charles recently ran an article about the 5% glass ceiling. I was surprised how difficult it is to really get users to use continually your search engine because when you are a vertical search engine, the process that we get users to use your search engine is as follows. |
| They will go to Google first. The will search Google. They will have to not find what they are looking for in Google but that doesn’t really happen that very often. Afterwards, they will have to remember you exist. And then they will have to make the connection that because the information they are looking for could be found in your search engine. And then you’ll have to use search engine, hopefully and get better results than Google. | |
| 22:48 | So, you narrow it down and it’s very difficult to get users deciding not to use Google first before you use any other search engine, because it’s so good. So, it’s really, really difficult to get you to use other search engines before they use Google. You do have to brand yourself correctly and to make a connection between the type of information you are producing to a search engine. |
| For example, in the case of Omgili, searching for an opinion about a chair I want to buy. If I search for a chair, Google probably gets specifications where I can buy this and so on. But if I want to see what people think about it because it’s an expensive chair and I don’t want to waste a lot of money before I buy it, it will be very difficult to find with Google. | |
| 23:48 | So, if you want opinions, I wouldn’t go to Google before I go to Omgili. To get the word out there is very difficult. But I was surprised that actually when I saw replies and posts and blogs and forums that Omgili did a much better job at finding information than Google. I was surprised. It’s really something you don’t read everyday. |
| I saw that my search engine returns better results than Google’s because, hey, Google is the authority in search. And that was very surprising and I was very honored to receive an award from Charles and AllSearchEngines. It really meant a lot. It’s really a great feeling. | |
| 24:36 | Sean Ammirati: Well, thanks so much Ran. |
| Ran Geva: Thank you! Thank you very much. |
September 12th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
[…] The interview between Sean Ammirati and Ran Geva. […]
September 13th, 2007 at 2:05 am
Very interesting!
They should invest more in marketing since I never heard of them before, but I guess they are a young company so it is no real surprise.
Alex.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I just found Omgili last night and already made a post talking about it on my blog. I prefer searching discussions to conventional search engines.Your answers are opinions, which is 9 time out of 10 what I am looking for when looking something up. I think Omgili will do quite well.
I’ve used other discussion board type search engines and the results were pitiful. I was pleasantly surprised with Omgili’s results.