Another company has entered the increasingly crowded world of internet accelerators and marketing tools. FriendMe Inc has launched CliqueMe, a tool that enables registered users to see who else is viewing the same web site as them and to chat to them, which is more or less same as Gooey, which was launched a few months ago. The flip side of that is that it also enables web site owners to track who is using their site and what they are looking at and it also enables the company to offer web marketers and e-commerce firms a list of web users who are all interested in the same things. The three-month old company has an alpha version of the tool on its web site for download now and expects the beta within a week and the first full bug-free version within one month, according to company founder and CEO Wai-Keong Foong.
The San Mateo-based company, which got its seed round from a VC in Singapore, has inked distribution agreements with ISPs in Latin America, Germany and France and is talking to others in Asia, but there are no names forthcoming yet. FriendMe intends to employ the usual viral marketing techniques to build up CliqueMe’s user base quickly and will also offer ad space on the interface.
The company intends to extend its basic user profiling to enable e-commerce firms to target offers at users who are online, perhaps offering them discounts for, say a ten minute period, advertising with a ticker bar on the tool, with FriendMe getting a percentage of any revenues generated. However, Foong says the product will still be permission-based and will maintain individual users’ privacy. Additional ad space will also be sold on the tool. In the three days since its launch, there have been about 850 downloads of CliqueMe, Which is not a lot, but it’s very early days.
