By Nick Patience
Web acceleration may in the past have been about making the web faster in a pure velocity sense, using advanced caching and so on, but now web accelerators tend to be predominantly marketing tools designed to make it easier for users to go back to the same few core sites over and over again. For example, Web3000 Inc is in the process of remodeling its NetSonic accelerator into an advertising network, and now comes the latest entrant to the field, Newport Beach, California-based Winfire Inc. The company is just four months old and was formed by executives from advertising networks AdForce Inc and 2Can Media Inc.
The company’s new browser assistant, which went into public beta yesterday is a tool to enable faster navigation to sites that are used most by the user by providing an additional search bar and icons that can reduce the need to visit a partner’s web site in order to find a stock quote or search term or the weather. By entering data such as the ticker symbol, or the user’s zip code in the search bar and clicking on an icon of one of Winfire’s partners such as Weather.com or FreeRealTime.com, users are taken in one step to the relevant web site displaying the information they require.
President and chief executive David Kopp says the product is aimed both at a consumer and corporate audiences, although it seems more useful for users that cannot keep their browser open all the time for lack of a constant connection. Winfire has signed upwards of 40 partners so far who either get positions on various pull-down menus that emanate from the icons themselves or from a branded button at one end of the tool. That button will be available to distribution partners to brand themselves, says Kopp.
Kopp emphasized that users can delete any of the icons and add their own as they wish, so it is them, not Winfire that controls them. However, users do not seem to be able to configure the list of services that are slotted into the pull-down menus by Winfire, at least not with the beta version. Kopp says the top five slots will be sold, basically to the highest bidder, along the lines of GoTo.com. Winfire collects some basic user information, such as name, address and email and does intend to do direct marketing based on that information, but has also qualified for a Truset seal of approval for its privacy policies; in other words, users will be asked if they want to participate in direct matketing.
The company is not charging anything for the slots until the end of the year to work out which are the most popular destinations for users. After that it will charge slotting fees, affiliate merchant fees to take a percentage of sales made when users are guided to the item using Winfire, advertising revenues and direct marketing schemes. There is an additional revenue stream for Winfire as a marketing consultant as it plans to advise web sites of how they should configure their sites to achieve results from the Winfire tool.
The beta version of the tool is downloadable today from the company’s web site and is about 700K in size. The company raised $4.5m from local Orange County financier, IMI. Kopp spent about five years at Walt Disney Co before moving to be director of marketing at SynerDyne and then director of product management at AdForce, which is where he met the co-founders of Winfire, Chad and Ryan Steelberg.
Chad, who is the chairman and CTO of Winfire was the CEO, CTO and co-founder of AdForce, while his brother Ryan held a senior VP position at AdForce before leaving last year to form 2Can Media an internet ad rep company, which was promptly acquired by CMGI Inc.
