Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Thoughts on Returnable, and Contextual search and advertising platforms

I was pleasantly surprised with this post by Robert Scoble up on podtech...

The best part of being a startup is that you are forced to tackling specific problems.

It was a few months after i started the Returnable Project in March,2007 that i heard about the 11$mn odd funding that israeli startup kontera had received. Returnable , was pretty similiar - i said to myself but with a more developer and architectural perspective . It started off, and continues to be a small pet project i maintain with PVS - that deals with content delivery for end-user programmers ,but more catered to developers and the software engineering spectrum. It was to let ordinary end-users to concentrate on what to bring in in-text, instead of the how. Another entrepreneur buddy was also discussing ways to invoke returnable within their product. And so it is with a sense of pride and excitement that i assess that for a open source project I think it has served as a testing bed for things to come. I definitely am glad to see the buzz "contextual delivery" , apart from the the continued voids and irregularities that are still persistently haunting adopters of in-text content and ad delivery.

There are already a lot of players in the advertising space who offer in-text advertisements, and so on. There's Kontera, Miva , snapshot (that does a good job with the screenshots), addThis (fo social bookmarks) and so on. Can companies like Proximic or for that matter Kontera afford to give competitors another five years before building “contextual content delivery” and “in-text advertising” expertise ?

I honestly don’t think so 8 )

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