NEWS

Building a Personal Toolbar

Globes
April 17, 2008
By Gali Weinreb

Media start-up Conduit has developed a toolbar that companies can take with them whether they go in the virtual world.

If the Afula napkin folders' website offered a browser-integrated toolbar, it would probably include a search window, in which typing the name of a flower or animal would immediately return a link to a video clip demonstrating how to fold these images from a simple kitchen napkin. A more advanced version would have several windows offering the choice of an animal, color and texture for the cloth.

It would also have a button on which to click to change the screen saver background so that a different cloth appeared each time it came up on the screen; a second button which on clicking it would open a dropdown menu with a list of napkin folder network members with the names of those members currently logged on to Messenger highlighted; a changing catalogue of literature from abroad on napkin folding; rolling advertisements for stores offering gifts for the grandchildren, and, for good measure, a Google search window.

Conduit Ltd. (formerly Platforma Online - EffectiveBrand) enables commercial companies (and individuals too, although this is not the company's core business), to develop toolbars easily and with no programming needed, which they can then offer to anyone. From the moment you download the toolbar, you actually take the company's website with you wherever you go on the Internet. The actions you usually carry out on the site - chat, talkback posts, searches, and news updates - are concentrated in the upper part of the screen in the form of a collection of buttons and miniature windows. The site goes with you everywhere you browse while online, and appears in every page you visit, eliminating the need to switch pages especially in order to view it. "We offer companies real estate on the browser, and give them the opportunity to place 20-30% of their site on it," says Conduit VP sales marketing Joel York.

Most of you are undoubtedly familiar with the Google toolbar. Conduit's idea is similar, save for the fact that Google had to design its toolbar from scratch and that it is suited to Google only. Conduit, on the other hand, offers a toolbar that can be adapted for use by any company. If the company in question is running a financial portal, it can use the toolbar to offer share quotes, rolling news, and indices updates. If it is a social network, it can bring to the top of the page the latest news and updates from the hottest forums. A music site can use the toolbar to offer a radio player, news on artists, forums and a button which when clicked will bring up special purchase offers.

Conduit's toolbar is located on the section of the page where the browser buttons currently appear. A user will usually choose one or two toolbars from his favorite sites, although York swears he can even manage 15 toolbars with no bother.

While developing a toolbar may sound simple, the fact is that there are very few around aside from that of Google. There are, of course, RSS pages, which is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines or update notices to a wide number of people. Internet users can visit an RSS page with feeds instead of visiting each page individually. The problem is that preparing an RSS page requires a certain degree of ingenuity from both the end surfer and the site he gets the information from. Moreover, users still have to access the RSS page itself.

Not enough advertising to go round

Conduit was founded in 2004 and financed by its founders CEO Ronen Shilo, formerly founder of UCMore, and CTO Doron Erez, formerly development manager of DoubleAgent. The company launched commercial operations a year and a half ago. It raised $8 million from Benchmark Capital in its first funding round in January, and will use the proceeds to expand its marketing operations in the US and develop new products for the insertion of web content into browsers, not specifically by way of a toolbar.

Globes: You're offering your toolbars free both to portals which create them and offer them as downloads, as well as to anyone who downloads them. How do you earn your revenue?

Shilo: "We have agreements with partners who offer their content on our site through a button that can be added to the toolbar. If one of the portals that create a toolbar through us adds this button and then a surfer uses it to access our partner's site or to buy something from it, we take a share of the revenue."

Why not charge money for creating the toolbar? After all, your customers are commercial sites which have money and will also appreciate the contribution the toolbar makes to their business.

"The customers are commercial sites but also community sites. We don't believe in collecting payment upfront for content services - we prefer instead to share any generated revenue."

I've been hearing recently about more and more sites financed by advertising. There's a sense that this advertising money will never run dry. Doesn't this sound somewhat "new economy"?

"The Internet advertising pie, while it may be constantly growing, will not suffice for every single Internet venture around, and some have already suffered because of this. There will be enough for the good ones like us, and the fact is we're already profitable even though we employ 50 expensive employees at our R&D center in Israel and our marketing department in the US. So far 30 million toolbars created on our site have been downloaded."

If building a toolbar is that easy, wouldn't most surfers rather build their own toolbars with elements from different sites and no paid content buttons?

"Most surfers are not that sophisticated. They would rather have their favorite portal package package content for downloads in seconds. Take the iPhone - what did they do there? They put on the set's desktop a few applications that looked the most useful. That can be changed, but most people leave on the applications that came with device, and feel they got added value."