Full Transcript:

Introducer: Technology Evangelist Podcast for May 16, 2007. Web 2.0 Wednesday; interviewing Eric Goldstein from Clipmarks.com, recorded live with audience participation.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It is Web 2.0 Wednesday. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham and with me is Cariann Higginbotham.

Cariann Higginbotham: Howdy.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And we are with technologyevangelist.com. Today we have a special guest with us via the phone, it's Eric Glodstein, I hope I am getting your last name right, it is stein, correct?

Eric Goldstein: Yes it is.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely and that’s you are from Clipmarks.com.

Eric Goldstein: Yep.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Tell us a little bit about Clipmarks.

Eric Goldstein: Sure, well there are two basic ways of looking at Clipmarks. One is as a browser plugin that works with Firefox or Internet Explorer and with it, you can basically clip pieces of web pages. So, for all those times when you see something on a page that you want to save or share or maybe post to a blog or e-mail to someone and you don’t want to bookmark the whole page or send an entire link, you can clip just the part you want, much like you would clip a piece of a magazine or news paper page. We basically let you clip pieces of web pages and then pretty much do anything you might want to with anything you clip and then there is the second component which is clipmarks.com, which is basically a social environment where people exchange their clips and share them for other people to see and so you can go there and basically browse the cliperverse, which we sometimes call it, just to see what people are clipping about all sorts of different topics. Or post your own clips for the other people to see.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, what makes Clipmarks different than say a Digg/Del.icio.us combination?

Eric Goldstein: Sure, look that’s great question and I think the first thing that makes us very unique from those two services is the focus on the clip. You can’t post anything on clipmarks.com that is in excess of thousand characters, you can create your own clips, any size you want, but everything on clipmarks.com as opposed to Digg or Del.icio.us is small, bite size if you will and the reason that’s important, is because what we are really trying to facilitate is the ability for people to consume more topics, a greater diversity of information without taking more time to do it, because if you really look at the world right now, people have very little free time, very little patience and yet I think more curiosity about more topics than ever before and so if you are going to enable people to learn about more things and consume more things without taking up more of their precious time, you need to basically get to the point and that’s the idea of a clip. Don’t give me the whole article, give me the point I really need to know, let me consume it and then if I care too, every clip includes a link, so I can go right to it and read the entire article, but Digg started out with the techie in the technology focus and so it is just bred a certain type of content where as, that’s really not our main focus. And then Del.icio.us is about bookmarking entire pages and creating links to pages and again we are really about that snippet that jumped out of you, that you felt so compelled to capture, so just a different approach.

Benjamin Higginbotham: If you are only clipping the headlines and you are only doing a small clip, how are you getting the full content across, we were talking before the show about things like news segments only two minutes long, you can’t get all the information out there in two minutes, you can’t tell the whole story. So, how do you tell the whole story with just a small clip?

Eric Goldstein: Well, that’s what really interesting. I think what you are enabling people to do is consume more than they would, because I think if you didn’t provide them the clip, they wouldn’t consume it at all. There are all sorts of topics, if I go to; it is interesting, I am on the site obviously quite often and I find myself reading about all sorts of topics that I would otherwise never ever make time for things, honestly like Buddhism and things that are good for you to drink green tea and ways to be a better friend or a better listener, just all sorts of interesting information, including things about politics, and technology and the latest news, but I am able to consume more than nothing and I know that sounds weird, but I wouldn’t normally make time in my day, I don’t have time in my day to read articles about – I am looking through my clips now, ones I have collected from the site today and one is about a 29 million year old ape skull that was found. Now, honestly I would never read an article about that, because I typically wouldn’t be on websites that deal with that and I wouldn’t normally want to read an entire article, but in this case it was a very interesting paragraph talking about how this particular fossil was 29 million-years-old and I found it interesting, I collected it, I added it to my clip collection and if I wanted to read the whole article again, I can, that’s the thing, you cannot post a clip without including the link, it's automatic.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Mocheeks in the Ustream chat room said as, this sounds like it is bringing your content similar to what StumbleUpon is doing?

Eric Goldstein: Well, but again StumbleUpon and – look I use StumbleUpon, I am a fan of StumbleUpon, so I am not saying anything at all, honestly negative just different. What StumbleUpon obviously, lets you do is when you come across a page that interests you, you kind of give it a thumbs up. What we are trying to do and would always happen to me - here is a perfect example, you are reading a magazine, you are sitting in a coffee shop, you are reading a magazine and you lean over to the person next to you and you point to like two paragraphs and you say “Hey, read these two paragraphs”, but sometimes you don’t say to them “read this four page article when you are done tell me what you think”, because there is two paragraphs in that article that you know will matter to them. With StumbleUpon you can’t really point out what it was on the page that caused you to react, you can just say, “hey, this page caused me to react”. What we are trying to do is with Clipmarks is actually say what was it on that page that mattered to you, OK so you like the page, cool, we give you the link always, but I want you to tell everybody else what specifically on that page really moved you enough that you wanted to clip it, which is more granular focus.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s a really interesting analogy and CJay in the Ustream chat room says “never really big fan of StumbleUpon, never knew why? And may be that’s it. That is actually a really, really good way putting it, I never really heard any service put like that before.” And you are absolutely right, that’s exactly what you do you say here read this article or read this part of this article or read this snippet and let me know what you think and if that person is interested, they can read the whole thing. It sounds like that sort of what you got, where I can read the article, but then if you want to continue to the original, you can most certainly do that – read the entire article.

Eric Goldstein: Exactly, well you know what’s happened, I think with and again I don’t mean any disrespect to these services, I am just taking a different approach to them, but a thumb up or a thumbs down or a bookmark on Del.icio.us in some respect is too easy, it doesn’t really give us enough room to get specific about it. It is either, yes or no – black or white – good or bad, but we are trying to bring context to that and so maybe you and I both like the same page, but for completely different reasons, but if we both bookmark it or we both thumbs up it, nobody will know that it was two different parts of the page and matter it does. So, when you can create a clip and I can create a clip and we could present to the world the piece that matter to us, even know the ironic thing is that they're from the same page.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Let me ask you, how did you get started with this whole project? What was the inspiring moment?

Eric Goldstein: Oh, my God. The inspiring moment honestly was – look my background is not as a technologist, so I was using the Internet, reading articles and finding myself completely frustrated that, I have always been a "clipper", like I know that sounds weird, but I clip whether it is printed material or pieces on the radio or pieces on TV. I am the guy that sits there and when you are watching a four minutes news segment, grabs on to a specific sentences and says to everyone in the room, “wait did you hear what he just said?”. That’s clipping, you are really highlighting specific pieces of media that are small bits of a larger body of work and I have always done that, whether it is with text books in school, when I was younger, or with newspaper, magazine articles, when I listen to the radio, watching TV and so I'd be on the web, I would read an article, I come to this moment in a page or in something somebody wrote, whether do you see in to be a blog post, then I wanted like circle, I almost wanted to rip it out of the screen and I honestly the funny thing is I could remember myself looking around the room, thinking what could I use? And nothing. The answer is nothing, what are you going to do? So, I have no idea how or why? If I knew how hard it would be and I don’t even know, if I would have done it, but it is been an incredible ride and we created it, so it is been fun, it is exciting, I'll tell you that much.

Benjamin Higginbotham: How many are on the team?

Eric Goldstein: There is five of us now.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And with, did that start our with you, there must have been a programmer to start off with...

Eric Goldstein: Yeah, it was me and a programmer Derek Krzanowski.  He and I for a little while were working on it on our own and then we brought in two more guys, Adam Collett and Eric Weitner. Adam is our designer and Eric joined, Eric is a programmer and the two of them basically do all the coding and recently we brought on a fifth person Eric Skiff, who in some respects, has really brought me into the future, if you will, because I am not a techie as I said. I don’t really immerse myself in all the new latest technologies and yet I'd like to, so Eric hass really been great at doing that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You are going to buy an iPhone when it comes out?

Eric Goldstein: No.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s not the right answer. What you mean “no”, I've never heard anyone say no before, that’s weird.

Eric Goldstein: It's the truth, I probably won’t, nope.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Do they look at your weird sometimes when you ask them to do something, where they are like “that’s not possible, you can’t do that on the web today, what are you thinking?"

Eric Goldstein: Well, I think they are used to it. And I think as much as they probably – we have an incredible chemistry actually. We have been working together for number of years and I think they know that if I ask for something that’s unreasonable or really not even feasible that it's not because I expect too much, it's because I don’t know any better, so they will just say to me “Hey Eric, we can do that, but it is going to take three months” and then I could say “alright, that’s seems little crazy” and it is actually a great work flow. I think we have become very efficient and in some ways it's like work related marriage. You can anticipate each others answers and we communicate pretty well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What is your monetization for this? Clipping is great and I can hand my newspaper off to someone else, but the newspaper doesn’t make money when I clip that, so how do you make money?

Eric Goldstein: Well, we don’t yet. One of the things we have really been just a product development base company and trying to build their user base and get to the point where we are worthy of people either, accepting relevant ads on the page or what I much prefer to do is create iterations of Clipmarks that we can then license to whether it's other media companies or businesses. We have been approached by a number of Fortune 500 companies and even the government about providing an enterprise version of this. So, that imagine you're a company with offices worldwide and you want your employees to be collaborating on things they read on the web and you don’t have a place for them to do that right now. You are going to CC 80 people and then the e-mail gets completely out of control. So, that’s something I expect towards the end of this year we will start to really try to package it up and either be able to put it on in enterprise server or host it our selves and provide a private environment for businesses and organizations to leverage the collaborative nature of the clipping.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s cool, so you would have the server that, you place behind their firewall, allow them to clip to their own internal server, which basically prevents other users from getting access to that, potentially harmful content. I mean want some of the pre-release information getting out there, so you want to make sure that the information you are clipping is not getting beyond your firewall.

Eric Goldstein: Yeah, that’s right. We have been approached by some Wall Street firms. So, imagine you have research analysts all over the world and you want them to be sharing what they read and the thing is these days news hits the Internet first, because you could actually find it in a blog or find it in a chat room, who knows where? Well before it gets into the Wall Street Journal and so you have somebody reading that, how do they instantly make their fellow employees or associates aware of it, so people have looked the Clipmarks as a solution, but we haven’t been ready for that yet, but we are getting there.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I realize you are a CEO and so you require to say “it is been awesome”, but outside of the required answer, how has the response to Clipmarks actually been? Has it been what you have expected – higher/lower?

Eric Goldstein: I wouldn’t necessarily say higher/lower, I would say more challenging for me to be clear about what I hope people understand us to be and even  there is an example, the sentence makes no sense. The biggest challenge for me is – I think there is two big challenges. One is, there is really two sides of Clipmarks and they have really have nothing to do with one another. There is the clipping technology that nobody should be without, it should just be standard in the browser, because you would clip and even print. A friend of mine said to me “Eric, Clipmarks saves trees, because now I only print the parts of an article I need”.

Cariann Higginbotham: There you go…

Eric Goldstein: And that has nothing to do with social and then there is the social side which is connecting people and information through the little clips that people create and so trying to stay true to both of those because I care about both of them without confusing the message, I think has been something that I have really struggled with and then quite honestly I think the second one is, the Web 2.0 hype, while it's good and you want to roll with it if people are willing to throw you in that mix. In some respects creates so much noise, that everyone is confused about what everyone does. We have been told so many times “you are just like Digg” and we are not just like Digg at all actually, go spend half hour on Digg and half hour on Clipmarks, I think you will find the experience very different, but yet I can understand why you would think that when there are so many companies to try to keep track of and so many messages to try to dissect, that I would say it hasn’t been higher or lower, I say it's just been more difficult for me to place us and position us the way I truly want us to be perceived. And that’s frustrating.

Benjamin Higginbotham: When a user is adding something to Clipmarks, what actually encourages them to include more information, the meta-data around that clip, so it is easier to search and find?

Eric Goldstein: Well, the cool thing is now they don’t have to, this is a really, really new, pprobably a couple of weeks old, but a new feature that we offer that I think greatly separates us from any book marking service, which is you now can do searches based on the content inside the clip and so the reason we did that is, I found myself constantly when I would create a clip going, how should I tag this, is it Bush/George Bush/President Bush and then I found myself when I was going to look up a clip trying or remember, how did I tag that?

Cariann Higginbotham: Exactly.

Eric Goldstein: And the tags I found very frustrating, because you are constantly battling either you are predicting in the future what you think, you will use to find? Or you try to remember in the past what you did use, when you found it and so we completely support tagging, but much better than tagging is simply saying I know I clipped something, I am using the example of George Bush. I know I clipped something about George Bush, I don’t know, I don’t care how I tagged it. Do a search for George Bush and we will pull up all your clips that either have George Bush in the title, in the body or in the tags and we automatically highlight the matching word for you, so that you can instantly find it not to the little squinty eye thing when you are looking the words on a page. So, really trying to make it incredibly easy for you to find anything you have clipped.

Benjamin Higginbotham: There is a little bit of debate going on inside of the Ustream chat room right now, and the debate is Mocheeks has just tested it and said “clipping was something like five plus steps, you got to turn on the clipping, clip something, save it, title tag, key word, public/private, save” and it seems like it is bit heavy on steps using the newspaper analogy again, you just hands someone the newspaper and point go “uh, read that”, where it seems really simple, where as other users right after this saying, “well, yes, but there is a lot of detailed meta-data, that goes around that”, that then it makes really easy to find, which makes you really valuable. So, is it a combination, which is it is combination of both or you are trying to get those steps down or have you found what you think as the optimal work flow?

Eric Goldstein: Couple of things, well, if you create a private clip you don’t have to put any tags or title on it, that’s just for public clips, so that we don't want you putting a clip into the public with no title. So, when you are clipping for yourself, it is incredibly quick. Literally, you could provide no meta-data at all, it is completely up to you. On public clips, we do ask you to put in a title and we are likely going to make tagging voluntary on public clips since we have this new search capability, so that you don’t really need to tag, if you don’t want to, but I think like anything the first time you do something it feels heavy and then you do it once or twice and you go well it is actually not, and if you compare to Del.icio.us, when you bookmark a page on Del.icio.us, there is a title, theres tags you provide a description and you save it. I think it is relatively similar. I think we could probably do better, I would be shocked if we couldn’t, but I think once you get to hang of it actually, it is pretty quick.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, on the flip side of the coin, Mocheeks, who just have the argument for the five plus steps says, when you are talking about tags and how they are just an annoyance says “that was an awesome idea about tags ultimately are really, really good idea” and that they love your solution to it and how you are taking care of that. so, I guess it is just like you said, “once you get used to this system” and as long as you are able to find the data that you clip, because you are little bit more than just pointing at a newspaper, you are not only pointing at the newspaper, you are then cutting that out and putting that in a such a form where you can find it at anytime with a simple search and you could go back, potentially years and find data from a newspaper years ago, which of course you wouldn’t be able to do it at the regular paper newspaper.

Cariann Higginbotham: Well it is not even just a newspaper or it is not even just news, I don’t know how much you've played on it, but Eric, I was looking at some of the stuff that you have popped and some of the stuff you clipped, etcetera, etcetera and it is anything and everything from – I will just read a couple, it says “depression it is spiritually incorrect”, and "teachers stage a drill, a fake gunman drill" to "five of Winnie the Pooh's favorite quotes". So, it is not just news, it is not just stuff you are going to find on CNN, it is stuff you could find on anywhere between Nickelodeon and Bencredible.com.

Eric Goldstein: That’s right! No you see, that’s what so in my opinion magical about the solution. It is anything and everything that you or other people find interesting and then if you think about clipping, prior to Internet, not just prior to Clipmarks, but you are looking at people, who in their desk draws have years, if not decades of scraps. Now, it is cool when I think it creates a nice feeling for the person to know it is there, but if they needed to find something in that stack, good luck, but if you look towards the future and say “a lot of my reading, if not most of my reading will be online” then every time you clip something, you are instantly adding it to your own "search engine". So that if a decade from now, I am sitting there with my daughter and I say “you know something, I once clipped something 10 years ago about, a 29 million-year-old dinosaur skull”, I will just type in dinosaur skull, and immediately anything I clipped would be brought up and obviously if that was a newspaper article offline, I would be digging through my desk drawer for an hour to find it. So, that’s where the combination of the clips plus the search, plus the social aspect to me really does unite to create something very unique.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Let me as you this, I clip something today and in 10 years from now, I go back, let’s say I clipped a website for example, but that website has since gone offline, when I clip something is it saving that clip just that text in my Clipmarks, it is not actually going referring back the original URL?

Eric Goldstein: No, that’s right, again so another reason. Web pages go down all the time, a new story that’s hot today is gone tomorrow. So, you are really archiving your personal web, as you journey around on the web, you are in fact creating your own little treasure chest.

Benjamin Higginbotham: If I were clipping a video, does it do the same thing, or does it refer back to the original video? How does that work?

Eric Goldstein: That pulls from the original source, so like if you were to pull a YouTube; clip a YouTube video, if the video was then taken off of YouTube, it would not play on our site, honestly we just can’t afford to host all that video, it's just plain and simple.

Benjamin Higginbotham: But, any text, so anything that you can just grab as a text or an HTML?

Eric Goldstein: Images as well, we host images, we just don’t host video.

Benjamin Higginbotham: OK, so everything, but video then, anything that I have got in that little dropdown list of stuff?

Eric Goldstein: Yes.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s really cool. So, then you really can create an archive.

Eric Goldstein: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, let me ask you this, can someone game this system then, Wall Street Journal for example will have a paid section, what’s preventing someone from just going into the paid section that has an account clipping it and then sharing it with everyone else?

Eric Goldstein: Well, again that’s why we put in the limit of a thousand characters. So, yeah, you could go clip a paragraph, sometimes it is just paragraph and a half, may be two, but you are not going to be able to clip entire articles and anyone who does, quite honestly, if we see that they are gaming the system, we will stop them. I am not looking to allow that in our endorse that, quite honestly luckily it hasn’t happened, but you are going to have quite honestly really lousy clips, because the whole point of a clip is to get to the best part of an article and so if everybody else on the site is clipping these really key important sentences, paragraphs, really nailing the point and you are just clipping every paragraph you come across, you know what's going to happen? Your clips they are going to be ignored, because that’s not what we do on Clipmarks.com, we don’t read entire articles, we read the really interesting clips and when we are interested, we then click the source and so people, I think we have got a big enough culture, where people who don’t do that honestly, they are going to get no action to this site and so it actually would, probably add zero effect on Wall Street Journal, but if I saw that it did, I would just stop it, I'd take the clips down, quite honestly, that’s what I would do right away.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, a lot of people in Ustream are really enjoying this, they have been going to the website and clipping stuff and playing with service and they feels like, they seem to really think it is great, they are saying it “kills two birds with one stone” you have do this and this, “it really streamlines my life” and they seem to love it, that seems to what I am – but no one has really heard of it before, so…

Eric Goldstein: Yeah, I know. Well, look I think part of that is I am not really part of the Web 2.0 community. There is a group of bloggers and a group of companies and a group of venture capitalists and it helps when they all know each other and they all have lunch together and they really can create a buzz and I am not really focused on that or part of that. So, it is a bit more difficult for us to get the word out, but I think we may not have that kind of massive hockey stick uptake, but I think that we will have a consistent satisfaction rate and we will just have to grow it the old way, like literally earn it, one user at a time and hope that people spread the word and gather momentum, but it is true. I wish more people knew about it, but hopefully they will and I think it is starting to happen.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Are you making a little bit more of a marketing push, or at least just trying to do a little bit of ad sense type stuff or you just doing at the word of mouth thing, just trying to get it out there?

Eric Goldstein: No, word of mouth. One of the transitions we are making on the site right now that probably will be live, say a week from today, is to really facilitate you creating a personalized version of this site, based on the clippers that you like most. So, that as you navigate the public side, if you see there are 10/12/15/30/50, I think I have 87 clippers I follow or something. You will very easily be able to go get lost in your own environment, whether it is just two of your friends, who might want to create a little world for each other, and really segment off into the areas that you find interesting, go back to the public find more clippers and that’s really where I hope the scale can come in, because in the fact the analogy I think of, it is like we are putting more rooms in the house, where as right now every single person who comes in has to fit into one room and if you really make the analogy, when everyone is talking in one room, it could get very loud and so you often say “hey, why don’t we step aside”, we are trying to make it easier for you and the people that you gather with just say “hey, why don’t we step aside”, so that’s coming next and I think that’s going to be a key part of us being able to scale the community.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Speaking the scaling, where does funding come from, what’s going to ensure that you are here in 10 years?

Eric Goldstein: Well, we have had a number of venture capital offers, thus far we are funded by, luckily some friends and family that believe a lot in what we are doing and we don’t have a very high cost structure, so it is not hard to keep this thing going right now and the venture capitalists are interested, but one of the things I really want to do throughout the rest of 2007, is not focus on business or monetization. I really want to focus on product, because I think in the long run that’s what’s going to make the difference and when you are talking at least to the people I have been talking to, their focus has been more on from an investment standpoint, how are you going to monetize this? And so I think there will come a time where we have to monetize. Then like I said, I think in 2008, that’s something I will do, I hope to do it by licensing private versions to corporations and groups like that, but we are good for now and when I think if we decided we need a venture financing, I don’t think it would all that difficult to get, but I guess you never know till you really sign the dotted line, but we've had a few offers, so I am pretty comfortable with that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, my last question for the day is that, I spend my day in Google reader RSS, that’s I wake up, I open up Google reader and it is stays open for the rest of the day all through the evening and do you have the ability to integrate these clips directly into Google reader, because you are talking about being able to read these headlines and whatnot. Well I can those bring those headline into Google reader, which I am already doing some of that headline reading, that’s expands my reach as it were.

Eric Goldstein: Yeah, of course. Whether it is by topic or based on any particular user or it is just the top clips of the day or latest clips, anything, yeah sure. You can definitely pull them in.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well we brought you on the show because we thought it was a fantastic product, we thought it need a little bit of evangelizing out there in the technology community, we are very impressed with what you have and like I said; I've used it from a podcasting standpoint, from the blogging standpoint, of just clipping stuff that I wanted to remember down the road and just making sure that I had access to it. So, I could go, “oh, I wanted to write about that”.

Cariann Higginbotham: So, you mean I didn’t have to print all those things out for you?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, now you don’t anymore. You'll notice you haven't done that in while, so absolutely.

Eric Goldstein:Well, thank you for that, I appreciate it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, Eric you have got a great product and like you to thank you are so much for joining us today on Technology Evangelist Podcasts and tomorrow we will have, what is tomorrow, Cariann?

Cariann Higginbotham: Search Thursday.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Search Thursday, you know what? We actually have no plans for search Thursday whatsoever, believe it or not, we will come with one tonight, we will come up with something clever and fun for you guys in TalkShoe and in Ustream as well, so make sure to join us tomorrow that’s at 10 eastern, 9 central, 7 pacific. Thank you so much for joining us everyone, we'll chat with you tomorrow.