Continuing our series of Publisher Spotlights, we had the opportunity to talk to Andre Golsorkhi, CEO and Founder of Snipi. Andre shared with us some information about Snipi, his experiences thus far with the Shopzilla Publisher Program and even offers some advice to Publishers. Enjoy the article and feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Bryan: Andre, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. First question, what exactly is Snipi?
Andre: Snipi is a new social media platform that provides a smarter way for users to capture, organize, collaborate on, and share their personal interests - products, photos, videos and other content - from anywhere on the Web. It is the first online service of its kind that offers a patent-pending content capturing tool for both self-organization and group collaboration. Snipi's most compelling tool is a free Firefox add-on that enables users to literally drag and drop products, photos, videos and other content from anywhere online. The toolbar enables users to "snip" content directly from any webpage which will automatically save it to their personal profile. Users can share and collaborate through "Snipstreams" or broadcast to Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and other online destinations.
Bryan: Around the middle of May, Snipi seemed to take off, particularly with a feature article in the Wall Street Journal. What has been the target audience for Snipi, and how have you approached the social network market?
Andre: We have created a place where people can organize their digital lives and collaborate with friends around their interests. We believe other services have major gaps in architecture and functionality, leaving their users disorganized and overwhelmed with information. With Snipi, we looked to create an application that would nail the organizational aspect of content capturing while also offering some of the most powerful group collaboration capabilities on the Web. Alot of credit has to go to our teams on the creative and technical side, coupled with our business development and PR talent that helped us achieve exposure in a very short period of time. We're extremely pleased with the initial coverage but with our newest features being released in the month of July, we're anticipating a real upswing in traction and coverage. It is exciting times!
Bryan: What process/steps did you take before deciding to work with the Shopzilla Publisher Program?
Andre: We were in the early stages of development when we reached out to potential partner CSE's and we needed a team with the understanding and patience to work with an early stage venture. Shopzilla's team took the time to understand our vision and gave us the attention necessary to help us achieve our goals. This level of service was a requirement for us as we were still working out the kinks well before public launch and Shopzilla stepped up to help us through those areas in which they could be involved, and ultimately benefit from our success.
Bryan: What role does the Shopzilla Catalog API feed play in the interactive nature of Snipi?
Andre: As Snipi users drag and drop products from virtually any online store, the Snipi Toolbar immediately and automatically scours the page for product information. While the Snipi Toolbar is very much about organizing products users are researching online, we also wanted to provide other relevant information to the user without having them ever leave the page. Shopzilla's Catalog API allows us to give users price comparison information on-the-fly, along with all the other features Snipi provides (saving, organizing, sharing through social networks, etc). We also use the Shopzilla Catalog API to provide our Snipi users the same price comparison data in the Snipi iPhone app as they have in the Snipi Toolbar. While the Shopzilla API is strongest in the consumer electronics space, we expect that there will be greater precision to other categories as both of our products develop further.
Bryan: You were one of the first Publishers to test our new Catalog API service, how have you found its integration with Snipi?
Andre: We integrated with the new Catalog API almost immediately after its release. Coming from a team developing new technology and services we expect that the first iterations of a product will have a lot of kinks to be worked out. We were pleasantly surprised by how stable the new Catalog API was and how quickly we were able to make the change over. As a failsafe, however, we kept the old Catalog API in place just in case. Fortunately, as a result of the Shopzilla team's clean execution, we never found ourselves in a circumstance where we needed to revert to the old API.
Bryan: Overall, what has your experience been like with Shopzilla?
Andre: So far, so good! We're an early stage company and we still have a lot of our own kinks to work out, so, it is nice to have partners we can rely on and who don’t create more work for us than we already have. We hope that as our product evolves, we can work even more closely with the Shopzilla team to improve both our feature sets.
Bryan: Finally, do you have any tips or comments that you would like to offer any potential Publishers reading this article?
Andre: Publishers looking to build applications with or upon price comparison data should recognize that the gaps in product accuracy are in the CSE's control by only so much. No matter how strong of a search platform it is that they can build, inaccuracy will always fall prey to outside factors: 1) the difficulty in cataloging soft goods and 2) the lack of adherence to a web standard for product display and identification. I would urge publishers who may be working closely with or who have retailer relationships to help give more traction to the implementation of online product standards. This can be done by developing applications using this standard and showing them the benefits or by using your retailer relationships to influence their marketing and technical teams. The single most influential and far reaching development in this space will be the adherence of all stakeholders to an online product publishing standard. With a product catalog backbone, everyone will benefit.
Thanks to Andre for taking the time out to talk to us about Snipi. If you are interested about finding out more, or would like to try the Snipi toolbar, head on over to www.snipi.com. Snipi can also be found on Twitter: @snipi
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