Last monday morning, i was suprised with a phone call from well-known internet journalist Peter Olsthoorn asking questions about our new startup called Kimengi. Shortly after the call, I realised he was on my mailinglist and i had sent a mail explaining that i had left Locatienet.com, a leading web company for maps and directions services in the Netherlands and Belgium and was about to start a company in recommendation technology.
Though it was nice a interview and the article (here, in dutch) is reflecting it quite well, let’s see if i can clarify just few things, with some first information for English readers too:
- Most important one: We are both 35 now!
(Sorry about that Christian…) - feedforward is indeed a recommendation network. It means it will draw its value from working on several sites together on item/post level. On each site it will provide internal and external recommendations, depending on the blogs/websites configuration.
- Yes this was conceived, built and started from out-of-office hours. Meaning, all evenings and weekend straight for the past 8 months now. Before that, not every night but many nights were spent. I am going to do a post on that soon.
- ‘Soon launching’, to us, means somewhere in the next two weeks. Experience tells us that deadlines really don’t exist. Releases do!
- Our business model is not advertising in any form. We have a distinct direction of thoughts on a new type of business model. We expect to be working on that quite a lot from now on.
- We think we have some good ways of making spamming our network quite difficult. We won’t say there is no chance at all. We will fight it however quite fiercely.
- Yes we are working on a whole new technology level for recommendations. No, can’t say anything about it, but we will hopefully be solving some main issues of the currently used technologies. There will be some more information at the time we launch officially.
- Christian and i, have been working on these things for about 13 years now (on and off). It is not just a clever thought.
- We secured some good funding which will enable us to start and grow and take it to the first level.
- Not mentioned in the article, but should have been asked: What about privacy? We have a very strong opinion on it. Expect our service to be completely open and you to be in full control. Transparency and control is the key to a succesfull recommendation service, as we believe.
We’ll be working on some material that we will post at the time of launch, somewhere in the coming weeks.
Next post will be a short one about lessons learned so far as a startup.
If you want stay up to date on our developments, you can register or manage your subscription:
Thank you!
