Jon Thralow, Revisited

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ~Arthur C. Clarke

At the end of January we interviewed Jon Thralow on Internet entrepreneurialism and especially eCommerce. It seemed we'd only scratched the surface so I met with him yesterday at the Red Mug to do a little more probing regarding his work.

Though now primarily doing consulting work, Jon used to manage a team of programmers. As we compared notes from time to time these past few years, I found it interesting to learn that programmers and Internet developers can have temperaments like artists. Those who do the best work may not fit neatly into your standard corporate cubespace. Jon, though a technical wizard and programmer himself, understood this art-heart-spirit of his team. They consequently achieved remarkable things together.

Here, for a few moments, we explored the meaning of Web 2.0, the explosion of web content and at least one solution for dealing with the tsunami of information that is washing across cyberspace.

Ennyman: I have been hearing a lot of numbers thrown around regarding how fast the Internet is growing. What kind of numbers are you seeing and where do these numbers come from?

JT: As for sales growth the Internet is one of the few bright spots for the economy, but the larger growth is happening in content My best guess is that in pure data being uploaded is growing so fast with YouTube, and social media sites that the number of gigabytes online is at least doubling every other year.

Ennyman: The Internet has brought a lot of new terminology into existence. Here are a couple that the average person might be hearing that need clearer definitions. What is “Web 2.0”? What is the “deep web”?

JT: "Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design that aims to facilitate communication and interoperability on the World Wide Web. Some concepts that have led to this evolution are web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, and blogs. As all of this new content is quickly being added search engines like Google are having a hard time keeping up and indexing this information. The amount of information that Google is able to index is a small fraction of the entire Internet. Everything that is not indexed by search engines is called "deep web".

Ennyman: You have helped develop a number of successful eCommerce companies and are currently consulting in this area. What is it that so turns you on about eCommerce?

JT: I am not really sure. I like science and I like doing things that people tell me not to. When I first went into eCommerce, it was more of a feeling like, “What is this? It is going to go away in a week or two and will it even work if more people get online?” I was just too curious to leave it alone. One of the parts that I liked best was the ability to marry marketing and science. Knowing exactly what each dollar did and how much that dollar turned into…

Ennyman: You are also involved in a company called Mozenda which helps eCommerce companies efficiently gather data from the Internet. Why can’t people just do this with search engines like Google?

JT: Mozenda does much more than help eCommerce companies. We have very large companies using this tool.

For eCommerce, a search engine only returns results on the browser while Mozenda gathers the data you want and puts it into a usable format.

Ennyman: What other kinds of companies are currently using Mozenda’s software platform? How are these companies using the program?

JT: There are many different companies including even a couple of DOW-tracked publicly traded companies, one from retail and one from financial. Financial companies will track buy/sell data to predict future stock prices. The retail company is using it to compare its prices to its competitors. Another financial company is using it to gather data from one section of its organization to mesh it with another. Many PR companies are using the program to watch the reaction to the brand by harvesting data from blogs and forums. Other large companies are using the product to learn about potential recalls in their product line before production has put too many out into the marketplace saving the company millions and increasing the product quality.

Ennyman: Doesn’t it seem a little like opening the door to a Big Brother situation here? Can this kind of data acquisition lead to abuses and does that concern you?

JT: Yes, this sure can lead to abuse. I think the analogy might be that Mozenda makes the guns and they can be used for either good or evil fits here. There have been companies that have been taken to court by stealing data from their competitors, but Mozenda does not advocate this practice. The goal of Mozenda is to make the data on the net much more usable.