MineKey- More details

By Vivek | May 21st, 2007 at 11:00 pm ET         

As promised I am back with more details about the Sunnyvale, CA based startup -Minekey. Delip Andra is leading the charge at Minekey that is funded by NEA with Vinod Dham being on the Board of Directors. Delip and his team in India have been working on the content recommendation service for the past more than a year. In this long development cycle, MineKey has developed a content surfacing engine that enables publishers to target the most relevant content to their users based on the browsing history. This is a very different viewpoint from the existing mechanisms where majority of the publishers assume that the most relevant content is the one which is most recent, or has been assigned to the same category or has been similarly tagged.

Minekey’s recommendations web service enables content publishers to surface the most relevant content for each visitor through a personalized recommendations widget. Whenever you hit a site with Minekey widget, the widget looks into your click stream data and browsing history to deliver the personalized results. And same will be the case for each user hitting the website. So, without the site owner/publisher having to maintain/integrate an external authentication system, he is able to deliver a way better user experience. Besides that, some of the obvious benefits - greater user stickiness and increased page views. And not to forget - ability to get personalized news article recommendations at all the sites you visit that are part of MineKey network.

As far as making money is concerned, Minekey is looking to integrate this solution with low volume to high volume sites. As expected, majority of focus would still be working on larger publishing sites.  According to initial plans, publishers would work in revenue share per additional revenue generated by Minekey’s recommendations OR at a fixed rate per additional page view generated.

MineyKey claims that there are atleast 10% increase in the number of users coming to the website. I think the number would eventually increase as the widget spreads around. Right now I trying to get couple of issues resolved with the widget. Once that is done, you should see the widget up there on the blog.