I’m heading to San Francisco next week to attend the Web 2.0 Expo and participate in Charles Knight’s AltSearchEngine pre-conference, the AltSearchEngines Get Together on Monday, April 21.

AltSearchEngines Get Together

I’m excited that Charles asked me to moderate a panel discussion on the topic “Users First: Give them WHAT they want, the WAY they want (and need)”. Judging from the breadth of experiences the panel speakers have and their companies’ varied approaches to search, this will be a lively discussion.

Some of the questions we’ll cover are:
- What makes a good experience? How do you connect with your audience? How do you create a seamless experience (end-to-end)?
- What is your approach to user retention and stickiness?
- How do you get the user / consumer involved in the process of designing and building a better experience?
- User Distractions – Display Ads, AdSense-type programs or other paid sponsorships. How do you approach this dilemma? How do you find the balance?

Next week I hope to give you the highlights from the panel and the conference.

Let me introduce the speakers and the companies they represent. In no particular order:

Jaideep Singh, CEO and Co-Founder of Spock

Jaideep Singh is a co-founder and CEO of SPOCK. Prior to SPOCK, Jaideep was an early stage venture capitalist at Clearstone Venture Partners. He got his MBA from the Wharton School in 2002 and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona in 1991. He also completed all the required coursework for his MS in Computer Engineering. From 1992 to 2000 Jaideep worked in various marketing and engineering roles, mostly at Wind River. He started his engineering career at IBM.

About Spock

Spock is a people search engine that helps you find friends and colleagues on the Web. Spock combines two very powerful forces. First, our technology organizes web content about people into easily understood search results. We search for information on biography pages, social networks, news sites, blogs, directories... pretty much every place imaginable on the internet. Second, the Spock community contributes information to help enhance the search experience. Spock users can add tags, pictures, and web links or simply vote on existing information to increase its relevance. By contributing information about people in your life you improve the search experience not only for yourself, but for everyone.

David Hardtke, Chief Scientist of SurfCanyon

David Hardtke, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, worked for 13 years in experimental particle, nuclear and astrophysics. He has conducted experiments at CERN, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Brookhaven National Lab and at the South Pole Station. Immediately prior to joining Surf Canyon, he was research scientist and lecturer in the physics department at UC Berkeley. David specializes in searches for very rare patterns hidden in enormous (many terabyte) data sets using advanced automated statistical data mining techniques. He is the author of over 70 papers in referenced journals. David holds a B.S. from Duke and earned his Ph.D. in Particle Physics from Ohio State in a remarkable three years.

About SurfCanyon

Using semantic real-time implicit personalization, Surf Canyon develops Discovery for Search™. This patent-pending technology is embedded in a browser extension that can work with virtually any third-party search engine, and assists users in finding relevant information that's buried within the often overwhelming amount of search results.

Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind.com

Siva Kumar is a seasoned entrepreneur with a history of building successful information technology and software companies. Prior to TheFind.com, Kumar co-founded eight other venture-funded start-ups in his career: Onebox (acquired by Openwave), BridgeSpan (acquired by Hall Settlement Systems), Impresse (acquired by PrintCafe/Creo Systems), Seven, Vialto (acquired by Cisco Systems), Scalent Systems and Telera (acquired by Alcatel). Currently, he sits on the boards of both TheFind.com and SPOCK and previously served terms as president of Scalent Systems, president and CEO of Impresse Corporation and chairman of Onebox.

About TheFind.com

TheFind.com is a shopping search engine that delivers comprehensive, visually compelling results for products. TheFind specializes in lifestyle goods in the apparel, health & beauty, home & garden, kids & family, and sports & outdoor categories. From the most popular e-commerce sites to the most unique, hard-to-find brands, TheFind.com uniquely crawls the Web to find over 200 million products and shows the most relevant and popular products right on the first page of results.

Rob Rustad, Director of Marketing at Collarity

Rob Rustad, Director of Marketing at Collarity and Founder of everythingOnDemand has over twenty years of experience helping early-stage technology companies gain traction in the areas of product development and marketing. Previously, Rob served as the Vice President of Marketing for Imperito Networks, and he was a Senior Director of Marketing for Excite@Home. Rob has guest lectured for the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business MBA program and has provided professional course instruction for Seybold Seminars. Mr. Rustad holds an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, and a BA from Michigan State University.

About Collarity

Collarity is a recognized leader in the category of behavioral content and ad targeting. We currently serve millions of unique users and hundreds of millions of page views every month, through our website customers. Collarity's mission is to improve a site's monetization performance by delivering more relevant site search results, content recommendations, and targeted ads - all driven by the anonymous behavior of the site audience. After adding Collarity Compass Services to a website, visitors find the content they need and visitors are exposed to ads which they respond to more often. Web publishers experience higher revenue from increases in both page views and advertising click-through rates.