W Hotel and Live Videocast
April 29, 2008 at 10am
Speaker: Sonia Gasparini
INTRODUCTION
So good morning everyone and welcome to OneBigPlanet’s unveiling of our commerce and loyalty platform. It’s dedicated to social networks and organizations.
I’m Sonia Gasparini; I am really excited to be here with you all and thank you for being with us as we show you this wonderful platform. We appreciate everybody either being here in person or via live videocast. We had a tremendous response. We have the United States Chamber of Commerce here, as well as Forbes, L.A. Times. We have Tommy Hilfiger and eBay just to name a few. So thank you everyone.
I’d like to do just a very quick recap of how the presentations will flow. We will be starting with Christopher Hill who will give a synopsis of OneBigPlanet, both how it started and where we are at today. Then he’ll be followed by Christopher Norford, who will give a quick summary of the partnership with the United States Chamber of Commerce. Finally, but definitively not the least, we are in for an exciting demo by Eric Aubertin who will actually show you the platform live. So that is great.
So without further ado, I would like to introduce you to Christopher Hill. He is our Vice President of User Marketing here at OneBigPlanet; and have a great time.
Speaker: Christopher Hill
CORPORATE BACKGROUND
Welcome and thank you all for coming; we are obviously extremely excited. This moment represents the culmination of years of work for us and as you’ll see, it promises to be a really big thing.
So I want to start off just to give you sort of a context for what the real presentation is, which is Eric’s demo.
In the beginning, Eric had some time to think after he sold his last company eFundraising to Reader’s Digest, and he was sitting at home, feet up, eating bonbons, watching Oprah and he realized that as consumers, we are really bombarded and overwhelmed with messages and decisions that we have to make, hundreds of decisions weekly, millions of messages he loves to remind us every year from various sources. We’ve got phone telemarketing coming in, every time you turn on the TV there are of course ads interrupting your program, so on and so forth. So he started to think about this and he thought wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place that I could to get relief from all this advertising and put me back in control as a consumer.
He gave birth to this idea back then. He looked around at the time to see if there was anything. What he was looking for was kind of what Yahoo had done with organizing and filtering your information for you; so you had control over your news feed. He wanted to do that for consumption. But there was nothing like that; that existed at the time, even today as you’ll see in his presentation, there still does not exist anything which is why we are so excited.
SOCIAL NETWORKS
Then of course, he had this great idea, now we have to get the word out. Do we go direct to consumer or do we go business to business? What he elected to do, based on his background, was to go and target social networks, organizations, corporations for employees and clients as a benefits program. So this way he could sell the great idea as a benefit to them.
So the goal for these guys and how we help them is, we help them acquire new members, we help them retain and increase the members that they get, and then we help them generate additional revenue
As all of this is going on, we have this big rise. It is no secret to anybody that social networks are an enormous trend. There are over 350 million users and growing. There are social networks popping up right, left and center to serve every need and taste, and of course as a result the investment community has gotten on board and given them very high valuation.
At the moment, their revenue is typically limited to advertising or in some cases subscriptions, so what they need to is to find a new way to generate revenues to sustain those valuations because they could upset; you know it is a fine balance that they have to walk if you can imagine a social network. They don’t want to upset their customers who have come there for a particular reason, to communicate with other people with like interests. So if you put too much advertising on there, they’ll defect and go to other networks so on and so forth.
So we find a way around that. They also have the same problem with retention because they are communities, with retention and acquisition.
MERCHANTS
For merchants, they want to get onboard this platform, obviously because they, for the many reasons I’ve just mention with respects to advertising, they have a huge opportunity that they are not quite sure how to leverage yet to get on board with the social network and even through community based marketing.
So they want to increase sales and brand awareness which they do through our program.
We also help out because there are a couple of trends going on right now in marketing.
The first of which I call relationship marketing here, but it is like one-to-one marketing. Loyalty programs are known for that, getting to know your customer, getting relevant advantages or deals. Relevant content to your user is key these days and the way to do that obviously is to learn about them through a loyalty program as opposed to the broadcast mass marketing that is normally done.
Also simultaneously is permission marketing versus interruption marketing. Interruption marketing obviously is like broadcast TV so on and so forth that you see interrupting all the time, those calls at home “Do you want to buy insurance” whereas permission marketing is all we are all about. We want to put the consumer back in control of their consumer life. I go on to our portal, which you’ll see shortly, and I’m the one who chooses what I want to see: what category, do I want to search something directly or do I want to browse through categories and shops. And then of course getting to know the customers, which I’ve talked about. We do a lot of businesses intelligence and profiling to help with that.
COMMUNITIES, MEMBERS & MERCHANTS
So just to summarize, what we do is we connect communities, members and merchants in a very novel and interesting way. For communities, they get the benefit of retaining and acquiring new members and of course generating revenue. For the members they get a state of the art consumer portal that puts them back in control of their consumer life.
And for merchants, obviously they get access to this new world of social marketing and community based marketing.
So that’s it for me quickly just to set the stage for you guys.
I am now going to call up Christopher Norford. He is our Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances; he is going to announce our deal that he was instrumental in closing with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which makes us even more excited than what I’ve just shown you, so without further ado, Christopher.
Speaker: Christopher Norford
U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
I’d like to begin by thanking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for being here this morning, certainly for supporting us on our product, our momentous product launch. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is represented by Clint Wheeler who is the Vice President of Corporate Programs for the Chamber and Kelly Cox who is the Senior Director Business Development. We are excited by the exclusive partnership with the U.S. Chamber. OneBigPlanet will be the Commerce and Loyalty Platform for the U.S. Chamber members businesses as well as their employees. As you are undoubtedly aware, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents over 3 million businesses worldwide, representing some 600+ associations, representing thousands of small to state local chambers and over a hundred American Chambers of Commerce in over 91 countries. So what makes this partnership between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and OneBigPlanet so exciting is the way in which, as Chris stated, OneBigPlanet connects communities, consumers and merchants. For example, if we were to look first at the social networking sites, portals, organizations, companies, these are all, one, potential communities for OneBigPlanet. Secondly, members and state and local chambers, representing millions of local and national businesses. Again theses businesses are going to receive a special invite from US Chamber of Commerce to be merchants on the OneBigPlanet portal. So that is two. And third, all employees of theses member businesses, state and local chambers again represent tens of millions of consumers. So communities, consumers and merchants, with the ability to Save, Simplify and Share; all powered by OneBigPlanet. So for us it is very exciting. We welcome the US Chamber as a strategic alliance partner and we look forward for a very profitable and mutually beneficial partnership.
I have the pleasure of introducing the CEO, founder of OneBigPlanet, Eric Aubertin, but before I get him up front, I’d just like to give a couple of points on Eric’s background. Eric has over 15 years of entrepreneurial experience, operating mainly technologies companies, in the e-commerce, loyalty programs and fundraising market. Prior to starting OneBigPlanet in 2002, Eric was the founder of eFundraising which was acquired by Reader’s Digest. Solid entrepreneur, solid track record, and interestingly enough, for those of you who follows NHL, Eric is a former Montreal Canadiens; am I saying this correctly?
- That’s good! (Eric Aubertin speaking)
Ladies and gentlemen, founder, CEO, OneBigPlanet.
Speaker: Eric Aubertin
INTERNET SUMMARY
If you look at the Internet today and the history of the Internet, what is really exciting is basically there are four main categories. If you look back in history, AOL was the first one to bring connectivity to Americans. Then after that, you had Yahoo that helped you organize information. Then after that, Google was really powerful and relevant in term of search engine optimization and finding what you are looking for. And in the past few years, Facebook, MySpace emerged. When you think of a consumer portal, who do you think of? Nobody. As of today, I invite you to think of OneBigPlanet when you think of a consumer portal. We are the first one in the segment consumer portal and we are extremely excited about it.
SAVE, SIMPLIFY, SHARE
In terms of what we do, our mission is very simple. We want to empower consumers; it is all about the consumers. When we started the company, we had to think about what do consumers want, what do they need and we had to research do some surveys and gather everything that they could possibly wish for. Basically, a One-Stop Consumer Portal would have everything here. Number one, Save. You want meaningful advantages and deal that are worth something, at least 10% discount all the way to 30%. It has to be meaningful. Second thing, as a consumer - you want relevance. You want the platform to get to know you so that when you are looking for something, if you like expensive hotels, the system does not present cheap hotels, and if you like expensive clothes, whatever... We get to know you, and the advantages that you find are based on your interests and preferences so it is tailored to you.
In terms of Simplify, we have limited time and we need tools to help us simplify our consumer life; basically on demand information, instead of having merchants pushing information to you. I am interested in receiving offers from Tommy Hilfiger; I am interested in receiving offers from many different companies. I decide as a consumer on demand information rather than merchants pushing information to me.
In terms of useful consumer tools, you want to make the portal your home. So you want to be able to personalize, you want to be able to change color, you want to be able to organize the way you want, and then you also want in the future to be able to automate your purchases. Wouldn’t it be nice if you have to buy lenses every three month and you don’t have to be bothered, we send the lenses directly to you without any movement? That is automate. Also lastly, as a consumer you want relevant information to make smarter buying decisions.
In terms of the Share, which is a big component, the third one. You want to see your friends, you want to be able to see the type of merchants they like, the type of deals they like, you want to read their reviews, you want to exchange merchants, you want to see their favorite merchants, be able to import it.
That is what we put together, a One-Stop Consumer Portal that Saves, Simplifies, and allows you to Share. So without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to the OneBigPlanet, the consumer portal.
SOCIAL NETWORKS & ORGANIZATIONS
Let me first point out that we don’t go direct to consumers. We work with communities, social networks, organizations and corporations. As you can see on the top left, your logo, you would actually find the logo of a community that would have their own branded portal. That is for the organization, the top left corner.
PERSONALIZED CONSUMER PORTAL
On the top right, you have the section for the consumer. So you are able to personalize everything. So you are able to decide on which color you like to give you a few examples. You don’t like blue, you’d like green. So you can change it to green. The idea is that when you buy a home or you rent an apartment, you want to paint your own color. This is going to be your consumer home, you want to make it yours, and you want to put the colors you like.
If we go to preferences, once again you can change the color there. On your home page you have four categories that you can pick from, so anytime there are new deals about let say house and home, then it will appear so that you are aware of the new deals. Again you personalize your home page, to make it again your own. That would be personalize.
If you look at my interests, everything is about relevance. We want to know you so we can present deals that are relevant to you. We need to know that you don’t have a pet, so if you don’t have a pet you can uncheck pets the way I have it. My poor little cat passed away a few weeks ago so I’ve removed it, so my interests is about I don’t want to receive information about pets, I no longer have a pet. There you go. Communication is the same thing. Christopher referred to permission marketing. I decide the type of information I receive; I want my friend to be able to find me if they are looking for me or I don’t want my friends to be able to find me. I want to share my advantages and I want to receive the newsletter. Everything we do is about permission; it is all about you the consumer. So my communication is another example.
In terms of my consumer tools, which are enlisted here, we will come up with all kinds of consumer tools. Sittercity will soon be added to the portal. There is going to be a lot. So as a consumer you will be able to decide on which consumer tool you want and you will be able to take them off. Basically, this is to make your consumer portal your own, you decide, we want to know you. So that is an example.
Let’s go back to the home page. In terms of the home page, everything is drag and drop. So if you take pets and you want to move it up, you can just put it up to the top because you want to see the pets as one of the first thing that you see. Second thing you can do on the categories is that shopping… I shop all the time… I can take the shopping and move it up in term of categories. And I can move things I don’t use at the bottom. Again make my consumer life simpler. So that is one of the ideas. In term of a deal, let’s go through an example of a deal by clicking on food and groceries. So I see, if I go down, I like wine so I’ll click on that one. The first thing you see is you see the title. Second thing you see is a brief description. And if I need more information in term of condition or more information about the merchant, it is at the bottom. What is interesting, I see there is 3 reviews. So different people rated this particular merchant and then you can see, we gave you examples of ratings. As a consumer, I enjoy the merchant, I am going to give him a five star rating or a four stars in this case. And I’m going to say, I really enjoyed the wine and then other people are going to be able to see it. There we go.
Going back, if you just scroll down just a little bit. One of the elements of the portal, is that some of the offers you won’t really like but when you see an offer that you like or an advantage you click on add to favorite, I add that to my favorites and then on the top left corner, in my advantages are all my favorites. So when you search through the portal, you gather all the deals and merchants that you like. They’ll all be listed there, and then you can add all the merchants you like. If you go back to the top. You can see the advantage view, or you can see the merchant view. I want to know all my merchants and how many deals they have, 1, 2 0. Again, you can find all your merchants or your deals whichever. Going back to the top, if you look at the quick link. If you are looking for something quickly, you click on newest. You’ll find all the newest deals that we added. This is easy to find, most popular, top rated and expiring. So if you click on expiring... What is also interesting is that if you click let say on “Dick Sporting Goods”, and you add it to favorite, this will be added to my consumer calendar. So if you go to consumer calendar, you can see at the bottom notification: “Dick Sporting Goods” is about to expire in one day. So the consumer calendar allows you to do two things. Number one is that if you want to remember your mother in law birthday, you want to put it up on your calendar. You see a deal on Godiva chocolate, 25% off, you click on it, it goes on your calendar. Not only does it remind you of the birthday but of exactly what you want to buy. That is really interesting as well. And then also, when you add deals to your favorites, the system will notify you that it is about to expire and they will be shown there. So that is basically the idea. You can also be reminded seven days before, a month before, you decide, you are in control. That is the idea of the consumer calendar.
SEARCH ENGINE
If we move to the top and then we type in “carpet” in the top search bar. What is interesting is that we have our own search engine. Just like Google, we created our own system so that when you are looking for something and made a mistake in “carpet”, right there we have a dictionary in the background that will remind you did you mean carpet with an ‘e’? So again, it is easier for you so you click on it and then you find different deals on carpet. You go through the system and you say, well let me go look at other options. So let’s go see what is at eBay. One click away, all of a sudden you have all the carpets at eBay that are on sale and that are about to expire in terms of auction in a little while. One click of a button, you have other options. May be am not that comfortable with that, let’s get more options. We have a product comparison system which is very unique. It goes throughout the websites and all over the web and finds deals and tells you exactly who is selling it, at what price. Basically, it is a crawler that goes through the web. Gather the best prices, the different merchants and give all the options there. We mention about simplicity. This saves you time and money, both. Not just money but also time. So it is a really interesting tool. And if you also want to look for advance search you can add different keywords search for different thing, by merchant, category, whatever keywords. That is the search on top. You have your category on the left.
CONSUMER TOOLS
Let’s talk about consumer tools which are one of the most interesting elements. We talk about my consumer calendar. Let’s talk about travel power search. Personally in the past, when I used to travel, I would click on Travelocity, Expedia and all these sites. That takes time; you have to go through four, five, six different websites. What if there was a crawler that would go through all the traveling sites and gives you the best deals? That is exactly what that is. It is a meta crawler that allows you to search throughout the web to get your best deals. So that’s basically the travel power search.
In terms of eBay, when you click there, you are looking for an iPod; you can just type in iPod. Of course you can go to eBay but then you have to do a few more clicks to get there. What is nice about our portal, everything is there in one place and it is easy to find. Of course if you like something, you will click on it and you’ll purchase it on eBay but what is nice about it, it is right there inside the portal.
Same thing for product comparison. If you do iPod again... I think this is one of the cool features. The one iPod nano, there is seven merchants that offer that product and you can see all the prices. So obviously, the best price is at Buy.com and you have the listing. So again it searches through the web to find the best price, save you time. You don’t have to go through 17 different websites. It does it for you. It is a really interesting consumer tool.
Now in terms of restaurant reservations. You are sitting down, it is Saturday, I guess afternoon. You are about to go to dinner. First of all, what is interesting is that it gives you options. So you don’t know where to go. We always think where should we go, where should we go. There is a listing. So you click on let say District. So then you have the website. You have the map. So if we click on the map. So you can locate the restaurant exactly, because some people are more visual rather than the address this will tell them where it is. It is at the corner of so and so. That is a quick way to find it. Reserve restaurant. I like this one, I am going to reserve. Two people, set the date and your restaurant reservation is done. You don’t have to call. It does the work for you. You did not leave your computer, it did not take any time, it gave you some options again cool, and it is fun.
That is basically it. We will be adding Sittercity, so if you are looking for babysitters. Grocery deals. You have to go through all kinds of coupons; you need to cut the coupons if you are interested in coupons. What if there was a site where all your grocery coupons would be in one place that you can print it? Again, we are going to be adding so many tools. If you click on the little gear under my consumer tool... it is all interactive. I am not interested in the dining locator. It is gone. Everything can be personalized. So it is what you want as a consumer.
In the spotlight, it is all about... there are about 600 to 700 deals on the platform. You may not have the time to locate all the deals that interest you. We try to feature some interesting ideas for mother’s day which is coming up. So every time there is an event, we feature some of the deals. That is basically it.
If we move to the top now. Go to friends, which is the Share portion of the Save, Simplify, Share. So let’s click on Christopher Hill since he did a good job. Christopher favorite merchants are there. I like the way Christopher dresses... First of all you need to ask permission. You have to find a friend. So if you click on find a friend, you search through the system and then you find Christopher. The system will send an email to Christopher that say “Christopher do you want to be my friend? Can we share favorites?” Christopher will say yes. Then he will appear on my friend list. Then I’ll click on Christopher and I see all his deals. Why is it interesting? Because Christopher lives in California, I don’t see him often. I have no idea what to buy him for his birthday. I know his favorite merchants so I can go through the system. I can see what he likes; likes coffee. So I can buy him coffee or anything like that. I can also check all and I can add them to my favorites. So it will import his favorites into my favorites. Again it makes it easy in term of that. And think about the future. What is difficult at Christmas time is all the family members put together a wish list. What if I had the wish list to buy a gift? These are the gifts that I want. In the profile, you will be able to see the wish list of the individual to buy a gift. So everything is about simplifying the consumer life. So it gets really exciting in term of the friends. If you click on notification, buy Champagne to celebrate the launch. I wanted to make sure I buy a lot of Champagne for tonight. We are going to party and we are excited about it.
ONE-STOP CONSUMER PORTAL
So that is basically the portal. It is a One-Stop Shop where you can Save, Simplify your consumer life and then Share. I want to wrap it up with a few slides. We are adding... it is really exciting because we are fighting within the company on which feature should come next. We have about a 150 features we want to add and we are trying to see which one do we do first. This one, this one? And we are debating. We have lots of thing that we will be launching in a next little while. We do a launch every month. We also add between 40 and 80 different merchants. It is ramping up every month. And now with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it will go even faster. We have a momentum that is interesting.
Mobile advantageous... when you are traveling you wants to have your mobile. We know by geo-positioning that you are in New-York. We present restaurants within one mile of where you are. So you go “I’ve got a deal 25% at that wonderful restaurant, here is the review. Wow, I’m going to try it”. This is really cool. You walk into the restaurant, and then sometime you either scan the phone or you enter a code. This is the future and it is happening at the end of December, in 2008. Roughly around there, we are going to launch the mobile advantages.
Back office for partner communities and merchants. Again we are going through the community to help customers Save, Simplify, and Share. We are putting together a back office where every community and merchant will be able to change... For example, the merchant will be able to change their offers. They’ll be able to say, I’d like to sell my inventory. For the next two days, let’s launch a major promotion. Everybody in the platform knows that Home Depot, 15% off only for two days. So again, it is all personalized and allows the merchant to be able to change their offer. Of course we are going to monitor because we want to make sure that consumers get a good deal. And then the community needs to know the statistics, where people clicked, the visits, and then so on and so forth.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Business intelligence is the future. If the offers that we present to you are not relevant to you, you will not use the portal. So business intelligence, we are investing a lot of money in doing that. We track where you click for the purpose of presenting relevant advantages. We get to know you, and we start saying you often click here and here. That is the type of deal you are interested in. My goal and our goal in the future are to know you almost better than you know yourself. So Eric, at this time of the year you rent a cottage. Here you should be reminded to book your cottage. Here are five options for the type of cottage you like, and two of your friends already went there, look at the reviews. Again, business intelligence relevance.
The offline card program; we hired a firm from Europe and Asia that will be looking at a tracking card system that you can go to Target, swipe your car, and get your discount in the form of cash back on your card. This is just a pilot project.
It has been a tremendous ride. Just in term of code, for those of you who know technology, you are looking at over a million lines of codes. It is a big system; lots of work went into it. In terms of the interface, we must have changed it about forty times just to make sure it was simple to use. It has been a great effort and we’re a bunch of dedicated motivated people, so I want to thank all the employees and people that contributed to OneBigPlanet. It’s been an amazing ride and this is just the beginning. I want to thank the private investors, Propulsion Ventures that invested recently, advisors and the levels of governments, SDEVM, IQ and BDC. Most importantly, I’d also like to thank the merchants that believed in the dream as well as communities and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Speaker: Sonia Gasparini
Actually I think Eric deserves another round of applause; we should be thanking him that we could be part of his dream.
End
