Sidebar is a Santa Monica based company that allows content providers and aggregators to deliver content to people based on their preferences. As Sidebar’s CEO, Patrick Kennedy wears many hats as their Chief Salesperson, Evangelist and leader. Since coming to the company in 2009, Sidebar is emerging as one of the leaders in the personalized content discovery space. “We have a great management team that has helped create the vision, study the competition, distinguish the company and built world-class technology.” says Kennedy.
Sidebar’s product, built as a mobile app, set out to conquer the direct to consumer market. This was a challenge, since reaching critical mass of people worldwide is an enormous tack for a startup. Sidebar changed their direction to service content businesses. “While converting from a direct to consumer to a business to business company we had a 60,000 user beta. We used that to prove out the technology and improve the content recommendation engine.” says Kennedy. Sidebar now has an international customer base, with 65 million subscriber Indiagames. “Indiagames has been an important part in our strategy. They help us prove we have an affordable solution that applies to a growing market.” says Kennedy. Sidebar is now pursuing other domestic and international clients.
Sidebar’s technology does several things for content providers. First, it can help increase the number of customers to an application or content store. “We can send an SMS or WAP PUSH to notify a customer about content based on their preference.” says Kennedy. So each customer can get their own unique content relevant to them. Second, it can personalize content based on the frequency in which people buy content. This works well for prepaid providers, since now they will be able to offer content based on when people have reloaded their phones. Sidebar also offers high quality analytics that content providers use to strengthen their content offering to their customer across multiple devices.
Looking forward, Sidebar is thinking about the user interaction on Smart Phones and on how to personalize content for iPads and television. “The same paradigm that worked on the Internet no longer applies. Once you get past 2 screens of information discover becomes more important than search”, says Kennedy. With a strong team, strong positioning and many future customers, Sidebar is one of the many Southern California Web 2.0 companies to watch.
Comments