I went along to the November New York Tech Meetup on Tuesday night. The event was hosted by Root Markets, Seth Goldstein‘s new startup. Seth previously founded Majestic Research.
I’ll concentrate on what Seth said as Howard Greentein, another attendee, did a good job of rounding up the other companies that presented.
Root Markets are the first commercial extension of the work being done by AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit organization Goldstein was also involved in setting up.
Attention Trust has a noble aim, to put consumers in control of their attention, but at the present it is simply a clickstream recorder. Seth noted the irony of its similarities to Spyware and termed the app MyWare.
The basic premise is that people’s attention are trapped in services like Amazon and eBay and the myriad of Social Networks and they should be able to control and plug that data into other services they might use to make them even more useful.
Root Markets lets users plug their attention data into ‘vaults’ and then somehow they also have a lead generation exchange for mortgage providers (didn’t say much about this other than they had one). Next year they will have other verticals besides Mortgage. The connection between the attention data and lead exchange was suitably blurry but the company is in its very early stages and that is completely understandable. Seth said that they would make an announcement around funding in the next few weeks. Given that they are already 20 people and will be 40 by the end of the year, no doubt they have raised a good chunk of money.
The missing piece for me was how they would return value to the user. I assume nothing mortgage related. Seth made a good analogy around weight loss and dieting and how the key was a diary and that a similar analogy would play out over web use. I am not sure I buy that yet, but perhaps if the service found a way to make people more productive then it might.
I am using a fantastic service called Filangy for saving my bookmarks and occasionally for search. It records everywhere I go but I’d feel offended if I started visiting mortgage related sites and all of a sudden starting receiving emails or calls from mortgage brokers. There will also be a large majority of the population who will simply be too paranoid to let a company track their user behavior (maybe the non-profit status and the fact that the user is in control will dampen these concerns but in the end the user still uploads clickstream behavior to some commercial entity).
A fascinating space and I am sure we will hear more in the coming weeks.
