Host: Eddie Codel - LunchMeet
Host: Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
Guest: Alex Bard - Goowy Media

Eddie Codel - LunchMeet
Hey this is Eddie Codel.

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
And, Irina Slutsky.

Eddie Codel - LunchMeet
Welcome to LunchMeet, today we're at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, and we're talking with Alex Bard, who is going to give us a demo of yourminis, is that what's its called?

Alex Bard - Goowy Media
Yeah, that's exactly right, yourminis.com.

Irina Slutsky- LunchMeet
With Goowy Media.

Alex Bard- Goowy Media
That's right!

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
With your company.

Eddie Codel- LunchMeet
So, tell us a little bit about Goowy Media, what is Goowy Media?

Alex Bard - Goowy Media
So, Goowy Media is a company that myself and three friends started at the end of 2004. GUI actually means Graphical User Interface in technology terms. So, we kind of phonetically spelled out GUI and we thought it was a fun looking name and that's how we can up the company. We focus on building really fun applications that really concentrate a lot of attention on the user experience, which is why we called the company Goowy. So, a lot of the apps-- we actually have two live products now, one is a WebTop, which....

Eddie Codel- LunchMeet
WebTop, what does that mean exactly?

Alex Bard - Goowy Media
A WebTop is a desktop metaphor, but inside of a browser. So, imagine your desktop, you've all these applications, you can drag them around, you can right-click, they are very dynamic and interactive. Well, we've created that same kind of experience inside of the browser. So, you can take your desktop with you anywhere you go. And inside of that we've built applications for communicating and sharing email, contacts, calendaring, instant messaging and minis and that's our second product actually called 'yourminis'.

Eddie Codel- LunchMeet
Got you, and minis are kind of widgets, is that right?

Alex Bard - Goowy Media
That's exactly right. So, they are called widgets and gadgets and we call the minis just to confuse people even further, but we think minis is a good name because they are really mini applications that go out and get your data and functionality from all over the Internet, all in one place.

Eddie Codel- LunchMeet
That sounds cool. Well, why don't we just dive into it and take a look?

Alex Bard - Goowy Media
Yeah, let's do it. So, what you are looking at right now is yourminis as a Webpage. There're actually two way to access it; one is as a Webpage, and one is as a browser plug-in that I'll show you guys in little bit. But, you go to yourminis.com and we default you to several minis or widgets and these are ones that I have created. So, I actually have multiple tabs across the top, these are my RSS feeds. If you look here, I've got some feeds from TechCrunch, Digg, which is a popular Web2.0 site, ABC, and others. I also have my Goowy email here and we can actually get a preview of your email from Yahoo!, from Gmail, from Hotmail and all the major providers. You can actually aggregate them all into one place. So, let me take you around a couple of this tabs and just show you from the various minis that I've configured again, some various RSS feeds that I've, and you'll notice they're all different sizes and colors and you can completely configure your experience to move these things around as well as the background. I'll go to a more dynamic tab where we have similar multimedia interactive mini. So, here we've a clock and you can go and you can change the colors.

Irina Slutsky- LunchMeet
This somewhat scares me, its -- there's so many things going on here.

Alex Bard - Goowy Media
Well, you make this for yourself. So, for me I like to have a lot of things going on, but you certainly can have a lot less. I'll actually show you how to create a page and make it really simple, but I've got the weather here in San Diego, I've got some notes, YouTube videos, so I can actually search YouTube videos without going there and clicking play right in line here. This goes after Flickr and I like Ferraris. So, I have it alternating to various Ferrari pictures and then some of the Ferrari pictures that I like have actually pulled out and added to my desktop, so I like this.

Irina Slutsky- LunchMeet
So, those are sucked in out of Flickr.

Alex Bard - Goowy Media
Exactly, so I just like that picture that you saw and I sucked it in and I rotated and I made myself a video collage. I've got a tab here for cold place, so you can make tabs that are relevant to interests as well. So, these are some various Coldplay albums, some pictures from the guys, an RSS feed about news on Coldplay and then the playlist that I've imported from the Internet. So, all these kind of get together.

Eddie Codel- LunchMeet
Can you share the -- create preset tabs and share them with your friends?

Alex Bard - Goowy Media
Yeah, absolutely, great question. So, if you look at these tabs here, you'll see that they have a little icon that means I've shared these tabs. And if I click this dropdown here, you'll see I can change tabs skins like I published the tab, and when I publish a tab I get a direct URL to it. So, I have created this direct URL yourminis.com/coldplay and if I view the link, I'm actually opening it in a separate browser and you'll see that exact tab that I've created except it doesn't have all the other tabs next to it and if somebody visits this tab, they can click on add this tab to my minis. And now all of a sudden they're subscribed to my Coldplay tab.

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
Okay, that is very impressive.

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
Yeah, it's really cool. Any changes that I make it in my tab will automatically be update on everybody else's tab. So, it's a great way to set up dashboard to see stuff but also to share things as well.

Irina Slutsky- LunchMeet
So, for example, somebody can make a tab that's about Geek Entertainment Television and then...

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
That's absolutely right.

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
...every time we have a new episode they can have stuff in there.

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
That's exactly right.

Irina Slutsky- LunchMeet
Every time there is a new picture of me on Flickr they can have it in there too.

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
And they can take that picture, they can rotate it, resize it, they make an Irina collage.

Eddie Codel - LunchMeet
And currently is this just a -- is there plug-in to do this or is it just browser based?

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
There's two ways. This is the browser based, so, actually I'll show you the plug-in. Let me just show you really quickly how you add content. So, when I clicked on add content, we've got a series of pre-defined minis and we've also different RSS feeds and news that you can go to, but if you want to add one of these minis, let's say I want to add weather to this page, I just click and I drag it on and there you go, there's the weather. And then I can configure a change colors and do all sorts of neat stuff. So, let me show this is a browser plug-in actually and I'm just going to go to Google's homepage for example or any Webpage on the Internet. In the bottom right hand corner you have an icon for your minis and I can either use a keyboard shortcut control tilda or I can click on that icon. And when I click on that icon, you'll see that my pre-configured minis are actually going to load over that Google page. So, if you look you can still see that page in the background, but now I've been able to access this without opening any browser or going to an URL and if I want to go back to it, I just click into the background and if I want to pull it up again and again, I just click on the icon and it comes right out.

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
And I had said to you earlier this look -- I thought it looks like rails to me but I was wrong.

Alex Brad, Goowy Media
Yeah. It's actually flash, so, we wanted to create a really dynamic experience for the user and flash just gave us more capability to do so across multiple browsers and operating systems.

Eddie Codel - LunchMeet
Is this free?

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
It is. It's absolutely free for consumers. So, come just check it out at yourminis.com and play around with it. Let me really quickly show you the browser plug-in and you'll see some of the added benefit that you get from that. So, let me go to a Website that has our accessories or I'll go to TechCrunch.com.

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
You are using Alexa for something?

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
Just checking out writings.

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
Yeah. Very accurate.

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
Yeah. Very accurate, exactly, to the individual actually. So, when you go to TechCrunch you'll see that the page is still loading and as soon as it finishes loading all your minis will finish loading as well and it will notify the user there's an RSS feed here. So, if I click on this and call up your minis over the top of this TechCrunch page, you'll see in the upper right hand corner I'm going to get a one-click option to add this. Oh, you know what, I didn't get it because I've already TechCrunch on this tab, but if I didn't have TechCrunch, if we kind of redo that and launch this I'll get added one-click option (Inaudible), alright. We've already loaded it. But, in any case the browser plug-in interacts with content on the page. So, if you're on a YouTube video page you can add the videos to your minis. If you are on a microformats page, you can one click do options with the microformats and if you have RSS feeds it will detect and let the user know an add them making it really simple for general consumers.

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
Now, do you have a business model?

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
Great question, of course, we do. So, the business model is rooted in two things fundamentally. So, one is we're not going to blaring advertising. We don't really believe in that, we believe in value added revenue generation. So, some of the minis that we have when I go into add a content are affiliate relationship minis. So, we have an Amazon mini and if you search Amazon, we make it really easy for you; we get a piece of that transaction. If we do things like AOL videos and you watch videos and you click over it, we get a piece of that interaction. So, it's really the Richard Pryor half pennies from Superman or office space for kind of some of the younger folks out there. So, it's kind of unobtrusive and that's the way we generate revenue.

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
Okay, great. Thank you so much, this is definitely one of the most interesting things that I have see out there so far and...

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
It's definitely a real good use of Flash and being able to...

Irina Slutsky - LunchMeet
Extremely impressive. (Foreign Language)

Alex Brad - Goowy Media
(Foreign Language) Come and check it out at yourminis.com

Eddie Codel - LunchMeet
We will. Thanks Alex.