Wednesday, November 17, 1999

The "Ankur Man's" Orbital Report


            As I gazed into my crystal Orb, I decided the hot spot for the night would be at the aptly named Orb party.  There were a good number of people there and I quickly began to meet them.  The first person that I had the pleasure of speaking with was the Co-Founder of Orb, Ms. Laura Berland.  A very nice woman, she explained to me a bit of what Orb is about.  Orb has been around for about 4 years and it mainly helps companies that are interested in driving transactions.  Specifically, they help marketers gain extreme real-time optimization in what they are trying to do.  Just the wordings impressed me! Orb has many well-known clients, such as CitiGroup, Petsmart.com, and CotyShop.  Ms. Berland, as I learned, was also a very popular person, as she was asked to be in pictures constantly.  With the camera flash going off around her at all times, I literally was seeing stars by the end of the night.

            I guess for this night, one could refer to me as the Cheese Whiz or the Big Cheese.  Since the temptation of some wonderful hors d’oeuvres was too great for me, I headed for the food and actually ended up having a couple of meetings right at the cheese plate.  My first meeting was with Mr. Miles Rose who works with Y2G and also is the owner of SiliconAlley.com.Y2G is an online subsidiary of FUBU.  Mr. Rose works in Business Development and cuts many a strategic and e-commerce deal. 

            Mr. Rose was also helpful for one other thing.  He introduced me to the beautiful Ms. Samantha Daude, who is an Account Manager at Orb.  Her main focus is with the company CotyShop, who is the leader in mass marketing of cosmetics and fragrances. 

            I was really enjoying the fact that I did not have to move from the food table to meet people when, voila, I met Ms. Claudia King.  Ms. King is the marketing assistant for Voila, which is a small company that is just starting to move into North America.  Voila runs a network of Internet portals.  They have 9 portals, 8 in Europe and 1 here in North America.  Voila North America just launched in April and Voila U.K. just launched in September.  Each portal uses the local language of the country that it is based in.  70% of the users are from Europe, so most of the North American content is geared towards their European users.  On these sites, one can get information on the news, weather, do searches, etc.  The main feature is that the sites have thematic search engines.  When someone uses one of these engines, the search is done with automatic built-in filters that allow for only the information that you are looking for to be found.  Also,  let’s say you want to visit one of the European sites but are the stereotypical ugly American tourist and don’t know the local language.  No problem.  What you type in will be translated into the local language so that you can still surf a different country. 

            Well, I finally left the food table and headed into another room for my next venture.  Lo and behold, there in the other room was another food table and the drinks were right next to it.  So I took up a strategic position that happened to be right between the two of them and it wasn’t long before my patience was rewarded.

            Having trouble figuring out where you can get the best deal on Pokemon memorabilia so that you can face the kids on Christmas?  Well, here is your solution.  Go to Dealtime.com.  I met Mr. Duke McKenzie and Mr. Scott Ressler from the company.  Dealtime specializes on comparison shopping service.  You may have seen their commercials.  If not, you will during the upcoming holiday season.  Happy Holiday shopping.

            I finally pulled myself away from the food.  As my final hurrah for the evening I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Matthew Greene, the Vice President of Digital Business Builder.  At the party, his role was of schmoozer, or so his nametag said.  He explained that he “borrowed” the nametag from WebAttack.  But he is giving something in return as he is helping with the marketing of the WebAttack conference that will occur next year.  Before that though, he says that there are many exciting happenings at Orb.  Not wanting to say much, he did inform me that there will be upcoming announcements concerning growth and client acquisition.  In answer to my question of what he feels is the important thing that Orb offers their customer, he said that Orb “can fix what ails ya.”  Who could ask for more than that? 

            With a final adieu, I left Orb and went out into the cold New York air.  It had been a fun night.  Who knows where my crystal Orb will lead me next week?