Getting personal with Axtive
 
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What is it that the likes of Amazon and CDNOW do with customers that is such a powerful business strategy? Sell them stuff? Well, OK but I'm looking for something more profound in terms of their business model.
What I'm thinking of involves building relationships. A key component of this is personalization. When a Web site can profile your likes and dislikes and customize their presentation to your tastes, they have a hold over you that while subtle, is remarkably binding.
Personalization makes your whole experience of a site (assuming that its content continues to interest you) more intimate and therefore more compelling. And if your interest is flagged for any reason, personalization allows the vendor to "sweeten" the experience: Make you special offers, chase you (hopefully carefully) by e-mail, add extra service attention and options to your account, and so on.
Axtive Software Corporation offers what it is pleased to call "e.Business Personalization" through their e.Monogram product. The company touts the fact they don't rely on "cookies" or "annoying log-in passwords" although both techniques are supported as options.
The company claims that their AxtiveLink component provides a more reliable way to identify customers. AxtiveLink is a 200KB Windows application (they refer to that as small but on a 28.9 connection...). The application is stored and run on the user's system to provide a unique customer identifier the company refers to as a "fingerprint".
The e.Monogram Personalization Server is a Java server extension that contains both repository and matching engines for personalization. It provides analysis of the customer profile data and matches it to the personalization parameters established by Axtive's client. This results in the presentation of the personalized page to the customer/user.
The product suite includes a development tool kit.
Sounds interesting although I would suspect that asking customers to download yet another component would limit the use of that mode of e.Monogram's operation. Other than that caveat, this looks like an effective personalization solution.
Address: Axtive Software Corporation
3100 McKinnon Street Suite 800
Dallas, Texas 75201
Telephone: 214-880-4820
Pricing: Not available
Mark Gibbs is an consultant, author, journalist, and columnist. He writes two weekly columns, Backspin and Gearhead, in Network World and authors frequent features for a number of publications.
Gibbs is also a principal of Change Council and affiliated with a number of high tech ventures including Netratings, Inc., the most advanced Web audience measurement firm. Contact him at mgibbs@gibbs.com.
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