Executive takes shot at shopping via wikis

Joyzelle Davis, Rocky Mountain News

Published August 5, 2006 at midnight

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Kevin Ryan, former chief executive of online advertising pioneer DoubleClick, is betting that consumers want a better way to shop.

Ryan, 42, now heads up shopping comparison site ShopWiki, which launched in April. Such sites have been around since nearly the advent of the Internet, but ShopWiki hopes to grab consumers with its combination of search engine technology that trolls 120,000 Web sites and "wikis" that allow users to write and edit their own product reviews just as on Wikipedia.

Ryan joined DoubleClick in 1996, when it was just a 20-person startup, and helped build it into a 1,500-employee firm with nearly one-third of its work force in Thornton and Broomfield. DoubleClick rode the Internet boom and bust during his tenure, with its shares reaching a record of $134 on the first trading day of 2000. The company's shares then plummeted along with other Internet stocks, hitting a low of $4.53 in August 2002.

Ryan left after a San Francisco-based private equity firm bought DoubleClick last year for $1.1 billion and teamed up with former DoubleClick colleagues Dwight Merriman, former chief technology officer, and software developer Eliot Horowitz to found ShopWiki.

The New York-based company, which launched its site in April, has about 30 employees. ShopWiki recently closed on a $6.2 million round of financing, which it plans to use to expand internationally and add more employees.

Ryan recently spoke to the Rocky Mountain News about the changing face of Internet retailing.

On what it was like to leave DoubleClick:

It's always difficult to sell or leave a company that you've been involved with for nine years. But it was a good time to focus on something different, and it was just a fantastic time for startups.

On his current role at DoubleClick:

When Dwight and I left, we both sold our stakes and have no formal role. I'm in touch with the management team, and I just saw Brian Rainey, who runs Abacus, when I was in Denver (in May to see his two sons play in the National Elementary School Championship chess tournament).

On the idea for ShopWiki:

We've been thinking about that space really for quite a while. One thing consumers don't realize is that most shopping engines are basically ads. Everything you see is there because someone paid to have it there.

But if you asked people what they want, they want to see everyone who is selling an item. Say you're shopping for a Ken Griffey Jr. baseball card. You'd want to see all of the people who are selling it and choose from there.

On what the most popular searches on ShopWiki are:

People search for all kinds of obscure things.

In search, there are no big sellers. The top search might have just 100 because most people have bought the mass items out there, like the iPod. It's everything.

On the use of wikis:

Our mandate is we want to be the place where you start the shopping experience online. Wikis are designed to explain how you go about buying an item, like a diamond ring or a digital camera. It replaces the process of when you walk into a store and talk to a salesman.

Say you want to buy an air conditioner. The wiki breaks the problem down into specific needs, like if you have a small apartment, so you can narrow it down to five products from there.

On Ryan's reviews and wikis:

I play competitive pingpong, which is a very obscure thing, so I wrote about picking out a pingpong table. And then on video, I reviewed my triathlon bicycle. The whole point of the video review is if you want to buy something like a tri bike, you'll probably call your friend who competes and ask him. We're trying to replicate that.

On whether stores can opt out of showing up on ShopWiki:

It's completely up to them. The way it works on the Internet is there's essentially an opt-out code on Web sites that spiders (programs that browse the Internet to gather specific information, such as searching on key words) can read, so it'll either say all crawlers (or spiders) are fine, no crawlers are allowed or certain ones are OK. So if someone for any reason didn't want us to include their site, they could opt out. But what we're doing is driving traffic to their site for free.

On competition in the shopping comparison arena:

Google has a product called Froogle that hasn't gotten that great of a reception. Google has hundreds of products and doesn't always focus attention on all of them. It's a very big space. We have the biggest shopping wiki and the most innovative and powerful search for shopping.

On how the Internet space has changed since Ryan started at DoubleClick:

It's completely different. What's happening now is the fundamentals in the Internet space are fantastic. Companies are enormously profitable, which wasn't the case in 2000. Back then, they didn't have the right business model. Today it requires much less capital to start a company because the hardware and bandwidth costs are down.

I see so many promising, profitable companies. In 2000, there were some great ideas, but some of them were too early because the infrastructure wasn't there. And I don't see anyone spending less time on the Internet than they did before.

davisj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2514

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