A NEW digital media start-up has developed an online service for tagging content emotionally, allowing people to register instantly how they feel about and react to a product, event, web content or brand.
Founded by Italian entrepreneurs with backgrounds in computer science, psychology and marketing, the company is called B-Sm@rk and is based in Dublin.
The company claims its first product MySmark is five times more effective than the now-familiar “Like” button on sites such as Facebook because it makes the user’s interaction with the content more personal and accurate.
MySmark is a coloured, personalised smart wheel that allows people to leave one-click smarks, or “smart marks”, on a website, in an app or on a social network page.
People can calibrate their feedback, leaving up to 32 different tags based on their emotions and moods.
“It is very easy for our customers to integrate MySmark in their content and very easy and interactive for the users to access a brand new vocabulary to express their experience,” says B-Sm@rk’s chief executive Nicola Farronato.
The company plans to earn revenues through a combination of product licensing and technical services, since implementing the smart mark will involve some customisation. The start-up is currently in discussions with several Italian fashion, food and entertainment brands and is close to announcing its first customer.
Mr Farronato says the attraction for brands and content providers is that, unlike market research, which is historical by its nature, feedback from smart marks is captured at the point of interaction and delivered back to content owners in real time so they can gauge customers’ moods more effectively. The hook for consumers could be some form of incentive or special offer in return for leaving these smart marks, Mr Farronato suggests.
The company’s all-Italian management team deliberately chose Ireland as its base because their home country lacks the culture of supporting digital media entrepreneurs that exists here, he says.
“I’ve been travelling extensively in Europe over the last 10 years and I don’t see southern Europe doing enough. There is a community there [in Italy] but there is a lot of brain drain towards more developed digital economies. We are completely missing the infrastructure in terms of administration – too much paper – timing and funding. Basically we want to cook the pasta but we don’t have good ingredients at home.”
Some of Ireland’s advantages as a location were very specific to B-Sm@rk’s needs, since academic groups here had been working in areas such as sentiment analysis, semantic computing and computer science.
“From a technical point of view it was triggered by what’s going in education and research in Ireland,” says Mr Farronato, who already had connections with NUI Maynooth and NUI Galway’s DERI research group. The company has also formed links with Waterford Institute of Technology.
While B-Sm@rk initially intends to tap into its founders’ home country for customers, it is also looking to the UK and US where marketing is more highly developed. “As a gateway either to the UK or US markets, Ireland is a strategic place to be,” he says.
He was impressed with the range of acceleration programmes for early-stage technology companies here. “Ireland will be the number one place to do digital and web start-ups in Europe,” he says.
