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February 10th, 2007 at 8:15 pm

Earlier this week we had the opportunity to speak with Samuel Deskin and learn a little more about samfind.com. To put it simply, samfind.com will dramatically assist users with organizing the Internet the way that they see most useful and providing an easy way to access websites that you actually use. We hope you enjoy the interview.

TechAddress: Tell me a bit about your company, what it does and what’s your value proposition?

samfind.com: samfind is a consolidator of the web’s most popular websites to make the websites that people use handy from their homepage. samfind’s interface is fully customizable so that users can select or add topics and websites that they use. The websites that they want are accessible from the samfind homepage directly and can also be accessed via search directly from our homepage.

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

samfind.com: Depending on how you look at it, our competitors could include websites like Clusty and Rollyo. Clusty is an interesting service that consolidates the search result of multiple websites in one place. The topics it offers and websites it consolidates are limited to the ones they have chosen. Rollyo lets you use any websites and creates a search result from them. Both are interesting websites with fundamental differences from samfind. We believe that user’s value convenient and instant access to the websites they want to get to. Our goal is to stay out of our user’s way and provide convenient access to the websites they want to get to so that it is as convenient as possible to get there. Our competitors only provide consolidated search results from groups of websites not direct access to the websites that they consolidate.We also believe that users do not want a middleman to present the search results to them. Frankly, we think Google can do a better job at presenting their own search results than we can (or for that matter better than Clusty and Rollyo as well). We direct the user to the search result of the website they want on that website. We simply make it easier to access these search results and compare the search results among multiple websites. Another way to look at our business is to say are competitors are Google Personalized Home, My Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Netvibes. But, while we are able to be a homepage replacement like these websites, we plan to launch with a series of widgets that will interface with these websites so in fact we will not be competitors as much as we will be functionality providers.

TechAddress: For are some of the main features?

samfind.com: Our main features are

a fully customizable homepage for easy access to the websites our users use;
search aggregation to make access to the search results of multiple websites handy; and
- This is most useful with topics like shopping to do price comparisons, search to conduct research, and travel to conduct searches across multiple travel websites for competitive pricing.
widgets for the homepage replacements.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

samfind.com: Our target audience are:

individuals who use the web intensively, because they can really stand to benefit from having quick access to the websites they use; and
people who do not use the web that often (on the complete other end of the spectrum) would benefit because they would be able to access our default websites that are the most popular ones and still be able to easily identify websites that are very popular in different topics without doing research to figure out which websites they are.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

samfind.com: We are going to start building widgets soon including out own toolbar to make access to the websites you use handy from your browser without being on samfind’s homepage or your own personalized homepage.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

samfind.com: We plan to continue building additional topics that include more complex search algorithms like those of travel and classifieds to name a couple.

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

samfind.com: We made this websites so that our mothers could access the web easily instead of being frustrated with trying to get to the right place. So are guiding principle is make is so that it is simple enough for mom to use while being functional enough for everyone else to use as well.

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

samfind.com: Our mission is to make access to the websites people use easier by making websites handy. Our innovation is a homepage that is user-centric, not company-centric. In other words we are not a behemoth internet corporation that has certain properties that we want to push to our users. We are a start-up not beholden to anyone giving unbiased access to websites to the world.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

samfind.com: We are self funded and in development.

TechAddress: If your technology or service is not formally launched yet, when’s the launch date?

samfind.com: We plan to be launched by the New Year.

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