Circulate Bios
Bill Densmore
Co-Founder
Bill is one of the inaugural Donald W. Reynolds fellows at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Circulate is the first commercial project created from his research project, “The Information Valet Project.” Bill also serves as director/editor of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the New England News Forum. A veteran journalist, Bill has written for the Associated Press, the Boston Globe and ComputerWorld Magazine.
Jeff Vander Clute
President
Jeff is founder of Semesphere, Inc., a Palo Alto, CA-based consulting firm that developed several social media and networking applications. Jeff has known and worked with Bill for 15 years, and provided the technical lead on “The Information Valet Project.” He was the principal developer of the Internet’s first mass-market social network, Tripod Inc., which grew to 33 million users worldwide.
Martin Langeveld
Executive VP
Martin spent 30 years in the newspaper business, including 13 as publisher. He started the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass., where he worked in ad sales, circulation, promotions, marketing, and, eventually publisher. He later became publisher of the Eagle’s sister newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, and executive vice president and director of interactive media for New England Newspapers, Inc.
Joe Bergeron
VP, Product Development
Joe founded the Computational Economics Group at Williams College, conducting research in computer modeling of economic markets. As a software engineer, his experience includes development of financial transaction and retail systems. As a member of JAND China, Joe helped technology and retail startups, corporations and non-profits develop operations in Mainland China.
About Circulate and How it Works
CircLabs connects people with digital news, information and entertainment relevant to their lives and their communities.Our first product, Circulate™, is aimed squarely at providing those connections. Circulate brings content you want without the effort or frustration of searching for it.
Circulate is available to you as a Web user at all times. It finds personalized content you want, based on your interests. It makes it easy for you to share news, video, blogs and other content with friends.
How does Circulate™ work?
Circulate travels with you, at your option, wherever you go online. Using your expressly shared interests and preferences, along with your current browsing path, it suggests where you may want to go next, or later on. Over time, you can refine your content interests so that Circulate gets to know you and becomes an even better personal guide to the Web.
That's cool enough, but there's more:
- If you like what Circulate has found for you, you can share it with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.
- Circulate will offer convenient and economical access to Web pages that require payment or subscription.
- Circulate will let you interact with thousands of information publishers, with your friends on social networking sites and with providers of products and services that you use or that may interest you.
- Circulate will be available on smartphones.
Why is Circulate different?
Before Circulate, you had to know where you're going online or use unpredictable search engines. And you needed to do all the work by typing search terms or by scanning links. This hasn't changed much during all the time the Web has been around.
Circulate solves this problem by bringing the Web to you simply and quickly. With Circulate, you can take a big step into the post-search, Web 3.0 world. Circulate is a personal information agent that works just for you.
How does Circulate do this?
When you begin using Circulate, you'll probably want to tell it a little bit about yourself. As you continue to interact with it, you can allow it to learn more about you and your preferences, and it uses that information to deliver Web recommendations to you.
Eventually, you'll find that Circulate brings you what you want to see, learn about, and interact with online, before you even think about it. In a real sense, it will become an intelligent personal information agent.
What about privacy and security?
User privacy is a fundamental value at CircLabs.
At all times, Circulate is fully under your control. It respects your online privacy and security. At any time, you can review the personal information Circulate uses to bring the Web to you. You can edit or delete it at any time. Circulate will not share your personal information without your specific approval (and that approval won't be buried in the kind of user agreement nobody actually reads).
I'm a news and information publisher. How can Circulate help my business grow?
As a publisher of news, information or other content online, you face the challenge of getting paid for what you offer on your sites — through advertising, subscriptions, à la carte pricing or other revenue streams.
Circulate addresses this challenge with a game-changing solution to help you earn more revenue from your online content:
- Local branding: Circulate appears on the browsers of Web users with the online brand of the participating local news enterprise through which the user registered for the service. This serves to strengthen awareness of your valuable local news brand.
- Increased high-value traffic to your site: Because Circulate can travel with users wherever they go online, the service is always ready to recommend relevant content to them. So users are presented with links to your sites not just when they search for it, or visit you through their bookmarks, or find your content in aggregation sites. With Circulate, they may be sent links to your valuable, original content no matter where they are on the Web. Visitors coming to your sites through Circulate will be high-value visitors, and added high-value traffic means incremental revenue.
- Local advertising on Circulate: Circulate will be a powerful platform for local advertising sold by participating publishers. It will deliver Web users to relevant content whenever they are online. That means that local advertisers can deliver high-value, narrowly targeted messages. These messages will produce quick responses, build long-lasting relationships and enable social interactivity between customers and advertisers.
- Subscription revenue: Circulate can adapt to any payment model, at the publisher's discretion. For example, at your option, you can make a portion (or all) of your content available under Circulate's paid-content service. Circulate users may pay a monthly fee to access content at multiple publishing sites; publishers receive the majority of the subscription revenue paid. Circulate can help to market this service to users by including recommendations for content that's offered on a subscription basis. After sampling, users can choose to pay full subscriptions for ongoing access.
- Per-item revenue: Also at the publisher's option, some content can be made available on a per-item basis. For example, this can include material such as archive content, which is now accessible only by search and at relatively high prices. Circulate can recommend archive content — and deliver it with one-click convenience — driving up demand for such content.
- Circulate and commerce: As Circulate is adopted widely, Circulate may — as a clearly differentiated commercial service — optionally recommend products and services along with news and information. Because users will have learned to trust the system to make useful content recommendations, many will choose to accept commercial content recommendations as well, with a priority on interactive content such as surveys, videos, coupons, affiliate marketing and lead generation. Circulate's permission-based preference targeting can provide affiliate and lead-generation commissions shared with publishers.