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.
CircLabs Inc
CirLabs Inc. was incubated at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Circulate is the main product that has come out of CircLabs Inc. Circulate is a service that makes online news and information more accessible and social.
What is Circulate?
Publishers sign up with Circulate to deliver a high-value experience to their readers, and to benefit financially from the additional engagement. Consumers sign up with Circulate through a trusted Web "home base" (for instance, a local publisher) and optionally share their interests. Circulate then discovers news, information and entertainment from trusted sources and delivers to each consumer a personalized streams of content, wherever he or she is on the Web. Circulate is available to Web users at all times, as contrasted with the 1% of time spent by Web users on news sites. Circulate finds personalized content that consumers want and makes it easy for them to share news, video, blogs and other content with friends.
How does Circulate Work?
To get started with Circulate (once it goes public) you will go through a one-click simple procedure to register and download Circulate. You'll share some basic demographics and preferences, and you'll select your preferred participating publisher of local news (who becomes your Circulate "home base"). Circulate is then installed as a slim browser notification bar. You'll see the Circulate Bar at the top of your browser window as a thin purple line that expands politely when it has updates for you.
The Circulate Bar remains visible, 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.
What else can you do with Circulate?
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, as an e-mail notification, or as a destination Web site.
What is different about Circulate?
Before Circulate, you had to know your online destination or use often-unpredictable and frustrating search engines, RSS, aggregation sites or bookmarks to find it. 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.
For more information contact Bill Densmore at densmorew@circlabs.com