Commentary

Q&A: Collokia's Pablo Brenner

Search is about matching people with information. Sometimes it’s a product. Sometimes, a service. It can also be used to match people with qualifications or knowledge with those seeking those same qualifications or information.

Startup Collokia, which recently received $1.4 million in funding, looks to provide employee and task-matching services for large businesses across a wide variety of vertical platforms. Search Insider recently spoke with company CEO Pablo Brenner about how the company’s product, which uses machine learning for search, can make businesses more efficient and how it plans to compete with Google’s recently launched (and similarly targeted) Springboard platform.

How do you describe what Collokia does?
We provide seamless collaboration for organizations. Typically most knowledge or collaboration systems are [sluggish]. And people then prefer going to Google and working on the Internet, and there the content is mostly outdated. We try to integrate the collaboration and the tools that people use on a daily basis with little effort. We do that with plug-ins for tools that people use on a daily basis like the browser, and the machine learning and the cloud that understands what everyone is doing and shows opportunities for collaboration or for integrating internal documentation. 

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How does that differ from what’s already out there?There are other services that provide these opportunities?
We try to provide a system that is fully integrated. Whenever you do a search in Google, in many cases, you get a box on the side with some information. [In our system,] the box will also include internal information, related to the project you are doing. The program has been researching who are the experts in the company, so you don’t need to do a special search in any other place. 

It provides more efficiency and productivity. Whenever they start a project, people don’t know what the other guys are doing, even if they’re in the same office, particularly if they’re in different offices away from each other. Knowledge workers spend about 20 to 25% of their time searching the Internet, and in many cases, they don’t find the right information or they are searching for something that someone else in the company has already. 

How do these technologies apply to a broader search marketing world?
We have two versions of the program. There is one that is for the organization and to make the organization collaborate. We also have a kind of open platform that is more community-based, where people can share things on a free environment. In the software industry, we’re talking with software experts. In many cases, what you see happening is when you do a Google search, it shows you the most used, linked or visited site. In many cases, the software is advancing so rapidly, if there’s a new version, it may be on the second or third page. If someone uses the top searches, they’ll spend a lot of time with the old version. We can provide an annotation from the owner and the expert saying this is not the right answer, the right answer is something else.

What is your biggest challenge? You’re still in a basic launch phase.
It’s probably to get to the wide market where people understand what we do. We’ve been talking to organizations with 100,000 people. They understand the problem immediately. But going to the general public and having them understand what are the possibilities, that’s a little more difficult. We are in a phase of trying to simplify the solution for people to start deploying it. 

Google already has Springboard, which offers some of these options. How do you compete against a giant like that?
We believe Google will be much more shallow and have a wider audience, and they will not go as deep into different verticals. We’ve been approached by the legal industry, in many cases they have people searching for something that someone else in the company has already been researching. The same goes for the software industry and the medical industry. We don’t think Google will go into very specific verticals.

What keeps you up at night?
Our main concern today is to get into the market and get people to use Colloquia, and to not lose focus. One of the problems we’re having is that we’re having many different companies ask us for solutions for many different industries. When you’re a startup, if you don’t have a clear focus, it’s easy to get very confused.

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