• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 11, 2014

Several former Microsoft executives at startup Parllay will roll out technology that moves brands past limitations on Facebook and traditional Web sites, and toward building an interactive content hub with discounts, rewards and ecommerce features. The Web site of the future aims to help brands build better social relationships with consumers.

Parllay Studio enables brands to build content marketing platforms that monitor trends through a semantic knowledge engine that lets consumers discover and understand product connections, whereas Parllay Channels aggregates content and supports product discovery and loyalty marketing. The company's CEO and Founder Tarek Najm said the tools will help brands build the brand destination of the future for desktop and mobile. He calls it a social hub, traditionally known as a Web site, filled with trending articles and reviews, rather than simple images and product information.

Najm said there's a trend toward building brand ecommerce hubs to move away from the limitations on Facebook, Pinterest and other social sites. The tool Social Pulse in the Parllay Studio platform becomes the foundation for the hub, providing a way to curate content supporting a visual dashboard of trending online stories powered by a searchable index of categories, topics, stories and entities.

Through Social Pulse, brands can explore thousands of current stories across the taxonomy of categories to find topics of interest. The topics help brands build their hub and share content with consumers across the site or on other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. It keeps the hub as the main content distributor to these other sites.

From the dashboard, Parllay Channels helps businesses build branded communities with the brand's owned media. Using Parllay Channels, brands create dynamic social hubs using their aggregated social content, user-generated content, campaigns and loyalty rewards programs.

A handful of advertising agencies are using Parllay's technology, per Najm, who spent 15 years at Microsoft building the data mining infrastructure for the Redmond, Wash.'s, online division for MSN, online messenger, and foundation for Project Knowledge Web, which later became Santori, Bing's knowledge index.