Web sites are all very well for selling stuff, but consumers have
to visit your site first before they find out what great deals you
offer.
Not so at WHSmith. The book seller's online unit has been
equipping users with an application that follows them around the
Internet, popping up on screens whenever they visit Web sites of
competitors, and cheekily suggesting they might pay less if they
jumped to the WHSmith site.
This sales application, dubbed Net Angel by WHSmith, comes from
the British software company Meltingpoint. It was launched to the
general public last week under the name Mirazo after a short pilot
with the bookseller.
Meltingpoint claims the software could be used, not just by
retailers looking for Internet sales, but also in enterprise
environments to bring together best-of-breed applications from
several vendors into a single user interface.
Visitors to www.whsmith.co.uk register, giving basic
demographic details, and download the 500k Net Angel
application. It will sit invisibly in the background every time
they log on to the Internet.
Each time they land on the Web site of one of the competing
sites targeted by WHSmith, the application keeps watch on the pages
being read and sends back information to Meltingpoint's server,
which runs the Web pages through a rules-based system to decide
whether Net Angel should respond. If the page contains information
about a product WHSmith is also selling but at a lower price, the
application might pop up a floating window to alert the user to
this offer, and invite them to go to the relevant WHSmith sales
page.
Rick Latham, managing director of WHSmith online, said the
company does not disclose subscriber figures for the service, but
claims the response has been encouraging.
"I view it like a piece of elastic, for grabbing people when
they have moved off to another site and bringing them back to our
site," he explains. Julian Graham-Rack, chief executive of
Meltingpoint, said: "Normally, Web sites are static. Customers have
to make the effort to go and find a site. We make customers static,
and let Web sites move around them."
WHSmith first started talking to Meltingpoint a year ago, in
December 1999. In January, the pair began development of the Net
Angel application. The first version of the product was ready in
May, and it has been broadly available to WHSmith customers since
late September. The project cost less than £1m to complete, but
WHSmith declined to be more specific on price.
What the user sees when Net Angel is activated is a Dynamic HTML
window floating in front of the Web browser on the screen. The
window is little bigger than a business card, containing text,
links and images. It can be quickly turned off if the message is
irrelevant. The client only works on Microsoft's Internet Explorer
5, so Netscape users are out of luck.
At the back end, the Net Angel client, which is an ActiveX
control, intercepts in real time the URL requests entered by the
user and sends them to the host NT server cluster at MeltingpointÕs
offices. There the URL is checked against a database of 30 sites,
mostly competitors, that WHSmith has programmed in. If the URL is
not among these sites, the client remains invisible. If it is, the
software springs into action at the server end.
Meltingpoint sends its Mirazo software, independently of the
user, pelting off across the Internet to the page the user is
reading. It grabs the content from the page. Meltingpoint has
already analysed the HTML structure of the pages of all the chosen
sites and holds that structure in a configuration file. By
consulting that file, the software can quickly decide which pieces
of the user's page contain which type of content.
If the user had landed on a page on the Amazon site referring to
the book Lord of the Flies, Meltingpoint would know which section
of the page contained the price of the book, which section
contained information on availability, and which contained a book
review. Configuration files are also updated.
Meltingpoint extracts relevant information and deposits it into
a template made up by WHSmith. Depending on content, this could be
text telling the user that the same book can be found £1 cheaper on
the WHSmith site, or suggesting other books by the same author and
giving hyperlinks to reviews of them on the WHSmith site, or
holding information about how to buy the video of the book. The
filled-in template is sent to the user, where it pops up on his
screen. The whole process should take no more than a few
seconds.
Similar applications to Mirazo are already available, but
Meltingpoint claims its software allows retailers more control over
messages they send to users.
Alexa, from a company of the same name, is a program developed
in the US can follow users around sites, acting as a browsing
companion to suggest other sites that may be of interest.
Autonomy also launched its Kenjin product to fanfare this March.
It is deployed by Tesco.com, though it has failed to make an impact
elsewhere. Kenjin sits at the bottom of the userÕs browser screen
and, as they surf the Internet, suggests related topics and Web
sites based on lateral relations between key words.
So, if a user was reading an article about BSE, it might bring
up links to sites about pathology of prion diseases. Either of
these programs could be adapted to the e-commerce purpose
Melt-ingpoint envisages for its software. As this application is
still in its early days, it is difficult to judge whether users
will adopt it with glee, or view it as an unwelcome intrusion into
surfing and turn it off.
Meltingpoint has another market in mind beyond
e-commerce. The company was spun out from the universities of
Kent and Brunel in 1996, from a research project that attempted to
find new ways of integrating heterogeneous applications without
changing inherent structure. That could be achieved, the
researchers realised, using HTML.
Peter Maude, chief technology officer at Melting-point,
explained: ÒIf you wanted to pull together some best-of-breed
enterprise applications, you could use Mirazo software to pull
together different functionalities and present them in an
integrated form, looking like a single user interface."
For example, take a document management system and a billing
system. Each might hold information on a sales contact, but in
different forms. Without integration, the user would have to jump
between the document management system and the billing system to
view all data. With Mirazo, both types of information could be
presented in a single browser window. "Today, that integration
requires complex and intrusive software. Our approach gives power
of integration at an interface level," said Maude.
For this application, however, Meltingpoint's software would
require quite a high degree of customisation at the back end.
Fiona Harvey is former editor of business technology bible PC
Week and business Internet monthly Internet World. She now writes
for the Financial Times