Interview with Karen Howe, CEO of SingingFish

The Company started in 1999, and was founded by four fellows who knew each other from different work environments. Their goal was to build a company that they all wanted to work for. They looked around and attempted to determine the key values that wanted to have intrinsic and core to the entity and then start looking at the technology. Once they worked out the value system then they began identifying the business opportunity that was out there. They saw that there were millions of Real Media Player downloads taking placeand they wondered what people were using it for if they didn’t know what type of rich media was available on the web.

They then built a search engine to identify audio and video files on the Internet. At that point in time no one else was performing this kind of service. It was a function of spidering specific areas of the Internet, and crawling those areas where we knew we were going to rich media or stream media, collect the information, and put it into a searchable index for our users. Typically, other search engines will spider the Internet as well, but they are only spidering for different file formats. It is a lot easier for a text search engine to understand what that page is about, because they have so much contextual information available. However, for streaming media it is completely different. We have to peak instead the stream to determine the bit rate, the duration, the copyright, the title, the author, the description, etc.

The other problem that you face is that most of these data fields within streaming media are not filled out by the publisher. They tend to encode the stream and publish it with virtually no information about the stream. We then have to infer, use third party databases, use the referring web page, etc. Anything to determine the relevant information about each piece of streaming media.

That plays back to how companies go full cycle. We started off with the idea of not being a destination site. When we were originally founded we would have required $20 Million dollars to build out a site due to noise in the market for destination portals. Everyone had spent Millions of dollars building their website’s brand and the VC’s that were funding the company preferred that we build a backend service for other sites, and license our search capabilities. About the time we changed to model to license to third parties, is when the majority of companies we would have sold and licensed to crashed and burned.

We were very fortunate to have been purchased by Thomson the multi-media company, which also owns RCA, Technicolor, and other companies. We became a wholly owned subsidiary of Thomson, which is based out of Paris, and we were placed in the Technicolor division. This enabled us to stabilize the business. If Thomson hadn’t purchased the company, I do not think that there would have been enough business to support ourselves at that time.

We were lucky enough to be local to Microsoft and Real Networks. We also had the best product in the market. One good thing is that we were considered best of breed, but we were not considered a competitor to either Real or Windows Media.

We were able to move forward with both parties, exactly because of that. It did take a long time to extract those contracts. I do not want to minimize that fact. Each contract took months longer than anyone wanted them to, or expected them to. We also had to build out certain services that they required to be able to better fit with their services.

That you can do deals with big companies. That you don’t have to be on par with them in terms of size to cut a deal. That they are totally achievable. The problems you confront in doing deals with very large companies are that you will be pressured to include clauses that could be damaging to your business. You have to be very careful that you not do anything that will potentially harm your company. If you are prepared to stay the course and keep the business context forefront then you can get your business objectives taken care of without harming your company. It will take a long time and you have to have the financial stability to stick with it until the deal is done. If they think they can get you into a corner with timing they will certainly try.

Typically within large organizations, they try to push decision-making down to the managerial level, but they are not the ones that will be signing the contract. It absolutely requires good ole fashioned corporate accounts selling. You must have an account map of who reports to whom and who is the decision maker. I always start the conversation with “Great to meet you, who is signing this deal, where does this have to go in the organization to physically be signed, and how close are you to that individual?” It is vital to understand where your contact falls within the organization, and how hard they will need to up sell this contract. Will the decision maker take your contact’s word, or will they scrutinize the deal. You have to get intelligence from inside the organization to find out about the business development person you are working with. What is their reputation internally. If they have a strong reputation, then most likely you can do a deal directly with them regardless of where they are in the hierarchy.

We try and spider specific areas of the Internet. If you attempt to spider the entire Internet you are going to find entire areas that just a desert for streaming media. There will be no streaming media, but then you will find other areas that are oasis for streaming media. There will be rich pockets available in these areas. To optimize your search, you want to direct your spiders to areas where you know you will find streaming media. We are finding that as more and more streaming media becomes available, that people will contact us to ensure that we are crawling their site. We have indexed over 45 million streams of which 10 million are searchable. That number continues to grow at about 200,000 per week.

Some are. One example is NPR, whose initial files were unusable due to the lack of information but who we have worked with to ensure use formats that work for both of our systems and now contains all the necessary information. This is one example of allowing us to keep our index current, which is the real value in news. We can index information within a few hours of it being made available.

We are seeing an obvious transition from sport, entertainment, news, movies, and music and expanding into training and education. You will see whole courses on how to do things. This will be from how to fix a leaking faucet to how to do open heart surgery. Duration of streams is extending. People prefer streams that are between two to six minutes long. Streaming media is an excellent solution for explaining something in greater detail. High ticket or luxury items will also see more streaming media associated with them. The major impact this has to our business model, is it allows us to bring more content to our users through our partners.

You are now communicating in a much more compelling way. Companies are now in the process of creating a branding experience by setting up a dialogue with your customers. For more than any kind of banner ad can provide for you.

We went from being a company that didn’t compete with our clients to being a part of a much larger company with a history of competing with our partners. As businesses have matured in the high-tech area there is this idea “coopitition”, where I compete with you today, tomorrow you are my best friend, and where different areas of the businesses work together while others compete directly. This facilitates marriages of convenience. You work out deals the best that you can, knowing that they will change over time, they may go away, etc. You cannot get too wedded to a particular business plan or model. It is far too dynamic of a space to expect otherwise.

You are looking in 12-month increments, hopefully 18 months out, and pretend to look out further, but you would be kidding yourself. This requires that you hold to your core tenets, such as understanding that the user experience is paramount. Once the entire company is focused on key tenets of the business, then you can adapt without associating personal issues with the business requirements.

About the time of Thomson’s acquisition of SingingFish, I was brought in as the VP of Marketing and then reluctantly transitioned to CEO. It was one of interesting points in your professional career where you have to switch from being the person that says “No, you should be doing this, this, and this” to being the person where everyone is tell you “No, you should be doing this, this, and this.” Then you have to make the hard decision and do it.

We are owned by AOL, and previously we were owned by Thomson. We are still in essence a startup. I have found that the key to our success is to ensure that I am in contact with headquarters a lot. That means picking up a phone, as well as meeting in person to meet with people in person. This allows us to be disproportionately visible within the organizations that we are a part of.

I would have thought that by now female CEOs would be far more commonplace that they actually are. Too often I find myself giving speeches at women’s groups talking about being a female CEO. I find this stunning. I believe that women have left the corporate market place. The number of women on board positions has not increased in the last few years. Women still make less money per job title than their male counterparts.

They are starting their own companies. Where they can be more in control of what is going to happen and the type of culture that is present. I think that this is a really good thing, but I think that it is unfortunate that corporate America loses that talent. That is why you aren’t seeing women on the boards, because they aren’t there.