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Spigit can best be described as an “idea simulation engine”. You take a concept, product or personality and you allow the wisdom of the crowds to rate, critique and improve upon it. It’s a combination game, forum and social network that allows users to help develop ideas and simulate how they will be accepted in the wider market.

I had a chance to speak to Paul Pluschkell (CEO) and Padmanabh Dabke (CTO) and here is what they had to say.

What Is Spigit

I take it that Spigit is an idea simulation engine. Describe how this works, and how could a typical business benefit from this service?

Participants engage in a simulation through contributing to and evaluating content on social networks. spigit’s analytics engine captures, measures, and quantifies all of their interactions. spigit tracks hundreds of dynamic events, and through a series of algorithms, spigit computes metrics that provide insight into social connections, user reputation, and relative value of competing ideas. spigit’s analytics engine can be applied to any domain where mass participation and social debate can be quantified as part of the evaluation and decision-making process. Ideas can be refined and their viability can be determined. Participants increase their reputation through their contributions and peer feedback, and the quality of connections can be measured.

Unique Value

Spigit is also being called a method of building professional contacts. Tell me, how is this product different than other business oriented social networks like LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a great tool – however it’s very one dimensional in terms of building your personal brand – you basically have your resume, and your connections are people you have met in the general course of business, and endorsements. Spigit aims to provide a 360 degree view of professionals experience – you still have the traditional resume features and professional network components, but you also have actual contributed content to support your resume as evidence to your level of expertise in different areas. Further, spigit computes a reputation index (between 0-100) for a user based on the quality of content posted on the site, as evaluated by their peers. The reputation index is based on a multitude of factors, including the number of peer spigs and scraps, review quality, review reputation, number of posts voted upon in relationship with the total number of posts authored, and many others. Your reputation is consistent with your contributions, so you simply have to contribute good content that is appreciated by other spigit users to build your reputation on the system.

Monetization

What are your plans for monetizing Spigit? Is it a purely advertisement based model or are you looking at other vectors?

The big play, we believe, is in the flexibility of our engine to be used in almost any area where meaningful information and user reputation can be quantified from contributions in online communities. From this position, spigit’s simulation engine can be licensed for use in any community play. There are various monetization opportunities including pay per click, white label, private label, traditional subscription, revenue sharing or purchase models. For communities that are created and exist directly within the spigit universe, traditional advertising channels apply, but there is also tremendous opportunity to monetized research and analytics, based on the enormous amounts of critical data collected based from user participation and feedback. This wealth of knowledge provides tremendous insight to companies, researchers, investors, and the like, in better understanding their target marketplace and community drivers and trends.

Initially, we expect the majority of revenue to come from the enterprise and other premium services. There is an enormous need in the enterprise to find ways to facilitate and drive innovation throughout an organization. Historically decision making is a top-down process. Many of the companies we are working with are excited about the prospects of providing a grass-roots solution that allows employees, partners and customers to connect. spigit facilitates the development of innovative ideas and provides the tools for evaluating ideas as well as identify key resources. This possibility, not too long ago, would have been nearly unimaginable and an impossible task. Now, not only are all resources connected, but they can collaborate openly, share their ideas and provide meaningful feedback, and most of all be recognized for their contributions. It’s a win-win for everyone in the organization and fills a significant need.

The Burning Question

I try to ask all of the entrepreneurs that I interview this. As entrepreneurs, do you have any advice for people who have an idea but just don’t know where to start or how to get it off the ground?

Come to spigit’s community for startups. Our community consists of entrepreneurs, investors, subject matter experts in various domains, and highly entrepreneurial and generally curious audience who are passionate about new ideas. By leveraging spigit, you will have the opportunity to test your idea against real market forces, Not only will you receive feedback from a wide range of resources, but you will also have the ability to identify good feedback based on user reputation. We have hundreds of entrepreneurs that come to our site every month to share and collaborate on their ideas for new ventures, so if you are looking to get your idea off the ground, try spigit as a starting point.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Spigit is a spectacular new take on the idea of social voting and it is a platform that you probably have never seen before. If I were to give the product a single critique, I would say that the learning curve is rather steep. It took me 15 minutes to figure out exactly what information I was looking at and why it was relevant too me.

In order to garner mass appeal, a product like this needs to be dead simple to pick up and use. Since it is only in BETA, there is still plenty of time to tweak the interface before it goes live. Otherwise, I highly recommend that you take some time to see what Spigit has to offer.

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