Ted O’Neill is Founder and CEO of
Infopop which builds and manages some of the most widely used online
community platforms.  His views on his firm and the industry:

Tell me about Infopop: current products, metrics, initiatives?

Infopop has focused exclusively on technology for online communities for the past 5 years. We currently have
two products. The Ultimate Bulletin Board(tm) (UBB) is our original discussion forum product. It is a downloadable application that is
installed on the customer’s web server. The UBB set the standard for message boards, creating the look and feel that just about every other
competitor has copied. It is also cross-platform- easily installable on just about every kind of web server.

Our more recent product is OpenTopic(tm). OpenTopic is a completely turn-key,
hosted message board solution. We provide all of the infrastructure- the servers, the hosting, the maintenance, backups, and upgrades- for a monthly
fee that is dependent on the amount of usage and the number of features/services desired. We feel that OpenTopic is the most scalable,
powerful, customizable discussion forum technology on the market. Although OpenTopic is only a year old, it
already accounts for almost half of our total revenue.

Financially, we are the antithesis of the prototypical “dot-com”. We have millions of dollars in revenue, tens of
thousands of paying customers, and proven products. Additionally, we enjoy positive cash-flow, have no
long-term debt, and have ALWAYS been profitable. Aside from those cold hard facts, though, Infopop
embodies innovation, relentlessness, and an extreme focus on the customer.

Because over 200,000 sites use UBB, we have an amazing grass-roots community
of devotees. And this has also allowed us to easily penetrate the market world-wide. Over 30% of our customers are outside the United States, and
that percentage continues to rise. One goal we have is to focus more on sales and marketing internationally.

How do you make money?

By providing fantastic products and by bending over backwards to assist
every customer.   (Sorry, I could not resist the flip answer.)

Our revenue is derived from licensing fees and service fees. For UBB, we
sell licenses and also offer services such as installations, support plans, and upgrades. For
OpenTopic, we charge monthly fees based on the type of plan and the amount
of usage.

You have both a community software product and an ASP service. What is
your view about the way things are heading?

We see more resistance on the low-end of the market to ASP services but on
the corporate/enterprise end, we see solid growth for ASP services. On the
really low end- for customers who might typically rent web space for $50 per
month or less- there simply isn’t much budget for even very affordable ASP
services. Those customers would rather try to cut corners and invest their
own time in managing things like a message board– even if we can show them
they actually save money using our ASP service. Customers with budgets usually see the advantages to outsourcing, with the only real concerns
having to do with access to data and privacy. When we show our customers that they have full access to their data at all time and can make
their own backups to their own servers if it makes them feel better, those
fears are overcome.

Overall, I think there will always be a market for both pure software and
ASP services. As the concept of web services takes hold, however, I think
the popularity of ASP solutions will increase.

We are also focused on trying to solve the larger problem that many of our
customers face- how to monetize their communities. For many hobbyist sites,
simply coming up with the money to break even is getting harder and harder,
now that online advertising revenue has taken a nosedive. And even for the
larger corporate sites, there is pressure internally to prove the ROI. Thus, some of our ongoing development efforts revolve around not only the
technology of message boards but also providing more hooks that either allow
sites to monetize their communities or provide a framework whereby the ongoing costs are significantly reduced.

Have you seen an evolution in the type of clients you have or a shift in
the ways people use your products?

As mentioned before, our client base is becoming more international. In
terms of usage, I haven’t seen much change. Message boards continue to be
an essential part of any site that wants to provide a means for visitors to
interact. There continue to be necessary business uses- customer support,
intranet collaboration, community-building. One area we have focused on with OpenTopic, and which is increasingly important for businesses using our
products, is data analysis. Businesses need to be able to analyze the data
on their boards and communicate in ways that transcend the boards- sending
targeted emails, for instance.

Another important shift is in wanting to break message boards out of the
box. Message boards are great, but you need to be able to syndicate that content to other parts of your site. Discussion forums are outstanding
examples of user-generated content- being able to sprinkle that content throughout the site is very valuable. You do not have to use XML for this
purpose, but it sure does help.

What initiatives relating to online communities catch your eye as
particularly innovative or promising?

On the consumer end, I’m intrigued by the efforts to have members pay for
the costs of the communities. I think this was a necessary evolution and one that will take root. It’s only natural, after all. The consumers are
the ones using the boards and deriving value from them- as the beneficiaries
of that value, it makes sense that they should cover the associated costs.

On the enterprise end, I see some of our customers like Sony undertaking
some pretty ambitious plans to build multi-dimensional communities. I think
this is where most existing communities are really lacking. Too many times,
the community is nothing more than an email list or even just a message board. I’d love to see a more holistic approach to the concept of
community- in terms of trying to layer the fullness of the physical world on
the relative flatness of the current online world.

This is where most of our thinking is going in terms of product development-how can we create truly compelling solutions that connect with people in
ways that increase trust, provide choices, and embody a much richer experience. This necessitates going beyond “simple” message boards.

As you look ahead a couple of years, which trends or technologies make
you excited?

I’m most excited about a future that focuses more on the user and less on
the site. In a couple of years, we will look back and laugh at some of the
primitive ways we did things. We as individuals will have much more control
over information than we do today- which in turn will mean that the internet
itself will be much more useful. For the last decade, we’ve looked at the
internet in the way that an infant looks at the world- amazed by anything that moves and trying to absorb as much as we could.

We can now move beyond simply being awestruck by the power of the internet
and begin constructing tools and platforms that actually serve our needs. When you are a kid, you have no clue how the building is built or why you
need roads to get you there, or why there are signs on those roads. We at
Infopop want to help build the more intelligent infrastructure that takes collaboration via the internet to a whole new level. This is less of a
technology problem and more of an implementation issue.

For Infopop itself, in two years we will remain the kings of discussion
forum technology but I think that most people will know us for a much broader set of solutions. We will continue to be innovative, relentless,
and completely customer-focused. We will also hopefully be creating technology that we cannot even imagine now.