Herwig Rollet: "Xohana helps people better articulate what they really want."
21.09.2009
Knowing the intentions of your customers is a crucial asset in rapidly evolving markets. Xohana, a recently launched intentaion platform, uses semantics to help customers better articulate their needs and demands. CEO Herwig Rollet, former high level researcher and specialist in semantic technologies, gives us an insight into his platform and explains the pricinples of an emerging intention economy.
Herwig, after several years of sophisticated knowledge management research you decided to start your startup xohana.com. What were the reasons to become a web-entrepreneur?
Research is great. As a researcher, you get paid for living in the future. William Gibson famously remarked that the future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed. I really want to distribute it a bit more evenly. But to do that on a larger scale requires build an own business: www.xohana.com
What is Xohana actually about? Can you give us a short description of the service?
It is the world's first really effective intention economy platform - a kind of web-based marketplace starting with the buyer's individual needs rather than the seller's available products. So basically we're structuring demand. Most services today are still about structuring supply - getting more accurate product data, making it searchable etc. By contrast, Xohana helps people better articulate what they really want, and then uses that knowledge to help them get it. For sellers of appropriate services, that knowledge means highly qualified sales leads as well as market research.
You are also an expert on semantic technologies and familiar with the Semantic Web. What role does semantics play in Xohana? Could you lift some of the technological secrets below the surface?
We use semantic technologies mainly to make intelligent suggestions during the preference elicitation process, on a much finer level than is common today. Xohana doesn't suggest products, but individual criteria that are important to you. For example if you can finally go on vacation again after a serious illness, suggestions about the kind of diet your destination should provide may be relevant. Technologically, what we're most proud of is the range of modules that provide these suggestions, which employ semantics in a very pragmatic manner - deliberately not trying to be perfect, but instead always focusing on the cost/benefit ratio of the whole process (including ontology maintenance etc.). We also combine semantic and non-semantic recommendations, and we've got a very flexible way of aggregating the results of these different modules.
What is the business modell behind Xohana?
Right now (we're just starting out) we take a fee from providers who get new customers through us. That's the usual way in tourism. In the future, in specific other markets, charging seekers will also make sense.
Where are you heading with Xohana? What are your plans regarding further features and business development?
We now focus on making people in our initial market (health tourism) aware of how we can help them. But we're also open to strategic partnerships and joint ventures. The nice thing is that what we do is complementary to rather than competing with what most others are doing. This offers many win-win opportunities for business development. For example users coming to us but looking for more standardized things we could send to a product-focused partner portal, and vice versa.
About Herwig Rollett
Herwig Rollett enjoys connecting the dots - business needs, capabilities/partners, ideas - with strategies leveraging both people and tools. After many years in knowledge management, particularly at the Know-Center in Graz, his focus in on fundamental changes in the way we work, think, and create the future. The common thread of his endeavours is the quest for better ways to cope with complexity. He is author of a book on the processes and technologies enabling knowledge management and holds a PhD from Graz University of Technology.