Zentaneous

Resurrecting universal redirection:
A multi-million dollar opportunity

Our product is called Zentaneous, Zen for simple, taneous of course being a an abbreviation of the word instantaneous. Hence Zentaneous is simple yet extremely quick. Zentaneous is a redirector service, and if we may be indulged for two minutes, a very short demonstration will save us countless words of explanation. Zentaneous simply redirects an individual to a web page via a simpe code word. As you can see, its simple -- just put in a code word in in the redirector form and hit enter, --- And its quick -- you go directly to the assigned webpage for that code. That's pretty much all of the technical aspect of using the service other than understanding we have several databases. to shift in and out of. To shift to a city database like Austin -- simple type in Aus for Austin and then enter the appropriate code. To switch to another city database like Houston, we type in Hou, and then enter codes. There is only the one central database, which may be also be called the national database, but an unlimited number of possible city databases. No code may be used more than once in a database, but as there are an unlimited number of city databases, the same code can be used hundreds or even thousands of times. There is also a private account database --to enter it just hit z1 to go to the login screen, and enter your private account name/password -- then proceed to enter your personal z codes. To get back to the main database, type in z, or to get back to an individual city database, type in the city code. We call the codes entered into the form a Z codes. And where does one get the codes to place in the Zentaneous form? Except for personal codes, primarily they will imbedded discreetly in traditional advertising such as this exmple from a print ad. This being the completion of our initial demonstration for Zentaneous, your initial reaction may be some form of underwhelment. So what, you might be thinking. We understand, however, we beg to differ, and would like to throw out a number to emphasize our point and get your attention, and to be honest it is an embarisingly large number for a start-up company to throw around, but that number is $500 million dollars. Yes, that's right, $500 million dollars is what we conservatily estimate to be the first year revenue value of Zentaneous, if it is fully implemented in a logical manner and becomes as popular as we envision it. That being said, we would like to spend several minutes describing how our $500 million dollar figure is not pie in the sky, or smoke and mirrors, but actually a realistic possibility and a goldmine of revenue waiting to be tapped. In order to do so, we need to step away, for just a minute, from the internet, and look at other media. Limitations of the human mind and key words Marketers have long understood a cardinal rule for reaching a customer in any media,-- the human mind has limitations -- therefore, whenever possible, provide content in a matter that is easy to understand and which sticks. In our heads, we think in terms of words therefore, its difficult to remember numbers. or long names, and out short term memory is fleeting at best. With a little luck we can remember our personal phone number, and perhaps those one or two of our closest friends or family numbers. Everything else is up for grabs. To bypass the this limitation, clever marketers in various media use keywords to drive a brand name or thought into the brain. Thus there's a reason that select, vanity toll-free phone numbers, perhaps the the most successful media so far ever to exploit the use of short key words, are sought. For many businesses, 8oo toll free vanity numbers work exceedingly well. Here's a portion of a short 800 number video clip: Not only do 800 numbers works very well for select businesses, significantly boosting their call and retention rate, but more importantly, for our own service, it is signficant to note that many, if not all of the owners of the of these vanity phone numbers, spend significant amounts of money touting their keyword phone number in other media --print, televsion, billboards, yellow pages, the internet, etc. The medium of the 800 phone number is the telephone, but the marketing takes place in other media. This is very important to note because we believe the same is true with Zentaneous. Our medium is the internet, but most of the marketing will take place outside of the internet. Use of keywords in other media In recent years, the cellular phone industry also has made made a successful forray into the use of keywords in marketing with text messaging. Mobile phone companies have managed to convince many marketers to use text vanity keywords in their advertising campaigns on a limited but very sucessful basis and the use of marketing via text is growing by leasp and bounds. As an example, the US national guard has been running the following ad in over 1000 movie theatres inviting young people to text their age to guard recrutiers, who in turn send back information about the physical fitness levels of the guard, and who also get follow-up messages about guard benefits such as college tuition assistance. And of course there is the text campaign almost everone is familair with, the use of texting to vote on American Idol. Cingular Wireless reported over 64 million text message votes logged for voting on Amercan Idol during the 2006 season alone. The mobile phone companies of America, even have a governing body, the Common Short Code Administration, which adminsters and to governs the use of text codes in the US. Vanity text messaging may never become as useful or sucessful business wise as 800 toll free numbers are, for the simple reason that perhaps less than 25 percent of adults know how to text, or have the physical dexterity to text a code into a small phone keypad, but as the American Idol campaign indicates, it is a powerful medium. Again we would also like to point out that the medium of text keywords is the same as that of 800 numbers -- the telephone, but the marketing takes place outside the medium, on television, in magazines, and in pre-movie theatre commercials. The Internet and keywords -- the remaining holdout in interactive media. The use of kewords requires an interactiave media, and fundamentally, there are only two universal forms of interactive mass media -- the telephone and the internet. A magazine or newspaper will not talk back and forth with you, and outside of changing channels neither will a radio or television. As of 2007 the sole holdout in the short code world is the internet, for very complex reasons. First, there is a governing body, for internet domain names -- ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers. ICANN is a private, not for profit corporation, but works under the auspices of the US Department of Commerce. ICANN determines various things such as which domain name extensions are allowed- .com, .net, .org, .biz etc, the registration of domain names, and which domains cannot be usurped by individuals in case of so called cybersquatters -- ie, an ordinary invidual owning a website dedicated to the singer Jennifer Lopes named, JenniferLopez.com, Despite many complaints, for the most part, the web functionions smoothly under the ICAAN universal resource locators rules, with millions upon millions upon millions of web pages delivered daily. But from a business and marketing viewpoint, the URL system presents any number of challenges: To be effective on the internet and overcome the limitations of the average persons short term memory capability, you really have to have a short catchy name, or at least a memorable one to have a presence on the net. Hence we have Yahoo, google, etc. The shorter the better for a name, provided it is lexical -- 7xl8j.com as an example is short but its not lexical and easy to remember and wouldn't make a very good domain name for a business. As any business person who has attempted to find and register a domain name has already painfully discovered however, finding the rare short and lexical domain name that is also has some relation to your companies business is close to impossible. There are more than 60 million .coms names already registered, with name registrations almost doubling every 3 or 4 years . Many, if not the vast majority of domain names are owned by by domain speculators, and some use sophisticated software to systematically sift through domain names hoping to spot an short, lexical, unregistered domain. Once found, these speculators snap up and park the domain, hoping to make a 10,0000 percent profit or more in the future on their $9 registration fee. Desperate Measures The need for for a short (or at least memorable)name on the internet has forced many companies into making uncomfortable, sometimes almost desperate decisions, including changing their company names and abandoing their old web addresses -- American Online is now AOl.com Barnes and Knoble is Bn.com the internet, Merril Lynch is Ml.com. However as those three choices demonstrate, being short by itself does not in of itself make a a brand name. AOL is recognized as a brand name, because it was a natural nickmake for American Online, but ask anyone on the steet what bn.com or ml.com stands for and they won't have a clue. The other desperate move businesses have untertaken is buying existing, registered names, particulalary generic names -- words that cannot be trademarked, for extrmely high prices. ---Here are a few results of a recent domain name auctions --computer.com sold for $2,200,000. Investment.com sold for $900,000 and sportingoods.com sold for $450.000. Nationally, sometimes a generic name works -- more often it doesn't. Business.com was sold for 7.5 millions dollars several years but what is a business.com? Is it a place to buy a business? Whatever it was intented to be, it turns out now to be just crappy little website that has links to different type of business services -- something a thousand other websites do better, and cheaper. Hence, companies that already have an easy to remember, lexical names, like geico.com, and who also have the advertising dollars outside the net to reinforce their brand name have a leg up on the internet, while many others that do not are having a difficult time slugging it out. The number one bookseller online is not the one with the shortest name, bn.com but Amazon.com. Nearly everyone on has heard of Amazon.com, even if they haven't ever bought an online book. Few know what bn.com is. Oddly, as the internet evolved, internet providers and internet web browser companies, had various levels of sucess with short, keywords that bypassed the domain name system, and had the potential to reap the multi-millions that Zenteanous is shooting for. However, they never were able to completely exploit those millions due to clumsy attepts at monoplizing the internet, or at monoplizing the search engine business. America Online Keywords America Online was early the leader in the use of keywords. Which made perfect sense. At one time in the 90's - AOL was virtually synonomous with the internet for most Americans. AOl had as many as 33, million subscribers, and since its network was closed, it could offer keywords to point directly to a particular marketers internet site without any difficulty of overall domain name resolution. Those who are a little older, thus may remember National advertisments for Chevrolet and other national brands with included an AOL Keyword. The AOL keywords in these advertisments were identical in nature 800 vanity number and text message advertisements we alluded to earlier. They were seemlessly embedded into the copy. AOL however was a victim of its own sucess. When it went from a per hour charge business model to a flat rate charge, millions of people signed up for this new hip news chat and entertainment media called AOL, but AOL was not prepared to handle the dial-up overload.-- people had to wait hours to get signed on to the AOL (or to cancel), and AOL had a pr nightmare from which it never recovered. Compettion quickly opened up and millions of previous AOL newbies on the internet now felt competent enough to navigate the "real internet" sucessfully without all the spoon feeding of AOL, and for a lot cheaper price. As AOL became unhip and unpopular, losing, millions of customers, with it went the the effectivness of AOL keywords. We are not sure when the last time a national ad ran with an AOL keyword, but we know it has been several years ago. Microsoft, RealNames and Internet Exporer. In the late 90's, Microsoft, through its internet explorer, had the opportunity for better way, but its executionwas also haphazard. Microsoft partnered with a company called Realnames. Realnames could actually be activated from within the windows explorer brower -- a significant advantage over aclosed system like AOL, as the keywords worked regardless of what internet service provider you were using had as long as you were using an Internet Explorer browser. And as Internet Explorer browser had captured as much as 96 percent of the broswer field (until countless lawsuits forced Microsoft to unbundle Internet explorer as part of windows operating system) It seemed likely that keywords would become a permanent part of the Internet landscape. However, RealNames had a number of infrastructure, vision and conlict problems. The main one being that Microsoft, which had a 20% stake in RealNames was happy when RealNames keywords worked, but there were primarily focusing on becoming the number one player in the search engine field ( which of course is a battle they ultimately lost.) Microsoft eventually terminated their contract with RealNames in 2002 citing a poor user experience, while RealNames cited internal memorandum accusing Microsoft of a holding to a philosophy that with the search experience, Microsoft could control the entire user experierience,where as with the typing of a keyword, they had no control. We believe however, that RealNames failed for a number of obvious reasons which Zentaneous will not. First, Realnames, seemed to have been stuck in the same, topname paradimn as the domain name system itself. While Realnames had the ability, through Internet explorer to resolve key names to privately, bypassing the ICANN url system, they never thought about having local or city databases -- only a national one. To demonstrate that point, In an SEC filing for an initial public offereing of RealNames,(later withdrawn) The company touted as one possible use for a keyword in business functional of the keword indicating " a pizza company, might buy the keyword 415pizza, 415 being the area code for San Francisco. Why not just the keyword pizza instead of 415 pizza? The answer is of course because RealNames e never envisioned multiple city databases -- just a single national database. Similarly, AOL, never had a local database either. Its keywords were only targeted to a national market. Zentaneous, unlike Realnames or AOL, has multiple city databases. The user, not the browser, determines witch database to activate codes from, so at all times the user clearly knows when they are activating local codes (not to mention at the top of every city base is listed the name of the city, -- hence there is no need for any type indicator preface like an area code. More over, unlike reliance on one central database, the use of local databases offers the unbelievable economic advantage of using the same code over and over again -- thus the simple code pizza can be used for austin, houston, los angeles, new york, and hundreds, if not thousands of cities. Another key reason that Realnames failed, is that they envisioned Realnames replacing searching which was clearly delusional 90's dot.com thinking which was also in conrast to Microfts vision. With the average person barely able to remeber their own phone number it was delusional to think that that RealNames would replace search engines capable of indexing millions of webpages. Realnames sold around 128,000 keywords, so it would appear that they were sucessful, but those figures are misleading. Unlike American Online, which offered advertisers the use of legitimate andsimple brand name codes like Chevrolet, RealNames seemed to have had a vague defeniton of what a keyword should be. For example, in May of 2000, A Panasonic announced the purchase of 10,0000 RealNames, and they would begin to advertise using them almost immeddiately, and also add them to all their promotional media. Which begs the question, Why would a company like Panasonic need 10,000 codes? If General Motors owned a Zenteneous code for every single model of vehilcle its sells, something we envision might take eventually place with Zentaneous in the near future, they would need only 87. Surely Panasonic did not have 10,000 functional products to sell? There were other failures in the Ralnames schema, but probably the chief among them is that fact that they never suceeded in making it universally popular. We are unaware of any national advertising campaings that hit the airwaves using a RealNames keyword. Indeed, The founders of Zentaneous, have been avid computer surfers for a number of years, had never even heard of RealNames until doing some research on keywords. We developed the concept independently. And this was the case with millions of others. Simply put, Realnames never scored on the radar screen of most internet users. From the onset, we plan on not making the same mistake with Zentaneous, and we have a number of specific plans as well as current internet mature advanates. First, the internet is very much a more mature and stable communication platform in the late 90's. -- Google appears to have permantely won the search engine wars, there are no longer any wars for isp supremancy wars -- No one really cares who provides their internet service as long as it is fast and cheap, and users are now net savvy -- the average 8 year old can search google, use instant messenger and undertake internet tasks that many adults had difficult grasping in the 90/s. The second is the advent of broadband on a wide scale. Youtube, which started in a garage in 2005 recently sold out to Google for 2 billion dollars, exists because of the vast amount of broadband connections available, and demonstrates the uneblievale attention capturing power of delivering short video over the interntet. Marketers, using Zentaneous will use the same power of video to offer supplemental content of real value tothe consumer. While RealNames, therefore envisioned an internet surfer typing in BMW instead of BMW.com in their webrowser --we envision the customer seeing an advertisment on television or in print for a BMW Z4 typing in the simple code Z4 in their Zentaneous toolbar and to be offered a media rich video of the Z4 like as in this example: BMW (show video) Indeed, we anticipated that Zentaneous will spark a video revolution on a local level as well as the national level, to the point where eventually, most local upscale restraunts will have their Chef come on in a short video on a daily basis and show and describe today's specials, and professionals will show, not tell, by having knowledge base videos showing how their product -- such as how plastic or or lasik surgery works. The ability of video to deliver media rich information over the internet is an advantage that RealNames could not have imagined 10 years ago. However, we still haven't totally answered the question how to popularize Zentaneous so that the Zentaneous codes are known and used. One answer is to make a Z code part of the advertising culture. We must revive the use of keywords on a national level in order to gain attention and make Z codes part of the culture. How do we we plan to do this? Initially we plan on popularizing the use of Z codes nationally in coooperation with the entertainment industry. For a limited period of time -- perhaps, 3 to 6 months, we expect to provide Z codes for free to any movie production company willing to use Z codes on print and television advertising. In addition, we plan on having a national pr firm be prepared to publicise to the far corners of the nmedia, the use of and revival of keywords on the internet. Whoever is first out of the gate, be they a paying customer or not to feature a Z code in a national advertising campaign stands to reap a great deal of pr for their campagin. In additon, as part of the Zentaneous roll-out, we plan on offering a free online, musical concert, by a A list band, broken up into 15 minutes segments. In order to activate the first segment of the concert, the user would actually enter a Zentaneous code in the code box, thereby getting the look and feel and experience of how easy it is to use, and in order to proceed to the next section, the user would enter a new code to get to the next section of the concert. Finally, the biggest key of all, and the one that makes Zentaneous totally different and 100 percent distinquishable from RealNames or AOL Keywords is interactivity. Realnames and AOL keywords only delivered advertising, Nothing else. Outside of the value of the advertising conent, there is nothing for the user. Zentaneous is different. We offer any individual the opportunity to create an account and receive 200 personal Z codes for private use. A user can use one Z code to link directly to his online banking , another to go directly to his or her email, a third to link to their favorite pizza place, etc. Heres a short demonstration of how the user can use their personal z codes. (show demo) We estimate most users will use about 30 or fewer personal codes for practical use, but many, particularly the 18-25 year old set, will use close to 100 percent of their alloted z codes to directly link them to favorite locations like Youtube videos, myspace pages of friends etc, making Zentaneous, a very functional, interactive service, not just a stream of advertising. Professionlas, particularly traveling professionals will also use them, because any bookmarks they create with a Z code will be stored on our servers, not on their computer, so thay can access their bookmarks, quickly, and easily from any computer, at work, at home, or on the road. Another interactive touch that will further drive Zentaneous into the intenert culture will be the allowance of and creation of group accounts. Losely affiliated groups such as fantasy football leagues, or clubs, or more formal groups such as schools, can sign up for more a group Z code account. Every teacher in a jr high school for example, might be alloted 15 or 20 Z codes, to link direct to homework assignments, tutorials, etc. Every club in the school can have a few Z codes to communicate activites over the web for the school. And educators should not have any objection to the use of Z codes since no group or club Z code will ever have any form of advertising on it. Z codes, therefore, have the possibiility of becoming not just an advertising media, but a shorthand form of communication among groups and a useful personal tool for bookmarking at lightning speeds. We also plan to announce Zentaneous through the use of viral marketing, primarily through the use of a humorous Youtube videos, and a humorous Zentaneous tutorial featurity professional comedians. The right Youtube video can "announce" a service like Zentaneous virally, to thousands of individuals in a manner RealtaNames or AOL keywords could never have come close to achieving. Prizes, such Ipod give aways might also be an extrmely effective method of gaining attention. Youtube gave away one Ipod a day, in its early history and gained a massive audience quickly. Our action plan We would now likely to briefly describe our business mdel. plan. Zentaneous plans on remaining as small as possible staff-wise and to contract out areas of expertise as much as possible. For example, we are not planning on having a sales force to sell Z codes. We plan on contracting out to a national agency, already in the field of advertising, for the national codes, and if deemed practical we may contract city codes sales as well to the same national agency. On the other hand for the sale of local city codes, we may partner with someone like Yellow pages, who already have sales people in the local field. In any case, our bus model is to contract services out to professionals in the field, whenever possible. We may need a small IT department, but primarily as manager and translaters of our needs. -- At least for the first couple of years, we do not plan on owning and operating our own servers to store the millions of peronal and group Z codes that may be created or to deliver the conent out. -- Again, We will contract that out to professional companies who have a staff to do that 24 hours a day. Bandwith and server storage space will be our primary expenditures, but as the vast majority of the content will be stored on the marketers own servers, even the costs for that will not be excessive. We conservatively estimate that overall expenditures for Zentaneous, even at full capacity in year two or three, with millions of individual and group accounts, and thousands of local and national codes sold will be less than $10 million dollars. Forecast of revenues Finally we would like to return to the forecasting of revenues. first is that they overreached on the value of a keyword, in some case asking for a healthy percentage of a corporate sponsors annual revenue, instead of something reasonable like 1, 5, or even $10,000. When the RealWord stragetgy of getting corporate sponsors to float the bill at outrageous prices didn't work, realwords - farmed out the sale of keywords to thousands of secondary agent who, contrary to Microsft's explicit directions, began selling key words to sites that were not directly related. -- Ie, a keyword for Disney didn't take you to a Disney site, but took you to some secondary vendor selling Disneyland tour packages. Microsft's deal with keywords lasted about 4 years, and eventually, when their contract ended, so did the keyword concept. Microsoft attention was also engaged heavily in attempting to become the number one search engine tool, a battle which of course they eventually lost, so the keywords concept here might be summarized as a great idea, executed haphazadrly, at the wrong time. Never the less, the keywords did work -- during the last quarter of their use in 2000, almost 50 million keyword searches were executed through internet exlorer. Zentaneous: the resurection of keywords on the internet. The current internet landsape is very much different from where it was in 1996-2000. With the advent of broadband connections, the internet audience continues to grow at an exponential rate without the type of internet dial-up frustrations previously experienced with AOL. And while there continues to be skirmises, rather than out and out battles in the internet world in terms of search engines and other technology, the inteernet is pretty much a stable platform as compared to 9 or 10 years ago. So at this time we would like to demonstrate why we believe the Zentaneous keyword concept is ready for a revival and is a $250 million dollar goldmine, waiting to be tapped. The first key element is the capability of using the same keyword multiple times in different databases. To understand the unbelievable financial value of that ability, we need to digress for a minute and speak a bit more about the use of generic domains. Within the ICAAN domain system structure, the same word can never be used more than once, except in the case of using it with a different domain suffix. As an example, there can only be one diamonds.com, but there can be diamonds.net diamonds.org etc. In all practicality however, through conditioning habit, and limited understanding of the domain name system, many people would never even consider typing an internet address with a domain name other than com into their browser. Secondly, the use of generics for domain names at a national is problematic. The domain name diamonds.com sold for 10 million dollars recently and while the price is high, the owners stand to have a reasonable choice at making money on their investment, as buying a diamond ring by inteneret order has gained poplularity. However, the generic name plumber.com probably wouldn't generate a lot of business because when you have a plubming problem, you want a local guy, and in all likelyhood, you really don't care whether the local guy is part of some big national chain that could afford to spend a million dollars locking up the one available website. plumber.com. You just want a reliable, local plumber in your area. The economic power of the same simple keyword leased 500 times over. Contrast the ICann domain system with the ability to use generic keywords with Zentaneous. With ICANN, there can only be one root name. With Zentaneous, with many databases, we can deliver multiple uses of the same code. There are over 200 cities in the U.S with a population of 200,000 or more. And another 20 in Canada. The Zentaneous system plans on initially launching a database for all 220 of those cities, and another 300 or so populated cities of around 100,000 or more. This means that the same generic code, plumber, this time being localized, and actually making sense, can be leased 500 times over! How easy will it be to sell such codes to business. Condider this: Nearly every sizeable city in the U.S. has a half dozen or more full page yellow page ads for attorneys specializing in DWI defense. With a full yellowpage ad running anywhere from 10 to 90 thousand dollars, depending upon the size of the city, it is not hard to picture one law firm in each city would snap up the local, but never the less exclulsive Z code -- DWI, particularly since local premium generic Zcodes would be priced at around $750 each, and a with a net profit of around $500 per code, after commisions are paid for advertising sales of the codes. $500 x 500 translates into $250,000 for one code, and almost all the bandwith delivering this code take place on the customers server. Therefore, the profit margin for that one individual generic code would approximately $248,000. We have identified over close to 1,000 generic alone that make perfect business sense for a business owner to use. Here are a few examples: autoglass DWI lasik golfpro tickets facelift (plastic surgeon) Generics codes: just a fraction of the Zentaneous city database If generic codes were just only thing available in the Zentaneous city data base, it is clear from the all that has previously been deliniated that the potential lines in the multi-millions of dollars. However, for every generic code, there may be as many as 50 non genercis advertising the same category of professional service such as law or plastic surgery. Thus, although the numbers are far reaching, it is not unreasonalbe to imagine at $100 per non generic code, that the Zentaneous city database would bring in a revenue stream of an additional $200 million dollars over an above the expected revenue of $250 million for for the sale of generic codes. This leads us into another key difference between rediredetion in the current era and what happened earlier earlier with real words and with AOL keywords With the era of broadband cable, the video is king. Youtube, the start up delivery service for videos started in a garage and two years later sold to google for close to 2 billion dollars. But videos are not just for entertainment. Videos can explain a service in details that words cannot. Thus, users of Zentaneous Z codes, whenever possible, are encouraged to add video to their website, or preferably, have thier z code send the inteneret viewer direct to that video. An excellent example would be Lasiik or plastic surgery. To have a video that you can watch to thourougly understand the risks and the rewards is invaluable. We forsee in the not too distant future that Zentaneous will start sort of video marketing revolution on the internet with restaunts having the chef showing up daily to tell us today's specials, and stores showing us some of the goods on today's sale. Until that time, one use that Zentaneous will be used for with frequency is in selling autos and real estate. Already, many