A Natural Fit

Today we launched a very cool integration with AboutUs.org. AboutUs is another Portland, Oregon-based Internet company. If you don’t know about AboutUs, here is how they describe themselves:

AboutUs is a wiki for and about businesses, organizations, blogs, forums, and really anything or anyone that has a website.

Think of us as your guide to websites (that you can also help build).

So what does a Web archive have to offer a Website wiki? We think a lot. This relationship will provide every AboutUs user access to the iterasi archive of Web pages for each AboutUs website they visit.

Here’s how it works. Each AboutUs Website now contains a link ‘Iterasi Archive’ in the section titled ‘Website Information’ immediately under the thumbnail. This link may have a number next to it representing the number of pages for this domain that exist in the iterasi archive. Clicking on the link will bring the user to the Web archive where they can dig further into the iterasi archive of Web pages for that domain. If we haven’t seen this domain in our archive we will queue up a job to go archive that site. We will do the same if the newest archived page is older than 30 days. That way we will keep the archive fresh and current with more use by AboutUs users.

So why is this cool? Well for a whole bunch of reasons. It gives the AboutUs user a very cool new feature (obviously…right!). AboutUs users can now search through the iterasi archive to research the evolution of the Website, search for information of historical significance, whatever. For iterasi, it should be a source of traffic to our site where we can hopefully turn them into happy users as well.

But there’s more to the story…

Some people…

So how did this deal come together? How did two Portland, Oregon-based companies ever determine they could do something to benefit each other? Did we bump into each other at one of the 10,000 coffee shops in Portland? Did we follow each other on Twitter and become lifelong brothers before we ever met face-to-face? (Don’t laugh… this has been happening a lot lately… ).

No. Oddly enough, this relationship was initiated by Erik Benson of Voyager Capital. Yes, that’s right. A venture capitalist put us together. Erik and the Voyager team recently made an investment in AboutUs. But the history here goes way back. I have known Voyager since the late 90’s and have interacted with Erik and partners Bill McAleer and Enrique Godreau many times since. They have always been professional and downright decent to work with. Even when they declined to invest in my firm in the 90s (WeSync.com) they took the time to explain where I should improve my plan. Note that this was in the Bubble 1.0 days when no response was considered the best-practices method for a VC firm to signal a startups to just ’get lost’. So years later when I was working with a promising young company that needed venture financing, I stood on the table and shouted“Hey, talk to Voyager, they are really smart and really decent people as well”.

Recently I ran into Erik. I suspected he had something to do with putting iterasi and AboutUs together. The talk went something like this:

Pete: ‘Erik, are you behind this?’.

Erik: ‘Yes. It makes sense to me’.

Pete: ‘You know, if people find out you do nice things, it could be the beginning of the end for you as a VC’.

Erik: ‘Yes, it could appear that I am losing my edge’.

We both had a good laugh and went our separate ways.

So here I go again

I know, I know. I should be blogging about how great this relationship is for both companies and for all of our users. There will be more on this - you can count on it. I promise to bang our drum louder as this relationship unfolds.

But I just had to point out wh
at anyone who has been in business very long can tell you: People make it happen. Nice things you do for people result in nice things happening back. Karma is real. I want everyone to know how the business world should work, can work and, for me, did work this time.