InterActive Corporation’s (IACI) Pronto
Bob Tedeschi’s NYTimes article signaled that IAC’s (NASDAQ: IACI) Pronto might be ready for primetime.
While the company has been quiet during its beta period, the Times article uncovered that Pronto crawls 50,000 merchants and might have plans to bundle its software.
I followed up with John Foley, COO of Pronto on these two points.
Do you really crawl 50,000 merchants or are you getting backfill from another comparison engine? Shopwiki claims to crawl over 100,000 merchants, why such a big difference in the number of merchants?
We’re currently crawling 51,000 merchants. We’re adding thousands of new merchants every week (we launched with 30,000). Since we started crawling, we have found “products” on over 330K sites, but the subset that we are currently crawling represent sites that we have deemed appropriate for our shopping index based on a number of proprietary criteria. We also currently accept solicitations from merchants who are not currently in our index.
Are you planning to bundle with other applications?
We’re planning to use traditional marketing means [Editor's note: John mentioned that Pronto is already advertising on Google].
We will test a variety of marketing channels, but in all cases Pronto’s offering will be clearly presented to the consumer and they will always be given the option to decide whether or not to install. We have seen integrated placements with other downloadable products such as branded search toolbars that meet this criteria and will likely test something similar with the right partner. The [download process] is in no way under the table or insidious. We want 100% of the people who have Pronto on their desktop to want to have it. We want Pronto to be the best consumer brand on the web.
Related Posts:
ShopWiki - CTO & Founder, Eliot Horowitz - March 30, 2006
Pronto Update - March 14, 2006
Bringing Shopping Closer to Home (buySAFE Shopping) - February 7, 2006
Pronto: First Look - January 10, 2006
