Monday, August 13, 2007
Interview with Jeremy Jaech, Trumba
Our interview this morning is with Jeremy Jaech, President and CEO of Seattle's Trumba (www.trumba.com). Jaech gave us an update on Trumba and its calendaring software, discussed some of the recent wins the firm has had with newspapers and other media, and also talked about the firm's offering have evolved from the consumer side to offering services to businesses.
Jeremy, thanks for the interview. For those who aren't familiar with Trumba, what does your service do and who uses it?
Jeremy Jaech: Trumba is a developer of innovative event presentation and content management solutions that help organizations effectively publish, promote and communicate their events online.
Our flagship product, Trumba Connect, is a software-as-a-service solution that enables any business to easily design and embed fully branded, interactive website calendars and other event widgets into their websites. The service is supported by a number of other great event-centric capabilities including the ability to email calendars, maximize user-generated content through event submission forms, and create calendar sub-categories based on event types or geography.
Aside from its robust feature set and ease of deployment, Trumba Connect transforms traditional static calendars into two-way communication vehicles. Our interoperability with virtually every major personal calendaring platform enables visitors to our customers’ websites to seamlessly add events directly to their personal calendars, set email and text message reminders, forward events to friends, and be notified of event changes.
Taken as a whole, the Trumba Connect service enables our customers to build community around and even generate revenue from “go-and-do” content. The technology appeals to a broad range of customers, including media organizations, institutions of higher education, corporations, associations, municipalities, hospitals, museums, health clubs, and large religious organizations.
Tell us a little bit about the recent deals your firm has been signing with newspapers?
Jeremy Jaech: We’ve seen a great deal of customer traction across all forms media, actually. In addition to a number of major newspaper customers, our Trumba Connect solution has been deployed at television, radio, and magazine outlets locally and nationwide.
It seems that more and more, traditional media organizations – be they print or broadcast – are looking to the Web to provide them with another channel to engage their constituents. Today, virtually every magazine, newspaper, and TV and radio station has an online presence, and often these Web counterparts are getting more eyeballs than their offline predecessors.
The newspaper sector has been a natural fit for Trumba because of the primary role these organizations play in their respective communities as the hub of local information. Newspapers have always been the central resource for community event information, and as that role continues in the virtual world, Trumba Connect provides them with an ideal, turn-key solution.
Our initial move into the newspaper space was led by a deployment with the New York Times. Currently, The Times is using Trumba Connect on both its online Autos and Careers sections. We are also being used by The Seattle Times, several regional Ottaway newspapers, which are all part of the Local Media Group of Dow Jones & Company, as well as Chattanooga Times Free Press and Northern Life, a regional newspaper in Ontario, Canada. In addition, we’ve just announced that both King5 in Seattle and Oregon Public Broadcasting are using Trumba Connect to power their online events calendars.
It looks like Trumba started out as a personal calendaring service; it appears from your offerings now you're much more focused on groups and offering your services to others?
Jeremy Jaech: It’s interesting how the market has evolved since we first hit the scene.
The early days of the calendaring market was dominated by discussion around personal calendaring tools. In fact until very recently, online calendaring was a consumer-only technology market. Naturally, since the central component of the Trumba system is an event calendar, we were initially lumped in with the Outlook, GCal, iCal, and Yahoo calendars of the world. And, our low price point in the early days coupled with the lack of any robust alternatives back then did add to the confusion by making Trumba an appealing option for many consumers.
So in order to drive home our core message to the market and to realize our original vision, we began to aggressively campaign on our business value and Trumba Connect's true function as an event marketing system for organizations. We changed the face of our website to eliminate any confusion as a consumer solution and we added more business-focused language to our marketing. But the core technology, though constantly being tweaked, upgraded and optimized for business environments, did not really change too much.
Since the beginning, Trumba has focused on making it easy to effectively publish and promote events through the Internet. Our goal has always been to give our customers cutting-edge solutions for managing their event content and promoting and soliciting events online.
What's the business model behind the service, do business users pay for the software or is this more of a software-as-a-service model?
Jeremy Jaech: Trumba Connect is software-as-a-service (SaaS). Our customers can invest in a monthly subscription or work with us to develop pricing by contract.
With traditional licensed software, businesses typically have to wait for the next release to benefit from the latest innovations or to move to a new browser or operating system. Given the cost and complexity of moving to a new version, it may not even be practical to upgrade each time a new release becomes available.
With a Trumba SaaS subscription, however, our customers benefit from innovations on a rapid, on-going basis. As soon as a new or improved feature is developed and tested, our customers are using it.
In addition, as a SaaS vendor, we form a kind of community with our customers. We know how they’re using the product and where they’re running into limitations. This constant supply of metrics translates into rapid bug fixes, new feature ideas, and improved usability and performance.
Finally, what's the next big piece of Trumba's plans, and where do you see this market heading?
Jeremy Jaech: Today, Trumba is focusing a great deal of our energy on media companies which often act as aggregation sites with respect to events. The endgame for these media companies with respect to event aggregation is to become the de facto event resource for their respective communities, whether those communities are shaped by geography or common interests or what have you. As such, these aggregators are focused entirely on promoting the largest quantity of relevant events and Trumba provides them with a feature-rich platform to do just that. And what’s more, the way the Trumba solution is architected enables these aggregators build out their event content even further by leveraging user-generated content supplied by event originators themselves.
I can see a time in the not-too-distant future where we might do something like offer a version of the Trumba solution that helps our event aggregator and event originator customers work together in new ways to more effectively play to each others’ strengths and tap new opportunities. Additionally, another area we are investigating is how to effectively monetize event listings for aggregation sites by giving the event originators a way to upgrade a basic listing and gain more exposure on the media sites through premium placement or promotion.
The calendaring market in general has a number of exciting directions it can go right now. For some time now, personal calendaring solutions have played a vital role in the lives of individual consumers, as well as for business people and groups trying to manage schedules. But, the calendar as an enterprise asset is just coming into its own; and in particular, businesses and organizations are only just beginning to learn how to leverage advanced calendaring systems like Trumba’s for their specific needs. It may not be too far down the road that we begin to recognize interactive calendaring solutions as the new communication platform rather than the latest Web 2.0 application.