Meet Wikidi CEO Michal Illich

Almost an obligatorily question - when, where and how did you find the Wikidi idea?

I was always frustrated when I searched for product information I did many web searches, read many reviews, saw information in e-shops, opened many PDFs and in the end I had written the most important things on paper (!) just to be able to compare all the features. I thought there must be better way to organize such information.

Is there any similarity with Jyxo, a search company you have build before and which has been successfully acquired?

Yes and no. Wikidi also organizes a lot of data. But general search engines haven't advance much in the last 10 years - they are still mainly searching words in the text. Wikidi tries hard to understand the structure of the text. It knows that "10 inches" is a size and when it's mentioned on a page about iPad, it probably means display size.

 

Aren't you afraid of Google or any other potential competitor?

Google's Freebase actually gives us their data for free :) Their success will be ours too.

Actually, WolframAlpha is working with structured data too...

It's great for geeks and math enthusiasts. I just don't believe it's a good product for mainstream users.

Can we trust user generated content?

Yes, studies have proven that Wikipedia is on a same quality level as Britannica. We obviously won't have as many users as Wikipedia in the coming years, but we can compensate that by verifying a lot of data by our text analysis algorithms.

 

And what about business model? Where are your revenue streams?

On the product pages we offer links to shopping search engines. In the future we will get fees from every sale.

Somebody said: "If you work on something new, there are ten other startups working on the same thing". Do you have any message for them :o) ?

Sure, keep working. We like competition. And if competition gives their data for free as we are doing, we will all benefit.

OK, thank you for your answers and good luck!