Ad Supported Applications

Accomplice (www.accomplice.com) is a hot, new company, that not only has an innovative product, but also an innovative business model. Accomplice makes a client based organizer and is “your partner in time.” It provides a single place to organize all of your todo’s - both work and personal. Further, it synchs with Outlook, PDAs and other Accomplice users who you invite into your network. So it makes it very easy to coordinate and see status of tasks across different groups. Of course, this also makes it very viral.

But most interesting of all is that Accomplice plans to distribute a free version that is advertising supported. Accomplice will serve up small text adds similar to Google that are context and time sensitive. Thus, it will deliver ads relevant to what you are doing when you are doing it. For example if you have a todo that says “plan summer trip to Italy” you will see travel related ads. If you had a work todo to “print launch brochure” you would see ads relating to print services. If, however, you happen to be meeting your friend Pam Anderson for lunch, I do not want to think about the ads that might show-up on your desktop. Hopefully Accomplice will also add a content filter feature to their ad server.

Still, I am very intrigued by the thought of advertising supported applications.

Comments

[Kent Allen]

Hi Greg:

Just a quick heads up that the public version of Accomplice launched last week at DigitalLife. CNN ran a nice feature [http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/18/technology/personaltech/accomplice/index.htm]

Cheers,

Kent