Genius tracks your Web behavior for sales people, launches with $5M
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Genius is a Silicon Valley company (San Mateo) that launches today, and wants to help sales people track your activity while you are surfing through a Web site.
It is a tad scary, and some people will no doubt call it “evil.” Rafe Needleman has already jumped in with warnings.
Genius was co-founded by David Thompson, former Chief Marketing Officer at WebEx.
Genius says its customers — companies that have something to sell you — will become more efficient in their sales process. Here’s how it works: The companies send you a link as part of a marketing pitch, and you click on it to find out more information about the company’s product. While the link takes you to the company’s Web site, Genius is simultaneously tracking your activity, so that sales people may get more insight into what you’re likely to buy. Genius argues that they can reduce the number of unwanted solicitations this way.
The problem is that Genius does not require its customers to offer an opt-out to users, so they may be crawling sites without knowing they are being tracked.
Six weeks ago, the company said it got $5.1 million in a first round funding, led by Emergence Capital Partners and Walden International.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
