INTELLIGENT AGENTS
Where computer users see system glitches, executives at Santa Clara, California-based Aveo (www.aveo.com) see opportunity.
CEO and founder Paul Hurley has built the company on an algorithm that sniffs out and alerts you to potential conflicts on a PC before they cause trouble. The company provides a free client, Attune, that compares your applications, plug-ins, and drivers with a master database of problems. When you install software known to conflict with another program, Attune dings you with an Intelligram - an email containing route-around instructions. "We're adding 10,000 people a day, and within the next 12 months we should be on 50 million machines," Hurley says. "The growth rate for the system is exponential."
Aveo collects fees from partners such as Dell, HP, and 3Com, which bundle Attune with their products to reduce customer-support costs. But it's not just preemptive tech support that has clients excited: The application doubles as a kind of stealth marketer. For example, because Attune can monitor the ink in your printer, Hewlett-Packard floats an offer for a replacement cartridge just when the ink is running low. Aveo execs, who have dubbed this idea of tech-support-related commerce "t-commerce," say that timely offers like HP's replacement cartridge are seeing buy rates as high as 11 percent. "We show up only when users have a need, because we know how they're using their PCs," says Aveo VP Brian Burch.
Having an intelligent client closely monitoring users' hardware and software does raise privacy concerns, though Hurley notes that all Attune-related data is housed on the user's PC and that Intelligrams are triggered only after cross-checks for conflicts or upgrades are done locally.
Still, with privacy, perception is reality. "There's potential for tremendous misuse," says Aaron Goldberg, principal analyst at Ziff-Davis. "But there's also a tremendous opportunity if they handle things right."
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