Linkstorm is an advertising technology company pioneering a new approach to online advertising with the premise that ads perform better for the advertiser when they are more useful to the customer.
Our next-generation hyperlinking system significantly enhances the performance of online advertising, e-commerce and online publishing by overlaying cascading menus onto any kind of hyperlink or ad unit, thus enabling customers to navigate directly to the information or actions that they want.
By rolling over a Linkstorm-enabled link or ad, the customer unfurls a menu of links, thus previewing additional destinations even before having to click. Then a single click takes the customer deep into a website, right to the answer to their question, the product info they were seeking or the transaction they wanted to perform. In the case of advertising, these links could include multiple products, offer details or marketing messages that specifically address their interests.
See Client Examples to learn how Linkstorm is turning display advertising into a true high-performance marketing tool.
Linkstorm is headquartered in New York City and is funded by visionary investors including and Jim Rutt.
Linkstorm, founded as Content Directions in August 2000 and renamed in November 2005, was established to commercialize the Handle System®, a next-generation linking system developed by Dr. Robert Kahn, a co-creator of the Internet and co-inventor of its underlying communication protocol, TCP/IP. This innovation improves on the URL concept of linking only to a single web page address, which often requires information seekers to follow a daisy-chain of page links to reach the exact nugget of content they need.
In Dr. Kahn's Handle System platform, a handle is a unique identifier for any kind of digital object. Then, through Linkstorm's unique patent-pending extensions to the Handle System, the object can be associated with any number of related links, other objects, or any other centrally maintained data. The scientific/technical/medical (STM) publishing industry has embraced this technology and uses it today to interlink 99 percent of the world's journal articles.
Linkstorm's management, however, after helping drive this universal adoption in the journal industry, determined that this technology could impact a much larger market segment in ways that would benefit the business world and the hundreds of millions of active Internet users beyond the scientific community. The company spent years building and enhancing that technology in collaboration with major publishers such as McGraw-Hill and Harvard Business School Publishing and has now optimized its patent-pending platform for the new marketplace opportunity represented by online advertising.
Ari Brandt joined Linkstorm as CEO in January of 2009 to broaden industry adoption of the company's performance enhancing online advertising technology. Named to MIN's Digital Hot List in 2008, Ari is a seasoned media executive with over 16 years of experience building successful web products. Most recently, he was the head of digital media for Condé Nast Business Media Group where he guided the launch of the critically acclaimed Portfolio.com. As general manager, he was responsible for developing the site and building an infrastructure that supported the generation of several million dollars of revenue, over 4MM monthly visitors and six awards during its first full year in operation.
Prior to Condé Nast, Mr. Brandt was the director of ad solutions for the Yahoo! Media Group, where he led business operations for the top ranked Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! News properties and oversaw the successful go-to-market launch of Yahoo! Tech. In this role, Mr. Brandt oversaw strategic monetization initiatives representing nearly $200MM in annual revenue and led a team responsible for creating innovative advertising solutions.
Before joining Yahoo!, Ari was the associate publisher at SmartMoney where he oversaw all aspects of marketing, sales and business development for SmartMoney.com and SmartMoney Magazine. He was responsible for integration, brand development, sales support, research and promotion for both print and online. While at SmartMoney, he led the launch of SmartMoney Select, SmartMoney.com's subscription based Web site -- generating over $1MM in annual revenue after its first year in operation.
A veteran of online advertising, Ari began his Internet career running business development for DoubleClick's Business Network. Previous to his tenure at DoubleClick he was the director of advertising and public relations at Neuberger Berman, a money management firm in New York. He began his professional career developing his skills within the Media, Account Management and New Business disciplines for leading advertising agencies including Weiss Whitten Stagliano, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, and MVBMS/Euro RSCG.
Ari attended Fordham University for an MBA, and holds a BA from Temple University. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey with his wife and three children.
Mr. Tosto joined Linkstorm from BusinessWeek, where he started in 2002 and guided an integrated sales team that represented both BusinessWeek.com and BusinessWeek. Prior to BusinessWeek, Mr. Tosto entered the online advertising world in 1998, first as the ad director of SmartMoney.com, where he worked with Mr. Brandt, CEO of Linkstorm. He became General Manager of SmartMoney.com in 2000 and working with Mr. Brandt led the site through the dotcom bust and to its eventual profitability in 2002. Prior to SmartMoney.com, Mr. Tosto has held various sales management positions. He also spent his formative years in advertising in the media departments of NW Ayer and William Esty Co.
David Rosenbloom has worked in software development for over two decades, in domains as varied as online collaboration, peer-to-peer communication frameworks, games, graphics, music, real estate, advertising and systems. At Linkstorm he leads the development team and contributes as architect and developer. Previously he held similar hands-on CTO roles for Sigma Design, Softwax, Homethinking, and Rare Medium, overseeing the expansion of the latter, through its IPO, from a small design shop to a 13-office international services company. He has also worked for AT&T's Downtown Digital, Eidolon/Electronic Arts, Workman Publishing and Information Builders, and led design and development on two award-winning game titles. David is also active as a composer, guitarist and painter, and is a cum laude graduate of Harvard.
Mr. Sidman is a seasoned business executive with wide-ranging experience in the publishing, technology and finance industries. Prior to founding Linkstorm, he served as director of new publishing technologies for John Wiley & Sons, where he helped the U.S.' oldest independent publisher to transition its print business to the web through a combination of strategy development, internal projects enabling organic growth, and external acquisitions/investments. In four years he helped grow electronic product revenues 16-fold, with profitability rising more than 10-fold. He also helped initiate usage of the web as a sales channel for print publications, growing this channel from nonexistence in 1996 to over $30 million by the time he left.
For Wiley's Journal business, he worked closely with Internet pioneer Dr. Robert Kahn and his DARPA-funded Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) to adapt Dr. Kahn's Handle System for the Scientific/Technical/Medical Publishing industry, including the founding of CrossRef which today interlinks more than 25 million journal articles. He then founded Linkstorm in August 2000 as Content Directions, Inc. (CDI) in order to develop additional applications based on the Handle System for the publishing industry, securing multi-year ongoing commitments that continue today from McGraw-Hill, Harvard Business School Publishing, Cambridge University Press and others.
Prior to Linkstorm and Wiley, Mr. Sidman held senior management positions in the technology, finance and information businesses with Barclay's Bank, Moody's Investors Service, Shearson Lehman Hutton/American Express, Mercantile Stores and the American Society of Civil Engineers. Mr. Sidman is a summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, where he also taught physics, mathematics and philosophy as an undergraduate.
Jon Emery was Senior VP, General Counsel of Network Solutions, a technology company, which was sold to VeriSign for $17 Billion in July 2000. Before Network Solutions, he was Corporate Counsel at Tambrands (formerly Tampax), and so brings significant business perspective about advertising and marketing at a major consumer products company. He is now a full-time investor who is actively involved in all his portfolio companies.
Since 2000, Kim Goh has been Senior Managing Director at Hudson Ventures, as well as being an active private investor. He has worked with many early-stage companies, and has an extensive background as both an entrepreneur and a technologist, especially in the Banking industry. See bio at http://www.hudsonventures.com/goh.php.
Ewan Main is CEO of The Daggerwing Group, a marketing strategy company owned by Omnicom which consults with advertisers at senior-most levels to determine what their marketing goals and strategies are, and then helps evaluate whether their advertising programs actually reflect those strategies. His prior background is in management consulting, and his clients have included Mercedes Benz, Reuters, UnitedHealth Group, Hewlett Packard and others.
Jay Shapiro was recently CEO of Blue Interactive, an ad agency that he founded, built up to 130 staff worldwide and about $7M in revenues, and then sold to WPP. He then built a worldwide outsourced production network to service all of WPP, thus lowering ad production costs globally.
Mark Shifke is Managing Director at JP Morgan Securities Inc., and has been a long-standing, repeat Linkstorm investor. He has also served on other startup boards.