Meet Ali Ghafour, Co - Founder of viafoura

My name is Ali Ghafour. I'm the Co-Founder and CTO at Viafoura. Viafoura helps large online publishers get more engagement around their content and also monetize their content. The catalyst was, we were listening to talk radio in the car and the radio topic was who's a better boxer - Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson. And then we called in on the radio show uh... we waited forty five minutes. Got to our destination only to be told that the show had ended. So we got frustrated, couldn't voice our opinion. Went online trying to find that same debate, but all you could find was just anonymous people with very basic text commenting. So we thought there's a better way to doing engagement online and that's where the whole idea started. Publishers do a great job of creating great content. People still go to them to consume that content, but all the engagement happens on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube for that matter. So publishers were really losing this great dialogue that was happening on their websites. The opportunity for Viafoura was to have these conversations that were happening on these social media sites, to bring that back onto the publisher's website so that they can get all the rich conversation on their side and that they could get more data about their users and also monetize that. So if you can think of, for example, in an article you read the article ... and underneath it there's comments. We go beyond just simple text comments. We show you who the best ones are -- curate them -- give people ranks, badges, and awards and that's essentially the first half of it and then there's a whole back end analytics that provides a lot of rich insight into the users and into why users are doing certain things so that the publishers can make better business decisions. The actual innovation or technology that Viafoura provides is a software as a service. So the client installs our simple javascript into their content management system and then through that, it provides all the suite of tools that they need to engage their audience and to monetize their audience.