What is Circulate™?

Circulate is a service that makes online news and information more accessible and social.

Publishers sign up with Circulate to deliver a high-value experience to their readers, and to benefit financially from the additional engagement.

Consumers sign up with Circulate through a trusted Web "home base" (for instance, a local publisher) and optionally share their interests. Circulate then discovers news, information and entertainment from trusted sources and delivers to each consumer a personalized streams of content, wherever he or she is on the Web.

Circulate is available to Web users at all times, as contrasted with the 1% of time spent by Web users on news sites. Circulate finds personalized content that consumers want and makes it easy for them to share news, video, blogs and other content with friends.

How does Circulate work?

To get started with Circulate (once it goes public) you will go through a one-click simple procedure to register and download Circulate. You'll share some basic demographics and preferences, and you'll select your preferred participating publisher of local news (who becomes your Circulate "home base"). Circulate is then installed as a slim browser notification bar. You'll see the Circulate Bar at the top of your browser window as a thin purple line that expands politely when it has updates for you.

The Circulate Bar remains visible, at your option, wherever you go online. Using your expressly shared interests and preferences, along with your current browsing path, it suggests where you may want to go next, or later on. Over time, you can refine your content interests so that Circulate gets to know you and becomes an even better personal guide to the Web.

That's cool enough, but there's more:

• If you like what Circulate has found for you, you can share it with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.
• Circulate will offer convenient and economical access to Web pages that require payment or subscription.
• Circulate will let you interact with thousands of information publishers, with your friends on social networking sites and with providers of products and services that you use or that may interest you.
• Circulate will be available on smartphones, as an e-mail notification, or as a destination Web site.

Why is Circulate different?

Before Circulate, you had to know your online destination or use often-unpredictable and frustrating search engines, RSS, aggregation sites or bookmarks to find it. And you needed to do all the work by typing search terms or by scanning links. This hasn't changed much during all the time the Web has been around.

Circulate solves this problem by bringing the Web to you simply and quickly. With Circulate, you can take a big step into the post-search, Web 3.0 world. Circulate is a personal information agent that works just for you.

How does Circulate do this?

When you begin using Circulate, you'll probably want to tell it a little bit about yourself. As you continue to interact with it, you can allow it to learn more about you and your preferences, and it uses that information to deliver Web recommendations to you.

Eventually, you'll find that Circulate brings you what you want to see, learn about, and interact with online, before you even think about it. In a real sense, it will become an intelligent personal information agent.

What about privacy and security?

User privacy is a fundamental value at CircLabs.

At all times, Circulate is fully under your control. It respects your online privacy and security. At any time, you can review the personal information Circulate uses to bring the Web to you. You can edit or delete it at any time. Circulate will not share your personal information without your specific approval (and that approval won't be buried in the kind of user agreement nobody actually reads).

How can Circulate help grow my publishing business?

As a publisher of news, information or other content online, you face the challenge of getting paid for what you offer on your sites – through advertising, subscriptions, per-item pricing or other revenue streams.

Circulate addresses this challenge with a game-changing solution to help you earn more revenue from your online content:

• Local branding: Circulate appears on the browsers of Web consumers with the online brand of the participating local news enterprise through which the consumer registered for the service. This serves to strengthen awareness of your valuable local news brand.
• Increased high-value traffic to your site: Because Circulate can travel with consumers wherever they go online, the service is always ready to recommend relevant content to them. So consumers are presented with links to your sites not just when they search for it, or visit you through their bookmarks, or find your content in aggregation sites. With Circulate, they may be sent links to your valuable, original content no matter where they are on the Web. Visitors coming to your sites through Circulate will be high-value visitors, and added high-value traffic means incremental revenue.
• Local advertising on Circulate: Circulate will be a powerful platform for local advertising sold by participating publishers. It will deliver Web consumers to relevant content whenever they are online. That means that local advertisers can deliver high-value, narrowly targeted messages. These messages will produce quick responses, build long-lasting relationships and enable social interactivity between consumers and advertisers.
• Subscription revenue: Circulate can adapt to any payment model, at the publisher's discretion. For example, at your option, you can make a portion (or all) of your content available under Circulate's paid-content service. Circulate users may pay a monthly fee to access content at multiple publishing sites; publishers receive the majority of the subscription revenue paid. Circulate can help to market this service to users by including recommendations for content that's offered on a subscription basis. After sampling, users can choose to pay full subscriptions for ongoing access.
• Per-item revenue: Also at the publisher's option, some content can be made available on a per-item basis. For example, this can include material such as archive content, which is now accessible only by search and at relatively high prices. Circulate can recommend archive content – and deliver it with one-click convenience – driving up demand for such content.
• Circulate and commerce: As Circulate is adopted widely, Circulate may – as a clearly differentiated commercial service – optionally recommend products and services along with news and information. Because users will have learned to trust the system to make useful content recommendations, many will choose to accept commercial content recommendations as well, with a priority on interactive content such as surveys, videos, coupons, affiliate marketing and lead generation. Circulate's permission-based preference targeting can provide affiliate and lead-generation commissions shared with publishers.

Who is behind CircLabs and Circulate?