Beyond email: a new way to get your message out

Stuart Corner
Monday, 12 February 2007 08:36

Your IT - Home IT

A UK company, elertz (www.elertz.com) has come up with a way to enable organisations to get their message out without using emails that are increasingly blocked by spam filters.

Users download a new toolbar for their web browser, and sign up to receive information from organisations that are using the elertz system to communicate. Then, whenever new information is available from that organisation a red star flashes in the user's toolbar. The user clicks on star to view their bookmarks and the elertz bookmark that has an outstanding notification will have a red star. The user then clicks on this bookmark to go view the announcement.

The service is free to both distributors and recipients of information. Elertz generates its revenue from third party advertisers whose adverts appear within the toolbar of the browser. Contextual ads are trigged when users access certain high profile web sites, such as British Airways, or whenever they enter a search term into certain popular search engines - msn, yahoo, Google and Ask.

Users can also opt to receive, for a fee, an SMS alert when new information arrives and they are offline. Information providers receive a share of the SMS fee.

The company told iTWire: "Our main sources of revenue will be from contextual advertising within the toolbar from third-party companies. The ads will change depending on the URL the user visits and their search terms. We share the ad revenue with our partners. We also generate revenue from our SMS service. Users who are offline and have signed up for SMS elertz will be charged a small fee. Again we share this 50/50 with our partners."

Users are charged £10, $US20 or EUR15 depending on territory for a batch of 100 SMS credits. In addition, a partner website can offer up to 10 SMS text messages free for each new user that installs the toolbar.