Skimbit announces beta and first customer

Skimbit, described as a social decision-making tool, launches it’s formal beta trial this week. The free service is designed to let you manage the results of web searches, say for a holiday, wedding or shopping trip, and aggregates the feedback from friends and family to make it easier to come to a group decision. Notionally Skimbit is meeting a need, since about 88% of adults conduct some sort of online research prior to making a decision. No surprises there.

Skimbit founder and CEO Alicia Navarro has pretty much built the site herself, with contractors. Skimbit.com’s revenue model is based on wrapping contextual advertisements around your research, so in theory there is more targetting as a result.

However, I see a better future for it as a white-label service, which it also offers as ‘Skim-in-a-box’. Indeed TV channel Wedding TV now offers a Decision Manager, helping its users plan their weddings. This is a useful extra for the site and provides more reliable revenues for Skimbit, which rather begs the question of whether Skimbit is really a Web “feature” or a has a future as a company. At least if they get more users and white-label clients, they’ll find out.