The long tail theory states when you put something out on the Internet, it lives forever. For some, that means it comes back to bite you long after you posted it, but for content creators like marketers, artists and writers, they may simply lose control of how and where their content gets displayed. That’s where Minder, a company that appeared on Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, comes in.
Minder lets you set who can see the content, the duration the content is accessible and a geo fence, or limited geographic area where viewers can access your content. This means you can control exactly who, how long and where the content will display. You share the content by email, SMS or on Facebook and the link takes you to the content inside Minder.
As an example, suppose you wanted to create a video to promote your event at TechCrunch Disrupt. You could limit the video distribution to just the TechCrunch Disrupt location area and you could make it available from September 8-10th, just the dates of the event. If you wanted to limit it to your team, you just select their names in your address book before you share it.
“Everything stems from the concept the people who create the content should own, control, manage and publish that content,” Michael Tracy, vice president of business development at StoryCloud, the company behind Minder explained.
Once you’ve set this information, the content is only available within the parameters you set for the duration you defined. For certain use cases, this could be quite useful and unlike a product like like Cyber Dust, which entrepreneur and Dallas Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban talked about in an interview on Monday at TechCrunch Disrupt, the content doesn’t just disappear after a defined period of time. The content owner can still access it and use it, but the people you’ve shared it with will no longer be able to see it.
Once you send out the content, analytics let you see the number of impressions, locations, unique views and how long viewers stayed on the site.
Tracy explained once you put content out there whether on email or Facebook, it becomes community property and you lose control of it. Minder lets you have complete control over the content and once it expires or you move outside the geo fence, the link simply won’t work anymore, even if it gets shared.
Minder, which was started by serial entrepreneur Ken Kalb, is in Beta right now and free for all users, but eventually Tracy says they will probably charge content owners to use the service. There are also plans to white label it and sell it as a company-branded service. It currently integrates with Box and Dropbox, so users can access content from these services when using Minder to distribute it.
Minder is the first product released by StoryCloud, which bills itself as a cloud app development shop and hopes to create a suite of cloud products in the coming months in addition to Minder.
Tracy told me, so far the company is funded by private investors he didn’t wish to name.