Gravity’s Amit Kapur Says Personalization Is Going To “Explode” This Year

Following AOL’s acquisition of content personalization startup Gravity last month, co-founder and CEO Amit Kapur stopped by the AOL office in Manhattan to discuss where personalization technology goes from here.

When Gravity was founded four years ago, Kapur said its founders thought it was “inevitable” that the web would become more personal. At the time, everything on the web was “generic” and “one size fits all,” even though “the amount of content available is exploding at scale and the screen real estate is shrinking.”

Kapur pointed to Google and Yahoo as other companies investing in this area, although the “semantics” of what it’s called may change and they might not always refer to it as personalization.

“The basic notion is that you should stop having to put in work to find information,” he added. “Information should understand you and actually find you. I think that, again, this is really the year that you’re going to see it explode, and for Gravity, the idea of combining with AOL is going to help us take that to scale aggressively.”

In the video above, Kapur also discusses how this technology affects writers and artists, and what it’s like to be acquired by AOL. Since AOL owns TechCrunch, he even put me on the spot and asked me what I think about the company’s future.