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Company description
Milo.com is the free Web site that enables shoppers to
research online and buy local – providing the best of both worlds. It combines
the advantages of an Amazon-like experience with the ability to touch, feel and
get products now at a local retailer. It provides all of the product details
and user reviews people have come to expect with online shopping, and then
searches store shelves to find the best price and availability for the products
shoppers want – right when they want them.
Milo.com’s
direct customers are top, nationally-distributed retailers, including Best Buy,
Nordstrom, Target, Walmart, and dozens of others.
Milo.com’s
features include:
In-stock
search filters that allow shoppers to view only
in-stock products in the search results and, through an experience
comparable to travel site kayak.com, know instantly whether the item they
want is currently available at a store near them.
Price
alerts
that notify shoppers the moment a chosen product at a local store reaches
a price they are willing to pay.
Distance
filters that
enable shoppers to pinpoint the stores closest to an exact address that
stock the items they want.
Real-time
availability and price updates so that shoppers never miss out on a
sale or drive to a store that no longer has the item in-stock.
Price comparison across
local stores that allows shoppers to find the retailer closest to them
with the best price for the product they want.
o
Sale
tracking to find real-time sale prices for more than 2
million products at national and regional stores throughout the country.
The
Milo.com shopper values information, time and money, and uses the site to make
a well-researched decision not only on what to buy, but where to buy it to
optimize value, enable trial and have it in-hand immediately.
Team
Jack Abraham
Chief Executive Officer & Founder
At
age 12, Jack began coding and building some of the first data
extraction and processing mechanisms that would quickly help comScore
(SCOR) grow from 3 to 40 employees. His interest in data further
propelled him to write software that crawled and analyzed arbitrage
opportunities on eBay and traded products in real-time when such
opportunities were identified. His eBay arbitrage company was printing
money before it was shut down by PayPal. Jack also has previous
experience developing behavioral targeting campaigns for Microsoft and
Drugstore.com.
Jack is in the process of graduating
magna cum laude as a Joseph Wharton Scholar from the Wharton School
with a customized degree in Technological Entrepreneurship, which
combines his passion for business and computer science.
John Evans
Chief Technology Officer & Founder
John
works on everything but most enjoys developing on Milo's Python
back-end. Before Milo, John ran J.P. Evans, Inc., a 7-person software
development company that he founded to build custom technology
solutions to problems facing several Fortune 500 clients. John also
developed the core technology behind comScore, which is where he first
met Jack (a long, long time ago). John dropped out of University of
Maryland College Park where he was studying Computer Science to spend
more time hacking.
Ted Dziuba
Lead Engineer & Co-Founder
Ted
started his engineering career at Google, where he managed the crawlers
for the company's internal search engines. Google's ad-hoc internal
network provided a wealth of challenges for Ted, each time prompting
him to find a new answer to the question, "How do you get the data?"
After Google, Ted co-founded an online news aggregation startup called
Pressflip, where he led the engineering effort to crawl and parse
content from the web. At Pressflip, the question became, "Once you have
the data, how do you make sense of it?" and Ted wrote the natural
language processing and machine learning algorithms to answer it. He
joined Milo in 2008 and is the lead engineer for data acquisition.
Ted
has a degree in Mathematics from the Rochester Institute of Technology
and is already attempting to teach math skills to his baby daughter,
Rose.
Business model
Currently, Milo.com monetizes mostly through a
cost-per-click (CPC) model, since that's the familiar industry standard. Some
retail partners (especially those with a buy online, pick up in store option)
are engaged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis. Milo.com is working on
introducing a revenue model that monetizes the offline transactions that were
generated on Milo.com - one that tracks sales generated on Milo
and converted in-store.
Competitive advantage
Internet
Retailer reports, 87% of consumers in
the United States
research products online before buying them in-store. And, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce currently
accounts for less than 5 percent of U.S. retail sales, with the rest of
sales still conducted offline. Milo.com is poised to own this trend, projected
to amount to almost 40 percent of total retail sales by 2011 – a $1 trillion
market.
Milo.com’s proprietary technology connects to
retail partners’ inventory data and provides shoppers real-time access to local
product availability and prices, along with other helpful data such as
specifications and user reviews.
Milo.com has no direct competitors. There are other
startups trying to capture the growing trend, but none has the real-time
availability information and product coverage of Milo.com.
It competes primarily with e-commerce sites like
Amazon.com and serves the large segment of shoppers who want the depth of
information available online with the immediacy and tangible benefits of
shopping at a local store. Milo.com connects the Amazon-style information, user
reviews and price comparison capabilities that shoppers love with the tangible
benefits and immediate product access of in-store shopping. As an added bonus,
Milo.com removes the extra cost and waiting time associated with shipping.
The sale prices found using
Milo.com average 25 to 30 percent off the original retail price and, when used
in conjunction with the product details and local availability information,
gives users everything they need to save big on great products that are locally
available now.
Unlike Google, it can tell
you if a product is in-stock locally and unlike Amazon, you don’t have to wait
for it to arrive, or pay for shipping.
