Welcome to My World…..

OK, not really “my world” per se…but the world of IP intelligence (for those who know me, that should come as a huge relief). No, this is not some god-given knowledge that I was born with. However, I do consider myself a pretty smart guy (and, did I mention very good-looking, too? And modest??? But I digress…).IP Intelligence is the tons of pseudonymized data derived from analyzing an Internet user’s IP address, including city-level location and other information. It is something that all companies doing business on the Internet have access to and should use to make their online businesses more successful. OK, so the secret’s out. Now, what are you going to do with it? You see, that’s where I come in. As founder of Digital Element, I’ve been involved in the world of IP Intelligence since its infancy, coining the term almost 10 years ago. We were probably a tad bit ahead of our time back then…but that’s ok. Folks tell me that I’m a tad bit behind my time in my fashion sense (I still don’t understand what people have against polyester), so I guess it all averages out. Companies were initially caught up in the vast global opportunities afforded with the Internet – so who needed geographic boundaries, right? It sounded great on paper. However, in reality, geography plays a very important role in conducting business in the offline world:

1. What language you speak
2. What currency you use to make purchases
3. Whether or not you sell to someone (legal restrictions)
4. What products you are likely to buy/how you should stock your shelves.

We recognized these realities wouldn’t change just because companies are now conducting business online. After all, a person is still a person, whether or not they are sitting behind a computer terminal (though, as you may have noticed from earlier in my post, some of us can add a great deal of intelligence and looks, when we’re just typing away in the virtual world 😉 ). We set out to find a way to harness online consumer information and apply it to the “the new way of doing business.”

Let me be clear: This isn’t stalking. There’s no personally identifiable information involved in the process. We are very privacy sensitive here at Digital Element. We started the company to make sure that people get relevant information without giving up their sense of privacy.

It’s more like wanting to know a little bit about someone you meet for the first time. If anything, to find out what you both have in common. So you can view IP intelligence like online dating…only slightly different…umm, never mind that analogy, it was pretty pathetic.

My role in all this is to show you what information about online users is available to your company and how you can apply it to both the online and offline business world.

So the time has come for me to hitch a ride on the blog bandwagon. I figured as a pioneer in the IP Intelligence space and more than 10 years of experience with routing technologies might uniquely qualify me to share some of my thoughts and experiences in hopes to help you deliver and customize content that is more relevant to your online audience. While I don’t take myself too seriously (for good reason), I do take IP intelligence very seriously!!