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TIME EUROPE Friday, December 1, 2000 The Natural Touch Dutch start-up Q-go injects an element of humanity into online operations By THOMAS K. GROSE London Amsterdam's Q-go.com wants to help Internet businesses close the "reality gap." CEO Berend Metz says too many websites are ineffective and too complex — which costs them customers. "In most sites, it's very difficult to find your way. There is a big gap between ambition, strategy and reality." Q-go offers a "natural" solution to bridge that gap: search software that can understand questions written in "natural language." "It's more than a search engine, it's a Web-based customer service solution," Metz says. And he thinks websites that use Q-go should be designed so that the first thing a visitor sees is its search facility. Q-go's own audience, he says, is any Internet business with a clientele to serve, though he calls financial services, telecoms and media companies best positioned to use its products. Bank customers, for instance, can ask such questions as, "How do I apply for a mortgage?" or "What are your current savings account interest rates?" Customers of a telecom might ask service questions, like, "How long do I need to recharge my mobile phone's battery?" Metz calls Q-go software a money saver because the more questions businesses can answer online, the less they'll need to rely on costly call centers. One of the secrets of Q-go is to reinsert the human element. It uses human-compiled databases that can easily be sorted in ways logical to users. Initially, Q-go does the bulk of the initial work in setting up clients' databanks, while simultaneously training their employees to take over necessary updating. A publisher, for example, could have editors learning how to use Q-go tools to file and index its latest stories. Q-go won't directly take on Web-wide search engines that also rely on natural language, like Ask Jeeves. But it will license its software to publishers and Internet service providers who want to offer a customized service to their clients under their own brand. So far, Metz says, Q-go has no "head-to-head" competitors, though he admits that companies that offer, say, key-word searches are rivals of a sort. The company has already branched into Germany, Britain and Spain, but Metz is cautious about where or when Q-go will next expand. It's more important, he says, to first establish the company where it's already operating before expanding further — though he maintains that Q-go has ambitions to widen its market. Metz and co-founder Stan van de Burgt were both executives at Dutch telecom Royal KPN before launching Q-go in September 1999. Metz's background is in customer service, while van de Burgt's is in science. "He is the brains behind our technology," Metz asserts. Ultimately, Q-go's future may be inexorably linked to voice-enabled navigation of the Internet, which would let it more easily — and naturally — integrate with the wireless Web. If the mobile Internet is to really take off, Metz says, use of voice-recognition technology — currently somewhat hamstrung by vocabulary limitations — needs to become commonplace. But once it has, Q-go expects to be ready to help websites quickly respond to their customers' even more vocal needs.
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