The Edisonweb team in Sicily

Mirabella Imbaccari is a small village in the heart of “rural” Sicily, the “far” periphery of the high-tech world. Therefore, it sounds surprising to find here an excellent software company operating in one of the most innovative and fast-growing business areas: the “proximity marketing”.

Edisonweb is a small company of 12 people. They are not a start-up; it was founded in 1995 with the vision to share information making it available to people through a simple and easy to use technology, something that could be really effective and low-cost. The first applications were developed for the Local Administrations and Tourism offices.

The major change occurred with the Cloud Computing diffusion, the adoption of Microsoft Azure technology “Platform as a Service” (Web Signage was the first software for digital signage to be available on Microsoft Azure©) and its availability on all the “mobility” devices.

Sharing information is a “passive” operation. Why not to transform it into an “active” and “mobile” operation? This passage allows the creation of a platform where communication becomes:

• Customised
• Dynamic
• Interactive and Mobile
• Measurable

All of these characteristics are required by a “proximity marketing” set of applications.

• Customised: know your potential customer, individually.
• Dynamic: know the impact played by the place and the time of the day when your system gets in touch with a potential customer.
• Interactive and Mobile: nowadays your potential customer can be interested in playing with a touch screen device and exchange information with the system, and, why not, in receiving some advantages like a customised immediate coupon for a special offer.
• Measurable: with total respect for privacy, customer data can be gathered in real time, analysed, tracked and used for analytic computing about products, customers’ attitudes and purchasing behaviours, in order to offer them an even better experience.

Luca Naso, CTO, Edisonweb

This all defines the future of “proximity marketing”: know your potential customer in real time, know where he is and know what he wants to see. Or, in other words, says Luca Naso, CTO of Edisonweb, “shoot the right bullet at the right time to the right target. I believe that the future belongs to data-driven businesses, interactive communication and personalised answers”.

Who is interested in it? All vendors and retailers, whatever the value of the product sold, and all the “sites” where potential customers are numerous and frequent: commercial centres, restaurants, gyms and SPAs, transportations (a significant reference is with the New York City yellow cabs), hotels, real estate, and many more.

Edisonweb’s core business is software development, so the business model is only indirect, through Partners, VAR and OEM.

A further innovation is in the use of LinkedIn for Partners lead generation. In a few days after the publication of the LinkedIn Company page the key-word “proximity marketing” generated a flow of queries, easy to qualify and transform in inputs to the commercial network.

We at TBK Consult are convinced that LinkedIn is becoming the best and fastest way to expand business internationally, mainly in USA and Western/Northern Europe.

Given where the company is located and the environment where it operates, this further innovation is driving an international success for this “Made-in-Italy” software.