Robert Landes, President and CEO of Fetch Technologies

Brief Introduction

A 25-year Web industry veteran, Robert Landes’ contagious energy and visionary leadership has led Fetch Technologies’ transition from a government-funded R&D firm to a commercial leader in next-generation Web search, extract and integration services. Prior to Fetch, Robert served as the CEO at Guidance Solutions. Under Robert’s leadership, Guidance grew sales from $1 million to $21 million within three years. Robert previously served as executive vice president and chief marketing officer for L.A. Gear in Santa Monica, CA. An ebusiness insider, Landes is a sought after speaker on Internet venture capital markets, Web development, search and integration technologies.

Mr. Landes, could you please introduce the company that you manage to PromotionWorld audience? What are the short and long term targets that you pursue?

Fetch Technologies is a leading provider of artificial intelligence-based Web Integration solutions. Developed under funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NSF, NASA, the Air Force, and other U.S. Government agencies, the Fetch Agent Platform provides fast and powerful integration of data from virtually any data repository.

Our short-term targets are to maintain high customer satisfaction amongst our existing customers, to grow and leverage our technical and business experience in the employee data solutions vertical, and to expand our news, blogs, and message board services to the publishing and sentiment analysis industry.

Tell us something more about Fetch Technologies' products and services portfolio.

Fetch Technologies provides services and software to many Fortune 1000 companies in the risk management employee data screening business. Our travel business vertical provides low-fare search and booking technology to Farelogix and AAA among others in the industry.

Our emerging growth area is in providing software and data solutions for publishers and newspapers along with sentiment analysis companies that are interested in monitoring accurately what is going on in real time within new sites, blogs, and message boards. Our products reduce the in-house costs of extracting and aggregating information from disparate web sources, so companies can focus on the analytics and use of the data versus spending money on acquiring data.

What takes Fetch Technologies ahead of the competition?

Our unyielding passion for technical excellence and innovation using machine learning and best business practices.

What are the advantages of artificial-intelligence search technology?

The Web, when seen as a database, is fragile and ever-changing. In order to get maximum benefit from the value of Web information, one needs a flexible, reliable and scalable solution to maximize investment in harvesting Web information.

So-called “Deep” web is now finding a place in businesses looking for tool that can search the Internet beyond the Web-crawling capabilities of Google and Yahoo. Can you describe the difference between the approaches taken by Fetch and a standard Web crawler?

Web crawlers go out and index the web, Fetch is a precision extraction and aggregation technology that our customers can use to target specific data elements from thousands of websites, normalize that data, and link related data points without having to crawl through the entire Web which leads to high costs of engineering post-processing and hardware.

How companies can leverage the “Deep” Web to build competitive news, pricing, blog and message board opinion "mashups" for their own customized Business Intelligence system?

First companies have to realize the web is growing and information is coming at them from thousands of different directions. By using Fetch and our machine learning methodology, one can automate human repetitive task when it comes to harnessing the power of disparate web sources.

Which are the businesses that take advantage of your services?

Because of our non-disclosures, I cannot go into detail about our customers in the risk management pre-employment screening vertical, but I will say Fetch Technologies has been adopted and utilized in mission-critical applications for eight of the top ten companies in the U.S. We are proud that these companies have received high quantitative ROI’s on their investment with Fetch.

What does Fetch Technologies do to keep the existing customers and to attract new ones?

Our corporate culture is one of excellence, openness, learning, and willingness to explore new technologies. We are here to serve our customers and deliver excellence in all of our practices. The success of our customers is the measure of our success.

With the recent top management acquisition in the person of Timo Kissel, Symantec Corporation's former Senior Director of Program Management, Fetch Technologies confirmed its serious interests for global leadership. Could you tell us more about your team, the people that work for Fetch Technologies. Are they the company's biggest asset?

Fetch’s biggest asset is its people. 75% of our engineers have a Masters degree or higher. Although our culture is diversified by nationality, gender, education, we are all committed to the belief that data extraction and aggregation machine learning is the preeminent and best method for automating human repetitive tasks to deliver excellent accurate and reliable data to our customers.

How do you estimate the development of the Internet during the past few years and what are your expectations for the future?

The reason I came to Fetch was the firm belief that the Internet was not only here to stay, but that it is becoming an important medium for business communication, cultural diversity and more of a necessity than ever before. I believe the Web is just getting started in terms of business value. Fetch stands at the forefront of this renaissance of harnessing the Web as a viable, profitable, and scalable data solution for businesses around the world.