Taking Nextumi to the next level.

Byline: Don Dodson

Jan. 29--CHAMPAIGN -- A longtime manager for AOL has been hired as the new chief executive officer of Nextumi.

Mike Blackwell, 42, of Columbus, Ohio, joined the Champaign-based company in December. During the next year, he expects to oversee launch of a prototype that will demonstrate the company's technology.

Founded in 2004, Nextumi is commercializing technology developed by David Goldberg, a University of Illinois professor of general engineering. The technology helps Web users "discover" information that theoretically is the most interesting and relevant to them.

The demonstration project, tentatively called "Newstumi," will involve a Web site that lists news stories of particular interest to users.

The system discerns what stories might appeal to the individual user, based either on the user's previous visits to the site or on other sites the user has visited.

Nextumi hopes to generate revenue either by building Web sites that employ the "discover" technology, or by licensing the technology to sites that want to enhance their popularity.

Blackwell said "Newstumi" should be launched during the first quarter of this year and solidified in the second.

"We'll measure the results of what people like and don't like," he said. "By the end of the year, we hope to have enough information to prove what we want to prove."

The technology involves three steps: Learning about users and their preferences for information.

Matching them with users who have similar interests.

Snaring the most suitable information for those groupings so users can "discover" the information right away.

"It's magically there and amazingly relevant," Blackwell said.

Blackwell said the technology's applications aren't limited to news stories. They're translatable to any service that delivers content or products. Eventually, the applications could extend to online shopping or social networking.

Other companies specialize in behavior analysis, but Nextumi tries to address it from a consumer's point of view, Blackwell said.

"A lot tend to do it from a demographic approach," he said of competitors. "They're very much interested in taking standard demographics for their benefit, but not for the consumer's benefit."

But Blackwell believes the Web is changing, and Nextumi's technology will "empower the consumer to make choices" and "give the consumer control while maintaining the wall of anonymity" for users.

In the future, Blackwell expects Nextumi technology to take into account how user preferences change over time.

For example, a person about to buy a car may be very interested in comparative automobile information, but much less interested once the purchase is made.

Nextumi has several investors, including Blue Chip Venture Co. and Queen City Angels, both of Cincinnati; Waypoint Ventures of Ann Arbor, Mich.; and IllinoisVentures, the UI's start-up services company.

Rob Schultz, senior director of IllinoisVentures, said he expects 2006 to be "a development year" for Nextumi and 2007 the year when revenues start to flow in.

Until now, all the company's operations have been based at the EnterpriseWorks building in the UI Research Park. But with Blackwell's hiring, the company also expects to have a team in Columbus concentrating on production and output.

Columbus offers the resources of hundreds of AOL employees. Blackwell calls them "good people to draw on, from a product development/ product management point of view."

Nextumi's research and development team will continue to work at EnterpriseWorks, he said.

"We envision growing the core science team here in Champaign," Schultz said. "We envision the brains of the system in Champaign."

Blackwell commutes to Champaign from Columbus. So far the most efficient commute has involved Delta/Comair service from Cincinnati to Champaign, he said.

Blackwell received his bachelor's degree from Ohio State University in communications, with an emphasis on emerging technologies. He went to work for Columbus-based CompuServe while still in college. In 1998, that company was bought by AOL, and for a time Blackwell worked for AOL in Dulles, Va., while living in Columbus.

During his AOL years, he worked in search technologies and Web properties, dealing with non-AOL brands such as the Netscape browser. Altogether, he worked 18 years for CompuServe and AOL.

Later, Blackwell was senior vice president and chief operating officer of HighSpeed America, a start-up company that sought to develop infrastructure for emerging wireless broadband companies. Unfortunately for HighSpeed America, those companies "didn't emerge fast enough," he said.

Schultz said the search for Nextumi's first permanent CEO took three or four months.

"We probably screened 150 different candidates," Schultz said, "and no one understands the Internet consumer better than Mike does."

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