Doyon Kim is the founder of Spotplex. Visit the company blog here.

What is Spotplex and why should people use it?

Spotplex is a real-time online content ranking service based on impression count. In short, people can find out what the most popular articles are today or in any given time frame. There are a few other services available, but our list is based on what people read most, not how many people vote for the article.

Obvious competitors are digg, stumbleupon, reddit, etc... They are all great services, but they also have limitations.

Such as?

They only reflect opinions of active contributors and core users of the services. For example, Digg has millions of viewers, but what they see is basically submitted by a few hundred people.

According to Hitwise's new research, only 2% of people contribute to the most popular web 2.0 services. Can this 2%, or a few hundred people, represent the total population? I don't think so.

Instead of using the contribution based system, we are trying to reflect majority general public's opinions by using impression count of each article. By doing so, I believe we can present an unbiased, impartial article ranking not just in technology oriented subjects, but in everything and anything the general Internet public would be interested in.

What type of funding have you raised so far?

We had small seed round from angels in the area and are about to start fund raising for series A.

Where is the company headquartered?

Santa Clara.

How many people are working on this service?

3 full time and 2 contractors.

What is your personal role in this company? What do you do in a typical day?

I am a CEO. At the same time, I am the only non-engineer here. I answer customer support emails, contact bloggers and reporters, accounting, finance, hr, etc...

I guess it is easier to think of what i don't do. I don't do coding.

However, this is not my first start-up, so I'm used to this kind of setting.

What is your personal background, education history, and prior experience in entrepreneurship?

Got my MBA from the University of Michigan. I co-founded Dialpad, a voice over ip company. We got 1 million users in 3 month after launch and had 14 million registered users at the peak. It was quite a roller coaster ride, but was eventually acquired by Yahoo. The next one was Opinity, a online reputation service company. Spotplex is my third.

What is the Spotplex business model?

Mainly two revenue sources. An obvious one is advertising. We also have a plan to offer some premium service for bloggers. I guess i did not fully explain our service yet. One other difference we have over our competitors is, in a way, who does the work. For example, people digg or recommend articles for other services. However, for us, bloggers do the work. Bloggers generate Spotplex code and insert the code into their site. Then, the code reports Spotplex server whenever the article is read.

As an extra benefit for bloggers, they get a blog traffic analytics page at Spotplex. Not just typical traffic analytics: it is a very much blogger tailored traffic analytics.

We provide the service for free, but have plans to add more in-depth analytic features and offer premium service to bloggers

So bloggers can use Spotplex as an analytics tool while readers use it as a popular news aggregation service?

Correct.

What specific advantages do your analytics have over tools like Google Analytics?

As you can see, we show what are the most popular articles (not some html file) in the blog, and in real-time. Also, Google analytics does not give you more readers.

You can go down to the last one hour level. Most popular articles in the last one hour.

By the way, this can be a reader service too. Everything we have is widgetized. You can put a widget that shows a list of popular articles of your own blog, or popular articles in Spotplex. By doing so, bloggers guide viewers better and retain them a little longer.

What are some current figures?

We have around 4000 bloggers so far in our network, and around 80,000 visits a month. We just launched, so we do not have a lot of traffic yet.

Any parting words?

I just want to thank you for having me today, and hope you like our service. If you or your readers have any suggestions or issues, you can contact me at any time.