Monday, January 29, 2007

GeoTrust execs launch web rating site

By Christopher Calnan

Two former GeoTrust Inc. executives are launching next week a Boston company that produces a web tool that enables users of similar profiles to rate just about anything they want.

RatePoint Inc., founded by former GeoTrust CEO Neal Creighton and former GeoTrust CTO Chris Bailey, raised more than $1 million in seed funding to launch their new RatePoint.com.

The site is a social rating service that lets people rate web sites and shares those ratings with other users with similar profiles.

Bailey said the tool is based on the anti-phishing technology developed at GeoTrust. Whereas other websites, such as Amazon.com, have internal rating systems, RatePoint is a browser-embedded tool that can be used to rate any web content or products.

"It's a tool to filter out the noise and find what you need on the Net," he said. "It's completely different, but leverages what we learned from GeoTrust."

RatePoint first formed last year and has received investment from Prism VentureWorks LLC, a Westwood-based venture capital firm, and .406 Ventures, a Boston-based VC firm, combined with Bailey and Creighton's own capital.

Larry Begley, managing director of .406 Ventures, said his firm invested in RatePoint largely because of its management team and their success at GeoTrust.

The Needham-based web security company was founded in 1998 and raised $40.9 million in venture capital before selling in May 2006 to California-based VeriSign Inc. for $125 million.

Bailey expects RatePoint to generate revenue through advertising, but said it's too early to tell when it would reach profitability. The RatePoint tool will be free to users, who create a profile based on their choices.

The key to its future though will depend on the tool's usability combined with the number of users it attracts, said Westborough consultant Paul Gillin, the former editor of Computerworld and former editor-in-chief of TechTarget.

RatePoint will be most worthwhile to users if it's used by large numbers of raters, Gillin said

"The more people who use it, the better it will be," he said.