Building user-friendly customer-service sites

What: DataSphere, Bellevue

Who: Satbir Khanuja, 41, president and CEO

Mission: Provide businesses the ability to build data-rich customer-service Web sites at a reasonable price.

New standard: Amazon.com has set the bar for customer sites, with its ability to present comparative and explanatory data for every item in the store. Khanuja predicts e-commerce will be the first area to recover from economic woes, and users will gravitate toward those sites with the widest range of information. "Companies have tons of content, and it's not presented well," he said. "They spend huge amounts to develop an e-commerce application, but the data is not discoverable."

Local authority: News sites are a perfect application for this process. Searching the KOMO news site, for instance, visitors see a list of popular categories, features and locations. They can then drill down to news from specific neighborhoods to read articles or view related video. Real estate is also a natural fit; users can access information about neighborhoods, schools and individual houses.

Employees: 35

Financials: The private company provides no financial specifics, although Khanuja predicts profitability in 2010. It uses a subscription model for its data services and runs several real-estate sites the old-fashioned way: Advertisers get the best placement.

Data pool: "We make information discovery a new experience," Khanuja said. "And this experience can be on the level of the top Web sites. All our clients need to do is to supply us the data any way they want. It can be in a tiny black box. We will then put it online in a way that is easily accessible and searchable by the user."

— Charles Bermant