After Action Reporter

So it wasn’t a bot, but instead one of the Conduit staffers who got in touch in the end. In case you’re wondering what this is all about Conduit are the people behind the Battlefront Community Tool Bar that, by default, is installed with every Battlefront demo or patch (yes, patches too!).

It’s an interesting email and I thought I would reproduce it here in full to highlight the fact that, by all accounts, the tool bar is entirely benign (something I found as well). That being said, I still find it a strange sort of marketing tool for Battlefront to use, and they deliver it in a strange way. Anyway, here’s the email:

Hi,

One of your recent posts at After Action Reporter (https://afteractionreporter.com/2009/03/15/theater-of-war-2-demo-adware-available-now) was just brought to my attention and I wanted to touch base and get a better understanding about some of the items that were posted there.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with our company so I I’ve listed below a few quick facts about us. I am more than happy to share with you some more  information about our company and platform via phone or email or I can have you speak with a few of our customers, partners or team members should you want to learn some more.

Here are a few quick facts about Conduit:

1) The company was founded in 2005 in Israel by 3 engineers who founded Conduit as a marketing solution that enables web publishers of all sizes to build their own community toolbar.

2) From the very beginning, Conduit was set to prove that toolbars can be used as an innovative marketing tool to help publishers better communicate with their users wherever the users are on the web. And of course proving that wasn’t easy based on the bad reputation toolbars had, and as mentioned in your post: “those things that were all the vogue for marketing companies back in 2003 and are now considered homes of spyware, adware and general evilness”. The Conduit platform is safe and it is 100% [free] from any type of malware. Our products were tested and approved by the leading security companies, certified by trust-e and past rigid technical due diligence process before signing with our strategic partners.

3) The Conduit platform introduced an innovative technology that makes the process of building and promoting community toolbars really easy and cost effective. The technology was awarded a patent and also won several industry awards. It was recognized in all of the leading  technology blogs and in a few prominent marketing publications.

4) Today, Conduit serves more than 200,000 web publishers ranging from well known US brands (30 Major League Baseball teams, Universal Music, Travelocity and many others) to non profits (Greenpeace, ASPCA), media (TechCrunch), global brands (Lufthansa) and thousands of smaller publishers. our publishers have more than 50,000,000 active users that are based in more than 80 different countries and use toolbars

5) Our business model is clean and simple: instead of charging publishers for our services we are able to offer them for free by adding a search box that is powered by Google to toolbars that are built using our platform. This way we enable publishers to offer their users with the most powerful and popular search available today on the web and save on the significant costs of software development.

Here are a few specific clarifications with regards to some of the items mentioned in your post :

1) The Conduit platform is 100% free from any type of adware (or malware for that matter).

2) As mentioned above, the search box is powered by Google. The search results or the sponsored links are not offered by Conduit and we have very little to do with them. Other Google partners are using a similar search feed MySpace (http://searchservice.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=sitesearch.results&type=Web&qry=dvd) and EarthLink (http://search.earthlink.net/search?area=earthlink-ws&q=dvd&channel=www&cgid=1&li=0) are just two examples but there are many others.

3) Conduit does not monitor toolbar usage and does not share or sell user or publisher date. This is not our business and goes our against everything that we believe in.

4) I’m not sure what you meant by “I expect a few Conduit spam-bots will turn up”. Again, Conduit does not spam and we most certainly do not send “bots” to comment on the web. I am a real person and will be more than happy to prove it (J).

5) The Conduit platform is available to publishers of all sizes for free. As such, our objective is to serve our publishers and offer them with the best tools to build a successful community toolbar and deliver their content to their users. We have very little to do with the content of the toolbars that are built using our platform and we do not distribute any of these toolbars. our business is to provide a marketing platform and support our publishers  and that’s basically it… some of our marketing materials can be found here (http://www.conduit.com/Publishers/Toolbar-Marketing.aspx) and publishers can connect with us on different social networks (click the links in the previous page to see hundreds of examples of videos by our publishers in our YouTube channel, images on our Flickr channel, friends on Facebook, etc. you can also check out our newsletter here http://www.conduit.com/news/Newsletter.aspx).

I hope that this email was helpful in providing you with more background about our company and offering. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help or if there are any questions I can answer.

Please feel free to post my comment in your blog if you want. We work hard to keep our platform clean because of all of the “bad” toolbars that our out there and it is important that we clarify some of the points listed in this email.

I look forward to getting your feedback and I will be more than happy to jump on a quick call or communicate with you via email.

Thanks,

So there you go! Justin Timberlake might be bringing sexy back (so my wife tells me), but that’s nothing compared to Conduit bringing browser bars back! Good luck to them, I don’t have much use for them myself but I’m sure many people who don’t get RSS and whatnot find them useful.

But still, delivering this device in patches and demos. Does it make the average gamer feel better or worse about Battlefront? My feeling is worse, but I’m open to suggestions. Comment and vote in the poll and let us know what you think.