Bien Logic

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Bien Logic, Inc. was one of the first interactive marketing agencies based in San Diego, California. It was founded in February 1993 by Frederic Bien in collaboration with Michel Delory, George Geller and Dina Tsoukas. Peter Yianilos was the first angel investor in the company. The initial plan was to create educational software for handheld digital books and personal digital assistants. Bien Logic delivered two prototype products: MatchCoach (for Simon & Schuster and Franklin Electronic Publishers's eBook [1]) and SpanishCoach (for Apple Newton [2]). Faced with the low consumer adoption of these early digital books, Bien Logic changed direction in 1994, and started developing websites and interactive marketing programs for various clients.

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[edit] Web Development

First commercial success was the launch of the website for University Towne Center, (then called ShopUTC.com, now see different site). This website was inaugurated in May 1995 by San Diego then-Mayor Susan Golding, who called it the "largest expansion in history for this major shopping center". On stage, Joan Embery [3] who then hosted a popular TV show about animals was holding a parrot in her hands, which pressed the Enter key of a computer keyboard, and pulled the UTC home page for the first time on the web. This project won the 1995 Award for Best Overall Marketing Campaign for shopping centers of over 1 million square feet (90,000 m²) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC); Stacy Armstrong received the award for UTC.

Following ShopUTC.com were a number of noteworthy websites for Pearl Jam (rock band), Baker & McKenzie (law firm) and First Virtual Holdings (email-based secure online payment system). Bien Logic initial key staff were UCSD students and friends: Uyen Nguyen, Marc Northover, Mike ZeMans, talented Teresa Shaw and unstoppable Bob Adams. Later joined 3 executives: Kevin McDermott (ops mgt), Charles Gillespie (pr & proposals), Jack Abbott (sales).

The firm continued to grow developing larger projects for Trizec-Hahn Company (shopping centers), San Diego Zoo, Sempra Energy (then called SDG&E), Lucent Technologies, Saturn Cars, CaliforniaMart, Procopio (law firm), California Avocado Commission, Apparel News for MnM Publishing and many others.

In the middle of this, more key staff joined the company, including Marlene Matheson (sales), Dana Todd and Joe Eibert (account exec), Lane Sharman (CTO), Victor Spindler (creative director) [4], Victoria Battison (PR), Becky Savell (editorial), Marc Koob and Adrian Stewart (ops mgt), and other important people.

[edit] Traffic Analysis Software

Bien Logic developed and marketed [5] two software applications that were among the first commercial-grade web traffic analyzers:

  • SurfReport [6] (mostly by Rick McGillis and Michel Delory based on graphics routine from MatchCoach), and
  • ProxyReport [7] (mostly by Michel Delory).

Besides general web traffic reports, SurfReport in 1996 provided innovative and strategic marketing information, namely a list of keywords searched by web users in search engines that had led these users to visit the website where SurfReport was installed. At that time, major search engines were Netscape, Yahoo, Altavista, InfoSeek, and Excite, and none of them offered to buy keywords yet. In 1997, SurfReport was the first web traffic analyzer able to analyze over 1 Gygabyte of data in less than 1 hour. It was used by Netscape [8] to analyze some of its log files, (which were among the largest at the time). Employees of Bien Logic contributed articles about standardization of web server log files and analysis of their content [9]. Oracle marketed SurfReport for its network computing architecture [10].

[edit] Web Publishing

In addition, Bien Logic developed and published original websites that continue to exist today:

  • one of the very first online dating sites: Flirt.com launched in February 1995 (expanding a simple webpage named Flirt Online in Dec 1994),
  • web directory Planet Earth Pages, originally started by Richard Bocher from the San Diego US Navy. (In 1994, it was the 14th most visited website on the internet according to a Wired magazine ranking).

[edit] Other Team Members

Additional angel investors in the company were Lenny and Julia Baum, and Sandor Straus [11]. Jacob Reinbolt [12] was general counsel, and became a prolific writer on the subject of intellectual property protection on the internet. Ken King (CFO), Nazanin Berenjian (controller) and Eric Boldt (taxes) handled Bien Logic finances.

[edit] Company Sale

Bien Logic was sold at the end of 1997 to form SiteLab LLC and Netrics Inc. SiteLab is now a Top 50 Interactive Ad Agency [13], led by former Bien Logic employees: Marlene Matheson [14], Dana Todd (President of Board of SEMPO, 2005 & 2006) [15], and Mike ZeMans . Netrics is an innovative company [16] providing high-end and intelligent search solutions for enterprise databases. Peter Yianilos is now Chairman of Netrics [17].