About Viewpoints Network

Viewpoints Network is a social technology and media company  focused on helping consumers make smarter decisions.  We specialize in building communities and motivating "social influencers" to share their experiences by writing reviews, blog posts, how to guides, participating in discussion boards and contributing and voting on ideas.  We then help organize and present those contributions to help other consumers make well informed purchase decisions.  The Viewpoints Technology Platform runs Viewpoints.com and also powers communities for customers like Sears Holding (www.mysears.com).

The Team Behind Viewpoints

Having spent the better part of a decade building CoolSavings and Orbitz, two of the leading publicly traded Internet companies in Chicago,  Matt Moog, Jolie Fleming, and Leon Chism got together in August of 2006 and joined forces to launch Viewpoints Network.  They were joined by some of the most talented developers and designers from both of those companies and by October, development of Viewpoints.com was underway.  Within six short months a beta site was launched and three months later, in September 2007 Viewpoints.com was officially launched. We passed one million users in late 2008 and with the launch of MySears.com on the new Viewpoints Technology Platform we are cruising our way to two million users in early 2009.  Follow these links to learn more about the management team and the company milestones.

The Big Idea

The Viewpoints Technology Platform helps to harness the power of the social web by organizing data and content to improve decision making.  Feedback from consumers is good, structured feedback followed by an on going dialouge can be even better.  The marriage of a social profile and a structured information architecture that includes category taxonomies, product pricing, geo-location, and product attributes all help to organize and package user generated content to make it useful. The team here at Viewpoints also believes that rich member profiles make a major difference in the credibility and relevancy of user generated content. The moment when a consumer stops to provide feedback in the form of a review, discussion post, survey, poll or idea is an ideal time to start an on-going dialouge with that consumer. The Viewpoints Technology Platform taps into the need for people to share their personal experiences and provides an extensive, easy to understand profile of every member. These profiles help in-market consumers who are actively doing research to make smarter decisions by finding reviews and advice by people who share their interests and tastes. 

The Big Picture

We believe that the Internet is fundamentally changing the paradigm of information creation and distribution, or, as Leon, our VP of Technology likes to say "the architecture of participation." The democratization of media and content empowers individuals to share, inform, educate and participate in the creation of content that is credible, comprehensive and complete. We think that this change is important and fundamental, and its true impact will be realized for decades to come.

Our Commitment to You

We are humbled by the opportunity to build a community, a brand and a service that is of genuine and real value to millions of consumers. We don't pretend to have all the answers. We are committed to listening and responding thoughtfully, and working hard to make the right choices that are in the best long term interest of the service. We are in this for the long haul. We will seek to be inclusive, transparent, respectful and ethical in all that we do.