About BrandVantage

Hi, I'm James Turner - Director of Turner Software and creator of BrandVantage.

BrandVantage is my first foray into the SaaS business, providing tools for brands to access and understand data that they haven't easily been able to before. Or more succinctly, to empower brands with data. While there are many ways I could achieve this, I decided to put a focus on structured data first.

See, the Internet is a treasure trove of information, it is searchable but generally unstructured. People have managed to create all sorts of different pages in HTML, but in the process of making a website everything is designed for a human user. It is this way for obvious reasons, we are the consumers of web pages after all... aren't we?

Structured data on the other hand flips this on its head - take these web pages designed for us humans and make it easier to process them with a computer. This information can then be queried and used in different ways for business. One good use of this data is for competitor analysis - allowing you to keep an eye out on your competitor's products and the prices they offer them for.

Web pages can express structured data in their own markup but it can be incomplete or one of a variety of different formats. BrandVantage not only understands these via our Web Page API, it also can understand data that doesn't have any special markup - the unstructured data of a web page. This is a unique feature compared to other tools and is something that will constantly be expanded on.

BrandVantage is still early on in its journey and I have a lot of ideas to expand the feature set beyond structured data.

I'm going to close this out with a quote from the TV Show Halt and Catch Fire, a favourite of mine and was, in part, the inspiration behind my focus on structured data.

"The moment we decide what the Web is, we've lost. The moment we try to tell people what to do with it, we've lost. All we have to do is build a door and let them inside."

- Joe MacMillan (Season 3, Episode 10)

Web browsers have been that door for people and while it might sound grandiose, BrandVantage could be that for brands and businesses.