Last weekend I spoke with Jed Alpert, Vice President of Marketing for NY-based WebCollage. WebCollage describes their service as, "a content exchange for manufacturers and their business partners". It's a service that would have been perfect when I was working with Target, Walmart, etc. to get our products onto their online websites.

The company was founded in 2000 and currently employs 100 people in NYC. Jed tells me that they enable brands to merchandise their products. We went through a number of examples of how the service works but basically brands enter their content into the WebCollage system either by manual input or by feeds and APIs.

From their ecommerce sites including Macy's (seen below) pull the content and incorporate the content into their sites. In the example below Macy's is selling Chanel perfumes and rather than just offering a simple page with price and size, WebCollage adds more content about the perfumes. It basically becomes a much richer consumer experience because brands can also incorporate video and audio along with photos and text.

Jed noted that many companies are seeing 6-20% lift in sales by leveraging the WebCollage platform. For sites that use a fully-injected model, they are seeing 12-20% lift in sales.

Another interesting component of the service is the ability to co-brand online ads. Here online ads can display a consumer brand and a merchant - this combination has been used in print ads and on tv for years.

WebCollage is yet another great example of NYC technology firms that might be unsexy as opposed to creating another twitter or iphone farting application but are creating real value for their customers, employees and the company as a whole.