Husband, father, Clog, Fimmigrant, blogger and the CEO of Cluetail.

Jos started Cluetail Ltd. in 2009, after six years at Nokia’s corporate communications team, to help organizations and individuals extract more value from the conversations and interactions in which they engage on-line.

With Cluetail Radar, the company’s SaaS Web & Social Media Monitor, customers stay on top of what is being published and discussed about them, their brand, competition, or their topic of special interest.

Trained in journalism and social sciences, Jos has been professionally engaged in developing and managing Internet- and intranet-based media concepts since the early 1990s.

In March 2011, he was a finalist to the first ‘Uutisraivaaja‘ (‘Newsplorer’) innovation contest by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, with the idea for a hyper-personalized news recommendation engine called ‘Eleet’ (= Finnish for ‘gestures’), based on on-line social gestures. See it in action at http://eleet.fi.

At Nokia, Jos was global concept owner of ‘Nokia-internal news’ and the ‘Central News Desk’, a company-wide platform for internal news creation and distribution. The ‘News Hub’, Nokia’s news and conversation intranet site, for which he was a concept developer and editor, was granted an Award of Excellence at the CiB Awards 2007, by the British Association of Communicators in Business.

As an Associate Producer at Talentum Group, Jos and his team pioneered the first-ever online news service delivered simultaneously as a Website, an email newsletter, a WAP service, via SMS, to Palm OS, Windows CE, and ‘thin HTML’ tailored to Nokia Communicator devices. The service won the NetMedia European Online Journalism Award 2000 for best technology reporting.

‘City OnLine’, an Amsterdam-based Internet portal, part of publicly listed Wegener NV, where Jos was a concept developer, reporter and editor at the time, won the Interactive Publishing Award 1998 for the best European Internet community website.

Jos considers the Cluetrain Manifesto and the Long Tail theory to be two of the most insightful contributions to our understanding of the Web and where it will take us.

In order to successfully conduct business transactions, companies need to build relationships of trust. The way to establish that trust is to engage in the right conversations – with the right people and with the most relevant information at hand.

As conventional ways of searching and discovering information – such as using search engines and social networks – are not sufficiently geared towards finding the most relevant information and significant strangers, Jos set up his firm to develop advanced data analysis and recommendation algorithms to this aim.

In addition to building applications for the New Internet, Cluetail Ltd. helps organizations with complex communication structures to benchmark and develop their communications and social media strategies and practices.

Elsewhere:
http://linkedin.com/in/josschuurmans
http://twitter.com/josschuurmans
http://facebook.com/josschuurmans
http://profiles.google.com/josschuurmans.com
http://about.me/josschuurmans
etc.