Category Archives: Web 2.0

Advertising, Business, Funding, Internet, Investments, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Money, Palomar Ventures, Retail, Shopping, Web 2.0

Behavioral recommendation service for shoppers raises $10 Million, market heats up

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A couple of months ago MyBuys raised $10 Million in Series B funding aimed to help online merchants sell more by utilizing behavioral targeting techniques. The company provides software to ecommerce stores that allows them to serve up ads and products based on your behavior – for example, tracking what you search for and showing related items during a future visit. Lightspeed participated in this latest round, which was led by Palomar Ventures.

“The funding further validates MyBuys’ unmatched targeting ability using our proprietary, patent pending technology,” said Robert E. Cell, CEO of MyBuys. “This investment will enable us to significantly increase our market momentum.”

MyBuys, which introduced MyBuys 3.0 earlier this year, delivers the industry’s first 1:1 behavioral recommendation service that targets consumers both while they are shopping and in follow up emails. MyBuys presents products a consumer is truly interested in buying, which enables online retailers to achieve extraordinary 300% higher revenue per customer interaction.

“As pressure grows to maintain high growth rates in ecommerce, MyBuys’ service will become a competitive requirement for online retailers,” said Amanda Reed, partner at Palomar Ventures. “With this financing, MyBuys will have an opportunity to further its ability to provide the greatest revenue lift for online retailers.”

“With its innovative approach to targeting and optimization, MyBuys offers the most effective solution to this burgeoning market,” said Peter Nieh, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “MyBuys can significantly improve the profitability of online merchants by enabling them to more fully monetize the website traffic that they have spent substantial dollars to generate.”

These services are used by online retailers to show you potentially interesting merchandise, by tracking what you have already been looking at or buying before. If you do a lot of online shopping for designer jeans, a service like MyBuys may recommend especially popular or discounted designer jeans to you.

The company makes money by receiving a cut of revenue from the retailer when users purchase suggested products.

Mybuys is already being used in retail sites such as camera site Ritz Interactive, urban style site Karmaloop, and fabric site Hancock Fabrics. The company also said it builds behavioral profiles on each consumer.

More about MyBuys

MyBuys is a 1:1 behavioral recommendation service for online merchants. MyBuys builds deep behavioral profiles on each consumer resulting in the highest converting recommendations. By reaching consumers on a client’s web site, through email, and in RSS feeds, retailers realize more repeat visits, increased conversions, and larger order sizes. MyBuys generates revenues at 300% the rate of traditional marketing programs, with no upfront costs and a pay for performance model, so customers realize immediate results with no risk.

MyBuys 1:1 behavioral product recommendation service is a truly comprehensive service proven to deliver real results such as:

• Increasing conversion rates with relevant, personal recommendations

• Re-activating former customers by targeting their interests

• Increasing basket size through relevant, personal cross sells and up sells

• Recovering lost sales due to shopping cart abandonment or items out of stock

• Increasing overall lifetime customer value by driving your customers to your site more often to make more purchases

MyBuys is based in Redwood City, California and is managed by Robert Cell (CEO), Mark Weiler (VP of Engineering), and Paul Rosenblum (VP of Marketing).

Management team

Robert Cell
Chief Executive Officer

Robert Cell is an expert in retail, advertising, and consumer products. Most recently, Robert was Chief Executive Officer of AdSpace Networks, where he led the company through rapid growth and strategic restructuring to focus on becoming a mall advertising network while also growing, and subsequently, divesting its CoolSign video merchandising enterprise business. Under his leadership as Chief Operating Officer at Blue Martini Software, a pioneer in e-commerce solutions, the market capitalization tripled, license revenue doubled, and net results increased by $40M. Prior to Blue Martini, Robert served as the Vice President of Corporate Development for Kellogg Company and as General Manager for its Lender’s Bagel Division. In addition to leading Kellogg’s external growth and acquisitions, he led the turnaround of the Lender’s Bagel Division, tripled its value, and divested the unit for nearly $300M. Preceding his tenure with the Kellogg Company, he was Managing Director and co-founder of Deloitte and Touche LLP’s Midwest Corporate Finance practice responsible for advising the region’s clients on acquisitions and joint ventures. Robert holds an MBA with High Distinction and a BSE from the University of Michigan. 
 
Paul Rosenblum
Vice President of Products and Strategy

Paul Rosenblum has over 20 years of experience defining the strategic direction of successful products for the retail industry. Prior to MyBuys, Paul was Entrepreneur in Residence at Redpoint Ventures. Earlier, he was responsible for product strategy at Pay By Touch, the leading biometric payment system for retailers. Previously, he served as Vice President of Marketing at Movaris, where he repositioned the company as an early leader in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance systems for Fortune 1000 companies. As Vice President of Product Marketing at Blue Martini Software, he was responsible for defining retail eMerchandising. Prior to that, he was Senior Director of Product Marketing at Siebel Systems where he was responsible for the definition of Siebel’s flagship sales effectiveness products and launched Siebel’s first vertical market solutions. Paul holds an SB in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lisa Joy Rosner
Vice President of Marketing

Lisa Joy Rosner has over 16 years of experience launching, rebranding, and driving revenue for high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. Lisa joined the MyBuys team from BroadVision Inc., an early innovator of personalized e-commerce solutions. During her four-year tenure as Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, she re-launched the company, introduced three new products into the global market, and was part of the team that returned the company to profitability. Previously, as Vice President, Marketing, at DecisionPoint Applications, a financial performance management software provider, she transformed the company brand, aligned sales and marketing processes and added industry-leading companies to the customer base. Prior to that, Lisa launched Market-Touch Corporation where she pioneered and evangelized a new category in CRM – Sales Effectiveness. She has also served in senior business development, marketing and education management roles at Brio Technology, SGI, and Oracle Corporation. Lisa graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Maryland with a BA in English Literature. 

Mark Weiler
Vice President of Engineering

Mark Weiler provides the technical and visionary leadership to MyBuys Engineering team. He brings over 16 years of experience in building high quality solutions in the areas of Web Applications, Enterprise Applications, Infrastructure, and Systems software. Most recently, Mark was Vice President Engineering at NorthStar Systems Inc., where he was part of the founding team and was responsible for first 8 versions of the company’s leading Wealth Management and Asset Management solutions. Prior to joining NorthStar, he managed the teams responsible for building B2B connectors and EAI adapters for Extricity (acquired by Peregrine) whose Alliance B2B product line was used to automate supply chains including RosettaNet processes for several major electronics vendors. Before Extricity/Peregrine, he developed a number of products at Microsoft, notably Exchange Server, MAPI, and LAN Manager and he was a key member of the Exchange X.400 Message Transfer Agent on the first four releases of Exchange Server. Mark holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. 
 
Len Eschweiler
Vice President, Sales

Len Eschweiler has over 13 years of sales leadership experience in the e-commerce sector. Prior to joining MyBuys, he was an early team member of MarketLive, an industry leading e-commerce platform and solutions provider where he served as Vice President, Sales and Marketing, and most recently headed up European expansion efforts as Vice President of Strategy, Europe. Previously, he was Director of Sales and Marketing for IMS-Net, a start-up focused on serving the needs of commodity trading via an Internet based trading marketplace. Before entering the software arena, he founded one of the first online music distribution sites for unsigned artists. Len studied computer science at Colorado State University and holds a BS in Finance with a minor in Music from Sonoma State University. 

Shaun Schooley
Vice President, Client Success

Shaun Schooley is charged with ensuring MyBuys clients receive the most efficient deployment and the highest performing implementation of the MyBuys service. He brings over 20 years of senior management experience in marketing. Most recently, he was Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Naehas, a web-based marketing solution to create customized and personalized web pages, where he maintained major client relationships and led follow-up programs for Fortune 500 firms. Prior to Naehas, Shaun spent over 19 years in financial services and technology marketing with companies such as Charles Schwab, Amazon.com, and Wells Fargo. Shaun is a frequent industry speaker at 1:1 marketing events sponsored by the DMA, U.S. Postal Service, and the National Center for Database Marketers. He holds several patents in electronic payment technologies and he holds an undergraduate degree from Hastings College and an MBA from Arizona State University.

More about Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a technology-focused venture capital firm that manages $1.3 billion of capital commitments. We closed Lightspeed VII, a $480 million fund, at the end of 2005. Over the past two decades, our partners have invested in more than 120 companies, many of which have gone on to become leaders in their respective industries. Our team invests in the U.S. and internationally from offices in Menlo Park, China, India, and Israel.

We are proud to have partnered with many exceptional management teams. Our investment professionals have contributed domain expertise and operational experience to help build high-growth, market-leading companies such as Blue Nile (NILE), Brocade (BRCD), Ciena (CIEN), DoubleClick (DCLK), Informatica (INFA), Kiva Software (acquired by AOL), Openwave (OPWV), Quantum Effect Devices (acquired by PMCS), Sirocco (acquired by SCMR), and Waveset (acquired by SUNW). Some of our recent exits include the top-performing tech IPO of 2006, Riverbed Technology (RVBD), and the top enterprise software acquisition of 2006, Virsa Systems (acquired by SAP).

Lightspeed is known to be all about ecommerce. We are only seeing the “tip of the iceberg” in e-commerce, the firm’s top blogger Jeremy Liew wrote in June — he thinks there will be “many more” e-commerce companies that grow to make more than $500 million in revenue by using behavioral targeting and other methods of matching purchasers with products they’re most likely to buy.

More about Palomar Ventures

Palomar Ventures was launched in 1999 by veteran venture capitalists to focus on early stage information technology companies that demonstrate the potential for exceptional growth and market leadership. The founding principle of Palomar is teamwork; we work closely with our portfolio companies to assist them in achieving their objectives. The partners at Palomar have contributed their strategic insight, network of corporate relationships, and recruiting skills to assist in building nearly 50 public companies.

Palomar Ventures is currently investing Palomar III, a $225 million fund, bringing total capital under management to over $500 million. A typical investment involves $2 million to $5 million in capital, and we prefer to act as a lead or co-lead investor early in the process of value formation. We believe that beginning early with a company is the best way to utilize our experience in building value rapidly by focusing the company on a small number of key milestones.

The market

Behavioral advertising and behavioral targeting are both lately becoming yet another hot area in the online marketing space, with Tacoda recently acquired by AOL for an estimated amount of $200-300 million. Start ups are trying to analyze every move you do online and try to hook you up with the right ads, products and services. MyBuys is making no exception it tracks user behavior to help online retailers make better recommendations.

Competition in the field is staggering and some of the names include StyleFeeder relying on community recommendations and raised $1M so far, Wunderloop, Baynote, Matchmine, which also raised $10M recently and not last Aggregate Knowledge, which once used to be a hot start-up in the Silicon Valley.

The demand among online retailers for better behavioral tracking is so high right now that MyBuys and its startup competitors are all able to gather this “low hanging fruit” –Lightspeed Venture Partner’s Peter Nieh explains further.

The market shakeout in behavioral targeting will resemble search engines startup in the 1990’s, Nieh, a Lightspeed Venture Partner, thinks: Many companies were able to search the web, but Google ended up doing it way better than the others, and captured the largest portion of the market.

More

http://www.mybuys.com/
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=778293&sourceType=1
http://mashable.com/2007/10/08/mybuys-funding/
http://www.pehub.com/article/articledetail.php?articlepostid=8085 (requires subscription)
http://venturebeat.com/2007/10/08/mybuys-behavioral-targeting-for-online-retailers-raises-10-million/
http://pulse2.com/2007/10/08/mybuys-raises-10-million-series-b/
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2007/10/08/daily7.html?ana=from_rss
http://www.lightspeedvp.com/
http://www.palomarventures.com/
 

Acquisitions, Business, Internet, Media, Microsoft, Money, MSNBC, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

MSNBC made its first acquisition in its 11-year history, acquired Newsvine

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In a recent deal the citizen journalism startup Newsvine has been acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture, for an undisclosed sum.

Newsvine will continue operating independently, just as it has been since launching in March of 2006. The acquired company also indicated there would be little change in the features of the site. 

Newsvine is one of the good CJ [Citizen Journalism] web sites. Others include Digg, Reddit and Netscpae’s Propeller among others. Newsvine is a good example of a startup CJ site aimed to be a mainstream news destination in the future. Along with most of the other current CJ sites, Newsvine uses many of the ‘web 2.0’ functionalities in its design – such as user-generated content, reputation, voting, comments, friends lists, tags, and more. Newsvine was among the first sites on web to implement basic semantic tagging based on the content submitted. The first site, as far as we know, was NosyJoe.com with its intelligent tagging engine.  It allows users to ‘seed’ stories, by adding a link and short description. Users can also write a full article as well. Newsvine is arguably more advanced in its design than other CJ sites, often trying new things and design techniques – e.g. the Newsvine, a color-coded visual representation of a user’s impact on the site.

The site opened as a private beta in December 2005 and was officially launched on March 1, 2006. Newsvine CEO is Mike Davidson and the company is based in Seattle which is the home of MSNBC too. Calvin Tang is the Co-founder and COO. More details about Newsvine can be found below.

“Over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense.” Davidson explained further.

Newsvine officially became part of MSNBC on Friday, October 5th, but Davidson said they’d “been talking since May.” The company will continue to be based in Seattle, perhaps due to the location of the MSNBC too.

What is MSNBC getting, anyway? Mostly the citizen journalism community and features combined with some basic (compared to MSNBC’s) traffic but representing a very loyal community. From our perspective this deal looks more like acquiring technologies, features and mostly practical experience from the citizen journalism and the social news sector. It could also be an employment through acquisition. Basically Newsvine successfully established and positioned itself especially within the social news arena yet the site cannot be clearly identified as a popular site with its only 1.2M unique visitors per month. So, MSNBC is clearly trying to tap into the social news space and is buying experience.

The following statement from the company supports out thinking:

“While Newsvine may be well known in early adopter circles, we want every college student, every farmer, every weekend journalist, and every household to have their own branch on the “Vine”.

Davidson, the Newsvine’s CEO has explained the reason why he sold out to MSNBC.
It seems it is all about scale and partnering with bigger media company to achieve that:

“Why would a young, efficient independent news startup become part of a large organization? For us, the answer is simple: it’s all about growing the community and spreading the idea of participatory news as far and wide as possible. Although going from zero to over a million users a month in less than two years is heartening, msnbc.com operates on another scale entirely. While Newsvine may be well known in early adopter circles, we want every college student, every farmer, every weekend journalist, and every household to have their own branch on the ‘Vine. In order to spread this idea further, we could have gone out and raised a lot of money, quadrupled our staff, and gone it alone, but when one of the finest news organizations in the world is headquartered right across Lake Washington, the potential of partnering with such a great team is dramatic. We feel strongly that we can learn from the successes of their experienced team, in a way that will empower Newsvine to become the worldwide mouthpiece of the citizen journalist.”

This is the MSNBC’s first acquisition in its 11-year history and is a good fit for MSNBC.com. Newsvine will report directly to the Publisher/President of MSNBC.com.

Neither of the companies would disclose terms of the all-cash transaction, but deals for other social media sites have ranged as high as the $75 million that eBay was reported to have spent for StumbleUpon.com, which claims about 3 times the number of users as Newsvine.

It appears as Newsvine will move to the server farms of MSNBC.com to allow for greater reliability and expansion.

Reach

Back in July 2007 the stat numbers were reported by the founder Mike Davidson, to be in about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and Newsvine has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month.

Where the site stands at today?

Quantcast is reporting for slightly over 260,000 unique visitors per month but Newsvine is not quantified there. Compete on the other side is reporting for 409,000 unique visitors.  Both sites are reporting on only the American traffic.

In details about Newsvine

Newsvine is a website consisting of community-driven news stories and opinions. Users write articles and save links to external content, vote, comment and chat on article pages created by both users and by professional journalists.

Seattle-based “Newsvine, Inc.” was incorporated in March of 2005 by Calvin Tang. Mike Davidson, Lance Anderson and Mark Budos subsequently left The Walt Disney Internet Group and together began development of Newsvine during the summer of 2005, as the four co-founders of the company. Josh Yockey joined the company shortly after development began, with Tom Laramee following in the spring of 2006. Eric Glomstad joined as an intern over the summer of 2006 and has stayed on with the company since. The development team consists of several veterans from the Disney Internet Group and ESPN. Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine Inc. was interviewed in episode 8 of Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur’s weekly Inside the Net podcast.

Community

Newsvine is a community-driven news site similar to sites such as Slashdot, reddit and Digg. It combines user submission of information with items from the Associated Press and provides each user with a blog-style “column” for writing their own ‘posts’.
Features
 
Seeding
Newsvine allows users to “seed,” or post links for others to view. Seeds usually contain a short description or direct quotation from the linked article. With the “Newsvine Button,” users can select “Seed Newsvine” from their bookmarks and a seeding dialog will appear. Seeds allow for all of the same options as articles except the ability to insert photographs.

Articles
One of the most defining features of Newsvine is the ability for users to write their own articles. Commonly known as citizen journalism, this allows for users to express their opinions for public disccusion or even report in a journalistic manner. The most popular articles for top tags appear in the “Featured Writers” section, where article writers can receive extra publicity.

While writing articles, users are also given the ability to upload their own photographs or choose from a list of Flickr photos registered under a Creative Commons license for addition to the post. Captions can be written as well to clarify the meaning of the photograph.

Voting
Another common feature among social bookmarking websites is the ability to vote for content. Users who enjoy reading an article/seed or agree with its content are encouraged to vote for the content. Articles and seeds with the most votes appear in the “Top Wire,” “Top Seeds,” or “Top of the Vine” sections of the site.

Newsvine also allows for users to vote for comments that they enjoyed reading. This aspect of commenting encourages better content and friendly discussions. When a comment receives at least five votes, a green star is placed in the upper right-hand corner, signifying that many users enjoyed or agreed with the comment. Clicking the star will lead viewers to the next highly rated comment.

Negative votes are also registered, and a comment that receives too many negative votes will often be collapsed, so that it can only be viewed by deliberately opening it. This limits discussion under that comment, since new comments under it will not be seen automatically.

Commenting
The ability to comment on seeds and articles allows for extra discussions regarding the content to take place. While debates are welcome, useless, insulting, and self-promoting comments are not. If a comment receives enough reports, that comment will be collapsed and its contents can only be shown by choosing to expand it. The Newsvine comment system also allows for threaded comments, easing the confusion of comment direction. While users do not yet have the ability to edit or delete their own comments, writers are allowed to delete comments on their own content. Unregistered users are also allowed to have their say, but comments by unregistered users are not made public until that user creates a registered account.

User Columns
Newsvine user columns give users the ability to manage and share their articles, seeds, friends, recommendations, and other statistical information. Every user has one, and each is given their own subdomain to access it (<user>.newsvine.com). User columns are customizable: aspects of the layouts can be moved or hidden, a user photo and biography can be added, a header (such as a welcome message) can be added, friends can be invited to Newsvine or added to your friends list, recommendations (such as favorite books, bands, blogs, etc.) can be shown, and comments and feedback from other users can be managed. Also, through user columns, members have the ability to add others to their watchlist and friend list or to send another a chat invitation.

Earnings
Newsvine tells users that they will receive 90% of ad revenue from ads on their personal Newsvine pages. These earnings are “based on traffic to your articles and seeds,” but it is unclear exactly how Newsvine calculate earnings. The remaining 10% go to whoever referred the user to Newsvine, or for site maintenance if there was no referrer. Newsvine does not publish the amount of revenue that has so far gone to users.

Chat Lobby
The Chat Lobby is a section of Newsvine that manages the various chat rooms available or open. Every article or seed on Newsvine has the ability to have a chat room created for it, where users can discuss the subject matter real-time rather than posting a comment. While this feature is not often used, the capability is there for those users that want to participate in a discussion.

Watchlist
If a user finds a particular writer or tag that he/she enjoys to read content from, it can be added to the Watchlist. Watchlists are lists of members and tags that a user can compile to easily find interesting news. Items on a user’s watchlist appear on the left column and, if there is content that the user has not read by a watchlisted author or tag, a number will appear next to the item name signifying how many articles or seeds have not been read.

Conversation Tracker
Much like the Watchlist, the Conversation Tracker allows users to track other members. However, the Conversation Tracker is a notifier of new comments. There are three sections to the Conversation Tracker: new comments from a user’s Newsvine column, new comments from articles that a user has commented on, and new comments from an article a user’s friend has commented on. If a user has added members to the friend list that share a common interest in content, the Conversation Tracker can act as a list of recommended articles.

Friends List
The Friends List gives users the ability to meet new people and find others with common interests, but there are no requirements in doing so. Creating a populated friends list gives users the ability to find interesting new articles through the Conversation Tracker. Once a user adds a friend to the list, the added friend receives a notification and is given the ability to accept or decline the offer.

Vineacity

Vineacity is a measure of six different elements that contribute to a Newsvine user’s overall rating as a positive influence to the Newsvine community. Earned as ‘branches’ on a Newsvine logo icon displayed next to the user’s name, the six areas of excellence include:

  • Courtesy – Earned when a user’s positive feedback outweighs any abuse reports they may have received.
  • Longevity – Earned when the users has been active for at least two months after registering.
  • Fruitfulness – Earned when the user has submitted a substantial amount of content or comments that have received votes.
  • Connectedness – Earned when the user appears on a substantial number of watch-lists and/or friend-lists.
  • Random Act of Vineness – Earned for an exceptional moment of greatness on Newsvine.
  • Lifetime achievement – Earned when a user has received a combined number of votes on all articles, links and comments around Newsvine.

 Newsvine is known to have had only 6 employees at the time the deal was announced.

About MSNBC

MSNBC.com is a privately run news organization started by Microsoft and NBC in 1996. The site is one of the most decorated, highly trafficked news sites on the web, serving more than 29 million unique visitors per month. Contrary to popular belief, msnbc.com is run independently from both Microsoft and NBC and even the MSNBC news channel. It is its own organization, headquartered in Redmond, and has been growing and profitable for several years now. MSNBC.com employs about 200 people.

More

http://www.newsvine.com/
http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/info/companyinfo
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21138371
http://blog.newsvine.com/
http://blog.newsvine.com/_news/2007/10/07/1008889-msnbccom-acquires-newsvine
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/newsvine_acquired_by_msnbc.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_state_of_citizen_journalism_pt1_newsvine.php
http://www.centernetworks.com/future-of-web-apps-mike-davidson
http://www.centernetworks.com/newsvine-acquired-msnbc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine
http://www.calvintang.com/blog/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/07/breaking-newsvine-acquired-by-msnbccom/
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/10/msnbc.com-acquires-newsvine
http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-3267.cfm
http://tang.newsvine.com/_news/2007/10/07/1008988-the-future-of-newsvine-and-what-it-means-to-you
http://www.quantcast.com/newsvine.com
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/newsvine.com/?metric=uv
http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/CompanyDetail.aspx?CompanyID=98714299&cs=QHF4kK7Uk&pc=compete

Entertainment, Felicis Ventures, Funding, Internet, Investments, Maples Investments, Media, Money, Social Networking, The Hit Forge, video, Web 2.0

Small round for Mesmo.tv

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The social video bookmarking and recommending service Mesmo.TV and provider of a very popular Facebook application, has secured over half of a $900,000 round of Series A financing.

Mesmo.TV’s Davin Miyoshi informed the public that Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, Mike Maples’ Maples Investments, Naval Ravikant’s The Hit Forge, and Georges Harik participated in the round. Simply put their tool allows users to rate and tag the videos that they enjoy. Mesmo.TV is then recommending videos to you and introduces you to other viewers with similar viewing habits and interests.

This tool, however, has not turned out to be the most successful part of Mesmo.TV’s business. The company’s TV Show Trivia  Facebook application, which launched in August, has garnered over 1.3 million users and over 125,000 daily unique visitors. This puts the application amongst the top 45 applications on Facebook, and made Mesmo.TV the largest TV show community on that social network.

Mesmo.TV plans to continue focusing on its social network efforts and looks forward to expanding to other networks, such as MySpace, who might open up in the near future. The company is also talking with TV networks to bring online videos to its users.
About Mesmo TV

“Mesmo TV” (formerly called TV Show Trivia) is the largest social TV application and community on the Facebook Platform. On Mesmo TV you can play TV trivia, discuss your favorite shows and share your favorite characters and quotes with your facebook friends. MesmoTV is building highly engaging, fun, social TV applications that that allow you to engage with your friends and favorite shows.

Mesmo.TV has been funded by a group of talented and successful entrepreneurs and some of the key people are listed below.

Davin Miyoshi Co-founder/CEO 
Jesse Hull Co-founder/CTO 
Debarshi Kar Co-founder/VP of Engineering 
Daphne Carmeli Board Member 
Auren Hoffman Board Member 
Cindy McCaffrey Board Member 
Munjal Shah Board Member 
Ben T. Smith, IV Board Member 
Aydin Senkut Investor 
Mike Maples Investor 
Naval Ravikant Investor 
Georges Harik Investor 

More

http://www.mesmo.tv/
http://blog.mesmo.tv/2007/05/about-us.html
http://apps.facebook.com/tvtrivia/?entrySource=mesmohomepage
http://apps.bebo.com/mesmotv/?entrySource=mesmohomepage
http://apps.facebook.com/tvtrivia/
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mesmo.tv
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/04/social-video-company-mesmotv-raises-900000-of-series-a-funding/
http://www.pehub.com/article/articledetail.php?articlepostid=8047
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/17/mesmotv-discovers-videos-you-like/

Alexandra Investment Management, Business, Funding, Internet, Investments, Money, Noble Grossart Investments, Prokom Investments, Search Engines, Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Technology, Web 2.0

Hakia takes $5M more, totals $16M

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In a new round of funding Hakia, the natural language processing search engine has raised additional $5M. The money came from a previous investor, some of which are Noble Grossart Investments, Alexandra Investment Management, Prokom Investments, KVK, and several angel investors. With plans of fully launching some time next year, Hakia has been working towards improving its relevancy and adding some social features like “Meet the Others” to their site. Hakia is known to have raised $11 million in its first round of funding in late 2006 from a panoply of investors scattered across the globe who were attracted by the company’s semantic search technology. As far as we know, the company’s total funding is now $16M.

We think that from all alternative search engines, excluding Ask.com and Clusty.com, Hakia seems to be one of the most trafficked engines with almost 1M unique visitors as we last checked the site’s publicly available stats. If it is us to rank the most popular search engines I would put them the following way: Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN, Naver, some other regional leaders, Clusty and perhaps somewhere there is hakia going.

On the other hand and according to Quantcast, Hakia is basically not so popular site and is reaching less than 150,000 unique visitors per month. Compete is reporting much better numbers – slightly below 1 million uniques per month. Considering the fact the search engine is still in its beta stage these numbers are more than great. However, analyzing further the traffic curve on both measuring sites above it appears that the traffic hakia gets is sort of campaign based, in other words generated due to advertising, promotion or PR activity and is not permanent organic traffic due to heavy usage of the site.

In related news a few days ago Google’s head of research Peter Norvig said that we should not expect to see natural-language search at Google anytime soon.

In a Q&A with Technology Review, he says:

We don’t think it’s a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords. Typing “What is the capital of France?” won’t get you better results than typing “capital of France.”

Yet he does acknowledge that there is some value in the technology:

We think (Google) what’s important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. To give some examples, “New York” is different from “York,” but “Vegas” is the same as “Las Vegas,” and “Jersey” may or may not be the same as “New Jersey.” That’s a natural-language aspect that we’re focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we’re not concentrating on the sentence. We think it’s important to get the right results rather than change the interface.

In other words, a natural-language approach is useful on the back-end to create better results, but it does not present a better user experience. Most people are too lazy to type in more than one or two words into a search box anyway. The folks at both Google and Yahoo know that is true for the majority of searchers. The natural-language search startups are going to find out about that the hard way.

Founded in 2004, hakia is a privately held company with headquarters in downtown Manhattan. hakia operates globally with teams in the United States, Turkey, England, Germany, and Poland.

The Founder of hakia is Dr. Berkan who is a nuclear scientist with a specialization in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. He is the author of several articles in this area, including the book Fuzzy Systems Design Principles published by IEEE in 1997. Before launching hakia, Dr. Berkan worked for the U.S. Government for a decade with emphasis on information handling, criticality safety and safeguards. He holds a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee, and B.S. in Physics from Hacettepe University, Turkey.

More

[ http://venturebeat.com/2007/12/12/hakia-raising-5m-for-semantic-search/ ]
[ http://mashable.com/2007/12/12/hakia-funded/ ]
[ http://www.hakia.com/ ]
[ http://blog.hakia.com/ ]
[ http://www.hakia.com/about.html ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hakia_takes_on_google_semantic_search.php ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hakia_meaning-based_search.php ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hakia.com/?metric=uv ]
[ http://www.internetoutsider.com/2007/07/the-big-problem.html ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/search/hakia.com ]
[ http://www.redherring.com/Home/19789 ]
[ http://web2innovations.com/hakia.com.php ]
[ http://www.pandia.com/sew/507-hakia.html ]
[ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/hakias-semantic-search-the-answer-to-poor-keyword-based-relevancy/5246/ ]
[ http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/hakia-semantic-search-set-to-music.ars ]
[ http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9800141-7.html ]
[ http://searchforbettersearch.com/ ]
[ https://web2innovations.com/money/2007/12/01/is-google-trying-to-become-a-social-search-engine/ ]
[ http://www.web2summit.com/cs/web2006/view/e_spkr/3008 ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/18/googles-norvig-is-down-on-natural-language-search/ ]

Acquisitions, Business, Internet, Investments, Media, Money, Web 2.0

Digg guys are up for sale again, quietly

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The situation around Digg is heating up, but not because there are many potential buyers bidding for the company, but it seems the rumors are all around us telling stories where Digg is in desperation to sell out. It has happened before; it happens today again, the only difference is the price tag. Digg is again getting serious about a sale and has hired Allen & Company to shop the site for what rumors claim to be anything in the $300 million range.

Investment bank Allen & Company has been involved in a number of high profile mergers and acquisitions in the past. Interesting for the Allen & Company is the privacy the investment firm seems to be working in as argument for which is the absence of even a basic site for the company on Web. Perhaps they don’t like publicity. Yet, we have found the firm’s contact details, which can be found among the other links on the end of the story’s page.

For Allen & Company, there’s no business like financing show business. The investment bank serves variously as investor, underwriter, and broker to some of the biggest names in entertainment, technology, and information. Viewed as something of a secret society, the firm has had a quiet hand in such hookups as Seagram (now part of Vivendi) and Universal Studios, Hasbro and Galoob Toys, and Disney and Capital Cities/ABC. The firm’s famous annual retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, attracts more moguls than a double-black ski run (Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and eBay CEO Meg Whitman have attended). Brothers Herbert and Charles Allen founded the company in 1922.

Key people and executives for Allen & Company LLC are as follows:

  • Non-Executive Chairman Donald R. (Don) Keough
  • President, CEO, and Director Herbert A. (Herb) Allen
  • Managing Director and CFO Kim M. Wieland

The obvious question is will Digg sell with a $300 million valuation given that it has been on the market (quietly) for months, even year or two, with no serious interest to date?

According to Quantcast, which we believe is very accurate, Digg.com is hugely popular site and is reaching morethan 22 million unique visitors per month.

Here we go again with lots of speculations for one of the top and most popular web 2.0 websites: digg.com. In our understanding there must be something wrong with either Digg, its business/revenue model or the momentum is simply lost, or something else.

Here are our thoughts on why Digg.com did not get sold so far:

  1. Not profitable enough towards their claims of having 22M visitors a month; in other words too many visitors, too much popularity that seem hard to be monetized.
  2. Digg.com is Slashdot.org 2.0., how much did Slashdot.org go for? As far as we remember it was bought for $20M something.
  3. Their technology and concept is not distinctive and definitely not defendable. There are too many followers and competitors, including Netscape.com (now Propeller.com). Digg set the standard but it seems too many old media companies are building up the same technologies within their web properties which will additionally undermine Digg.com’s popularity.
  4. Digg.com was and still is widely criticized for being corrupted in getting manipulatively different news stories promoted to the home page by a handful savvy Digg.com users.
  5. Geeks are not clicking on ads, as what many people say, so the advertising model seems highly unlikely to be the panacea for Digg.com.
  6. In the past Digg.com and News Corp negotiations have failed for one reason or another, which might have negative impact towards other potential acquirers.
  7. Digg is in one way or another under the control of its top users like Dmoz.org and Wikpiedia. What helped those sites grow to such popularity levels is what seems to be their setback. The new owner has to deal with this issue and it is not a small one.
  8. Top Digg users are often requested to help stories get the home page, sometimes in return for cash payments.
  9. Digg has issues with spam, scam and gaming of their system.
  10. When you have a system that works like Digg, of course there will always be people wanting to organize and promote stories that they like or have interest in. You can’t expect people to vote as an individual, they have friends, they have jobs, and they are involved in communities. Digg should have focused into the tech news at first and stay there. Now Digg is becoming mainstream with inaccurate, sensationalist, boring news mostly recompiled by bloggers from other news. As some people say: the front page posts are recycled news of web, nothing new there. Unless you want to see articles about Digg or the newest Free collection of fonts, the stories are crap. The only stories and news that make it to the home page appears to be the ones submitted by the top users.
  11. Digg is a great idea which has grown faster than its creators’ ability to administer it. In a perfect world, they’d be ahead of these sort of problems, rather than playing catch-up trying to fix scenario after it’s proven to be broken. I suppose broken is a bit harsh actually, but the site is definitely being gamed with Rose et al trying their hardest to implement some rules/policies that will keep it together without destroying the essence of what the site is all about.
  12. Being forerunners in this sort of self-run community, they get to sort out all the pain for those similar sites that will follow later and improve on the idea. Slashdot lead the way for a long while in this regard, and Digg.com came along and improved on the model without having to figure out a lot of the issues Slashdot had already been through. Now Digg is leading the way and having to wade through the mire themselves.
  13. We think that Digg is great success, and with the success all the issues come along, but it takes on old media outlets, which puts fire under their feet and unless they figure this out and find their niche, they are under the risk to have their concept and popular site ruined.
  14. Most users are around and gone after few months, short-term loyalty with revolving door.
  15. Mob mentality crowd which creates abusive comment section.

Despite anything said above, Digg.com, in our view, does cost more than $300M at the very current moment, with or without steady revenues, simply because of its popularity, leadership, reach and target audience. 22 Million unique visitors per month is almost a mainstream site and we have seen sites with less that traffic getting acquired in the 10 digit range.

Yet we cannot get rid from the feeling there must be something wrong that the general public is not aware of, which might be the key reason behind the decision of so many suitors so far to have backed off.

More

http://digg.com/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/for-sale-used-social-voting-site-asking-price-300-million-goes-by-the-name-of-digg/
http://www.hoovers.com/allen-&-company/–ID__51026–/free-co-factsheet.xhtml
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/no-acquisition-for-digg-raise-series-b-round-instead/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/07/just-sell-digg-already-jay/
http://nextnetnews.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-nobody-buys-diggcom.html
http://venturebeat.com/2007/12/17/source-digg-hires-bank-hoping-to-sell-for-300-million-or-more/
http://nextnetnews.blogspot.com/2007/02/diggcom-fights-spam-scam-games.html
http://www.quantcast.com/digg.com
http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/latest-digg-payola-exposed.html
http://valleywag.com/tech/rumormonger/digg-close-to-a-300-million-sale-320145.php
http://valleywag.com/tech/sun-valley/whos-selling-whos-buying-at-the-allen-confab-276716.php
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/06/28/374371/index.htm

Advertising, Funding, Internet, Investments, Marketing, Media, Money, Sequoia Capital, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

Sequoia Funding for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Firm Kenshoo

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Kenshoo, a search engine marketing firm, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Sequoia Capital. The end-to-end search marketing solution aimed at advertisers and ad agencies operates on an automated technology for advertising campaigns, and a core feature of the company’s suite of offerings relies on the longtail keyword expansion. It is an exclusive search formula using patented multilingual keyword expansion, automatically identifies thousands of related keywords from real user search terms with no need for manpower and hours of effort. Updates are provided on a constant basis on the campaign ensuring updated information on the exact keywords.

The basic idea behind their concept is to minimize the amount of man power needed to run a successful and informed advertising campaign online. Running an AdWords or related CPC text ad campaign is a time consuming and hard science process

Those advertisers that are savvy into it run up against the mind numbing tasks to entering data over and over again so they can run side-by-sides and constantly improve their dollar efficiency, and changes based on one cent’s move in either direction can sometimes mean the difference between a profitable ad campaign and one that ends up losing tons of money.

So it seems there is a growing need for automated tools in regards to online advertising and marketing, especially with the growing number of ways in which campaigns can be distributed across the web.

Their flagship product is called KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) and provides automated management for campaigns across multiple search engine platforms such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) is an end-to-end SEM platform, which automates the process of building and optimizing cross channel search campaigns.

Quality Management with KENSHOO SEARCH

Quality Management is a unique approach which automates all aspects of Search campaigns. Bid management is not enough anymore! In today’s search engines arena, creating a successful SEM campaign consists of a wide array of elements;

  • Selecting relevant keywords
  • Updating deep links URL’s
  • Creating effective ads
  • Providing and constantly updating bids
  • Monitoring the traffic
  • Structuring cross platform campaigns
  • Reporting and analyzing data on-time

Long-tail keyword expansion

Kenshoo’s exclusive search formula guarantees every search engine marketing campaign a long tail. By using patented multilingual keyword expansion, KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) automatically identifies thousands of related keywords from real user search terms- with no need for manpower and hours of effort.

Dynamic Sites

Website content perpetually shifts as new and improved products reach the cyber-shelves. The need for updating multiple campaigns is vital in order to keep up with this ever-changing environment. With the unique ability to automatically update itself as web content changes, KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) enables the client high ROI SEM campaigns. By staying in tune with this constantly changing environment, KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) seamlessly index a site and upload the exact model/brands or other keywords and data together with the deep link URL to the search engines. This enables the upload of the merchant’s products onto the Search engines as well as updating it as the site changes. The added bonus is the low cost per click, high CTR, high conversion rates and maximized ROI that result from the highly relevant landing page.

Intelligent Bid Management

Featuring an easy-to-use and configurable Bid Management solution, KENSHOO SEARCH ™ allows your bids to be flexible, applying its’ logic to all major search engines, it even allows you to create your own bid policy. Whether your products require maximum exposure or a positive ROI on any level, KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) follows campaign behavior in real time, detecting changes and reacting to the competition, insuring high ROI on your SEM campaigns.

Click Fraud

KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) offers the invaluable asset of identifying click fraud in real time. With the ability to manage multiple campaigns all at once, KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) reports the detection of Click Fraud immediately, protecting advertisers from over clicking, and allowing clients to obtain a refund. In addition, KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) has ability to pause campaigns when sites malfunction.

Quality Reporting

Stay on track with comprehensive reporting of your campaigns. KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) understands the importance when it comes to reporting. With Kenshoo search, in-depth reports are created that analyze traffic from different networks, displaying click distribution and ROI geographically, daily, and hourly, to take your campaigns to the highest level of success.

Kenshoo’s service enables advertisers and agencies to reach high volumes and optimize campaigns.

To utilize their services you simply give them your URL, and a designated account manager will assist you wit the process. They work hard to understand your targets and goals, analyze your website, assess your campaign, and optimize it to suit your individual needs.

The company is based in Israel. In August 2007, Kenshoo began applying its search engine marketing analytics on behalf of its first large client, AOL-owned IM company ICQ, also based in Israel. It also works with agencies such as McCann-Erickson and AlthogetherDigital. A representative for the company said one-year-old Kenshoo is focused on bringing its business to the UK sometime early next year. Once it’s up and running in Europe, Kenshoo then plans to build a U.S. presence.

Yoav Izhar-Prato, CEO and co-founder of Kenshoo adds, “We are thrilled to be joining forces with Sequoia, a partner with an unsurpassed track record of successful Internet investments such as Yahoo!, Google, Apple, PayPal and YouTube. Kenshoo is determined to be the leading provider of innovative Search Marketing solutions; harnessing our in-depth knowledge of the industry, our clients’ constructive feedback, technological strengths and continuous innovation- I believe we are well positioned to do so.”

Sequoia Capital is the Google backer and it is coming as no surprise they are funding a company that is helping in particular users and customers that are spending their ad money on Google.

Although Moritz sat on the evaluating committee, he is not the investing partner from Sequoia. Yuval Baharav, a partner in Sequoia’s Israeli office, is the one who invested and will take a board seat. This is Kenshoo’s first venture round. Terms were not disclosed, although one report in an Israeli paper puts it at a few million dollars. Previously, the startup raised about one million dollars from angel investors, and has been funding itself from operations.

More about Sequoia Capital

Since 1972, Sequoia Capital has provided startup venture capital for very smart people who want to turn ideas into companies. As the “Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs,” Sequoia Capital’s Partners have worked with innovators such as Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Gaurav Garg of Redback Networks, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor, Lou Tomasetta of Vitesse Semiconductor, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Larry Ellison of Oracle. The companies organized by Sequoia Capital now account for about 12% of the value of NASDAQ.

More about Kenshoo Ltd

Kenshoo is a provider of end-to-end search marketing automated technology for advertisers and agencies worldwide.

The company’s flagship product KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) provides automated Quality Management for cross- platform search campaigns. Kenshoo’s unique technology and approach enables advertisers and agencies worldwide to reach high volumes, optimize campaigns and to boost ROI.

Kenshoo is an innovator in Search Engine Marketing with extensive industry knowledge and a dynamic approach. Kenshoo’s strength is in developing SEM technology to increase ROI on search campaigns.

Kenshoo’s flagship product, KENSHOO SEARCH(tm) is an end-to-end SEM platform, which automates the process of building and optimizing cross channel search campaigns. KENSHOO SEARCH?utilizes Quality Management, the company’s unique approach to search marketing that automates much of the labor intensive search marketing operations.

As a Google Qualified Company, a Yahoo! Ambassador and Microsoft adExcellence, Kenshoo provides its licensed SEM platform and services to publishers, agencies, blue-chip advertisers, and affiliate marketers world wide.

Management Team

Yoav Izhar-Prato, CEO & Co-Founder- As a founder of several start-ups around the globe and former manager of ECI Thailand, Mr. Izhar-Prato brings over ten years of business management to Kenshoo. Mr. Izhar-Prato carries an Executive B.A., Business management from Ruppin College.

Alon Sheafer, VP Marketing & Co-Founder- Mr. Sheafer brings over ten years of internet experience to Kenshoo. Alon has a strong Technological background combined with sales and marketing experience. Formerly founder and CEO of Bazman, a price comparison website. Mr. Sheafer holds a B.Sc in Computer Science from the Academic College of Tel-Aviv Jaffa.

Nir Cohen, CTO & CO-Founder- As former founder and CTO of Bazman, a price comparison website, Mr. Cohen carries years of experience in leading design and development teams for companies such as Demantra and Imperva. Mr. Cohen holds a B.Sc in Physics & Computer science from Ben Gurion University, Israel.

Andrey Shirben, Head of Campaigns- A former VP in marketing with Storewiz Ltd, Mr. Shirben brings a history of technology experience to Kenshoo. As Head of Campaigns, Mr. Shirben’s background lies in business management and computer science with a BA in Management & Computer science from Open University in Israel.

Udi Broyer, CFO & COO- Mr. Broyer brings over ten years of Financial and operational experience to Kenshoo. Mr. Broyer previously served as the Director of Finance of Metacafe a leading UGC Video web site. He held various executive financial positions such as financial consultants for JVP a Venture Capital firm and VP of Finance at Fundtech. Mr. Broyer is a CPA and served as a Senior Audit Manager in the high-tech group at “Ernst & Young” Israel. Mr. Broyer holds a B.A in Accounting and Economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.

The market

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is the younger brother of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In general who fails to perform well on the SEO scene is forced later to rely on the SEM. SEO promises organic results and traffic while SEM does that for paid campaigns. On the other hand we think there are thousands of large-scale corporations and millions of small ones that have little to no ideas on how to develop white-hat SEO practices for their web based businesses and are in one way or another going to rely and depend on SEM and companies like Kenshoo for instance.

Otherwise the SEM market is very crowded and the environment is extremely competitive; there are literally thousands of small and mid-level SEM firms in the sector, yet having Sequoia on your side might be one step in the right direction for Kenshoo. I remember one firm in particular called Fathom Online. Fathom Online received $6 million in financing in its first round of venture funding a few years ago. The financing came from Constellation Ventures and private investors. As part of the funding, Constellation managing directors Virginia Turezyn and Dennis Miller have joined Fathom’s board of directors by that time. What we know Former Ask Jeeves executives Chris Churchill and Chris Raniere founded the San Francisco-based search engine marekting firm in 2002. Fathom also helps clients design and run paid search campaigns as clients include Hilton, Covad and Microsoft..

More

[ http://www.kenshoo.com/ ]
[ http://www.kenshoo.com/blog.asp ]
[ http://www.kenshoo.com/news_sequoia_invest_in_kenshoo.asp ]
[ http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/172/967 ]
[ http://mashable.com/2007/12/13/kenshoo-funded/ ]
[ http://www.venturecapitalupdate.com/node/970 ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/10/sequoia-invests-in-sem-automator-kenshoo/ ]
[ http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-israel-sem-provider-kenshoo-secures-first-round-in-support-of-european-/ ]
[ http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/071211/uktu014.html?.v=101 ]
[ http://www.fathomonline.com/ ]
[ http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/5033.htm ]

Business, eCoast Angels, Entertainment, Funding, Intel Capital, Internet, Investments, Money, Shopping, Technology, Web 2.0

MyPunchBowl gets angel funding, relies on algorithm to recommend best dates

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MyPunchBowl, the event planning site that has joined the new crowd of Evite rivals, has recently been angel funded. According to some sources like VentureBeat and Mashable, the exact amount of funding has not been disclosed, but it’s less than $1 million, and is enough to keep the team in development for another year, at least.

MyPunchBowl is known to have had a pretty good year, with several developments and feature upgrades to its event-planning service. More niche templates have been added to its collection, and they released their new Facebook application called “Party Animal.”

Partnerships with traditional media companies like the Boston Globe could also help to establish MyPunchBowl as a viable option for planning your next event.

In technological aspect they’ve been building out tools for each step of planning a party: finding supplies, inviting friends, setting a date, and the after party. MyPunchbowl has also made setting a date that much easier through the help of an algorithm that recommends the best date for your party. Connecting party organizers with suppliers in an algorithmic approach (supplies on-demand, recommendations in context of the party, individuals, events, at the right time and place etc.) could be a viable business model in our understanding and this is where the site is planning to make money from, see below comments.

More about Punchbowl Software

At Punchbowl Software, we believe that planning an event or party should be enjoyable and easy.

For the host, there are typically lots of pieces to organize: picking a date, sending invitations, choosing catering and entertainment, purchasing party supplies, and renting party equipment just to name a few. It can be a time-consuming process, and it usually isn’t much fun.

To solve this problem, we’ve created MyPunchbowl, a new web application for event and party planning. MyPunchbowl provides software for every stage of planning. With MyPunchbowl.com you’ll actually enjoy planning while saving time.

“They are the developers of one of the hottest websites in America and around the world. These are the folks that are at the vanguard of web development” – one reads at CNBC. 

For now, MyPunchbowl is avoiding monetizing the site through display ads. Instead, it plans to open partnerships with vendors, helping users secure any party supplies they need. To make money, the site is working on opening more relationships with vendors. A guest asked to bring the turkey to a Thanksgiving event, for example, might receive a targeted offering from Butterball.

According to Quantcast the site’s reach is less than 12,000 American visitors per month and compared to Evite.com’s 7 million uniques / mo MyPunchbowl looks like it has way too much to do in order to be called even close competitor to Evite, despite the press attention it gained over the past year http://corp.mypunchbowl.com/news.php. 

The company was founded by software and user interface experts who are fanatics about simplicity and ease of use. As they say “they were frustrated with the current tools, and knew there had to be a better way”. The funding came from Intel Capital and eCoast Angels.

As far as we know MyPunchBowl’s competitor Planypus has recently been funded as well.

Other competitors include Skobee or Renkoo although they have differentiated themselves by helping plan the casual outings for drinks or dinner. Socializr is taking a social networking approach.

The company’s founder is Matt Douglas. Douglas, whose principal offices are based in the Boston Metrowest technology center (Natick, MA), has three employees for now. Formerly of Adobe Systems and Bose Corporation, Matt Douglas has 12+ years in product management and marketing with expertise in software product development. At Adobe, Matt was responsible for Adobe Premiere where he grew revenue from $15M to $50M in four years. At Bose, he was a senior manager in the professional division where he led a hardware and software product team. Matt has a degree in music from the University of Rochester and an M.B.A. from UNC Chapel Hill. Matt’s favorite reason to party is Groundhog Day–he and his wife held their 11th annual Groundhog Day party in 2007.

Otherwise Punchbowl Software is a privately held Delaware Corporation.

The competition in the event planning sector looks intensive, but the vast majority of the startups being active in the arena have chosen specific niches, and will be trying to secure their own markets without invading each other’s territory.

More

[ http://www.mypunchbowl.com/ ]
[ http://corp.mypunchbowl.com/ ]
[ http://venturebeat.com/2007/01/15/mypunchbowl-joins-growing-list-of-evite-rivals/ ]
[ http://mashable.com/2007/10/02/mypunchbowl-funded/ ]
[ http://venturebeat.com/2007/10/02/mypunchbowl-lands-seed-funding-for-online-invitations/ ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/mypunchbowl.com ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/evite.com ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/21/mypunchbowl-the-algorithm-schedules-your-event/ ]
[ http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/07/22/will_boston_ever_catch_up/?p1=MEWell_Pos5 ]

Acquisitions, Business, Funding, Ingenious Media, Internet, Media, Money, Social Networking, Sports, Web 2.0

Sportingo has raised $3.2 in funding, moves to London

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Sportingo, a sports fan portal and blogging community, has raised $3.2 million in funding from London-based Ingenious Media. 

Launched early this year in Israel, Sportingo is a site where users can write their own match reviews and commentary, and discuss others’ content. With the type of content that’s created on Sportingo, this is very much a blogging community for users to contribute to the larger discussion around different sports. A wide range of sports is covered on Sportingo, from cycling to swimming, cricket and rugby to soccer and beyond.

Sportingo is known to have already acquired a UK soccer blog, CaughtOffside, in June. The site has since opened an office in London. This deal could be classified as employment through acquisition this way effectively hiring the CaughtOffside’s author Chris Toy as chief editor.

The founder of the company is the Israeli Ze’ev Rozov who has recently moved from Israel to London, UK.

About Sportingo

Sportingo is all about sport. Whether we follow football, cricket, rugby, tennis, golf, cycling, darts or tiddly winks, as fans, the main thing that we all share, is a passion for our sport. This passion has led to many late nights, arguments over pints of beer and cups of tea and neglect of partners and friends, whilst we debate the greatest sporting moments of all time, the top football players and their monetary worth, the virtues of one day international cricket matches and the need to retain the tradition of Rugby Union and Rugby League as 2 different games.

Sportingo is about fans sharing their opinions with the sports community. All fans are invited to register and write articles about any sport related event ranging from match reviews and team performances to nostalgia articles about memorable moments in sport.

Sportingo is about fans writing for fans; fans commenting and ranking the articles of other fans; fans deciding what are the topical and important stories of the day, fans setting the sport agenda.

Sportingo recently acquired the award winning football blog CaughtOffside. CaughtOffside was founded in 2006 and quickly became a leading football blog in the UK and across the world. The site focuses primarily on English football clubs and has developed a strong culture and reputation amongst the online football community.

Sportingo exists for the fans and because of the fans. As fans you are part of the website’s success. We welcome you and look forward to your contributions.

About Ingenious

Ingenious is an independent and integrated group of companies advising and investing solely in media, thereby providing a unique service to clients and investors.

Founded in 1998 by Patrick McKenna, Ingenious is one of the leading investors in the UK’s creative industries.

Our collective knowledge and experience has positioned us as the market leader in media investment and strategy and through our extensive network of relationships we are able to provide an unrivalled service to our clients.

We have the necessary depth of professional experience and expertise to provide both a high level of advisory services and investment to companies operating in the film, television, music, games and publishing sectors.

Our independence and impartiality allow us to work with a broad spectrum of other advisers, companies and financial institutions. We understand the needs of both the media sector and the investment community, thereby enabling us to work easily with both.

Alongside our private equity investments and project financing capability, we offer a range of media consultancy and corporate finance services and, through our asset management division, provide innovative solutions to the private investor.

More

[ http://www.sportingo.com/ ]
[ http://mashable.com/2007/10/02/sportingo-funded/ ]
[ http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-sports-fan-portal-sportingo-wins-65-funding-for-marketing-and-developme/ ]
[ http://www.ingeniousmedia.co.uk/flash.htm ]
[ http://www.sportingo.com/about_us/1001,4 ]
[ http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-sports-fan-portal-sportingo-wins-32-funding-for-marketing-and-developme/ ]
[ http://sportingoblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/new-round-of-funding.html ]
[ http://sportingoblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/move-to-london.html ]

Advertising, Business, Google, Internet, Public Companies, Search Engines, Semantic Web, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

Google is taking on Wikipedia

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Once known as one of the strongest and beneficial friendships on the Web between two hugely popular and recognized giants is today going to turn out into an Internet battle second to none.

It is no secret on Web that Google was in love with Wikipedia over the past years turning this small and free encyclopedia project into one of the most visited sites on Web today with over 220 million unique visitors per month. It is believed that at least 85% of the total monthly traffic to Wikipedia is sent to by Google. One solid argument in support of that thesis can be the fact every second article on Wikipedia is being ranked among the first, if not the first, results in Google’s SERPs resulting in unprecedented organic traffic and participation.

It is also well known fact that Google wished they had the chance to acquire Wikipedia and if it was possible it’s believed they could have done this even years ago. Due to the non-profit policy and structure Wikipedia is built upon it provided no legal pathway to such deal for Google to snatch the site in its early days.

Basically one can conclude that Google has always liked the idea and concept upon which Wikipedia is built up and since, due to obvious reasons, they were not able to buy the site they seem today are up to an idea dangerously similar to the Wikipedia and are obviously taking on the free encyclopedia.

News broke late yesterday that Google is in preparation to launch a new site called Knol to create a new user generated authoritative online knowledgebase of virtually everything.

Normally we would not pay attention on such type of news where a large-scale corporation is trying to copy/cat an already popular and established business model (concept) that did not turn into a large-scale company itself. This is happening all the time and is part of the modern capitalism except we found a couple of strategic facts that provoked us to express our opinion.

First of all the mythical authority and popularity of Wikipedia seems to be under attack and unlike any of the other attempts encountered before this time it is Google, a company that is possessing a higher degree of chance to make it happen, undermining Wikipedia despite its huge popularity and idealistic approach today.

A couple of weeks ago we have written an in-depth analysis how yet another mythical site Dmoz.org has fallen down and is on its half way to totally disintegrate itself and the only reason behind this trend we have found is the voluntary approach and principle the site relied ever since – almost 10 years of existence.

We think the same problem is endangering Wikipedia too and perhaps it is just matter of time we witness how the hugely popular free encyclopedia today will some day in the future start disintegrating the same way it happened to Dmoz.org due to the same reason – it hugely relies on and is heavily dependant upon the voluntary principle and the contribution of thousands of skilled and knowledgeable individuals. However we all know there is no free lunch, at least not in America. And once Wikipedia has its mythical image, today everyone wants to be associated with, lost and is no longer passing authority and respect on to its free knowledgeable contributors the free encyclopedia will then most likely start disintegrating and what’s today known to be an authoritative and high-quality knowledge data base will then become one of the biggest repository of low-quality and link rich articles of controversial and objectable information on the Web. Pretty much the same has already happened to Dmoz.org. The less the Wikipedia volunteers become interested to keep contributing their time and knowledge to the free site while fighting with an ever growing army of spammers and corporate PRs the more the low-quality and less authoritative information on the Wikipedia will grow to and that process appears unavoidable.

This is what Google seems to be up to and is looking forward to change. Google wants to compensate those knowledgeable contributors on a long term run that way avoid a potential crash in the future, which is unavoidable for every free-based service on the planet that had the luck to grow out of size. 

Having more than $10 billion in annual sales (most of it represents pure profit), and willingness to share that money with these knowledgeable people around the globe, as well as relying on more than 500 million unique visitors per month Google seems to be on the right track to achieve what Wikipedia will most likely fail at.

Otherwise Wikipedia is a greater idea than Google itself but anything the size and ambitious of Wikipedia today does require an enormous amount of resources to keep alive, under control and effectively working for the future. Wikipedia has been trying to raise money for a long time now with no viable success. On the other hand, Google has already these resources in place.

Google has already said that Knol results will be in Google’s index, presumably on the first page, and very possibly at the top: “Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.” Google wants Knol to be an authoritative page: “A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read” and that’s already a direct challenge to Wikipedia.

If Wikipedia is being replaced in the first top results on Google with pages from Knol respectively, Wikipedia traffic will definitely decrease, and possibly as a consequence so will broader participation on Wikipedia.

Will Knol be the answer of the Web of Knowledge everybody is looking for? We do not know but one is for sure today it is going to hurt Wikipedia and not the ordinary user of the aggregated knowledge base Wikipedia is. The entire army of both users and contributors will possibly move to Knol, for longer, or at least until Google finds ways to pay for the knowledge aggregation and its contributors.

Other companies that will eventually get hurt are as follows: Freebase, About.com, Wikia, Mahalo and Squidoo.

Below is a screenshot of the Knol’s reference page and how it would eventually look like:


More

[ http://www.google.com/help/knol_screenshot.html ]
[ http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/13/google-preparing-to-launch-game-changing-wikipedia-meets-squidoo-project/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/14/google-knol-a-step-too-far/ ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/knol_project_google_experiment.php ]
[ http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9834175-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware ]
 [ http://searchengineland.com/071213-213400.php ]
[ http://www.news.com/Google-develops-Wikipedia-rival/2100-1038_3-6222872.html ]
[ http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/12/wikipedia-and-w.html ]
 

Alexandra Investment Management, Funding, Internet, Investments, Search Engines, Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Social Search Engines, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

Hakia takes on major search engines backed up by a small army of international investors

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In our planned series of publications about the Semantic Web and its Apps today Hakia is our 3rd featured company.

Hakia.com, just like Freebase and Powerset is also heavily relying on Semantic technologies to produce and deliver hopefully better and meaningful results to its users.

Hakia is building the Web’s new “meaning-based” (semantic) search engine with the sole purpose of improving search relevancy and interactivity, pushing the current boundaries of Web search. The benefits to the end user are search efficiency, richness of information, and time savings. The basic promise is to bring search results by meaning match – similar to the human brain’s cognitive skills – rather than by the mere occurrence (or popularity) of search terms. Hakia’s new technology is a radical departure from the conventional indexing approach, because indexing has severe limitations to handle full-scale semantic search.

Hakia’s capabilities will appeal to all Web searchers – especially those engaged in research on knowledge intensive subjects, such as medicine, law, finance, science, and literature. The mission of hakia is the commitment to search for better search.

Here are the technological differences of hakia in comparison to conventional search engines.

QDEX Infrastructure

  • hakia’s designers broke from decades-old indexing method and built a more advanced system called QDEX (stands for Query Detection and Extraction) to enable semantic analysis of Web pages, and “meaning-based” search. 
  • QDEX analyzes each Web page much more intensely, dissecting it to its knowledge bits, then storing them as gateways to all possible queries one can ask.
  • The information density in the QDEX system is significantly higher than that of a typical index table, which is a basic requirement for undertaking full semantic analysis.
  • The QDEX data resides on a distributed network of fast servers using a mosaic-like data storage structure.
  • QDEX has superior scalability properties because data segments are independent of each other.

SemanticRank Algorithm

  • SemanticRank algorithm of hakia is comprised of innovative solutions from the disciplines of Ontological Semantics, Fuzzy Logic, Computational Linguistics, and Mathematics. 
  • Designed for the expressed purpose of higher relevancy.
  • Sets the stage for search based on meaning of content rather than the mere presence or popularity of keywords.
  • Deploys a layer of on-the-fly analysis with superb scalability properties.
  • Takes into account the credibility of sources among equally meaningful results.
  • Evolves its capacity of understanding text from BETA operation onward.

In our tests we’ve asked Hakia three English-language based questions:

Why did the stock market crash? [ http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=why+did+the+stock+market+crash%3F ]
Where do I get good bagels in Brooklyn? [ http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=where+can+i+find+good+bagels+in+brooklyn ]
Who invented the Internet? [ http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=who+invented+the+internet ]

It basically returned intelligent results for all. For example, Hakia understood that, when we asked “why,” I would be interested in results with the words “reason for”–and produced some relevant ones. 

Hakia  is one of the few promising Alternative Search Engines as being closely watched by Charles Knight at his blog AltSearchEngines.com, with a focus on natural language processing methods to try and deliver ‘meaningful’ search results. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Most other major search engines, including Google, analyze keywords. The company believes that the future of search engines will go beyond keyword analysis – search engines will talk back to you and in effect become your search assistant. One point worth noting here is that, currently, Hakia still has some human post-editing going on – so it isn’t 100% computer powered at this point and is close to human-powered search engine or combination of the two.

They hope to provide better search results with complex queries than Google currently offers, but they have a long way to catch up, considering Google’s vast lead in the search market, sophisticated technology, and rich coffers. Hakia’s semantic search technology aims to understand the meaning of search queries to improve the relevancy of the search results.

Instead of relying on indexing the web or on the popularity of particular web pages, as many search engines do, hakia tries to match the meaning of the search terms to mimic the cognitive processes of the human brain.

“We’re mainly focusing on the relevancy problem in the whole search experience,” said Dr. Berkan in an interview Friday. “You enter a question and get better relevancy and better results.”

Dr. Berkan contends that search engines that use indexing and popularity algorithms are not as reliable with combinations of four or more words since there are not enough statistics available on which to base the most relevant results.

“What we are doing is an ultimate approach, doing meaning-based searches so we understand the query and the text, and make an association between them by semantic analysis,” he said.

Analyzing whole sentences instead of keywords would indefinitely increase the cost to the company to index and process the world’s information. The case is pretty much the same with Powerset where they are also doing deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page and is publicly known fact they have higher cost for indexing and analyzing than Google. Taking into consideration that Google is having more than 450,000 servers in several major data centers and hakia’s indexing and storage costs might be even higher the approach they are taking might cost their investors a fortune to keep the company alive.

It would be interesting enough to find out if hakia is also building their architecture upon the Hbase/Hadoop environment just like Powerset does. 

In the context of indexing and storing the world’s information it worth mentioning that there is yet another start-up search engine called Cuill that’s claiming to have invented a technology for cheaper and faster indexation than Google’s. Cuill claims that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods.

Speaking also for semantic textual analysis and presentation of meaningful results NosyJoe.com is a great example of both, yet it seems it is not going to index and store the world’s information and then apply the contextual analysis to, but rather than is focusing on what is quality and important for the people participating in their social search engine. 

A few months ago Hakia launched a new social feature called “Meet Others” It will give you the option, from a search results page, to jump to a page on the service where everyone who searches for the topic can communicate.

For some idealized types of searching, it could be great. For example, suppose you were searching for information on a medical condition. Meet Others could connect you with other people looking for info about the condition, making an ad-hoc support group. On the Meet Others page, you’re able to add comments, or connect directly with the people on the page via anonymous e-mail or by Skype or instant messaging.

On the other hand implementing social recommendations and relying on social elements like Hakia’s Meet the Others feature one needs to have huge traffic to turn that interesting social feature into an effective information discovery tool. For example Google with its more than 500 million unique searchers per month can easily beat such social attempts undergone by the smaller players if they only decide to employ, in one way or another, their users to find, determine the relevancy, share and recommend results others also search for. Such attempts by Google are already in place as one can read over here: Is Google trying to become a social search engine.

Reach

According to Quantcast, Hakia is basically not so popular site and is reaching less than 150,000 unique visitors per month. Compete is reporting much better numbers – slightly below 1 million uniques per month. Considering the fact the search engine is still in its beta stage these numbers are more than great. Analyzing further the traffic curve on both measuring sites above it appears that the traffic hakia gets is sort of campaign based, in other words generated due to advertising, promotion or PR activity and is not permanent organic traffic due to heavy usage of the site.

The People

Founded in 2004, hakia is a privately held company with headquarters in downtown Manhattan. hakia operates globally with teams in the United States, Turkey, England, Germany, and Poland.

The Founder of hakia is Dr. Berkan who is a nuclear scientist with a specialization in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. He is the author of several articles in this area, including the book Fuzzy Systems Design Principles published by IEEE in 1997. Before launching hakia, Dr. Berkan worked for the U.S. Government for a decade with emphasis on information handling, criticality safety and safeguards. He holds a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee, and B.S. in Physics from Hacettepe University, Turkey. He has been developing the company’s semantic search technology with help from Professor Victor Raskin of PurdueUniversity, who specializes in computational linguistics and ontological semantics, and is the company’s chief scientific advisor.

Dr. Berkan resisted VC firms because he worried they would demand too much control and push development too fast to get the technology to the product phase so they could earn back their investment.

When he met Dr. Raskin, he discovered they had similar ideas about search and semantic analysis, and by 2004 they had laid out their plans.

They currently have 20 programmers working on building the system in New York, and another 20 to 30 contractors working remotely from different locations around the world, including Turkey, Armenia, Russia, Germany, and Poland.
The programmers are developing the search engine so it can better handle complex queries and maybe surpass some of its larger competitors.

Management

  • Dr. Riza C. Berkan, Chief Executive Officer
  • Melek Pulatkonak, Chief Operating Officer
  • Tim McGuinness, Vice President, Search
  • Stacy Schinder, Director of Business Intelligence
  • Dr. Christian F. Hempelmann, Chief Scientific Officer
  • John Grzymala, Chief Financial Officer

Board of Directors

  • Dr. Pentti Kouri, Chairman
  •  Dr. Riza C. Berkan, CEO
  • John Grzymala
  • Anuj Mathur, Alexandra Global Fund
  • Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator
  • Murat Vargi, KVK
  • Ryszard Krauze, Prokom Investments

Advisory Board

  • Prof. Victor Raskin (Purdue University)
  • Prof. Yorick Wilks, (Sheffield University, UK)
  • Mark Hughes

Investors

Hakia is known to have raised $11 million in its first round of funding from a panoply of investors scattered across the globe who were attracted by the company’s semantic search technology.

The New York-based company said it decided to snub the usual players in the venture capital community lining Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road and opted for its international connections instead, including financial firms, angel investors, and a telecommunications company.

Poland

Among them were Poland’s Prokom Investments, an investment group active in the oil, real estate, IT, financial, and biotech sectors.

Turkey

Another investor, Turkey’s KVK, distributes mobile telecom services and products in Turkey. Also from Turkey, angel investor Murat Vargi pitched in some funding. He is one of the founding shareholders in Turkcell, a mobile operator and the only Turkish company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Malaysia

In Malaysia, hakia secured funding from angel investor Lu Pat Ng, who represented his family, which has substantial investments in companies worldwide.
From Finland, hakia turned to Dr. Pentti Kouri, an economist and VC who was a member of the Nokia board in the 1980s. He has taught at Stanford, Yale, New York University, and HelsinkiUniversity, and worked as an economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is currently based in New York.

United States

In the United States, hakia received funding from Alexandra Investment Management, an investment advisory firm that manages a global hedge fund. Also from the U.S., former Senator and New York Knicks basketball player Bill Bradley has joined the company’s board, along with Dr. Kouri, Mr. Vargi, Anuj Mathur of Alexandra Investment Management, and hakia CEO Riza Berkan.

Hakia was on of the first alternative search engine to make the home page of web 2.0 Innovations in the past year… http://web2innovations.com/hakia.com.php

Hakia.com is the 3rd Semantic App being featured by Web2Innovations in its series of planned publications [  ] where we will try to discover, highlight and feature the next generation of web-based semantic applications, engines, platforms, mash-ups, machines, products, services, mixtures, parsers, and approaches and far beyond.

The purpose of these publications is to discover and showcase today’s Semantic Web Apps and projects. We’re not going to rank them, because there is no way to rank these apps at this time – many are still in alpha and private beta.

Via

[ http://www.hakia.com/ ]
[ http://blog.hakia.com/ ]
[ http://www.hakia.com/about.html ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hakia_takes_on_google_semantic_search.php ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hakia_meaning-based_search.php ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hakia.com/?metric=uv ]
[ http://www.internetoutsider.com/2007/07/the-big-problem.html ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/search/hakia.com ]
[ http://www.redherring.com/Home/19789 ]
[ http://web2innovations.com/hakia.com.php ]
[ http://www.pandia.com/sew/507-hakia.html ]
[ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/hakias-semantic-search-the-answer-to-poor-keyword-based-relevancy/5246/ ]
[ http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/hakia-semantic-search-set-to-music.ars ]
[ http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9800141-7.html ]
[ http://searchforbettersearch.com/ ]
[ https://web2innovations.com/money/2007/12/01/is-google-trying-to-become-a-social-search-engine/ ]
[ http://www.web2summit.com/cs/web2006/view/e_spkr/3008 ]
 

Business, Internet, Money, Morgenthaler, Music, Public Companies, Sequoia Capital, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

Exclusive: Imeem inks a deal with the world’s largest record company

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In what is believed to be a big leap for the relatively small social networking site called Imeem they announced today a licensing agreement allowing its users to listen free to the music of Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group.

Universal Music, the world’s largest record company, has opened a new chapter in the industry’s experiment with advertising-supported music by backing Imeem. Imeem now boasts deals with all four major record companies, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group, all of which have already inked deals with the social network.

It’s a sharp turnaround from earlier this year, when none of the majors were willing to sign on to imeem’s new ad-supported interactive service. In fact, Warner sued Imeem, arguing that by allowing its members to upload and share MP3s of Warner music, it was infringing on its copyrights.

After months of negotiations, the companies have concluded a deal in which Imeem will have full access to Universal’s catalogue, making it the first social networking site to reach licensing agreements with each of the four big record labels.

Imeem has received attention from music executives because it has quickly built an audience of 19 million monthly visitors, up from the 16 million they reported in May 2007.

Despite these claims and the deal itself, Imeem’s traffic seems to have fallen off since earlier this year, from a peak of 5 million visitors in April to 2.37 million in November according to Compete.com. Quantcast is showing even worse numbers – only 2.4 Million American visitors. The traffic curve there is permanently falling down over the past 6 months.

Imeem is an online community where artists, fans & friends can promote their content, share their tastes, and discover new blogs, photos, music and video. Here are some of the things you can do on imeem:

Discover
-Enjoy the latest videos, music, photos, or blogs posted on imeem.
-Stay up-to-date with your personal network of fans and friends with “What’s New” notifications.
-Get in-depth stats for all your content and track their popularity.

Interact
-Tag, comment, rate, and share any of your friends’ cool (or embarrassing) content.
-Create or join groups for your favorite band, event, topic, and more!
-Start discussions with other imeem users and make new friends.
 
Share
-Embed your media on other pages (such as your blog, Bebo, etc.).
-Recommend stuff to your friends or add it to your “Favorites” list.
-Easily add media to your Del.icio.us, WordPress, Blogger, or Typepad.

Imeem is hoping to make money from advertisers, a portion of which will be shared with its music partners. It has signed up Puma, Nike and Microsoft among others, though it does not disclose revenues.

As part of the deal, Universal is said to have received an upfront payment worth more than $20 million, as well as an equity stake in Imeem. Universal will also receive a small payment each time one of its songs is streamed on the site of Imeem. A person familiar with the discussions said that the pay out Universal is about to receive is an equivalent to a fraction of a cent in addition to receiving a share of advertising revenue associated with a given song, that is, ads running near where a song is accessed. Most licensing deals with services that combine free music with advertising tend to offer labels only a share of revenue.

Imeem isn’t the first ad-supported music service to gain the support of all four major labels. Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI have also been making their music available to ad-supported music downloading service Ruckus. Ruckus had an early advantage over other services in securing the majors’ cooperation because it targeted colleges and universities, where illegal music downloading is a particularly serious problem and is basically not possible.

In a statement, Universal Chairman Doug Morris called Imeem “innovative,” and praised Imeem for “ensuring that our artists are fairly compensated for the use of their works.”

According to eMarketer, spending on advertising on social networks will rise from $900 million this year to more than $2.5 billion in 2011.

Imeem is based in San Francisco and takes its name from “meme” – a term coined to describe the ideas that communities, adopt, and express. Dalton Caldwell is the CEO of the company and the co-founded together with Jan Jannink. The company used to be in Palo Alto and is known to have launched in 2004. Known investors in the company are Morgenthaler (Series A founding) and Sequoia Capital, the venture capital fund that supported Google and YouTube.

Via

[ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ff0a7e34-a6c3-11dc-b1f5-0000779fd2ac.html ]
[ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119725218005518932.html?mod=googlenews_wsj ]
[ http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204800459 ]
[ http://www.forbes.com/business/2007/12/10/imeem-universal-music-biz-media-cx_lh_1210bizimeem.html ]
[ http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9831163-36.html ]
[ http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004896 ]
[ http://mashable.com/2007/12/10/imeem-universal/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/09/imeem-pens-a-deal-with-universal-music-now-has-all-the-majors/ ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/imeem.com ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/imeem ]
[ http://imeemblog.imeem.com/ ]
[ http://lifehacker.com/software/social-networking/not-just-another-social+networking-site-208719.php ]
[ http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2005/54152.php ]
[ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/imeem-pioneers-free-music-with-ads/ ]
[ http://www.morgenthaler.com/content/Ventures/Articles/Articles%20documents/imeem%20in%20venturewire.pdf ]
 

Acquisitions, Clyde Street, eCommerce, Kegonsa Capital Partners, Microsoft, Public Companies, Search Engines, Shopping, Technology, Web 2.0

Microsoft acquires discount shopping search Jellyfish

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A couple of months ago Microsoft did an interesting move. They acquired Jellyfish.com – the Internet’s first buying [search] engine, as they call themselves.  Simply put: online discount shopping website that shares their fees earned from the merchants when you buy from them through cash back program.

Typical for how the major companies buy the price of the acquisition was not disclosed nor were more business details given. Under the terms of the deal, Jellyfish.com will maintain its standalone identity and its 26 employees will remain in Wisconsin.

Jellyfish.com had raised about $6 million in funding from investors that included company executives and Kegonsa Capital Partners, based in Fitchburg, Wisconsin and Clyde Street in October 2006.

Jellyfish.com was co-founded by Chief Executive Brian Wiegand and President Mark McGuire, who previously collaborated on NameProtect, a vertical search engine that provides trademark research. Venture-backed NameProtect was acquired by Corporation Services Company in April 2007.

What is Jellyfish.com anyway?

Jellyfish is a new kind of search engine. They call it the Internet’s first buying engine. Search engines are great for finding information, but they think you also need a search engine that is perfect for when you want to buy something online.

They try to make it simple for you to find the right product from a trusted merchant. But they also do something really different too: sharing their revenue with you. The guys there think of themselves as a Robin-Hood-like search engine that takes a percentage of the revenue you generate through your buying activity and redistributes it to you.
You use Jellyfish.com just like you would any other shopping search engine to find the right product at the best price. But when you actually buy something from a store in our engine, we share at least half of what we earn by connecting you to that store. All you need to do is sign up for an account to earn cash back. There are no fees or hidden charges.

This is the Jellyfish.com’s cash back promise: to share at least half of every $1 they earn when you shop and buy products using Jellyfish.com, as of course not all merchants within their data base are allowing them to share with shoppers, but this is clearly indicated.
At Jellyfish you will never get hidden fees, secret agendas, or annoying advertising. You will get an easy to use, transparent service that puts you in control.

Like eBay in Reverse

In reality, Jellyfish.com is one big marketplace of stores competing for your attention. But instead of annoying you with advertising, we allow stores to use their advertising dollars to lower your end price. If you like pretty pictures, you can see a picture of how this works here. And no we aren’t eBay, but we think our patent-pending marketplace is like eBay in reverse. Instead of bidding for deals, all you have to do is search to uncover the stores that have already bid the most to create the best deal for you.

How can they do this? Or better yet, why they are giving away $?

They just think that advertising stinks. Instead of wasting lots of money interrupting and annoying you, they have invented a new marketplace where stores make their advertising $’s work directly for your benefit and on your terms. Current advertising gives too much value to search engines at the expense of you and the stores that pay to advertise. Instead of the search engine keeping all of the advertising, we set up a system that rewards us, you, and the advertiser fairly when you find the right product to buy online.

What they really hope to do is show you the value of your attention online. And they couldn’t think of a better way than paying you cold hard cash. Technology has given you incredible control of what you pay attention to. You may not know it yet, but you are now in control. Companies in this new world will have to provide you with a maximum return on the value of your attention or they will die. And the value of your attention at Jellyfish is measured in extra dollars in your cash back account.

At Jellyfish, they want to pioneer a new form of search advertising that they call Value Per Action. Instead of charging fees when you click, they charge their advertisers only when you actually buy, and they share at least half of this fee back to you as cash back. In other words, they connect you directly to the value of the advertising. Instead of measuring how much money they make when you click, they measure how much value the advertiser is willing to pay YOU for your sale. With VPA, the advertising value of your attention becomes transparent (you can see it in the form of cash back) and changes from annoying advertising into something that actually lowers your end price.

Jellyfish.com’s platform is a sort of reverse auction where buyers bid on reducing prices, betting on when to place an order without knowing quantity at the given price.

This type of auction is a dutch auction, first used to sell Dutch tulips.

The Microsoft Live Search team said  they “think the technology has some interesting potential applications as we continue to invest heavily in shopping and commerce as a key component of Live Search.”

Another potential reason could be Google, again.

Google understands the game of pay per click is about to change and is moving. Microsoft pays attention to is and they’re locking up intellectual property in this move -one that combines multiple, successful and innovative digital shopping models.

Jellyfish takes a best of breed approach and “mashes them up” to the amusement of consumers: Ebates + Woot.com and on the advertiser-side, eBay’s Shopping.com + Google’s AdWords auction environment + Commission Junction’s (VCLK) performance-based cost model (cost-per-action) with a twist of Google (auctioning off ads).

It all ads up to valuable IP that Google, in theory, cannot access.

According to Jellyfish’s zeitgeist, pay per click advertising “fails to align incentives properly between the consumer, the advertiser, and the search engine intermediary connecting them.” It’s certainly an interesting take on sponsored links, but it will most likely be a complicated stance to maintain after being acquired by one of the larger players in the pay per click game.

Similar, and older, companies include Shopping (eBay), Bizrate.com, Epinions and Overstock.com.

Via

[ http://www.jellyfish.com/about ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/02/microsoft-acquires-discount-shopping-site-jellyfishcom/ ]
[ http://www.jeffmolander.com/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/27/cpa-shopping-search-jellyfishcom-closes-5-million-round/ ]
[ http://www.jellyfish.com/blog ]
[ http://www.jellyfish.com/howToUseJellyfish ]
[ http://www.jellyfish.com/blog/2007/10/02/microsoft-acquires-jellyfish/ ]
[ http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/10/microsoft-acqui.html ]
[ http://www.jellyfish.com/ourVision ]
[ http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/10/microsoft-acquires-jellyfish-apparently-shuns-peanutbutterfish.html ]
[ http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2007/10/01/microsoft-acquires-jellyfish-com.aspx ]
[ http://www.redherring.com/Home/22913 ]
[ http://www.jellyfish.com/founders ]

Funding, Intel Capital, Internet, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, RSS Investors Fund, Technology, Transcosmos & Business Development Inc, Web 2.0

Edgeio closes doors after burning $5M in one year

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In a final board meeting last evening Edgeio’s board members have decided to shut down operations of the company.

This failure is sort of symbolic for the Web 2.0 sector. Why? What Edgeio is interesting with? First off it has been co-founded by Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, an influential, probably the most, blog that is symbolic itself for the web 2.0 age and Arrington himself is the editor there and one of the most influential people on Web today, according many sources, including but not limited to Wired and Forbes. He is also mentoring, advising, consulting and probably brokeraging companies across the Silicon Valley and is generally well known technology evangelist. He expanded his Crunch Network with Crunchboard, Crunchgear and Mobilecrunch and is rapidly becoming the most influential journalist in the tech scene nowadays.

Aside Edgeio Michael Arrington is also having active participations in the following companies.

  • He is an investor in a stealth company called Daylife, based in New York.
  • He became an investor in Dogster on September 14, 2006
  • He is also an investor in Omnidrive since December 2006.
  • He is also an investor in Dancejam since the spring of 2007 and
  • An investor in Seesmic from November 2007, a video upstart launched by a French entrepreneur.

Aside Michael Arrington the company was also co-launched by Keith Teare and is said to be a great tool for bloggers and buyers alike. Using content from RSS-enabled sources, Edgeio is able to take millions of listings and categorize them in a central location. Early employees of Edgeio also include Vidar Hokstadt, Matt Kaufman and Fred Oliveira. Michael Arrington was not an executive but instead he served the company as a board of directors’ member.

Edgeio is all about edge publishing. It is Edgeio’s belief that services that try to restrict how users create and consume information cannot ultimately be successful. Users own their data, and services exist not to silo that data, but rather to add value to it. That is what Edgeio is setting out to do. Good mission. Simply put Edgeio will be focusing on classified listings of any type to start.

Blogs and other websites syndicating their content through RSS are an ideal place to post classified listings. Not only is the publisher in complete control of the content (what to include, when to change or update it, when to delete it and how to syndicate it for other services), but the website itself gives valuable context to readers of the listing. Unlike anonymous listing services, listings on blogs controlled by the publisher give readers an idea of who they are dealing with. That additional information is an important factor for readers in deciding if and how to interact with the publisher.

Very few blogs publish classified listings today. Most blogs have a relatively small group of readers, including friends and family, and are not able to effectively reach the larger audience needed to effectively market their listings.

That’s where Edgeio comes in. They promised to find edge published listings if they include the category or tag “listing” within the post or content. The listings will be indexed through the blog’s RSS feed and aggregated with other “listings from the edge”. Users of the Edgeio service will be able to search through listings and communicate directly with the publisher. Edgeio will also make aggregated listings available though a web service to other Internet sites and services that would like to include edge listings.

Edgeio promised to never attempt to silo or control publisher data, or restrict the ways that listings can be used by others.

The company has also launched a Chinese language version of its web site named mulu100.com (which in Chinese means catalog of catalogs). The Chinese service has initially formed a partnership with edeng.cn, a China based listings site, similar in many ways to craigslist.com.

Edgeio recieved $1.5 million in angel funds from the likes of Louis Monier, Frank Caufield, the RSS Investors Fund, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Michael Tanne, Auren Hoffman, Sam Perry and Bill McCabe.

In October 2006 Edgeio Closed $5 Million Series A Funding led by Intel Capital and also included an investment from Transcosmos & Business Development Inc, a Japanese public company with a Silicon Valley investment arm focused on Internet-based U.S. technology companies expanding into the Japanese marketplace.

The company burned through that money according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled; meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. No revenues came in and the user/partner milestones weren’t met and no one else was going to put more money into the company.

Employees will be let go but will be fully paid according Michael Arrington.

When being asked from a commenter on his blog what the company spent the money for Michael Arrington jokingly replied “parties, scotch, hookers, blow. You know the usual.”

The company seems to have failed even though Edgeio got a serious amount of coverage and in-context mentions on Techcrunch over the past years. All entries can be found over here: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/edgeio

De-facto it also affects another initiative of Techcrunch the Crunchboard.com, which will also undergo restructuring in the next days as they say. 

Michael Arrington also has said ”it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself as well as they always had problems with the PayPal API, which is a total piece of crap”

Here are some more interesting thoughts for food.

Advertising on TechCrunch is not cheap – $10,000 per month and Edgeio is known to have been an advertiser at TC for quite long period of time. The site was also used in TC’s job site www.crunchboard.com, which in our understanding did also cost money for the Edgeio. Having an influential company the rank of TechCrunch adopt and use your company’s services or products in our view is more expensive than having a banner rotating on the TC’s blog network.

The company was recently caught (September 2007) to be spamming Bloggers, which was even criticized by Arrington himself calling it ”Bad Idea”.

It is really interesting to see how things in SV tend to work. You have an idea, find an angel or two, prepare for the series A funding, raise the money, give it a try, if it work things out fine, if not then also fine, you close shop, go home, take some rest and try again later with another start up.

Indeed the company looks very good and healthy to us. Well done technology, good idea/concept, good numbers, was well funded, high-profile people involved and engaged and beyond. Quantcast reports for over 150,000 unique visitors from US alone while Compete is showing very healthy number of visitors – 348,797. Edgeio has access to over 100 million listings in 1,484,953 cities and 166 countries, 9,190,705 listings from 1,405 edge-direct feeds and 2,736 listings from 134 Classified Boards.

So what went wrong?

Why the company did not take a series B round of funding or tried to sell itself before crashing down? The business plan to start generating revenues was too pushful and unrealistic, in less than one year after funding? The company seems to have been given with less than a year to break-even? By contrast I remember another company that got coverage on Techcrunch Mahalo, started out by Jason Calacanis and was said that the company is having enough money to survive for at least 5 years without making any money at all. The company could have even been sold or profitably liquidated in one way or another and not simply closed.

So is there anything behind the scene that the public is not aware of?

Well, the very simple conclusion we can draw here is that a company success is not always guaranteed solely by who the investors or founders are… The DNA of the success with a company probably lies somewhere else and is a complex of factors, interests and events. 

Via

[ http://www.edgeio.com ]
[ http://wiki.edgeio.com/display/ExternalWiki/Home ]
[ http://blog.edgeio.com/2006/10/23/series-a-financing-china-web-site-and-patent-filing/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/06/edgeio-to-shut-down-in-the-deadpool/ ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/edgeio ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/30/edgeio-spams-bloggers-bad-idea/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/edgeio ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/24/edgeio-closes-5-million-series-a-financing/ ]
[ http://venturebeat.com/2006/10/23/edgeio-gets-5-million-to-expand-web-20-classifieds-site/ ]
[ http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/10/edgeio_has_been.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_blogspotting ]
[ http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/10/24/edgio-gets-5-million-in-vc-money/ ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/edgeio.com ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/edgeio.com/?metric=uv ]
[ http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/CompanyDetail.aspx?CompanyID=49351685&cs=QGC8QwFIE&pc=compete ]
[ http://rexdixon.wordpress.com/2006/10/24/edgeio-secures-5-million ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/about-techcrunch/ ]
[ http://www.crunchboard.com/ ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arrington ]
[ http://www.teare.com/category/keith-teare/edgeio ]

Acquisitions, Adobe's venture capital group, Public Companies, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

Adobe Systems Acquires Buzzword, a web-based word processing software

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Adobe Systems has acquired Virtual Ubiquity, the parent company of the Buzzword web-based word processing software.

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtual Ubiquity and its ground-breaking online word processor, Buzzword. The acquisition furthers Adobe’s commitment to foster a vibrant ecosystem for rich Internet application (RIA) development that delivers breakthrough experiences built on Adobe AIR. Separately, Adobe added a new file sharing service to its current online document services. Codenamed “Share,” the beta service will make it easier than ever for people to share, publish and organize documents online.

Virtual Ubiquity is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of November 2007. The addition of Virtual Ubiquity is not expected to have a material impact to Adobe revenue and earnings in fiscal year 2007.

Virtual Ubiquity had taken funding from Adobe’s venture capital group. At this point there is no disclosure on the size of the buy-out.

One may ask why? Well, Buzzword is built using Adobe Flex and runs in the Adobe Flash Player, making it a logical fit for the software company. Additionally, users can use Buzzword both online and offline using Adobe AIR. Much like Google Docs and Zoho, Buzzword also includes features for collaboration and sharing documents.

Buzzword, an elegant online word processor, enables individuals to work together to create high quality, page perfect documents. Because it was built with Adobe Flex™ software and runs in the Adobe Flash™ Player, Buzzword enables greater document quality, outstanding typography, page layout controls, and robust support for integrated graphics, regardless of the browser or device. The application also will run on Adobe® AIR™, offering users a hybrid online/offline experience and the ability to work with both hosted and local documents. The powerful collaboration capabilities in Buzzword enable multiple authors to edit and comment on documents from anywhere, at anytime, while document creators can set permissions that virtually eliminate version control chaos. For more information on the acquisition and access to Buzzword beta software, please visit http://www.adobe.com/go/buzzwordfaq.

Buzzword is a stunning achievement in design. Of all the PC-compatible word processors available — including the desktop dinosaur Microsoft Word — Buzzword is the easiest on the eyes and has the most elegant user interface.

The founders of the company will be joining Adobe as part of the deal.

So, is this an employment through acquisition? It could also be a well planned, funded and executed internal deal in the domain of the PR for Adobe in order to promote, proclaim and popularize its new products as Adobe Flex software, Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR, all trademarks owned by Adobe Systems Incorporated.

The deal comes in moment when the company announced the launch of the new Adobe Flash Player.

Via

[ http://www.buzzword.com/ ]
[ http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom…/100107VirtualUbiquity.html ]
[ http://mashable.com/2007/10/01/adobe-buzzword/ ]
[ http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/ ]
[ http://www.adobe.com/go/buzzwordfaq ]
[ http://about.buzzword.com/ ]
[ http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39289750,00.htm ]
[ http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2007/10/adobe_buys_web.html ]

Business, Google, Internet, Society, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

Dmoz.org – a falling star

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While researching over the popular business directories business.com and allbusiness.com, both recently acquired, I came across some very interesting details about Dmoz.org – the famous Open Directory Project (ODP).

Once mythical site millions of web sites were desperately relying on for Web authority, today Dmoz.org is declining in every aspect you can imagine of – from traffic, site usage, indexation level, PageRank(tm) to overall authority, trustworthiness and beyond. All traffic measurement companies are revealing similar and very unpleasant trend for the old web directory. Quantcast is reporting for slightly above 1.7 Million visitors per month. The situation at Compete is even worse – 1.5 Million where huge 33% decline is seen from the previous year on month-to-month comparison basis. Even the not-so-accurate Alexa is showing significant decline in the Dmoz.org’s popularity – once used to be close to Alexa 100, as far as I remember, today’s Alexa rank is in the 680 range. Just like to outline the negative trend the site’s yesterday rank (Dec 05, 2007) was 1143. If you take a look at the traffic’s graph from Alexa (shown below) for Dmoz.org you will see there is a constant decline in popularity over the past 6 months, at least. Just like this is not enough, even Google’s indexation level has dropped to only 211,000 pages, out of millions before, as we last checked it out. The Google PR has also dropped down from 9 to 8.

In matter of honesty we do believe the real traffic is bigger than what is shown on the sites above yet it appears the traffic today is times less than what Dmoz.org used to have in the past.

While the site is still claiming to have 4,830,584 sites, 75,151 editors and over 590,000 categories we are sort of agreeing only on the part of the number of sites and the categories. The active human editors in our belief are way below the number shown on the web site. For example, there were 7407 active editors during August 2006 (Open Directory Forum – General – Analyzing editor numbers – page 1, 13 August 2006).

I cannot help but ask why? What’s happening with Dmoz.org anyway? While there are potentially many reasons for the current situation behind Dmoz.org and we claim no accuracy here at all, I will try to summarize some of the issues below:

  1. The Open Directory Project’s main strengths, today, seem to be turning into its main shortcoming and its greatest weakness. Dmoz.org has always been run by volunteer human editors ensuring that listings remain high quality. However, this fact is fast becoming Dmoz.org‘s downfall most notably in the last 6 months.
  2. There have long been allegations that volunteer ODP editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition. Such allegations are fielded by ODP’s staff and meta editors, who have the authority to take disciplinary action against volunteer editors who are suspected of engaging in abusive editing practices.
  3. Dmoz.org.org has been accused a number of times by tens of thousands of small web sites and individuals in elitarism and corruption in how they were listing and delisting the web sites in the directory. 
  4. According to the masses pointing fingers at the ODP, some editors’ heads have become too big for their body. These rumors are also backed up from some Dmoz.org editors themselves. Allegedly, some editors have become too lazy to do their jobs properly. More serious allegations joined the fray. It became clear that editors have become petty and have started declining the applications for Dmoz.org listing for no valid reason. Other claims of corruption in the ranks of the listings became widespread. This began another round of rumors that said editors have turned dictatorial in their approval to protect their own interests; that is, if an editor perceives a site to be his competition, that web site isn’t going to get approved at all, and there’ll be no explanations given for the rejection.
  5. Other alleged abuses have occurred at the executive level, with company management leveraging the link value from ODP to accelerate new privately funded projects. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category, as of October 2007, Topix.com, a news aggregation site operated by ODP founder Rich Skrenta, has more than 10,000 listings*.
  6.  Early in the history of the ODP, its staff gave representatives of selected websites, such as Rolling Stone magazine, editing access at ODP in order to list many individual pages from those websites.
  7. ODP’s paid staff has imposed controversial policies from time to time, and volunteer editors who dissent in ways staff considers uncivil may find their editing privileges removed. One alleged example of this was chronicled at the XODP Yahoo! eGroup in May of 2000. The earliest known exposé was Life After the Open Directory Project, later appearing as a June 1, 2000, guest column written for Traffick.com, by David F. Prenatt, Jr. (former ODP editor “netesq”) after losing his ODP editing privileges. Another example was the volunteer editor known by the alias The Cunctator, who was banned from the ODP soon after submitting an article to Slashdot on October 24, 2000, which criticized changes in ODP’s copyright policies.
  8. We have been witnessing many corporate, brand and social battles and wars on Dmoz.org over the past years, similarly to what is today happening with Wikipedia.
  9. As we said above the number of active editors is getting lesser and lesser over the years while the backlog of web sites in the queue waiting to get listed is increasing. There were websites that had to wait years before they got listed. When Dmoz.org was first established listing could take a matter of a few weeks. Over time as Dmoz.org popularity grew so did listing times.
  10. It became known that some categories inside Dmoz.org did not even have any editors. In other categories editors became inactive and the backlog of submissions just continued to mount up.
  11. Many Dmoz.org editors are believed to have moved to Wikipedia through out the past 2 years.
  12. Dmoz.org began taking more flak when people started saying that the reason Dmoz.org is so lacking in editors – which leads to some categories not having editors at all for a great length of time – is the fact that the powers at Dmoz.org are reluctant to admit new editors to their ranks.
  13. Uninhibited discussion of ODP’s purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream Webmaster discussion forums.
  14. On October 20, 2006, the ODP’s main server suffered a catastrophic system failure that prevented editors from working on the directory until December 18, 2006. During that period, an older structure of the directory was visible to the public.
  15. Many site submissions were found to be in conflicts with the financial interests of the category editors.
  16. Underlying some controversy surrounding ODP is its ownership and management. Many of the original GnuHoo volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise. As ODP’s content became widely used by most major search engines and web directories, the issue of ODP’s ownership, management and governance became of greater importance to the public interests.
  17. Dmoz.org listings are also a powerful force in the world of expired domain traffic. Due to the popularity of the Open Directory and its resulting impact on search engine rankings, domains with lapsed registration that are listed on ODP have attracted domain hijacking, an issue that has been addressed (at least tried) by regularly removing expired domains from the directory.
  18. Competition. Dmoz.org clearly has missed the web 2.0 evolution and was left behind by better organized (semantic approach), bigger in size and more effective (contextual links) modern directories, an example of which is LinkedWords with its more than 38 Million English categories, sub-categories, phrases and words to get listed with. Basically LinkedWords is large-scale contextual platform which has similarity with Dmoz.org in its huge ontology directory structure but is entirely built up upon the spirit of web 2.0 with greater flexibility (adding pages, categories, sub-categories in real time), functionality (automated creation of contextual listings, yet there is zero spam) and technology (maximizes contextual linking among web sites, not just lists them). Having the web sites listed on its platform contributing, on daily basis, to the popularity of LW with in-text contextual links spreading around the Web is yet another advantage. This way sites like LinkedWords are not only helping more the web sites involved by connecting them together on a contextual basis but they are also helping the algorithmic robots find, classify and organize the information in context (following the in-context linked words) and not last the common users are also given with a chance to find the information in-context and on demand while reading around the web by clicking on the same in-text linked words.
  19. Google has begun to disassociate itself from the Open Directory Project. Nothing can be more symbolic than Google’s relegation of the directory from a prominent position in Google’s site to a position reserved for ordinary ‘worth checking but not really that important’ type of site, regardless of the high page ranks of most of the categories at Dmoz.org.
  20. Since the clamor of discontent has reached such a high degree and Dmoz.org’s staunchest ally – Google, has begun to keep its distance, Dmoz.org is like a decaying dinosaur that other animals are steering clear of it to avoid the vultures that are expected to feast on the beast when it dies. The death toll has been sounded for Dmoz.org.

While many of the points listed above may be arguable in one way or another – depending on points of view and interests – since they are gathered from the public Web during our research, they reveal the true picture behind Dmoz.org and it is easily to understand why the decline is so huge in the Dmoz.org’s village.

All of the above raises the reasonable question, how can Dmoz.org remain useful when people no longer trust its human editors?

Money makes the world go round they say. In 2007 it is also true that money makes the World Wide Web go round. In a world where online businesses can easily sell for a billion dollars the original lure of Dmoz.org for both webmasters and editors is waning. Today, Dmoz.org is still being used when web masters want their web sites listed. However, people no longer attribute much importance to it.

That pretty much sums up ours and a million other people’s sentiments about the current status and usefulness of this Open Directory Project. Sweeping changes and general reform, from political to technological, are required for the ODP to change from a Web 1.0 decaying dinosaur into a modern and effective directory with web 2.0 functionality.

For the people who do not know what Dmoz.org is, below we will include some basic information and historic facts about the ODP project. No, not everybody knows about Dmoz.org. In our basic estimate there are probably more than 400 million online users today that have no idea what the ODP project is.

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as Dmoz.org (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

ODP was founded as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998. At the time, Skrenta and Truel were working as engineers for Sun Microsystems. Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as the head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta was already well known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. Coincidentally, the original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence.

The Gnuhoo directory went live on June 5, 1998. After a Slashdot article suggested that Gnuhoo had nothing in common with the spirit of free software, for which the GNU project was known, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation objected to the usage of Gnu. So Gnuhoo was changed to NewHoo. Yahoo then objected to the usage of “Hoo” in the name, prompting them to switch the name again. ZURL was the likely choice. However, before the switch to ZURL, NewHoo was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation in October of 1998 and became the Open Directory Project. Netscape released the ODP data under the Open Directory License. Netscape was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter, and ODP was one of the assets included in the acquisition. AOL later merged with Time-Warner.

By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by ODP reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the number of URLs in the Open Directory surpassed the number of URLs in the Yahoo! Directory in April 2000 with about 1.6 million URLs. ODP achieved the milestones of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, three million listings on November 18, 2001 and four million on December 3, 2003.

I find similarities between Dmoz.org and Wikipedia.org. So, is it possible the same to happen with Wikipedia at future?

Via

[ http://www.Dmoz.org ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_Project ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/Dmoz.org ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/Dmoz.org/?metric=uv ]
[ http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/Dmoz.org ]
[ http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/Dmoz.org_had_9_lives_used_up_yet.html ]
[ http://www.newswriter.us/ShowAdminArticle-17.htm ]
* [ http://search.Dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=topix (accessed on 18th October 2007)]
[ http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/xodp/messages/1 (XODP Yahoo! Group Message Archive)]
[ http://www.traffick.com/story/06-2000-xodp.asp (David F. Prenatt, Jr., Life After the Open Directory Project, Traffick.com (June 1, 2000))]
[ http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/24/1252232.shtml (CmdrTaco, Dmoz.org (aka AOL) Changing Guidelines In Sketchy Way, Slashdot (October 24, 2000)]

Amidzad, Foundation Capital, Peter Thiel, Search Engines, Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Software, Technology, The Founder's Fund, Web 2.0

Powerset – the natural language processing search engine empowered by Hbase in Hadoop

2 Comments

In our planned series of publications about the Semantic Web and its apps today Powerset is going to be our second company, after Freebase, to be featured. 

Powerset is a Silicon Valley based company building a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing. Their unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search. By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results.

Powerset’s search engine is currently under development and is closed for the general public. You can always keep an eye on them in order to learn more information about their technology and approach.

Despite all the press attention Powerset is gaining there are too few details publicly available for the search engine. In fact Powerset is lately one of the most buzzed companies in the Silicon Valley, for good or bad.

Power set is a term from the mathematics and means a set S, the power set (or powerset) of S, written P(S) P(S), or 2S, is the set of all subsets of S. In axiomatic set theory (as developed e.g. in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postulated by the axiom of power set. Any subset F of P(S), is called a family of sets over S.

From the latest information publicly available for Powerset we learn that, just like some other start-up search engines, they are also using Hbase in Hadoop environment to process vast amounts of data.

It also appears that Powerset relies on a number of proprietary technologies such as the XLE, licensed from PARC, ranking algorithms, and the ever-important onomasticon (a list of proper nouns naming persons or places).

  

For any other component, Powerset tries to use open source software whenever available. One of the unsung heroes that form the foundation for all of these components is the ability to process insane amounts of data. This is especially true for a Natural Language search engine. A typical keyword search engine will gather hundreds of terabytes of raw data to index the Web. Then, that raw data is analyzed to create a similar amount of secondary data, which is used to rank search results. Since Powerset’s technology creates a massive amount of secondary data through its deep language analysis, Powerset will be generating far more data than a typical search engine, eventually ranging up to petabytes of data.
Powerset has already benefited greatly from the use of Hadoop: their index build process is entirely based on a Hadoop cluster running the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and makes use of Hadoop’s map/reduce features.

In fact Google also uses a number of well-known components to fulfill their enormous data processing needs: a distributed file system (GFS) ( http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html ), Map/Reduce ( http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html ), and BigTable ( http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html ).

Hbase is actually the open-source equivalent of Google’s Bigtable, which, as far as we understand the matter is a great technological achievement of the guys behind Powerset. Both JimKellerman and Michael Stack are from Powerset and are the initial contributors of Hbase.

Hbase could be the panacea for Powerset in scaling their index up to Google’s level, yet coping Google’s approach is perhaps not the right direction for a small technological company like Powerset. We wonder if Cuill, yet another start-up search engine that’s claiming to have invented a technology for cheaper and faster indexation than Google’s, has built their architecture upon the Hbase/Hadoop environment.  Cuill claims that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. If it is true what would the Powerset costs then be considering the fact that Powerset is probably having higher indexing costs even compared to Google, because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page? Taking into consideration that Google is having more than 450,000 servers in several major data centers and Powerset’s indexing and storage costs might be even higher the approach Powerset is taking might be costly business for their investors.

Unless Hbase and Hadoop are the secret answer Powerset relies on to significantly reduce the costs. 

Hadoop is an interesting software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data.

Here’s what makes Hadoop especially useful:

  • Scalable: Hadoop can reliably store and process petabytes.
  • Economical: It distributes the data and processing across clusters of commonly available computers. These clusters can number into the thousands of nodes.
  • Efficient: By distributing the data, Hadoop can process it in parallel on the nodes where the data is located. This makes it extremely rapid.
  • Reliable: Hadoop automatically maintains multiple copies of data and automatically redeploys computing tasks based on failures.

Hadoop implements MapReduce, using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) (see figure below.) MapReduce divides applications into many small blocks of work. HDFS creates multiple replicas of data blocks for reliability, placing them on compute nodes around the cluster. MapReduce can then process the data where it is located.
Hadoop has been demonstrated on clusters with 2000 nodes. The current design target is 10,000 node clusters.
Hadoop is a Lucene sub-project that contains the distributed computing platform that was formerly a part of Nutch.

Hbase’s background

Google’s  Bigtable, a distributed storage system for structured data, is a very effective mechanism for storing very large amounts of data in a distributed environment.  Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, Hbase will provide Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop. Data is organized into tables, rows and columns, but a query language like SQL is not supported. Instead, an Iterator-like interface is available for scanning through a row range (and of course there is an ability to retrieve a column value for a specific key). Any particular column may have multiple values for the same row key. A secondary key can be provided to select a particular value or an Iterator can be set up to scan through the key-value pairs for that column given a specific row key.

Reach

According to Quantcast, Powerset is basically not popular site and is reaching less than 20,000 unique visitors per month, around 10,000 Americans. Compete is reporting the same – slightly more than 20,000 uniques per month. Considering the fact the search engine is still in its alpha stage these numbers are not that bad.

The People

Powerset has assembled a star team of talented engineers, researchers, product innovators and entrepreneurs to realize an ambitious vision for the future of search. Our team comprises industry leaders from a diverse set of companies including: Altavista, Apple, Ask.com, BBN, Digital, IDEO, IBM, Microsoft, NASA, PARC, Promptu, SRI, Tellme, Whizbang! Labs, and Yahoo!.

Founders of Powerset are Barney Pell and Lorenzo Thione and the company is actually headquartered in San Francisco. Recently Barney Pell has stepped down from the CEO spot and is now the company’s CTO.

Barney Pell, Ph.D. (CTO) For over 15 years Barney Pell (Ph.D. Computer science, Cambridge University 1993) has pursued groundbreaking technical and commercial innovation in A.I. and Natural Language understanding at research institutions including NASA, SRI, Stanford University and Cambridge University. In startup companies, Dr. Pell was Chief Strategist and VP of Business Development at StockMaster.com (acquired by Red Herring in March, 2000) and later had the same role at Whizbang! Labs. Just prior to Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, one of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley.

Lorenzo Thione (Product Architect) Mr. Thione brings to Powerset years of research experience in computational linguistics and search from Research Scientist positions at the CommerceNet consortium and the Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory. His main research focus has been discourse parsing and document analysis, automatic summarization, question answering and natural language search, and information retrieval. He has co-authored publications in the field of computational linguistics and is a named inventor on 13 worldwide patent applications spanning the fields of computational linguistics, mobile user interfaces, search and information retrieval, speech technology, security and distributed computing. A native of Milan, Italy, Mr. Thione holds a Masters in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Board of Directors

Aside Barney Pell, who is also serving on the company’s board of directors, other board members are:

Charles Moldow (BOD) is a general partner at Foundation Capital. He joined Foundation on the heels of successfully building two companies from early start-up through greater than $100 million in sales. Most notably, Charles led Tellme Networks in raising one of the largest private financing rounds in the country post Internet bubble, adding $125 million in cash to the company balance sheet during tough market conditions in August, 2000. Prior to Tellme, Charles was a member of the founding team of Internet access provider @Home Network. In 1998, Charles assisted in the $7 billion acquisition of Excite Network. After the merger, Charles became General Manager of Matchlogic, the $80 million division focused on interactive advertising.

Peter Thiel (BOD) is a partner at Founders Fund VC Firm in San Francisco. In 1998, Peter co-founded PayPal and served as its Chairman and CEO until the company’s sale to eBay in October 2002 for $1.5 billion. Peter’s experience in finance includes managing a successful hedge fund, trading derivatives at CS Financial Products, and practicing securities law at Sullivan & Cromwell. Peter received his BA in Philosophy and his JD from Stanford.

Investors

In June 2007 Powerset has raised $12.5M in series A round of funding from Foundation Capital and The Founder’s Fund. Early investors include Eric Tilenius and Peter Thiel, who is also early investor in Facebook.com. Other early investors are as follows:

CommerceNet is an entrepreneurial research institute focused on making the world a better place by fulfilling the promise of the Internet. CommerceNet invests in exceptional people with bold ideas, freeing them to pursue visions outside the comfort zone of research labs and venture funds and share in their success.

Dr. Tenenbaum is a world-renowned Internet commerce pioneer and visionary. He was founder and CEO of Enterprise Integration Technologies, the first company to conduct a commercial Internet transaction (1992), secure Web transaction (1993) and Internet auction (1993). In 1994, he founded CommerceNet to accelerate business use of the Internet. In 1997, he co-founded Veo Systems, the company that pioneered the use of XML for automating business-to-business transactions. Dr. Tenenbaum joined Commerce One in January 1999, when it acquired Veo Systems. As Chief Scientist, he was instrumental in shaping the company’s business and technology strategies for the Global Trading Web. Earlier in his career, Dr. Tenenbaum was a prominent AI researcher, and led AI research groups at SRI International and Schlumberger Ltd. Dr. Tenenbaum is a Fellow and former board member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a former Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He currently serves as an officer and director of Webify Solutions and Medstory Inc., and is a Consulting Professor of Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon’s new West Coast campus. Dr. Tenenbaum holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Stanford. 

Allan Schiffman was CTO and founder of Terisa Systems, a pioneer in communications security Technology to the Web software industry. Earlier, Mr. Schiffman was Chief Technology Officer at Enterprise Integration Technologies, a pioneer in the development of key security protocols for electronic commerce over the Internet. In these roles, Mr. Schiffman has raised industry awareness of role for security and public key cryptography in ecommerce by giving more than thirty public lectures and tutorials. Mr. Schiffman was also a member of the team that designed the Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) payment card protocol commissioned by MasterCard and Visa. Mr. Schiffman co-designed the first security protocol for the Web, the Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol (S-HTTP). Mr. Schiffman led the development of the first secure Web browser, Secure Mosaic, which was fielded to CommerceNet members for ecommerce trials in 1994. Earlier in his career, Mr. Schiffman led the development of a family of high-performance Smalltalk implementations that gained both academic recognition and commercial success. These systems included several innovations widely adopted by other object-oriented language implementers, such as the “just-in-time compilation” technique universally used by current Java virtual machines. Mr. Schiffman holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Rob Rodin is the Chairman and CEO of RDN Group; strategic advisors focused on corporate transitions, customer interface, sales and marketing, distribution and supply chain management. Additionally, he serves as Vice Chairman, Executive Director and Chairman of the Investment Committee of CommerceNet which researches and funds open platform, interoperable business services to advance commerce. Prior to these positions, Mr. Rodin served as CEO and President of Marshall Industries, where he engineered the reinvention of the company, turning a conventionally successful $500 million distributor into a web enabled $2 billion global competitor. “Free, Perfect and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands”, Mr. Rodin’s bestselling book, chronicles the radical transformation of Marshall Industries. 

The Founders Fund – The Founders Fund, L.P. is a San Francisco-based venture capital fund that focuses primarily on early-stage, high-growth investment opportunities in the technology sector. The Fund’s management team is composed of investors and entrepreneurs with relevant expertise in venture capital, finance, and Internet technology. Members of the management team previously led PayPal, Inc. through several rounds of private financing, a private merger, an initial public offering, a secondary offering, and its eventual sale to eBay, Inc. The Founders Fund possesses the four key attributes that well-position it for success: access to elite research universities, contact to entrepreneurs, operational and financial expertise, and the ability to pick winners. Currently, the Founders Fund is invested in over 20 companies, including Facebook, Ironport, Koders, Engage, and the newly-acquired CipherTrust. 

Amidzad – Amidzad is a seed and early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in emerging growth companies on the West Coast, with over 50 years of combined entrepreneurial experience in building profitable, global enterprises from the ground up and over 25 years of combined investing experience in successful information technology and life science companies. Over the years, Amidzad has assembled a world-class network of serial entrepreneurs, strategic investors, and industry leaders who actively assist portfolio companies as Entrepreneur Partners and Advisors.Amidzad has invested in companies like Danger, BIX, Songbird, Melodis, Freewebs, Agitar, Affinity Circles, Litescape and Picaboo.

Eric Tilenius brings a two-decade track record that combines venture capital, startup, and industry-leading technology company experience. Eric has made over a dozen investments in early-stage technology, internet, and consumer start-ups around the globe through his investment firm, Tilenius Ventures. Prior to forming Tilenius Ventures, Eric was CEO of Answers Corporation (NASDAQ: ANSW), which runs Answers.com, one of the leading information sites on the internet. He previously was an entrepreneur-in-residence at venture firm Mayfield. Prior to Mayfield, Eric was co-founder, CEO, and Chairman of Netcentives Inc., a leading loyalty, direct, and promotional internet marketing firm. Eric holds an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he graduated as an Arjay Miller scholar, and an undergraduate degree in economics, summa cum laude, from Princeton University.

Esther Dyson does business as EDventure, the reclaimed name of the company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004. Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. Her board seats include Boxbe, CVO Group (Hungary), Eventful.com, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect, Voxiva, Yandex (Russia)… and WPP Group (not a start-up). Some of her other past IT investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), BrightMail (sold to Symantec), Medstory (sold to Microsoft), Orbitz (sold to Cendant and later re-IPOed). Her current holdings include ActiveWeave, BlogAds, ChoiceStream, Democracy Machine, Dotomi, Linkstorm, Ovusoft, Plazes, Powerset, Resilient, Tacit, Technorati, Visible Path, Vizu.com and Zedo. On the non-profit side, Dyson sits on the boards of the Eurasia Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Santa Fe Institute and the Sunlight Foundation. She also blogs occasionally for the Huffington Post, as Release 0.9.

Adrian Weller – Adrian graduated in 1991 with first class honours in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Barney. He moved to NY, ran Goldman Sachs’ US Treasury options trading desk and then joined the fixed income arbitrage trading group at Salomon Brothers. He went on to run US and European interest rate trading at Citadel Investment Group in Chicago and London. Recently, Adrian has been traveling, studying and managing private investments. He resides in Dublin with his wife, Laura and baby daughter, Rachel.

Azeem Azhar – Azeem is currently a technology executive focussed on corporate innovation at a large multinational. He began his career as a technology writer, first at The Guardian and then The Economist . While at The Economist, he launched Economist.com. Since then, he has been involved with several internet and technology businesses including launching BBC Online and founding esouk.com, an incubator. He was Chief Marketing Officer for Albert-Inc, a Swiss AI/natural language processing search company and UK MD of 20six, a blogging service. He has advised several internet start-ups including Mondus, Uvine and Planet Out Partners, where he sat on the board. He has a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University. He currently sits on the board of Inuk Networks, which operates a IPTV broadcast platform. Azeem lives in London with his wife and son.

Todd Parker – Since 2002, Mr. Parker has been a Managing Director at Hidden River, LLC, a firm specializing in Mergers and Acquisitions consulting services to the wireless and communications industry. Previously and from 2000 to 2002, Mr. Parker was the founder and CEO of HR One, a human resources solutions provider and software company. Mr. Parker has also held senior executive and general manager positions with AirTouch Corporation where he managed over 15 corporate transactions and joint venture formations with a total value of over $6 billion. Prior to AirTouch, Mr. Parker worked for Arthur D. Littleas a consultant. Mr. Parker earned a BS from Babson College in Entrepreneurial Studies and Communications.

Powerset.com is the 2nd Semantic App being featured by Web2Innovations in its series of planned publications where we will try to discover, highlight and feature the next generation of web-based semantic applications, engines, platforms, mash-ups, machines, products, services, mixtures, parsers, and approaches and far beyond.

The purpose of these publications is to discover and showcase today’s Semantic Web Apps and projects. We’re not going to rank them, because there is no way to rank these apps at this time – many are still in alpha and private beta.

Via

[ http://www.powerset.com ]
[ http://www.powerset.com/about ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_set ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset ]
[ http://blog.powerset.com/ ]
[ http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/index.html ]
[ http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-hadoop/Hbase ]
[ http://blog.powerset.com/2007/10/16/powerset-empowered-by-hadoop ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/04/cuill-super-stealth-search-engine-google-has-definitely-noticed/ ]
[ http://www.barneypell.com/ ]
[ http://valleywag.com/tech/rumormonger/hanky+panky-ousts-pell-as-powerset-ceo-318396.php ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/powerset ]

Games, Social Networking, Society, Technology, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0

Troubles and security issues in SecondLife and other virtual worlds

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The Mercury News has a story where savvy security researchers have found a flaw in Second Life virtual world that allows them to strip a user’s character of all of its in-world money.

Charles Miller and Dino Dai Zovi, two experienced hackers, claim they have found a vulnerability in the way Second Life protects a user’s money inside the virtual world from being stolen. It has significance because that currency, dubbed Linden dollars, can be converted into real world dollars. But the risks for Linden Lab, the San Francisco operator of Second Life, are limited because the researchers say the flaw can be quickly patched.

Miller, a researcher at security firm Independent Security Evaluators in Baltimore, gained some notoriety this summer when he found a way to hack Apple’s iPhone. He said that he and Dai Zovi found the flaw by exploiting a known problem with Apple’s QuickTime movie playback software, which is used to play movies inside the virtual world. That QuickTime flaw was exposed on Monday and the pair completed their hack in a few days. That gave an opening to Dai Zovi and Miller, who had been mulling over Second Life security for months.

The exploit works because Second Life allows users to embed videos or pictures on their character’s or their virtual property. When someone comes nearby and is within view of the object, the Second Life software activates QuickTime so it can play the video or picture. In doing so, QuickTime directs the Second Life software to a web site. By exploiting the flaw in QuickTime, the hackers can direct the Second Life software to a malicious web site that then allows them to take over the Second Life avatar.

When we last tried to reach the page at ISE where the security problem is said to be explained in details the page http://www.securityevaluators.com/sl did not open.

In another story Swedish authorities said in January 2007 they would clamp down on Swedes earning money through Internet games such as Second Life.

Indeed, while Second Life may have started as a utopian world where gamers, geeks, and technophiles could gather and immerse themselves into the pure and innocent escapism of a genuine second life, the rocketing popularity of Linden Lab’s online world has now begun attracting the attentions of people that intent on destruction, and even violence, reports the Concorde Monitor.

Here are some recent incidents that happen at SecondLife’s and other virtual worlds around Internet.

  1. Australian broadcaster ABC has its luxury island turned into a crater by angry hackers.
  2. Worrying reports of rape and child abuse have started to gather around the supposedly idyllic existence to be ‘enjoyed’ in Second Life.
  3. The above mentioned rape incident, which took place earlier in 2007, caused outrage when with one virtual avatar sexually assaulted by another.
  4. The police in Belgium opened an investigation into, not who perpetrated said rape, but whether an actual crime had been committed.
  5. 17-year-old Dutch teenager was arrested this week on suspicion of stealing furniture worth £2,800 from a hotel room in the three-dimensional world Habbo Hotel, a children’s game that only exists on the internet.
  6. German authorities have also homed in on an incident of sexual abuse involving live images of a child avatar having simulated sex with an adult avatar.
  7. Virtual gangs killing off lone in-game players and stealing their wares, which are later sold on for real-world profit.
  8. Shanghai-based 41-year-old Legend of Mir 3 online gamer stabbing another cheating player repeatedly in the chest after he stole an in-game weapon reportedly worth some $850 USD.
  9. British cops will be going undercover in Second Life to investigate depictions of adult-child sex and track down pedophiles

All of this, of course, promotes the question of whether a virtual world such as Second Life should be governed by a virtual police force.

Independent Security Evaluators‘ mission is to provide the outside technical resources companies need to control their technology risk. The experts at ISE have vast experience in every facet of security. The team includes computer scientists, electrical engineers, and cryptographers. ISE experts have testified before Congress, served as expert witnesses, participated in creating standards, and evaluated systems for both government and private industry.

ISE researchers have published several influential books and dozens of scientific papers in the top refereed conferences and journals. They have also analyzed and helped repair several widely used commercial systems. ISE was formed to offer this expertise to the private sector.

On the other side, in respond to the security issues pointed out by the hackers, Joe Miller, VP, Linden Lab in San Francisco, CA has replied:

I want to reiterate that this is an Apple QuickTime issue, not a flaw inherent in Second Life, and as such, affects all platforms and browsers that use QT. Second Life remains a viable environment for conducting business, with a stable economy and the appropriate Resident and economic controls in place.

Linden Lab alerted all Second Life Residents of this exploit both on the official Linden Lab blog and at log-in on Friday afternoon. In addition, the Second Life community is doing a great job of spreading the word, and letting their fellow residents know about the potential issues surrounding the use of QT. I can assure you that no other affected platform is communicating with their customers as thoroughly as we are.

We have measures in place to deal with this type of exploited vulnerability – including the ability to log and track URLs, identify the attackers and take the appropriate measures, as well as making sure that affected Residents are reimbursed if they should lose any Linden dollars.

We’re hopeful Apple will remedy this problem as soon as possible, and we pledge to alert Residents as soon as the fix has been made.

According to the Second Life’s website, there were 6,491,898 residents in its alternative reality.  Second Life, created by San Francisco technology company Linden Lab, has attracted several real-world companies, including car manufacturers and sports clothing makers, which created 3-D stores.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe. From the moment you enter the World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business. You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow Residents. Because Residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other Residents. The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges.

Other virtual worlds include:

Entropia Universe ( http://www.entropiauniverse.com/ ), the Swedish virtual world, which had a turnover of $365m last year.

Habbo ( http://www.habbo.com/), owned by a Finnish company, Sulake, boasts more than 80 million members today.

VOY Plaza Virtual ( http://www.voyplaza.com/vpv.html )

There.com ( http://There.com.com )

Club Penguin ( http://www.clubpenguin.com/) recently sold to Disney.

Active Worlds ( http://www.activeworlds.com/ )

Barbie Girls ( http://www.barbiegirls.com/ )

Cyworld ( http://us.cyworld.com/ )

Dubit ( http://www.dubitchat.com/ )

Faketown ( http://www.faketown.com/ )

BBC’s Adventure Rock ( http://bbc.co.uk/cbbc/adventurerock )

World of Warcraft ( http://worldofwarcraft.com )

Gaia ( http://www.gaiaonline.com/ ). The game has just got funded by Sony Pictures.

IMVU ( http://www.imvu.com/ )

Kaneva ( http://www.kaneva.com/ )

Millsberry ( http://millsberry.com/ )

Mokitown ( http://www.mobile-kids.net/ )

Neopets ( http://www.neopets.com/ )

Red Light Center (NSFW) ( http://redlightcenter.com/ )

Webkinz ( http://www.webkinz.com/ )

Zwinktopia by InterActiveCorp ( http://www.zwinktopia.com/ )

Openlife Grid ( http://www.openlifegrid.com/) Public Grid with Opensim Technology.

ViOS – ViOS 3D Internet Viewer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViOS )

Whyville ( http://www.whyville.net/top/index.html )

Citypixel ( http://www.citypixel.com/ )

Weblo ( http://www.weblo.com/ )

  

Via

[ http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/takahashi/2007/11/30/exclusive-hackers-say-they-can-pick-pockets-of-characters-in-second-life-virtual-world /]
[ http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/659761 ]
[ http://www.securityevaluators.com/sl/ ]
[ http://secondlife.com/whatis/ ]
[ http://www.thelocal.se/7347/20070518/ ]
[ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/17/internet.crime ]
[ http://metasecurity.net/2007/06/05/crime-rife-in-virtual-second-life/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/05/virtual-world-hangouts-so-many-to-choose-from ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_world ]
[ http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/ ]
 

Acquisitions, Business, Microsoft, Multimedia, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

Microsoft Acquires WebFives, yet another multimedia sharing site

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Microsoft has acquired yet another photo/video and audio sharing site called WebFives.

The agreement has been reached during November 2007 and according it Microsoft has acquired all rights to WebFives technology, patents pending, trademarks, and software to incorporate into its products and services over time. In order to make WebFives’s wind down process as easy as possible for their users, Microsoft has agreed to provide them with a license to continue operating WebFives until the end of the year, giving their users time to copy any information you would like to keep to your own PCs or another service prior to the end of the year.

WebFives has initially been founded by a former Microsoft engineer Mike Toutonghi as Vizrea, which later became WebFives. Vizrea launched in 2006 and is based in Seattle and had a handful number of employees in both locations Seattle and Prague (Czechs Republic). Originally they idea is known to have started in August of 2003 with a vision of making video, photo, music sharing, and blogging easy and accessible to everyone from any device. The company launched with the support from some early Microsoft executives. Mike Toutonghi was the engineer who initiated the Media Center version of Windows at Microsoft before leaving for the startup world.

The company realized that building a great sharing and social network means serving the community at first place. They are making it possible for anyone who creates videos, pictures, or music to easily share their creations in stunning quality to the entire world or just a small group of friends. WebFives includes advertising so they can offer you a great, free level of service for creating and sharing videos, pictures, blogs, and audio on your own personal WebFives website. Users are provided with standard social networking profile pages complete with blogging, and have the option of accessing their sites via computer or via a WAP specific page.

Some of the site’s fundaments:

1 WebFives is Quality
The video you watch and share on the web doesn’t have to be fuzzy and low quality any more. WebFives can deliver full-screen, digital-TV quality video, and CD quality audio. It’s high quality on mobile phones too.

2 WebFives is Everywhere
Easily share what you create. You and your friends can use the web browser on almost any phone to upload to WebFives, and watch WebFives video or listen to WebFives music. You can also use multimedia messages (MMS) to send movies and photos directly from your phone to WebFives. (Your web address is: webfives.com/username, your mobile address is: wap.webfives.com/username. It really is as simple as that.) Plus, for some phones we have additional, optional software.

 3 WebFives is Friendly
Already using another service? No problem, WebFives likes them all. Easily put your high quality WebFives media on other sites like MySpace, Xanga—or even on all of them at the same time. Send a video from your phone to WebFives and it’ll update for all of your friends right away.

4 WebFives is the Whole Enchilada
It’s got everything you’d expect from a sharing service—video, music, blogs, comments, ratings, tags, ‘friends,’ fast and easy search, and more—on both PCs and mobile phones.

5 WebFives is You
It’s designed from the ground up with you in mind, so it’s easy and fun to use. You can whip out great looking, custom web pages in minutes, and decide who can see them. (People who can’t see them don’t know they exist.)

Other prominent acquisitions within the sector are Photobucket by MySpace (News Corp/Fox Interactive), Flickr by Yahoo and Picasa by Google some years ago. In just recent weeks American greetings has acquired Webshots Inc, one of the leaders of Photo sharing sites. 

The deal terms and the acquisition price were not disclosed and typically for big buys (Microsoft, Google, etc.) the site stopped working and current users are given with 30 days to have their content downloaded and moved away from the site.

Via

[ http://mashable.com/2007/12/01/microsoft-acquires-photo-sharing-site-webfives/ ]
[ http://www.webfives.com/whatis.aspx ]
[ http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/258559_vizrea07.html ]
[ http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=723 ]
[ http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley/2007/11/microsoft_buys_toutonghis_seat_1.html ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/30/microsoft-acquires-mobile-focused-social-networking-site-webfives/ ]
 

Business, Google, Search Engines, Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Social Networking, Social Search Engines, Technology, Web 2.0

Is Google trying to become a Social Search Engine

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Based on what we are seeing the answer is close to yes. Google is now experimenting with new social features aimed at improving the users’ search experience.

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that Google claims this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

There seems to be features like “Like it”, “Don’t like it?” and “Know of a better web page”. Of course, to get full advantage of these extras as well as to have your recommendations associated with your searches later, upon your return, you have to be signed in.

There is nothing new here, many of the smaller social search engines are deploying and using some of the features Google is just now trying to test, but having more than 500 million unique visitors per month, the vast majority of which are heavily using Google’s search engine, is a huge advantage if one wants to implement social elements in finding the information on web easily. Even Marissa Mayer, Google’s leading executive in search, said in August that Google would be well positioned to compete in social search. Actually with that experiment in particular it appears your vote only applies to what Google search results you will see, so it is hard to call it “social” at this time around. This may prove valuable as a stand-alone service. Also, Daniel Russell of Google, some time ago, made it pretty clear that they use user behavior to affect search results. Effectively, that’s using implicit voting, rather than explicit voting.

We think, however, the only reason Google is trying to deal with these social features, relying on humans to determine the relevancy, is their inability to effectively fight the spam their SERPs are flooded with. 

Manipulating algorithmic based results, in one way or another is in our understanding not much harder than what you would eventually be able to do to manipulate or influence results in Google that rely and depend on social recommendations. Look at Digg for example.

We think employing humans to determine which results are best is basically an effective pathway to corruption, which is sort of worse than to have an algorithm to blame for the spam and low quality of the results. Again take a look at Digg, dmoz.org and mostly Wikipedia. Wikipedia, once a good idea, became a battle field for corporate, brand, political and social wars. Being said that, we think the problem of Google with the spam results lies down to the way how they reach to the information or more concrete the methods they use to crawl and index the vast Web. Oppositely, having people, instead of robots, gathering the quality and important information (from everyone’s point of view) from around the web is in our understanding much better and effective approach rather than having all the spam results loaded on the servers and then let the people sort them out.

That’s not the first time Google is trying new features with their search results. We remember searchmash.com. Searchmash.com is yet another of the Google’s toys in the search arena, which was quietly started out a year ago because Google did not want the public to know about this project and influence their beta testers (read: the common users) with the brand name Google. The project, however, quickly became poplar since many people discovered who the actual owner of the beta project is.

Google is under no doubt getting all the press attention they need, no matter what they do and sometimes even more than what they do actually need from. On the other hand things seem to be slowly changing today and influential media like New York Times, Newsweek, CNN and many others are in a quest for the next search engine, the next Google. This was simply impossible to happen during 2001, 2002 up to 2004, period characterized with a solid media comfort for Google’s search engine business.  

So, is Google the first one to experiment with social search approaches, features, methods and extras? No, definitely not as you are going to see for yourself from the companies and projects listed below.

As for crediting a Digg-like system with the idea of sorting content out based on community voting, they definitely weren’t the first. The earliest implementation of this we are aware of is Kuro5hin.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin), which, we think, was founded back in 1999.

Eurekster

One of the first and oldest companies coined social search engines on Web is Eureskter. 
Eurekster launched its community-powered social search platform “swicki”, as far as we know, in 2004, and explicit voting functionality in 2006. To date, over 100,000 swickis have been built, each serving a community of users passionate about a specific topic. Eurekster processes over 25,000,000 searches a month. The key to Eurekster’s success in improving relevancy here has been leveraging the explicit (and implicit) user behavior though at the group or community level, not individual or general. On the other hand Eurekster never made it to the mainstream users and somehow the company slowly faded away, lost the momentum.

Wikia Social Search

Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia’s founder) and Angela Beesley in 2004. The company is incorporated in Delaware. Gil Penchina became Wikia’s CEO in June 2006, at the same time the company moved its headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Menlo Park and later to San Mateo in California. Wikia has offices in San Mateo and New York in the US, and in PoznaÅ„ in Poland. Remote staff is also located in Chile, England, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and also in other locations in Poland and the US. Wikia has received two rounds of investment; in March 2006 from Bessemer Venture Partners and in December 2006 from Amazon.com.

According to the Wikia Search the future of Internet Search must be based on:

  1. Transparency – Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
  2. Community – Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
  3. Quality – Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
  4. Privacy – Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Other active areas of focus include:

  1. Social Lab – sources for URL social reputation, experiments in wiki-style social ranking.
  2. Distributed Lab – projects focused on distributed computing, crawling, and indexing. Grub!
  3. Semantic Lab – Natural Language Processing, Text Categorization.
  4. Standards Lab – formats and protocols to build interoperable search technologies.

Based on who Jimmy Wales is and the success he achieved with Wikipedia therefore the resources he might have access to, Wikia Search stands at good chances to survive against any serious competition by Google.

NosyJoe.com

NosyJoe is yet another great example of social search engine that employs intelligent tagging technologies and runs on a semantic platform.

NosyJoe is a social search engine that relies on you to sniff for and submit the web’s interesting content and offers basically meaningful search results in the form of readable complete sentences and smart tags. NosyJoe is built upon the fundamental belief people are better than robots in finding the interesting, important and quality content around Web. Rather than crawling the entire Web building a massive index of information, which aside being an enormous technological task, requires huge amount of resources and is time consuming process would also load lots of unnecessary information people don’t want, NosyJoe is focused just on those parts of the Web people think are important and find interesting enough to submit and share with others.

NosyJoe is a hybrid of a social search engine that relies on you to sniff for and submit the web’s interesting content, an intelligent content tagging engine on the back end and a basic semantic platform on its web visible part. NosyJoe then applies a semantic based textual analysis and intelligently extracts the meaningful structures like sentences, phrases, words and names from the content in order to make it just one idea more meaningfully searchable. This helps us present the search results in basically meaningful formats like readable complete sentences and smart phrasal, word and name tags.

The information is then clustered and published across the NosyJoe’s platform into contextual channels, time and source categories and semantic phrasal, name and word tags are also applied to meaningfully connect them together, which makes even the smallest content component web visible, indexable and findable. At the end a set of algorithms and user patterns are applied to further rank, organize and share the information.

From our quick tests on the site the search results returned were presented in form of meaningful sentences and semantic phrasal tags (as an option), which turns their search results into — something we have never seen on web so far — neat content components, readable and easily understandable sentences, unlike what we are all used to, some excerpts from the content where the keyword is found in. When compared to other search engines’ results NosyJoe.com’s SERPs appear truly meaningful.

As of today, and just 6 or 7 months since they went online, NosyJoe is already having more than 500,000 semantic tags created that connect tens of thousands of meaningful sentences across their platform.

We have no information as to who stays behind NosyJoe but the project seems very serious and promising in many aspects from how they gather the information to how they present the results to the way they offset low quality results. From all newcomers social search engines NosyJoe stands at best changes to make it. As far as we know NosyJoe is also based in the Silicon Valley. 

Sproose

Sproose says it is developing search technology that lets users obtain personalized results, which can be shared among a social network, using the Nutch open-source search engine, and building applications on top. Their search appears to using third party search feeds and ranks the results based on the users’ votes.

Sproose is said it has raised nearly $1 million in seed funding. It is based in Danville, a town on the east side of the SF Bay Area. Sproose said Roger Smith, founder, former president and chief executive at Silicon Valley Bank, was one of the angel investors, and is joining Sproose’s board.

Other start-up search engines of great variety are listed below:

  • Hakia – Relies on natural language processing. These guys are also experimenting with social elements with the feature so called “meet others who asked the same query“.
  • Quintura – A visual engine based today in Virginia, US. The company is founded by Russians and has early been headquartered in Moscow. 
  • Mahalo – search engine that looks more like a directory with quality content handpicked by editors. Jason Calacanis is the founder of the company.
  • ChaCha – Real humans try to help you in your quest for information, via chat. The company is based in Indiana and has been criticized a lot by the Silicon Valley’s IT community. Despite these critics they have recently raised $10m in Series A round of funding. 
  • Powerset – Still in closed beta and also relying on understanding the natural language. See our Powerset review.  
  • Clusty – founded in 2000 by three Carnegie Mellon University scientists.
  • Lexxe – Sydney based engine featuring natural language processing technologies.
  • Accoona – The company has recently filed for an IPO in US planning to raise $80M from the public.
  • Squidoo – It has been started in October 2005 by Seth Godin and looks more like a wiki site, ala Wikia or Wikipedia where anyone creates articles on different topics.
  • Spock – Focuses on people information, people search engine.

One thing is for sure today; Google is now bringing solid credentials to and is somehow legitimating the social search approach, which by the way is helping those so many smaller so-called social search engines. 

Perhaps it is about time for consolidation in the social search sector. Some of the smaller but more promising social search engines can now become one in order to be able to compete with and prevent Google’s dominance within the social search sector too, just like what they did with the algorithmic search engines. Is Google also interested in? Anyone heard of recent interest in or already closed acquisition deals for start-up social search engines?

On the contrary, more and more IT experts, evangelists and web professionals agree on the fact that taking Google down is a challenge that will most likely be accomplished by a concept that is anything else but not a search engine in our traditional understanding. Such concepts, including but not limited to, are Wikipedia, Del.icio.us and LinkedWords. In other words finding information on web doesn’t necessarily mean to search for it.

Via:
[ http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html ]
[ http://www.blueverse.com/2007/12/01/google-the-social-…]
[ http://www.adesblog.com/2007/11/30/google-experimenting-social… ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/straight-out-of-left-field-google-experimenting-with-digg-style-voting-on-search-results ]
[ http://www.blogforward.com/money/2007/11/29/google… ]
[ http://nextnetnews.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-nosyjoecom-… ]
[ http://www.newsweek.com/id/62254/page/1 ]
[ http://altsearchengines.com/2007/10/05/the-top-10-stealth-… ]
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/…  ]
[ http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05… ]
[ http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia ]
[ http://nosyjoe.com/about.com ]
[ http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/11/08/sproose_up_your… ]
[ http://nextnetnews.blogspot.com/2007/10/quest-for-3rd-generation… ]
[ http://www.sproose.com ]