“Presidential hopeful John McCain asked the technology sector for help fighting “Islamic extremism” and global warming at a conference here on Wednesday.” The full story. “Fighting Islamic extremism”? How…?
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minekey CEO Delip Andra told me that minekey will help users find content they may find desirable by comparing their interests against populations of other users.
minekey algorithms then go to work returning links to relevant content. minekey, which had hoped to launch yesterday, is now shooting for tomorrow: we’re looking forward to it.
Another startup, Adaptive Blue, makes a contextual search plug-in for Mozilla called Blue Organizer which attempts a similar feat in the browser. Right clicking gives you a list of what may be similar content. minekey’s approach is different (and I’m not sure I can say what it is until launch). More info TK tomorrow, I hope.
BTW, we’re starting a context category on this blog in the very near future. I think context is fast becoming one of the most important issues in providing advanced web services, like discovery (the topic of a session this morning. Stay tuned…
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We had a great time at AlwaysOn’s Stanford Summit today. The event – which appears to be quite well attended – has a good mix of VCs, funded and yet-to-be-funded entrepreneurs. I was busy in the press room most of mid-morning, and many thanks to Indy Gill at UnWired Nation, Vipin Jain at Retrevo and Delip Andra at minekey for being my subjects as I dusted off rusty reporting skills.
Only disappointments have been that I planned to cover the John McCain session from gulker.com via the streaming Flash video feed, but interest is overwhelming AlwaysOn’s server(s). We’ll have to see if they put up an archived version this evening (though this wasn’t a major interest area for me, unless the Senator has some bombshell ideas about the Valley.)
I’m also unhappy that I can’t so far get my AMD machine up and running under a new (or old) Linux distro. I was hoping to do all the remote coverage via Linux and open source apps. My trusty Mac will have to suffice for both until I can get Mr. AMD to display some video. We may go back over tomorrow AM…
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Unwired Nation’s CEO Indy Gill spent some time explaining to me ‘the world’s first voice publishing platform.’ The service, being unveiled here at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, allows any business – ecommerce sites, news and information services, social networks, et al. to reach opt-in mobile users at no cost. Their medium is the over 200 million mobile phones in use in the U.S. alone.
Cell phones represent a huge untapped channel for companies to communicate with users. The big question is how do you do that without annoying or otherwise turning off the customer? UnWired Nation favors an opt-in technique: for example, its first product, UnWired Buyer for eBay calls opt-in bidders during the last 3 minutes of an auction allowing them to choose to bid or not at the crucial moment. Ads that ride along on the phone calls provide monetization for the platform. It will be very interesting to see if they can extend the concept to other users…
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From the Merc:
“The Federal Communications Commission set the rules Tuesday for the multibillion-dollar auction of a valuable swath of wireless airwaves, starting a process that could dramatically change how consumers access the Internet on wireless gadgets.
“In a 4-1 vote, the commission approved rules proposed by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin that require the winner of the auction to allow any device and any software application to run on the new network, a key victory for the technology industry.” This should allow Google and others to offer ubiquitous access and cool new services…
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Vipin Jain, CEO of Retrevo talked to me about his service. Retrevo’s goal is to be the primary information source for household electronics. Their goal is to build a large community who sees Retrevo as a trusted, impartial source that can answer their ‘help desk’ questions quickly.
One of Retrevo’s goals is to reduce the pain associated with information overload and irrelevancy, a common problem when trying to understand and evaluate tech products.
Vipin reasons such a trusted partner would then be a natural partner when consumers go to buy new goods – Retrevo provides reviews, ratings and prices – part of which revenue would then go to Retrevo. Interesting business proposition: a trust model…
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Bambi Francisco, CEO of Vator.tv, speaks to the topic of ‘discovery’ at an early morning Stanford Summit session. The assembled panel agreed that discovery – of media content that matches the tastes of users – was not just about algorithms: indeed there are dozens or hundreds of algorithms in the public domain, dating back to MIT’s FireFly of 15 years ago. Many music and video matching sites run dozens or hundreds of algorithms trying to find best matches. Discovery requires algorithms, a user base that provides the input and a compelling social interaction interface that knits it all together…
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