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Category: Web/Tech (Page 18 of 21)

Eurekster: With Passive Collaboration, Who Needs Tagging?

One of the past firms that launched at PC Forum and was in attendance at this year’s event was Eurekster, a Web 2.0 search personalization company. This company debuted two years previous at the 2004 PC Forum. I sat down with CEO Steve Marder to get an update on what’s been happening lately with the company. Marder recounted how, in November 2005, his company introduced “Swickis,” which are community-powered search engines for personal and small-business websites. (Search + wicki = swicki.) He described that launch as a “self-service beta.” [Prior to PC Forum, I had actually taken Eureksterlogo advantage of that service and created a swicki for my own blog, which I set up and took live in about 15 minutes. You can see it at the right, complete with what’s called the “buzz cloud” within the widget itself.] In its announcement, Eurekster said publishers are invited to create their own swickis, free of charge, with the Eurekster SwickiBuilder here, and “can opt to share in the search-related advertising revenue, a feature that will be available soon.” Harder told me some 5000 blogs have signed up so far and set up a swicki.

Marder continued: “We operate on the ASP model. And it’s easy to integrate our look-and-feel into your site.” He said he and his co-founder, Grant Ryan, Ph.D., who is based in New Zealand, had previously cofounded another technology company, which was focused in enterprise search. That firm is SLI Systems, which Marder said is profitable, and both he and Ryan continue to serve on that firm’s board.

“Eurekster is all about the end user,” said Marder. “Our engine learns from your community. We enable personal networks.”

But, in addition to targeting “the rest of the Web,” as Marder put it, with the swicki concept (meaning the smaller sites), Eurekster also has an offering called SearchPublisher, which is an enterprise-level platform for delivering a highly customized, branded search feature on large web sites. Customers include such companies as Bolt, Gartner, Friendster, Hollywood.com, Community Connect, and Locker Gnome. Eurekster also announced, on the first of day of PC Forum, that Popular Science, the world’s largest science and technology magazine, had integrated Eurekster’s SearchPublisher community search platform into its website, PopSci.com. That site is a destination for readers interested in the latest developments in science and technology, including cars, electronics, communications, tools, space and aviation, among other topics.

“We allow passive collaboration, with no tagging. It’s the concept of ‘auto-tagging’,” said Marder. “Your users are communicating with you via search.” He said Eurekster gives the publisher control. “Small or large, they have community. We harness the collective intelligence of that community, while leveraging the expertise of the publisher.”

Eurekster is a privately held firm based in San Francisco and currently has 20 employees, with R&D based in New Zealand. It received angel backing in December 2004. What’s on tap for the company? Marder had this heads-up for me: “Monetization is coming next.”

PC Forum: Illumio Puts Social Networking to Work

I had a chance to sit down with David Gilmour, CEO of Tacit Software, Palo Alto, on Sunday afternoon, before PC Forum really got going, to learn a little about a new web service he would be debuting later at the event, called “Illumio.” I think it was the coolest stealth company to come out at PC Forum (actually, Illumio is not a company, but a project within an existing company). Tacit, founded in 1997, produces software to enable collaboration among employees in large enterprises. For a refresher on what the term “tacit knowledge” means, see this Wikipedia page. Customers include Lockheed Martin, Morgan Stanley, Northrop Grumman, and the U.S. Government, and its partners are IBM, SAIC, and Sun. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Woodside Fund, RBC Technology Ventures, Alta Partners, Reuters Venture Capital, and In-Q-Tel. Gilmour described Illumio as “a Web 2.0 way to extend Tacit software” What it will do (a public beta starts soon, per the signup at www.illumio.com) is allow any individual to search their network of colleagues, and tap into their knowledge for “what they know, what they have, and who they know.” Tacit’s patented software technology continuously processes e-mail, documents, and other business communications and automatically discovers each employee’s work focus, expertise, and business relationships.

The Illumio project started, said Gilmour, as a way to get smaller companies to take advantage of Tacit’s software technology — that is, customers that couldn’t afford either the cost or the time for a full software deployment, which can takes months. The Illumio version of the software, a web service, will be free initially, Gimour said. “Tacit and Illumio are more about collaboration as opposed to knowledge management. It’s what we call ‘massively federated desktop search’,” Gilmour explained. “We enable you to search your colleagues, and interact in new ways.” Later, in the company presentations session 031306tacit on Monday afternoon, CEO Gilmour spoke of the ready market for Illumio: “There will be something like 50 million desktop search engines by the end of 2006, and there will be zero PCs without desktop search after the next OS generation.” He said his company’s Illumio technology now supports Google and MSN desktop search, and others will follow. It searches files, documents, email, contacts, favorites, browser cache, appointments, and more. He allowed, however, that a problem with desktop search is privacy. “The market is hyper-sensitive about that,” and he said his company works hard on it.

The Illumio web service “gets you information you can’t find anywhere else,” said Gilmour. He explained that, once the service is ready for public beta (still not as of today), it will be a 2.5 Mb download (Windows only at first), which then sits on top of your desktop search engine. “The service doesn’t know who matches a request until someone opts in to the request,” he said. Illumio has an IM-like feature, and no peer-to-peer connection. “Everything is done through SOAP on the server, with tiny XML documents.”

Gilmour gave some examples of how the Illumio service would work. The first was a “Document Request.” For example, “Who has the latest Gartner presentation on social networking”? A message would pop up on the desktop of your network connections as a small window, said Gilmour, and the receiver does not have to search through his disk. “There’s even a time estimate displayed for you on how long all the contacts’ computers will take to respond to the request,” he said.

Another example he gave was a request called “Get an Answer.” Gilmour said this is handled by the declining Dutch auction method, in which “the bar will be lowered if there’s no answer, till one comes in.” Another type of request, which uses the software’s “Personal Groups” feature, allows one to search for someone that knows a certain person. For example, he said — in the case of “Who knows Esther?” — the software would search for who did the most email with her.

The company’s vision with Illumio is “How can social networks be put to use for people,” said Gilmour. “It lets you search your friends and colleagues for what they alone can offer you. And, when you have something they want, it puts you in control of that and ensures your privacy.” The web service will also have a feature called “Shared Illumio Groups,” which a user will be able to set up at the Illumio site, and these can be either “Public” or “Managed.”

Audience questions afterwards (it was a well attended and attentive session) included the following. Q: How will you stop scurilous uses? A: We’re very concerned. We don’t know yet, and will write the rules as we need them. Q: Will you partner with commerce sites? A: There is the possibility of buying and selling things with this technology. Q: What about competitors? A: Others that have tried to do something similar have required the user to write their own profile, but that’s not a reliable technique.

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Blogland Goes Wild: Google Buys Writely

In a shot across the bow of Microsoft, Google announced yesterday it acquired Upstartle LLC, developers of the web word-processing application Writely. The announcement was first posted on the Official Google Blog, and soon hundreds more blog posts came online — as you can see when you search the topic at the Google Blog Search page. Who says three people and an idea can’t make a difference these days? I guess it’s just more proof this Web 2.0/AJAX world is for real, folks.

Read more about it on the Writely blog, and at the independent Inside Google blog. There’s also much media analysis of this one coming inline. Here are two, from Information Week and CBR Online. This one is definitely a shot heard ’round the Web 2.0 world….

Meg Whitman Called: She Wants to Know What’s All This About Someone Killing Her Company

One word: Edgeio…or should I say EdgeIO…or edgeIO…or is it edgeio? [Seems to be upper and lowercase challenged.] But it’s all the rage in the blog-o-spherical world lately because somebody said it’s an “Ebay Killer.” No wonder Michael Arrington (the TechCrunch guy) didn’t return my email — he’s been, uh, a little busy lately? And no wonder he didn’t sit in on the presentations at DEMO, but just hung out in the press room. Now we know why! He’s hyping his new play, teamed up with old buddy Keith Teare from RealNames. You’ll remember that as a Web 1.0 company that was going to change everything, but … didn’t … quite … make … it.

Lots of talk out there about this one, and why or why not it will be the next big thing. Whatever, it’s really early-on at this point…. Though they plan to pitch the company formally at one of the next big, buzzy conferences: Esther Dyson’s PC Forum next month at LaCosta (Carlsbad, CA).

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