The Guidewire

Anyone with even a remote interest in the semantic space has likely experienced the same roller coaster I have regarding Powerset. When I first spoke with Barney Pell over a year ago, the semantic tech sector was an entirely different landscape. I was intrigued by my conversation with Barney and the short demo I saw of Powerset-enabled search. How nifty that the engine knows what I mean by “who did IBM acquire”! But as months went by, we didn’t hear much from Powerset, save a seemingly incongruous Labs announcement. And we heard much from other players in the space. The focus of the semantics community moved away from search to organization - making users’ Internet activity easier to manage - and answering the question of how to take semantics to the masses. Frankly, I had dismissed Powerset as an early mover in the space that had run out of steam. Boy was I wrong.

Powerset’s introduction today of its new Wikipedia search, which also integrates data from Freebase, could have a significant impact on the tech market overall, in that it changes the rules of the search game. Users who experience the incredibly deep, interactive, and intuitive nature of the Powerset search will be even more frustrated with the standard string of result pages delivered by traditional keyword search. Once you’ve dug into the meat of a Wikipedia article with just a couple of clicks, zeroing in on precise actions and entities and going directly to their citations in the article, paging through flat hyperlinks just ain’t going to cut it.

Powerset’s changing of the rules is evidenced by one key statement made by the company: a page of search results, no matter how targeted, is just the beginning of the effort required by the user. Once you’ve found relevant links, you still have to click through to new pages and scour the text for usable information. Powerset’s new way of searching attempts to do some of that work for you; with the scouring and drilling down already complete, you arrive at what you need much quicker.

The Outline feature of the Powerset search is a real gem and I expect will set a new standard for UI in search technology. Having a constant window beside the text as you browse provides an incredibly simple way to jump back and forth between concepts and facts. It could make the browser’s back button obsolete.

What I don’t love about the new search is that it’s currently only on Wikipedia. There are many searches I typed in that can’t take advantage of all this whiz-bang semantic technology. More nebulous concepts aren’t Wikipedia’s strong suit, so Powerset only returns standard results. Example: “Can Hillary win the democratic nomination” returned relevant results but no Wikipedia entry to plumb. So my big “if” with this announcement is whether Powerset can pursue a successful content partnership strategy. If the right publishers, and enough of them, integrate Powerset search into their sites, the long-anticipated threat to Google could finally take shape. No matter the long-term outcome, though, Powerset has raised the bar for search interaction and usability.

As I approached the tent where the Women 2.0 conference was about to start, I was struck by the string of prayer flags along the back wall.  That, as least, was what it looked like from a distance.   Up close, I realized that the organizers had strung up the entries -dozens of plans sketched out on standard dinner napkins — in the “Business Plan on a Napkin” competition.

Looking at these plans, up close and from a distance, and thinking about the aspirations of the women (and men) in the room and the ambitions of every entrepreneur I meet, I decided that these are prayer flags of a sort after all.

Here are some of the images I captured at yesterday’s event:

By the way, notice Christine Herron in one of the photos… now we know where First Round Capital finds its deals.

Those of us who are full - and sometimes egregious - participants in the social Web have quickly discovered that aggregation is vital in maintaining some sort of sanity. While there have been plenty of entrants in the aggregation space in recent months, the new Yoono add-on for Firefox is taking the sector in a new direction. By providing a consolidated stream of social services - FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter and others - along with chat, Web clipping, photos and videos, Yoono aims to provide an all-in-one tool for navigating one’s online life.

The UI is what initially piqued my excitement for Yoono. It’s simply the best I’ve seen. Simple-to-navigate widgets sit in an inconspicuous sidebar that opens only when you need it, small pop-up windows give informative snapshots of contacts and updates, all clicks open to a new tab, and photos and videos temporarily overlay the current Web page in a slick little feature I hadn’t seen before Yoono. The company has obviously put a large amount of effort and focus into design and it’s welcomed. At this stage of the social Web, it’s the type of UI we should start expecting from every product.

I have to be honest, though, and say that my enthusiasm waned slightly after a few days of putting Yoono through its paces. The app can drain a lot of memory and when you’re dealing with Vista, you need every little bit. (Macolytes, I don’t want to hear it.) I’ve also found myself drifting back to the FriendFeed page to read updates; the Yoono window just requires too much scrolling.

When I brought up that last complaint to Erica Lee, Yoono’s PR rep, she made a good point: Yoono isn’t intent on taking you away from regularly visited sites. The service instead wants to give you a one-stop dashboard, a more informative, simpler place from which to navigate. Perhaps then, the lifestream in the sidebar could be consolidated more, giving aggregated shots of FriendFeed activity, for instance. An aggregation of the aggregators, if you will. Stop me before I aggregate again.

My nits with Yoono, though, are just that - nits. Because I’m so impressed with what they’re attempting and the product they’ve designed, I’m even more demanding of perfection from it. Yoono is one step away from being a must-have product on my social Web list. With what I’ve seen of the team’s focus, responsiveness and overall aggregation philosophy, I imagine they’ll leap past my expectations rather quickly.

**We’ve been given 200 Yoono invite codes for interested Guidewire readers. Click here before they disappear.**

Carefully and deliberately over the past two years, Clipblast! has laid the foundation for a cross-Internet video distribution platform. First order, Clipbast! indexed video across the Web, aggregating video content no matter where it lives. Then, at DEMOfall 07, the company introduced its API and widget strategy that enabled other sites to easily incorporate Clipbast! indexes.

On both counts, Clipblast! has gained momentum in the market and today indexes some 1 million video clips each day.

Now, Clipblast! lays the keystone in the strategy with the introduction this week of Clipblast! Playbox. Playbox is, in effect, a universal content distribution platform that enables any video to be played from any site on any site. It’s best to think of Playbox as a conduit to video content, encapsulating an array of video players so that users can view video even if they’ve not downloaded a specific media player. The video itself, along with pre-, mid-, and post-roll advertisements and overlays are unchanged, allowing the originating video site to capture ad revenues as well as traffic data.

Clipblast! is working with content providers to enable them to the Playbox video distribution platform in their sites.

Clipblast! is a great example of the next phase of the Web (let’s not call it Web 3.0?) that is not so much about aggregating content and traffic as it is about distributing it. In this next wave, content providers needn’t build destination sites but will embrace syndication models that enable them to put their content in front of millions of users at thousands of sites across the Web.

This is a tough model for a lot of publishers to get their heads around in ad-based models, where audience is everything and the one who owns the platform reaps the ad revenue. Now, though, with the ability to target and embed ad messaging into content - as pre-, mid-, and post-roll video, for example, or within content widgets - the game is about taking content to the traffic, not attracting traffic to the content.

The idea is catching on slowly; I’m seeing a few massive content distribution/syndication models every week. In one instance, the company hasn’t even bothered to build its own consumer-facing Web site; it just wants to get its content onto everyone else’s sites. Makes for a massively scalable model.

In the future, sites like YouTube won’t be the center of the universe not because they’ve been displaced by other competitors, but because new competitors prove that the universe really has no center.

I’m headed to the Semantic Technology conference in a couple of weeks, primed to mingle with the top minds in what is arguably the most exciting sector in technology right now. I’ll be participating in a panel, “Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses,” that tackles a key issue around the semantic Web. How do we take semantics to the next level? How do we extricate ourselves from the convoluted morass of geek-speak to make semantic technology understandable and appealing to consumers?

We’ll dig deeper into the issue at SemTech but I think the broad answer is very simple: remove “semantics” from the equation. I tackled this issue a few months ago, making the point that

…the ultimate solution will likely evolve quietly, organically, behind the scenes of a seemingly run-of-the-mill software app. We’ll raise our heads from our keyboards one day and find that the words we’re typing have taken on a life of their own.

I was reminded of these words recently when I spoke with Semantra, a Texas company that enables employees to conversationally interact with business software. Founded by semantics pioneer Marvin Elder, Semantra allows users, techie and non-techie alike, to easily pull needed information from complex relational databases within an organization. Semantra believes that, while the analytics tools designed for businesses do the job quite nicely, the only people in a company who really know how to use them are in IT. Read the rest of this entry »

Video analytics is not a term that strikes excitement in the hearts of social media fanatics. It’s far too enmeshed in advertising lingo like “impressions” and “views” to appeal to the average Web 2.0 fan. But few among us can deny that ads fuel our beloved social tech economy. Further, I doubt many would object if our favorite sites and brands could find a more integrated, targeted and relevant method of ad delivery. In order to do this effectively, companies must turn to sophisticated measurement tools that deliver a deep level of insight about user habits and behavior.

The subject got a bit of attention this week when BrewPR’s Brooke Hammerling called for industry-wide standards in video analytics in a post for Silicon Alley Insider. She argued that terms such as “views” are too open to interpretation and manipulation. One commenter, Greg Stuart, former CEO of the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), parried back that the “view” term has been clearly defined - “at least as it’s defined for advertising” - by the IAB. The Washington Post weighed in on the topic yesterday, reiterating the lack of industry-wide standards. It’s also worth noting that advertisers are fickle bunch; they go where the results are. If there is no ability to measure results effectively, and no way to connect views with specific actions, then advertisers have no meaningful way to directly evaluate their online video ad spend. Thus, the huge opportunity in this space: not just for effective tools, but to define the terms of the competition.

We featured Visible Measures at DEMO 08, a company that interprets user behavior at significant intervals of viewing. As we said then, views - however you define them - are the easy part; understanding exactly how viewers interact with a video is a tougher nut to crack. With an average of 20-40 different events occurring during viewing, including rewinding, fast forwarding and the like, a rich field of user behavior would lie fallow without services like Visible Measures.

To evaluate effectively, you have to follow your users across all viewing platforms and mediums, which brings us to Divinity Metrics, a company whose product chases your video around the Web, delivering analytics on all occurrences of a video across the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »

I firmly believe you don’t find really great innovation by sitting at your desk and waiting for it to come to you. You’re not going to find it consistently by doing the Silicon Valley party circuit, either. You have to get out into the world and meet entrepeneurs where they live. And that’s just what we’re doing over the next several weeks as DEMO goes on the road.

We will be holding private meetings to evaluate potential demonstrators for our upcoming DEMOfall 08 conference. Meetings will be held in the following six cities:

• Seattle on Thursday, May 1st
• Boston on Tuesday, May 6th
• Providence on Wednesday, May 7th
• New York City on Thursday, May 8th
• Denver on Monday, May 12th
• Austin on Tuesday, May 13th

To request a meeting, please complete the Demonstrator application. Once we’ve had a chance to evaluate your application, we’ll be in touch with meeting locations and times.

During a few stops, we’ll be hosting drinks and conversation with DEMO veterans and newcomers alike. We invite you to attend and encourage you to bring along your closest colleagues and friends to experience the networking power and intelligent conversation surrounding the DEMO community. Space is very limited, so please click on the city link below for details and to RSVP:

• Seattle on May 1st
• Boston on May 6th
• Austin on May 13th

By the way, early bird registration is now open for DEMOfall 08 coming to San Diego on September 7-9, 2008. Registering now will save you $600.

Chris and I engaged in a lively discussion via Skype this morning regarding the merits of Rushmore Drive, a new search engine targeted to African-Americans. I heard about it from SheGeeks, who stated quite clearly how she feels about the service. Especially after hearing Rushmore Drive is under the same corporate umbrella as Ask.com, my immediate reaction was also one of dismissal and “what the hell are they thinking?” You may remember my own rant a couple of months ago about Ask’s development of a search engine targeted to suburban women in the Midwest. My point then - that the path to search success lies in broadening rather than narrowing your audience - holds true with Rushmore Drive. Assuming a group of people wants results from a limited pool denegrates the audience and simply doesn’t hold water.

Chris isn’t necessarily a fan of these sites either but she can’t help but put her experienced analyst hat on and deliver some opposing points. Her argument is that engines like Rushmore are serving a viable subset within a demographic that vehemently holds on to that demographic as their identity. There are enough of those subsets in any demographic to create a business; the question of how big that business is remains to be answered. She concluded by allowing that there are some issues she might turn to a women’s site over a general one, assuming they’ll have better information, i.e., health-related such as breast cancer, pregnancy, or menopause.

It’s easy to deliver emotional responses to such a model, as it’s inherently personal. That, after all, is the intended effect of the engines. Unable to differentiate algorithmically from the Google way of search, these companies are instead aiming to add a personal layer. If I can’t necessarily deliver a better search result to you, dear user, I’ll try appealing to your gut. Who are you and with whom do you identify? It’s a philosophical/psychological approach and it’s risky. To work effectively, the engine must excise some results and/or bring others to the fore. Who’s making that determination? Can one possibly write an algorithm to home in on female or African-American search results? I doubt it and I think that’s the point.

Technology should be blind to race, gender and creed. If you want to appeal to a demographic, create a destination site. Pack it to the hilt with what you think are appropriate links and material and let it be sourced by a general search engine. But the very nature of search is and should be egalitarian. Attempting to attract certain groups of people by rearranging their search results is, at best, touting a product for what it doesn’t do. And that to me, seems bad business.

What do you think?

Customer service. It’s a phrase that likely conjures up visions of… well, I’m not sure it conjures up anything for most people these days. It’s a dying philosophy in modern times, as we become more insular and removed from our communities. What’s the point of going the extra mile for someone when you’ll likely never come in contact with them again? Indeed, the only instances of excellent customer service that come to my mind are of stores and companies at which I’m a “regular.”

The concept is gaining more traction in blog circles lately, as companies attempt to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to better serve their customers. Sarah Perez recently focused on Twitter as a customer service tool on ReadWriteWeb and Cyndy Aleo-Carreira posted about some personal experiences, good and bad, with several companies. I myself have noticed a couple of new Twitter followers immediately following sign-ups in new betas recently. One amusing incident involved me tweeting “What the hell is Mergelab and what am I supposed to do with it?” only to receive a direct reply from the CEO 10 minutes later. Lesson: excising profanity will usually result in nicer-sounding tweets. Read the rest of this entry »