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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

LiveStation Readying Multi-Station Client

The Microsoft/ Skinkers P2P live television streaming LiveStation project demonstrated a multi-channel client at the IBC conference earlier in September.

Although not currently available for general testing, the demonstration proved that a product that streams one channel really well can actually scale over multiple content streams.

The Silverlight powered client competes with other P2P live television products including Zattoo. See our previous coverage here for an overview of the various operators in this space. As Skinkers CEO Matteo Berlucchi notes in the video below, LiveStation does not compete with Joost; this is a product that streams live TV and does not do video on demand.

The following video comes from James Clarke.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Will Kosmix’s Plan To Take Vertical Search Horizontal Go Flat?

Kosmix is a vertical search engine that launched in 2006. They also raised a heap of cash - over $25 million from Accel, Lightspeed and Cambrian Ventures as well as private investors including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Bill Miller of Legg Mason Funds.

Although Kosmix founders Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan might have gone to school with Sergey Brin, their goal isn’t to take on Google. In a bit of a reshuffle since they first launched search engine, Kosmix is now wants to use their search engine to create a “Home Page for Every Topic”. Their strategy is to create a series of targeted topic pages with relevant links, groups, and media. The pages are not only easily indexable by Google, but can easily generate new pages around a topic by typing a phrase into their search engine. It seems part Mahalo, part vertical search engine. Their first such vertical, health search, has been up for some time and currently does around 2.5 million visits and 9 million searches a month. “Neti Pot Facts” is one example of a search in which Kosmix has gained ranking.

They have been working on other verticals as well, listing autos, politics, finance, travel, and video games as their other categories. The hope is to scale to ever more verticals and then bind them together under one search box that picks the right vertical for the page.

Kosmix can continue to expand because they believe their method of search by category is sufficiently scalable. To add a new category, they’ll simply train the algorithm a bit, then let it to crawl the web on its own. Their category based search differs from Google’s popularity based page rank system by siloing websites into categories, then running searches within those categories. Pages are ranked based on how relevant their linking pages are as well.

However, as Kosmix moves horizontally they are placed in competition with a host of new vertical search engines like MedStory and Healthline for Health or Kayak and TripAdvisor for travel. That’s not including the knowledge databases such as Wikipedia and Mayo Health clinic, which high quality edited content. These verticals also offer specialized features such as maps, price comparisons, and symptom search. All things considered it seems a tough road ahead.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Google Street View Adds Four Cities

Google continues to add cities to its Street View maps product that launched earlier this year. You can now view and stroll through high quality photos of most of the downtown areas of San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando. Nine cities are now covered - click on the camera icons to dive into the city and see it.

Microsoft is working on competing products, but they are not as elegant or easy to use. See our coverage of Street Side and Virtual Earth 3D.

Monday, March 5, 2007