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.

ICCARUS: Three Dimensional Data Visualization

ICCARUS is a new service created by social music and video recommendations startup Scouta. It creates a three dimensional visualization of the data behind a social networking or related website. ICCARUS also shows the social network between members, the memberships of groups, and the links between members and the content they enjoy. Navigate by clicking on points of interest, or searched using commands. Results are dynamic and are delivered in real time, providing an instant visual representation of the given network

The data is fetched via TurboGears and uses the GFX library to create the visual effects.

ICCARUS was launched Wednesday at Webjam Perth and won first place from a field of around 15 demonstrating startups. I spoke with Scouta CEO Richard Giles at the WA Web Awards Friday and he told me that the feedback on ICCARUS had been strong. Scouta plans on further refining ICCARUS with a possibility of providing the service to the public either later this year or early 2008.

The screencast above doesn’t do the service full justice, but it’s enough to give some idea of what it is capable of.

Eventbee: AdSense for Events Has Busy Plans

Eventbee an event management startup out of Sunnyvale, CA has been a busy little bee lately. They are rumoured to be launching two Facebook apps (one for event registration and one for event recommendation) in the next week or so (who isn’t?). They are also developing a channel on Ustream.tv to cover local events. The company provides a great package of event management tools including online registration, email marketing (souped-up spam) and online event promotion.

Their online event promotion tools include a nifty service called Event Network Listing that can only be described as “AdSense for events.” The service lets event planners for a fee list an event on any site or blog in Eventbee’s growing partner network. The partner network consists of sites and blogs that have AdSense-like code embedded on their sites. This allows for highly targeted and controlled event promotion. You can see Eventbee’s network event listings in action on Rajesh Setty’s LifeBeyondCode.

Eventbee partners get paid in two ways. First, they get an initial listing fee for each new listing that they get to set in advance. Second, when event ticket purchases are initiated from their site they receive a commission. The commission amount is set in advance by the event planner. Eventbee keeps 29% of the total earnings partners make.

Event planners can create customizable event pages on Eventbee’s site just like you can with Eventbrite (see our Eventbrite TC20 page here). Tickets sold from event pages start with fees as low as 1.45% of ticket price, plus a minimum fee of $0.25. RegOnline and Acteva also offer online event registration.

Eventbee’s glorified spam, I mean, email marketing service is tightly integrated with their online registration. You can create beautifully designed emails by importing HTML code or using their WYSIWYG editor. The service allows you to track bounced emails, opened emails and online registration URL click-throughs.

They currently have over 6,000 event managers. They are self-funded with CEO Bala Musrif claiming to be profitable since 2005 with no plans for raising money.

NoSo - Backlash Against Our “Always On” Culture

“Meet no friends, attend no events and make no connections.”

NoSo, short for No Social, is more of an art project and cultural backlash than an actual startup. You join, get a user number (everything is anonymous) and then create and/or join “NoSo’s,” which are held wherever the organizer chooses to have it: parks, cafes, street corners and other public places.

Other users come, but people “meet without meeting.” Users arrive alone, unplugged and aren’t allowed talk to anyone, presumably taking comfort in the fact that other NoSo users are there sharing their experience. “Allow the NoSo experience to envelope you,” the site suggests. The video on the home page of the site describes the other details. A sample event is here.

It’s an obvious play on Flash Mobs, although, of course, without publicity.

This also appears to be a semi-serious endeavor.. The NoSo founders (Artists Christina Ray and Kurt Bigenho) were interviewed by 10ZenMonkeys:

We invite people to take a break from their every day experiences carrying around laptops and cellphones, and give them the chance to just disengage from the noise, the social network, the constant communication that’s going on around us all the time. We let them just experience the absence of that — the feeling of being without all those distractions. And a NoSo could happen in a number of different places. It could happen on a street corner, or in a cafe, or in an installation in a gallery setting.

iPod v. The Insulin Pump: Adaptive Path Rises To The Challenge

When I wrote about Amy Tenderich’s call for someone to design a better Insulin pump, perhaps by taking inspiration from the iPod, I didn’t really think anyone would actually do it. This certainly wouldn’t be an attractive market for Apple, and there are only so many design firms out there who would be willing and able to dedicate time to the project without being paid.

But I was wrong. Almost immediately San Francisco based Adaptive Path met with Amy and decided to spend time trying to design a more attractive Insulin Pump. They’ve now completed the initial design work and have been writing about it on their blog. Amy also followed up today with a long post describing the project. A video overview is below.

Breaking: Veoh Sues Universal Music

Perhaps new Veoh CEO Steve Mitgang is the kind of guy you don’t want to try to intimidate. He just called me to say that Universal Music made one too many threats to sue his company. To protect themselves, they are suing Universal Music in federal court and seeking what is known as a declaratory injunction to bar Universal from taking legal action.

Given that the lawsuits tend to flow one way against the video startups, this is a major surprise.

In the press release, Veoh says they acted based on “unreasonable threats” from Universal and filed the lawsuit under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. In a phone call a few minutes ago, Mitgang told me that the two companies met recently, and that Universal made it clear that they would be suing Veoh for copyright infringement in the near future. These kinds of threats are not idle - Universal tends to follow up with actual lawsuits.

When a company feels that a lawsuit is imminent, they can strike first to head it off. Since Veoh feels it has protection under the DMCA for its business model, they are striking first.

Mitgang also mentioned to me that Universal Music has never sent them a DMCA take down notice of any kind. He says that they would have complied immediately.

Email Attachments Are So Uncool

Online office suite Zoho released another product tonight, called Zoho Viewer. It is similar to Scribd (and the upcoming Docstoc) - upload an office or PDF document for easy viewing on Zoho’s website or embedded into other web pages.

Zoho Viewer is different than Scribd, though. With Scribd, documents are public by default (there is a private option). Zoho isn’t looking to create a community around documents like Scribd does. All documents are private and you must know the URL to view them. They are not listed in any directory or searcheable. So it is useful primarily to quickly upload email attachments and other documents you want to share with a few people but not the whole world. Viewers can also quickly download the document in its original format.

See the video below for an overview of Zoho Viewer. As an aside, I really like Viddler, which Zoho used to host the video. The quality is a lot better than YouTube and the player is very well done.

Powerset Releases Growth Models To Public

New natural language search engine Powerset, still in pre-launch stealth mode, has had a ridiculous amount of press this year. And while some have said there is too much hype around this company (even me), you have to give them some credit. They are certainly open with their plans, and willing to experiment with new ideas.

An example: they announced Powerlabs, a sandbox for users to suggest and give feedback on future Powerset features. People who sign up for Powerlabs are also promised early news, at least an hour before it is posted on the Powerset blog.

Another example: In May Powerset COO Steve Newcomb talked about how the company was predicting future growth, and posted data on their model on the company blog. When readers bravely requested that Powerset release the model itself, Newcomb complied, saying it would be made available this summer. In a post on his personal blog he said the reason for sharing the models was to show that the company intends to be open and give users unfettered access to information:

As I mentioned before, opening up our modeling techniques is part of a larger goal to begin the process of changing our image of a secretive stealth startup to a completely open company that gives you unfettered access to our product(s), the ability to help us design them and to provide insight into the way we think inside of Powerset.

Today, Powerset published the first in a series of models, with a Flash interface. Company-specific baseline assumptions have been removed or altered, but most of the industry assumptions remain intact.

Neal Mueller (Powerset Product Manager) walked me through the models and how they work. This first set helps a company that intends to index the web whether it is better to purchase, lease or create virtual servers on Amazon EC2. Assumptions about the size and refresh frequency of the index can be changed. Since the model is forward looking, it also makes assumptions about future server power and cost reductions from Moore’s Law.

All of the assumptions can be altered in the Flash interface, and the models can be embedded into other websites (although I could not get it to properly embed here).

Mueller says that at least two more dashboard models are coming - one for unique user forecasting and another one that they are not yet disclosing. The company is asking for feedback on the models, and will clearly take it seriously. Newcomb’s personal email is listed on the front page and he requests that feedback come directly to him.

Future Bazar Online.com

FutureBazarOnline.com started on January 2007.

It is the initiative to make available the products, items, updates and information on online shopping bazar and make it universally accessible online anytime, anywhere. Through its online operations it provides a worldwide and domestic service for shopping.