Posts Tagged ‘discovery’
All posts tagged discovery.
Back in the old days – or the ’90s as some call them – we utilized the Internet as an information resource. What’s that phone number, where is that address, where can I buy that product – you had concrete questions and were no longer required to speak to a human to get answers. Sure, there were bulletin boards and Usenet forums for discussion but they primarily involved coding arguments and game walkthroughs. The Internet wasn’t truly upended into a community, and all that that entails, until just a couple of years ago. It was then that the inundation of bloggers collided with social networking and lifestreaming to produce a perfect storm of content. (And when I say lifestreaming, I mean the trend of putting as many pieces of our life online as possible – books we’re reading, music we like, etc.) We’ve now backed ourselves into a corner online, raging against the indundation of content even as we scroll through our fifth page of FriendFeed updates. We recommend well-written articles about navigating through the noise, right after sharing 25 items in Google Reader.
The logical next step in this technological journey is to therefore prune, to make our time online more meaningful and relevent, no matter how small the nugget of information. Whether I’m setting out to qualify findings in a drug discovery experiment or wondering when Amy Winehouse was last arrested, I want the most reliable, relevant answer in the shortest amount of time. The problem is no longer whether the information is out there but rather how we can get to it quickly and accurately.
It’s against this background that I’m seeing a gradual evolution of the semantic search market. Read the rest of this entry »
I met with Songkick at SXSW, a Y Combinator startup that aims to bring live music to the masses. The London-based company is announcing some exciting new features next week (I call it “music semantics”) but for now, I’ll share what interests me about its current offerings.
CEO Ian Hogarth wants to “change the way people think about their Friday nights.” His reasoning is simple: when consumers want to see a movie, they do a quick check on Fandango or Moviefone and head out. Going to a concert just isn’t as easy. Even following the tour dates of mainstream artists is a headache, with listings and ticket sales scattered far and wide online. Songkick scrapes all those sites for you, grabbing venue and ticket info from major ticket hubs, as well as MySpace pages and music blogs. Users have a one-stop-shop for band listings, in addition to an instant price comparison list of competing vendors.
That’s all well and good for music lovers but what I really like about Songkick is its intent to appeal to the mass consumer. Through several innovative tools, the company wants to create more music lovers out of its audience. The Songkicker plug-in for iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player scans users’ music catalogs and lets them know of artists in their library playing nearby. Bandsense is a distributed ad platform that recommends area bands based on your IP address (check it out at www.missingtoof.com). And Battle of the Bands is a fun little app that combines MySpace data, blog mentions and Amazon sales to produce an Alexa-like ranking chart for bands.
Throughout our conversation, I kept attempting to bring Ian back to the technology; how recommendation and discovery are a hot market sector and that his algorithms could possibly be applied to other areas. But he would have none of it. Songkick isn’t interested in boasting about the brilliance of its technology. They’re singularly focused on using that technology to make live music more approachable to the general public. It’s a refreshing attitude to encounter in a startup and bodes well for the company’s future success. With most companies in tech today, considerable force is usually necessary to make them keep end-users top-of-mind. Songkick has been there from the start.
I first talked with Surf Canyon in 2007 and, in a profile for The Guidewire Report, took a wait-and-see approach to the company’s search technology. Delivering personalized, refined results to searchers via its Web site, Surf Canyon chose to focus on result customization rather than building an index from scratch. At the time, I wondered why another entrant was needed in search and posited that more differentiation was needed to make the service stand out. With today’s launch of its Discovery Engine for Search, Surf Canyon delivers that differentiation.
A browser plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer, the Discovery Engine has two things going for it: no new behavior is required from the user and no additional sites need be visited. I’ve been using the plug-in for several weeks now and have quickly grown to love it. It’s one of my favorite types of technology – I downloaded it and forgot about it until it made my life easier. When I search for something on Google, click a link and find it’s not what I need, hitting the back button activates Surf Canyon. It notes the link I clicked on and drills further down into the results to deliver similar results. Alternatively, you can click on the bulls-eyes next to each result to drill down without clicking through a link. I recently searched for the phrase “semantic investments.” Clicking on a link that interested me returned a related result from page 16 of the Google results – one I never would have seen without Surf Canyon.
It’s so simple and works so well that I wonder how much of a buzz it will raise in the search world. There are no tech stars behind it, no semantic appellations, no promises to change the world or defeat Google. Just an easy-to-use service on the front and complex algorithms on the back that make my existing search habits much more productive.
