Ask.com and other challengers hope to pull share from Google with new search methods, but it won’t be easy to unseat the market leader.
From BusinessWeek
Archive for October 5th, 2006
TagLoops: Remixable Web Movies Made Out of Tags and Feeds
TagLoops is an alpha stage Flash “movie” creation tool built by Greek IT consultant Harry Vikatos. Movies are built by pointing to images, audio or RSS feeds hosted elsewhere. Those items are tagged inside TagLoop where they can be reordered and layered over each other. The end result is a multi layered multimedia Flash movie. Those movies can also be remixed by other TagLoop users. It’s really interesting to me that TagLoops works with things as ephemeral as tags, feeds and URLs and ends up letting users create a tangible multimedia presentation.
Just like the application SlideShare, TagLoops is a relatively easy way to make a very rich online presentation. Neither of these work with video yet, but TagLoops aims to.
From Techcrunch
Introducing SlideShare: Power Point + YouTube
SlideShare is a new service launched this morning that lets users upload PowerPoint or Open Office presentationi files and share them online through a You Tube-like interface.
Power Point documents (or any office documents) stored on the web with a permanent URL are a valuable resource. No need to email the file to recipients, or carry a copy around on a USB drive. The presentation can easily be shared (and with permission controls, kept relatively secure).
The potential uses of online Power Point documents are numerous - from making sales pitches, lectures and conference presentations much easier, to having a permanent record of these and other presentations available on the Internet for easy access and reference.
Today, WebEx and its competitors fill some of the market demand for remote presentations, but they do not provide for online storage and archiving. We’ve covered two startups in the remote presentation space, DimDim and TeamSlide.
Online Power Point/Presentation solutions are also tackling this problem, from a different direction. They provide basic tools for creating presentations (and sometimes allow uploading of Power Point files). They also place a permanent URL on the file and allow archiving and sharing. See our profiles on Zoho Show, Empressr and Thumbstacks.
A problem, though, with the online presentation services is that the tools for creating presentations are difficult to develop within the limitations of Flash and/or Ajax. In our reviews, we’ve seen a lot of development effort go into producing these tools, which still fall short of what’s available from desktop software. Less attention is given to the actual presentation interface, and as a result those products are, so far, less than perfect.
SlideShare seems like a perfect solution, at least until online tools like Zoho rival the desktop applications.
There are a number of limitations on the service. Files cannot be larger than 20 MB, there are no sharing or privacy options, and the original presentations cannot be downloaded by the publisher or by viewers. Also you cannot edit a file online once it has been uploaded.
On the plus side: Files can be tagged, and comments left by viewers. Each slide has its own permanent URL for reference.
From Techcrunch
technorati tags:Slideshare, Online, Presentation, Upload
Amie Street Takes Innovative Music Model Into Beta
DRM-free music marketplace Amie Street announced its beta launch this morning. Songs uploaded by artists fluctuate in price according to demand over time. Users get recommendation tokens for each dollar they put into the system and get free credits if the songs they recommend rise in price. Artists receive 70% of sales proceeds. The company is angel funded, with one of the most notable angels being Robin Richards of MP3.com fame.
Today marks Amie Street’s official public launch as well as a site redesign. The design is still a bit rough, but some new features have been added and there is better Mac support for the interface. The new site allows advanced searching, a pop-up music player allowing users to listen to playlists of sample tracks, and Meebome accounts for real-time-chat in artist stores. Since we covered the company in July, their user base has increased to around 4,000 users. They have had a couple hundred artists participating in the alpha selling around 2,100 songs.
Amie Street isn’t the only company experimenting with freedom from DRM and changing price structures. See also the crowdsourced music production of Sellaband, the free listening with heavy DRM of SpiralFrog, the 77 cent tracks with DRM and 88 cent versions without from PayPlay.fm and the feature rich (plus newly funded) music browser Songbird. Music distribution is something that obviously needs some serious reworking. DRM faces growing criticism, music prices are too high and the ease of online distribution is making it clear that major labels (instead of the artists) are taking too much of the money we spend on music.
From Techcrunch
Competitio.us: track your competitors online
Competitio.us is a very useful looking competitive intelligence service built in Ruby on Rails that launched today. It’s a simple but powerful way to keep track of competing companies online. This is something that I think many of our readers, at least the ones working on startups, could find very helpful. The service is currently free but there are obviously any number of ways it could be monetized.
The basic idea is that it’s a tool for web startup teams to keep track of their competitors. You start by creating a project like “Ajax startpages” or whatever field you are interested in. You then add competitors by home page URL. Competitio.us hits the web and brings back each company’s blog, recent blog posts, related blog posts from off site and detailed traffic data from Alexa.
Each competitor page has an Ajax drop down to build a feature list. When one competitor on a project has a feature added, a check box for that feature is added to all the other competitors’ pages. You can then view all of the competitors and features in a full page matrix.
Blog posts are displayed (via the Google Ajax Search API) on the same page as each company’s information and can be sent to the clippings section with one click. When you add something to clippings you’re asked for comments and whether you want to email the clipping to the rest of your team.
There’s also a browser bookmarklet for adding news to clippings from off site. That bookmarklet brings up fields for related project, competitors and comments.
All of these clippings from a team of users can be subscribed to through a secure RSS feed. Any number of enterprise social bookmarking services are slowly emerging but this single feature in a relatively lightweight service makes it really valuable.
A team can work on any number of projects, each with different permission levels for individual users. Recent activity is listed on the sidebar so you can quickly check in on the newest discussion about your competitors in one place.
From Techcrunch
technorati tags:Competition, RSS, Ajax
I haven’t seen a demo of upcoming search engine Powerset yet, but reportedly many people who have are impressed, saying they’d never use Google again.
Powerset wants to let people use natural language when searching, including some words that search engines ignore today (what founder Barney Pell calls “stopwords“).
But Pell lays out a convincing argument that natural language search is important in order to communicate meaning and intent. He uses example searches to make his point - “book for children”, “book by children”, and “book about children” are all equivalent to “book children” to search engines today. His core argument is that there may be no way for us to properly express the query “books by children” without using natural language.
Powerset is looking for big money to launch their new engine. Venture capitalists are always the best source of rumors (the best time to hit them up for information is right after they’ve passed on a deal, or have lost it to another firm). If they don’t have a financial interest in the company, loose lips abound. With respect to Powerset, the rumors are that the company is trying to raise $10 million on a $20 million pre-money valuation. That’s a lot of money, but if Powerset pulls a Google, no one will care.
From Techcrunch
