Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
During DEMOfall 06, we wrote about about
the Retrevo vertical search engine for electronics.
Retrevo is one of the more advanced vertical search engines, because it uses
sophisticated mining and crawling technologies. In terms of UI, their aim is to blur the
boundaries between a search engine and a portal. Instead of just giving you a list of
search results, Retrevo creates the feel of a specialized application which has a
semantic understanding of the electronics space.
Retrevo is a vertical search engine, so initially what you get is a search box. You can search for anything electronics related, for example Sony Digital Camera. The result is a portal-style page like this:
Retrevo results page
John Milan's latest article for Read/WriteWeb explores the evolving software environment, with particular focus on Microsoft and Google. The article gets us to thinking: is Google the latest manifestation of an Internet bubble, or is it really different this time?
Although comparing two different decades is a little dangerous, perhaps even silly, we can't help but ask:
Recently I
came across a new magazine that is delivered via the Web - and utilizes a lot of Web
native functionality in the process. It's called Avantoure and the tagline is "life is a game". The
contents of the magazine appeal to me, but in this post I'll focus mainly on the web
technologies being used.
To read each issue of Avantoure, you need to download a web app called Zinio Reader - a 4.4 MB download. Zinio in itself is an interesting next generation Web app. The Zinio homepage provides a variety of name brand magazines to read and/or subscribe to - such as BusinessWeek, Macworld, Premiere. The latest version of Zinio Reader also features rich media, such as the following features:
As a recent NY Times article noted, there is a trend for magazines to go digital - so they can attract students and young people to read them. The Web is of course one of the prime delivery mechanisms, but also web technologies such as hyperlinking and rich media UI elements are key to the user experience.
Via Geekzone comes news of a
3D shopping mall, called The Mall Plus, that has
just been released in New Zealand. After seeing this, memories of the mid to late 90's
came flooding back to me - a time when websites built on real world metaphors filled the
Web landscape. For example the very first ISP I used, back in the mid 90's, used a
virtual town as its metaphor (if I remember correctly). For further background about
those days, here is how I described it in an article Joshua Porter and I co-wrote a while
ago for Digital Web
Magazine:
"During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals."
So I have to admit it is surprising that the virtual shopping mall, as a concept, is alive and well in 2006. Lately we've heard that Boo.com, an infamous 3D shopping website of the late 90's, is making a comeback later this year. But one that has actually launched already is The Mall Plus, where users navigate a virtual shopping mall in a 3D environment. All of the shops are a part of the The Mall Plus, rather than being external sites. Geekzone quotes The Mall Plus CEO Nigel Kirkpatrick as saying it's "the next generation of retail, through a virtual environment".
Written by John Milan and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the first in a two-part series. Update: Part 2 is now available.
The most
insidious thing about global warming is that it's everywhere, but not right in front of
you. And really, it has more to do with things disappearing than appearing - things like
glaciers, ice shelves and low lying islands. The odd thing is that the progenitor of
global warming, the Industrial Revolution, was rooted in making things disappear as well.
For example, teams of horses became a steam engine or two.
Though not as pernicious as climatic change, the software environment - admittedly nowhere near as complex, but growing more convoluted every day - is tracking a similar course. Just as odd, the Information Revolution was also rooted in making things disappear. For instance, teams of typists became a shared printer or two. But now newspapers are shrinking, phone and cable companies are mutating and the distance between people is vanishing. In fact, just like the first scientists researching the rise in ocean temperatures, a group has recently been commissioned to study the ramifications of the web.
Revolutions have many components, including the seeds of their own destruction. Once the genie escapes from the bottle, he begins enforcing the Law of Unintended Consequences. Ask an industrialist in 1875 if his coal burning plant could change the earth's climate and he would have thought you're from another planet. Ask a venture capitalist a few years ago if operating system hegemony could become an albatross weighing a company down, hindering entry into new markets and emboldening competitors - and he or she would have thought the same.
An interesting update to our post earlier this week about fake Social Network user profiles, created for marketing purposes. A Flickr forum thread states that the Red Passion user (the one referenced in our post, representing a marketing campaign for a beverages company) has now been terminated. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield made this comment in the thread a few days ago:
"Actually, I had just come across this article on the account. We will probably be deleting the account, but I'm curious and this is FlickrIdeas: what do YOU think about it? "
There is some interesting debate after Stewart's comment - not dissimilar to the opinions voiced on R/WW, that Red Passion violates some ethical principles around social networks. But the upshot is that Flickr has now terminated the Red Passion account.
Hasta la vista baby!
Red Passion on Flickr earlier this week, pre-termination
Yahoo has announced an event around
Predictive Markets, called confab.yahoo. It's
described as an "open micro-conference series" and is being run by Yahoo!’s
Technology Development Group. The reason it caught my eye was this:
"We started confab.yahoo because we want to push the web and its applications up to the next level. After slightly more than a decade, we as an industry have only scratched the surface of the web’s potential. The opportunities are virtually infinite, and we aim to bring together the people that can inspire the next generation web."
The next generation web is what R/WW is all about, of course :-) The feature panel is one entitled 'Prediction Markets: Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds' and is being moderated by author James Surowiecki (whose book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' is oft-cited by web 2 fans). The other panels feature an impressive line-up of speakers - including from the Big 3 Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Prediction markets are, according to Wikipedia, speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. The idea is a great one to apply to web technology, because it is such an exciting and fast changing environment. On a related note, check out the blog for The Institute for the Future. It's a non-profit research organization located in Palo Alto, California and has some excellent background material about predictive marketing and technology.
The event is on Wed Dec 13, 5:30-8:00pm. Unfortunately I'm unable to attend - so if anyone wants to volunteer to be a R/WW guest blogger for this, send me an email :-)
Recent Google acquisition JotSpot found itself the subject of unwanted attention this week, when an early customer complained of being shut out after the Google deal. A blog post by someone named Kevin (no last name supplied) had all the gory details, but Kevin then subsequently deleted it (note: I'd already read it before it disappeared). Techcrunch then posted the cached text of the post. My concern when I first read it wasn't so much for the damage to JotSpot's reputation (which the company is more than capable of defending), but the implication that hosted applications in general carry more risk than people normally assume. Here's the key extract from Kevin's post:
"Pick your hosted application service provider well. Relying on web hosted application services is much more dangerous than I ever would have assumed. This is especially true for those services that are “closed source” like those of JotSpot."
What's more, in the Techcrunch comments another person who claims to have been a JotSpot customer has his/her say:
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
A few weeks ago we were briefed by the co-founder of vFlyer, Oliver Muoto, about the changes and new features in their upcoming release. Oliver gave us a great overview of the service (which we will talk about a bit later) but he also shared with us an interesting map of the entire classifieds landscape. The map shows a lot of activity in the space and lots of players in different niches. And this is not surprising, since classifieds is a volume business. If you can attract and retain customers, then you will make money because the margins are there. So in this post we look at what is happening in the different corners of the classifieds landscape - and try to figure out who is doing well and where this market segment is heading overall.
Source: vFlyer
We begin with an overview of the general marketplace - i.e. those companies that provide end-to-end service to sellers and buyers. All of these web sites allow you to both list and search for items in various categories. However the mechanisms and approaches of each are quite different.
