Today we pay a visit to the office of Venky Harinarayan, the Co-Founder of Kosmix.

 

The Web is all about breaking down walls. In the early 2000’s, it was the “publishing wall” that went down. With Web 1.0 it was all about big corporations publishing mostly factual information. With Web 2.0, any Web user can publish anything – using blogs; posting reviews and comments on sites; creating a Facebook profile, uploading a video on YouTube…the list is endless.The rise of the consumer as a publisher has created an explosion of information online, and valuable information is now scattered across Web 1.0 sites, feeds, blogs, user -generated content sites (like YouTube, Flickr for instance), social networks, videos and imagesThe challenge for a consumer is finding all this information. In today’s world, a consumer has to not only know what to look for, but also where to look for it – should she look for it on Google, or go to YouTube, or Flickr, or a blog search engine.What the consumer needs is a “home page” – a starting point – for her topic of interest, which brings the best of the Web into one place for her to explore.

If there are home pages for organizations and consumers, why not one for topics?

Imagine if you were looking for books on gardening at a library, and your only option was to read every book with ‘gardening’ in its title or in its references, or be given phone numbers of gardeners. Wouldn’t you rather talk to a friendly librarian who points you to books for beginners, books on landscaping, scholarly books on horticulture, videos on gardening, local experts on gardening, and so on, and let you make the choice?

Categorization is fundamental to the ability to create a home page. Each category is a different direction for a consumer to explore a topic. At Kosmix, we have set out to build categorization technology that can answer this question, and scale to serve the needs of the billion or more users searching online.

For instance, for “diabetes,” Kosmix algorithmically creates a home page that enables consumers to connect to authoritative Web content about the illness; points of view from people who have diabetes; to images of the symptoms; to videos of cures; as well as related content like fitness, diet and nutrition, and much more… truly the best of the web from one page.

Today, the most important decision a new business makes is to focus on the right application for its technology. Our choice to pick health and autos as areas where online consumers benefit the most from our role as an automated research assistant has been proven to be successful. We power leading vertical portals in these areas such as Revolution Health and Autobytel among others. We are able to offer our partners more authoritative content, tailored to the needs of their consumer base. In health, that’s more than a hundred million people going online to find information.

Much of this functionality is also available directly to the consumer on our site, www.righthealth.com, which is at the forefront of our innovative product offerings. In fact, the moment we knew Michael Moore was taking a serious look at healthcare, we even gave his YouTube trailers a home page of their own! (OK, that was the work of our marketing team, not our algorithms, but we humans at Kosmix don’t mind pitching in to help!)

Happy (and healthy) searching!