Get Center’d – Search for People, Places, Events

June 18th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers, Reviews | No Comments »

The folks at Center’d just love it when a plan comes together. Unfortunately, that rarely happens without heroic efforts, hundreds of emails, and a fair amount of anxiety. What to do?

Why is it so challenging? Who is going, where are we going, when are we going. Easy, right? Except that it isn’t. In fact, no one has created an experience that gets all three of these pieces right. And until someone does, we will either continue to endure, or stop making plans altogether. Sigh.

At Center’d, they’ve been thinking about how to solve the challenges that exist in making plans. From the smallest get together, where you just can’t decide on where to eat and oh-my-goodness-I-can’t-take-it- anymore-maybe-I’ll-just-stay-home-and-wash-my-cat, to the large fund raisers and school activities that require signups and hundreds of emails and weeks of planning, one thing is clear: They can help.

That’s good, because you may notice on this map that there are no icons on Covesville! But if you come to visit, we’ll search for the nearest pizza, which is the blue fork icon north of us on Route 29.

Center’d says, “Hear us out. We can give you the tools you need to easily organize people, places, and times. Using the latest space-age technology, we have concocted features such as:

• Polling tools: Enable your guests to take some of the burden of coming to consensus on the place and time to meet. That would be nice, since they will probably forget to bring the chili. Again.
• Task Management and Volunteer Sign-up: Now you can easily get the team you need to do the stuff you need.
• Connection management and calendar sharing: Now that you are suddenly so organized, and ready to pull off the perfect girls’ night out/summer camp/grandparents day/birthday party/first date/last date, let’s make sure those who are important to you can view your calendars. But not everyone, and not every event. We can keep a secret.
• Explore neighborhoods: We’ll even help you out with finding other places and events. How would you like a view of your world filtered by the recommendations of people you trust? How would you like to be at the center, and have the people, places, and plans you care about revolve around you, just waiting to be experienced? We like that idea. In fact, we like it so much, we built it.”

Here’s a result taken from our life, the only pizza place for miles, Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie!

“Whether you want to plan a large grandiose soiree, an informal rendezvous, a down home hootenanny, or you just want a place to go, we are here to help your world organize itself and revolve around you. That’s the benefit of being Center’d.”

After having his first child, it became clear to co-founder Chandu that finding things like pediatricians, day care, or baby sitters in his local area was incredibly frustrating. Each new “search” for a service or place ended with him making numerous phone calls and sending tons of emails to determine what met his needs. Chandu realized what he needed was an efficient way to get trusted recommendations from his existing network and a site where that information could be archived and used by others (Eureka!). He set out to build a product that combined local information and social utility by starting Fatdoor, which would eventually evolve into who we are today.

For co-founder Jennifer, it was summer camp. Finding information on camps for her children became a daunting task every January. From getting the obvious information about a camp (do you feed the children or give them a sharp stick and send them into the woods?) to coordinating with friends, the days, emails, phone calls, and Web pages stacked up quickly. The worst part? Because none of this information is stored in an easily accessible way, the entire process repeats itself every year!

Convinced there was a better way, Chandu and Jennifer began thinking about how they could address this issue, and after meeting decided to combine their efforts and bring all their shared experience and knowledge together. Lucky for them, they found an incredibly talented underground team of ninjas who escaped government persecution and travelled the country helping people and performing odd jobs.

This was just the right team for the job, and Center’d was born.

Note! Defining Semantics, NLP, LSI and AI

June 18th, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in Guest Authors | 5 Comments »

By Kathleen Dahlgren, PhD
Dr. Dahlgren is the Founder and CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Cognition Technologies.

The ability for users to efficiently and accurately locate a complete universe of documents which are relevant to their interest is continuing to be a major challenge on the Web. Using Search engines like Google, users often miss documents they desire to retrieve (under-retrieval), and they also see many documents that are not relevant to their query (over-retrieval). Actually, the typical search engine retrieves only 20% relevant information (90% irrelevant), and misses 80% of the desired information.

Let’s look at an example: On a Wikipedia search using Google as the Search engine (i.e. the Google choice on the Search engine pull-down), the following query, “strike up an intimate friendship”, Google returns mostly irrelevant documents with concepts such as:

“living it up”
“strike justice upon one”
“it struck him that”

Google returns irrelevant information because it doesn’t understand semantics (i.e. knowledge of meaning). Frequent words such as “strike” have many meanings. In this particular query “strike up” means to “start” or “inaugurate”, not “living it up”, as in (1) above; or “mete out” as in (2) above; nor “occur to one” as in (3) above.

In addition, Google misses many relevant documents, such as those which say “strike up a close friendship” not an “intimate friendship”. Google missed the relevant documents because it didn’t know what “intimate” meant, and didn’t know that “close” in this context means the same thing (or expresses the same concept).

These problems, over-retrieval and under-retrieval, can be solved with technology that has “semantic” or meaning understanding. Software with semantic Natural Language Processing (semantic NLP) or linguistic semantics, can retrieve just the right documents, because before searching it interprets the meaning of the query.

Once the meaning of the words in a query are determined, software with semantic NLP can look for those same meanings in the stored index of the document base (which have also been semantically analyzed), and return documents that use “strike” and “intimate” with those specific meanings rather than returning documents that contain those words in any of their other meanings (thus avoiding the bad retrievals). The software can also find synonyms of those specific meanings.

Semantic NLP technologies also make use of taxonomies that classify things into categories. This taxonomy starts with very general categories such as “animal”, “vegetable” and “mineral”, and breaks down all the concepts of English into a tree structure. For example, the vehicle category is broken into a sub-tree like the one below:

In summary, semantic NLP enables an application or technology to “understand” word and phrase meanings within the context of how they are being used. Semantic NLP technology distinguishes the various meanings of ambiguous words from each other, it knows which meanings of words are synonymous with meanings of other words, and it knows which meanings of words are specific instances of more general concepts. In addition, semantic NLP enables a computer to recognize phrases, and their relationships with other words and phrases. For example, a computer technology with semantic NLP knows that “Securities and Exchange Commission” is a phrase, and that it is synonymous with “SEC”.

Comparison with other technologies

NLP (natural language processing) is a broader field that includes semantic NLP. Other aspects of this field are parsing technologies (which may or may not have semantic knowledge). In parsing, the grammatical structure of sentences is analyzed. Cognition has both parsing and semantic NLP. Recent entrant into the semantic NLP field, Powerset, has built its technology on a parsing foundation, with very little semantic knowledge. Hakia, another semantic technology company, does not publicly disclose what they have, but it appears that their technology is built around a well-developed taxonomy (reasoning from the general to the particular).

Other NLP technologies on the market do not include linguistic semantics or parsing, but instead attempt to teach the computer meaning through statistical methods. One such method is “Latent Semantic Indexing” that tries to infer meaning and synonymy through counting of word co-occurrences. For example, it counts up and computes that many documents frequently mention “ball”, “bat”, “field”, and “baseball” and assume that therefore any documents mentioning those words frequently have the same topic (namely, baseball). NLP and LSI are subfields of Artificial Intelligence, which endeavors to teach computers to behave intelligently. Language is one intelligent behavior, automated learning, vision and manufacture (robotics) are others also pursued in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Trusera Launches Social Search Site for Health

June 18th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Reviews, Verticals | No Comments »

Trusera, a Seattle-based startup, announced on Monday the launch of its online health network Trusera.com, which allows consumers to find and share real-world health experiences with others who’ve been there.

Led by former Amazon executive, Keith Schorsch, the company vision was based on Keith’s own struggle with Lyme disease and the difficulty in finding credible health insights from others. After meeting with 11 doctors, it was one phone call from a friend that finally led to his diagnosis and saved his life.

During his diagnosis and recovery, Keith realized that there’s actually too much health information on the Internet today. Many people find it overwhelming to navigate and hard to trust. He found the most useful information came from people with similar health experiences and their own personal health stories. He founded Trusera to inspire people to learn from each other to inform important health decisions.

When you visit the site, you are directed to one of these four choices:

The Community

There’s power in sharing personal experience and knowledge to help others in their health journey. Trusera believes that people are more than just the sum of their conditions. They are multi-dimensional and need personalized solutions for a variety of life challenges when dealing with a health issue.

Here is the main thing to take note of: when you search for a Condition, you get a Person.



* “Charles” shares what it is like to personally have CRVO, Central Retinal Venous Occlusion.

* “ScrapAddict74” shares what doctors don’t tell you about getting a mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

* “Leana” wants to inspire action in others by sharing her health insights and her personal experiences with cancer and Aspergers.

What’s “under the hood,” product and technology information:

Today’s health sites provide either generic medical information from experts or hard-to-qualify personal experiences on message boards and blogs. In contrast, Trusera uses technology to personalize the experience and surface the most relevant and useful content.

* Personal Suggestions: Receive suggestions on other people or content that may be of interest, based on details in your profile and the content you share on the site. Get recommendations on similar stories so you can explore topics and make more connections to like-minded people.

* Find Inspiration: The Trusera Muse Panel™ coaches you through the storytelling process by providing real-time suggestions and tips.

* Find an Answer: Post questions to the community on Trusera and rate the best answers so that others know what worked for you.

* Advanced Privacy Controls: Decide what information to share and with whom to share it. Keep a private journal, share a story with your Trusera friends only, or let the world benefit from your experience.

“There’s a sea change going on today in the consumer’s health experience. People are increasingly taking control of their health. At Trusera, we are dedicated to putting the consumer at the center of their health experience so they can take a more active role and not just be a passive participant,” notes Keith.

To register, just start HERE.

LOUD3R Launches Dozens of Vertical Search Sites

June 18th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Reviews, Top 100 | 4 Comments »

Yesterday, LOUD3R announced the launch of a network of websites for enthusiasts whose passions are under served by Web content. LOUD3R’s content discovery engine uses a combination of human intelligence and semantic technology to find and rank the best news, editorial, photo, video and other content related to a particular topic. LOUD3R sites only publish the best content, and filter out spam, splogs, repeats, and other fake sites. LOUD3R launched the network with 25 sites and plans to launch at least 10 new destinations each month.

LOUD3R subjects range from motorcycles to wine, fashion to venture capital, each having their own dedicated website. Because LOUD3R’s content discovery engine requires little configuration and maintenance, it is possible to rapidly launch sites with minimal cost and manpower. LOUD3R owns more than 500 domains that share the “3R” brand, spread across a wide variety of topics.

“I’m a motorcycle enthusiast, and found myself unable to keep track of all the news that was out there on a daily basis — that’s what prompted me to build LOUD3R,” says Lowell Goss, founder and CEO of LOUD3R, Inc. “I tried using RSS readers and other services but only found an overwhelming amount of spam and ‘fake’ Web sites. I created LOUD3R as an intelligent publishing platform that will help millions of people find the content they’re really looking for online.”


Editors create LOUD3R sites by assembling a source list of websites and a semantic glossary of terms to teach the publishing engine how to identify the best content related to a particular topic. The platform is capable of unsupervised learning, and automatically improves over time through user feedback across the LOUD3R sites.

The list of LOUD3R launch sites includes:
* FOUND3R – venture capital
* NEW3R – gadgets & technology
* DECANT3R – wine
* GLACI3R – environment
* WOOF3R – dogs
* GLITT3R – fashion
* SLAND3R – gossip
* SNEAK3R – sneakers
* DAPP3R – men’s fashion
* GRIND3R – skateboarding
* PUTT3R – golf
* PITCH3R – baseball
* CRICKET3R – cricket
* RAC3R -formula 1
* WINN3R – NASCAR
* WATCH3R – TV
* ROADST3R – cars
* FAST3R – motorcycles
* VOT3R – politics
* BLAST3R – video games
* SCREEN3R – movies
* FIGHT3R – mixed martial arts
* RUBB3R – motorcycle road racing
* BUZZ3R – internet business and technology
* STRIK3R – soccer

Many online properties struggle to capture a huge readership in order to create a viable advertising-based revenue model. LOUD3R has turned that model on its ear by creating a scaleable network with dozens of sites, each catering to a particular topic, and each bearing a low cost to maintain.

And don’t forget the widgets!

Hello. This is Lowell, CEO of LOUD3R. Thank you for checking out LOUD3R. Great post.  We are very interested in feedback from users and readers. Please post comments here or email us directly at info@loud3r.com