Sure, what’s the real use of it. Maybe its all about amusing people by listing them as top trendsetter – not too bad. In any case for now I will keep the elephant running, hope he makes some friends out there and he will let me know one day where he wants to go. Twopular started as a pure “let’s surf a bit on the twitter wave” project. Twopular is arisen from the confused mind of Martin Dudek and not affiliated with Twitter.
Track Trends on Twitter with Twopular
August 26th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers, Realtime | No Comments »
“The best of both worlds” Maktoob + Yahoo!
August 26th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Global, Majors, News | No Comments »
SUNNYVALE, Calif. & DUBAI, United Arab Emirates,
Yahoo! today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Maktoob.com, the leading online community in the Arab world, with more than 16.5 million unique users.
“This acquisition will accelerate Yahoo!’s strategy of expanding in high-growth emerging markets where we believe Yahoo! has unparalleled opportunity to become the destination of choice for consumers,” said Yahoo! chief executive officer Carol Bartz. “Access to information and communications tools can positively impact people’s lives in many ways, and with the acquisition of Maktoob.com and our investment in the region, the Arab world will soon get a Yahoo! experience in Arabic with relevant local language content, programming and services.”
Internet users in the region will benefit from the combination of Yahoo!’s popular products and services with Maktoob’s compelling local content, which today reaches one in three people online throughout the Arab world. This acquisition will extend Yahoo!’s current offerings by adding capabilities to deliver relevant Arabic-language content and services, as well as Arabic versions of Yahoo!’s popular Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail services. Maktoob.com is accessed by users in countries that include UAE, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
“Yahoo! and Maktoob are natural partners and this combination should help energize the Internet market in the region as a whole. We are excited about Yahoo! building a stronger presence in the Middle East and bringing its compelling suite of services to Arab users in Arabic,” said Samih Toukan, Founder of Maktoob.
While Internet usage in the Middle East has grown more than tenfold since 2000, most markets are still in the early stages of adoption. According to the World Bank, there are more than 320 million Arabic speakers worldwide, while less than one per cent of all online content is in Arabic.
With Yahoo! and Maktoob.com’s combined audience and platform, advertisers will have access to the reach and sophisticated targeting capabilities they need to effectively engage with the region’s online consumers. Spending on online advertising is expected to grow by 35 – 40 percent this year in the region, according to Madar Research.
“Internet users in the Arab world will have access to Yahoo!’s vast content portfolio, as well as world-class communications products, which will be available in Arabic for the first time. In addition, advertisers will be able to leverage the vast reach of the newly combined audiences to effectively market to consumers across the region,” said Ahmed Nassef, general manager of Maktoob.com.
Maktoob.com was founded in 2000 by Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury as the world’s first free Arabic/English Web-based email service, and since then has grown to be the leading Arab online community in the region.
“Yahoo is acquiring Maktoob.com for the strong brand and audience it has built over the last nine years and the passionate team they have assembled, which we believe is the strongest in the region,” said Keith Nilsson, senior vice president, Emerging Markets, Yahoo! “We see great growth potential in both audience and advertising in the Arab world and combining with Maktoob.com will allow us to quickly build our presence there with high quality products. This is a big win for publishers, advertisers, and consumers in the region.”
This acquisition is part of Yahoo!’s larger strategy to grow its business throughout the world’s emerging markets by connecting consumers with the content and services that matter most to them in their local language. The company’s Emerging Markets business group, headquartered in Singapore, is responsible for Yahoo!’s fastest growing markets such as South East Asia, India, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Yahoo! has a strong track record of delivering great Internet experiences and helping fuel Internet adoption through partnerships with local developers and content providers.
Following the acquisition, Maktoob.com will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo!. Ahmed Nassef, the current general manager of Maktoob.com, will continue to lead the Maktoob.com teams and will report to Keith Nilsson. It is expected that the transaction will be completed in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Upon completion of the deal, the remaining Maktoob Group companies – including Souq.com, cashU.com, Araby.com, and Tahadi.com – will operate under a new entity called the Jabbar Internet Group, managed by Samih Toukan. Yahoo! and the Jabbar Internet Group will continue to have a strong commercial relationship going forward, which will include the promotion of Jabbar companies on the Maktoob.com portal.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Source: Yahoo!
Search market to get another engine
August 26th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Global, Guest Authors, News, Semantic | No Comments »
By Shivani Shinde / Mumbai
Excerpts from the full post here:
Last year, Hewlett-Packard (HP) Labs initiated open research grants to dozens of universities worldwide. One such grant was given to the Computer Science Department of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B).
Professor Soumen Chakrabarti and his group at IIT-B used this grant to work on a new search engine which would trawl the web to provide relevant answers to queries. Their efforts are yielding results.
What makes this system different from others? While the existing major players still expect 2-3 word queries and return URLs (web addresses) to browse, the new engine will understand more structures in the query and respond with information nuggets and tables, and not just the links of the pages (sources) from which this knowledge is distilled.
So queries like “length of the Nile River” or “maximum speed of a Mercedez-Benz SLR McLaren” would be answered using encyclopaedia sources like Wikipedia, but in many cases the queries are not appropriate and need support from unstructured web text like news and blogs. However, this system being built can aggregate, for each query, tens of thousands of snippets into quantitative answers.
Chakrabarti adds that most of the popular search engines offer little or no support for at least two important kinds of queries: “For example, you cannot ask for a table of actors and the number of academy awards they won. Typing in ‘actor number academy awards’ is a shot in the dark, as the existing players do not expose to you any catalogue of actors that they know about, and let you implicitly expand actor into each known instance of that category.”
Second, he says, existing engines are not very good with letting people question and manipulate physical quantities, “although this is the single most important data type on the web.” He adds: “Sure, you can go to an e-commerce vertical and ask for digital SLRs (cameras) priced between $700 and $1,010, but you won’t be that successful asking a generic search engine for a laptop with battery life between 4 and 6 hours, or the typical driving time between Stuttgart and Mainz.”
My job search Day 2 – LinkedIn part 1
August 26th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Job Search, Verticals | 1 Comment »
From the site: Your professional network of trusted contacts gives you an advantage in your career, and is one of your most valuable assets. LinkedIn exists to help you make better use of your professional network.
Our mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. We believe that in a global connected economy, your success as a professional and your competitiveness as a company depends upon faster access to insight and resources you can trust.
So, Step One is to check my profile and my network:
Here’s the snapshot:
Here are the people that I have some relationship to:
With just a few keystrokes, I can make an announcement to everyone:
I have 100% profile completeness, and it looks up-to-date:
I have 408 friends, but no recommendations!
How do I ask 408 friends for recommendations?
But there is a cap, I can only send 200 requests.
I will have to stop here and select some of them.
To be continued…
Real-time search engine Collecta announces new features
August 26th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News, Realtime, Updates | No Comments »
Collecta is continuing its real-time search momentum, adding key features that make its search experience more interactive, participatory, and social.
Collecta lets people uniquely follow stories as they unfold by tracking information and updates on blog posts, Tweets, and comments in real time.
With the new release, people can easily share Collecta queries of interest with their friends and contacts by instantly publishing a Collecta search or Collecta discovered tidbit to their social network of choice — Facebook, Twitter, and more. People can choose to share the ever-updating stream of live updates, as well as specific results uncovered in their search.
This sharing feature turns a Collecta search into a powerful hub for inbound information gathering and outbound sharing. People are able to consume the live flow of stories across the web — such as wildfires in California or the healthcare reform town halls — and then instantly share that live flow and the insight of the real-time web with their social graph.
Another enhancement displays the site’s logo or user avatar associated with each result, enabling users to easily scan the sources of all results and choose the results and sources most important to them. In addition, a Messaging Box has been added to the search page that lets the Collecta team directly communicate with its community — such as alert people to a hot search topic.
“With the new sharing and sourcing features, we’re quickly moving beyond the basics— where we’ve been focused since launch in June,” explained Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta. “Over the coming months, we’ll continue to evolve along the path of our users’ input and our strong vision for streaming real-time search. Collecta’s goal is to create a useful new way for people to access the abundance of timely information on the web.”
Launched in June, Collecta has accelerated the pace of Internet searches —transforming the traditional search system of indexing, storing, crawling, and retrieving. The real-time search engine aims for second and sub-second latencies in order to present information the instant it has been published.
Collecta represents a new way to experience search, in real time. Collecta is the Web’s most powerful real-time search engine, posting matching stories, blogs, photos, and comments from sites such as Twitter, WordPress, Flickr and more — as they happen. By aggregating content in real time, Collecta offers a new and more comprehensive view of what’s going on in the world right now.
Source: Collecta.com
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