October 28th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Global, Semantic | No Comments »
“Timely insights are the key to successfully operating in today’s banking world and its associated branches. On the other hand, hours of manual research often end up in sheer information overload, whose processing is time consuming and ineffective”, says Stefan Ki Bergler, Managing Director of valuescope. “This was our motivation to develop this new generation search engine to support professionals in prospecting, competitive intelligence, and media monitoring”. Geared towards financial institutions and technology vendors, Finsearch360° provides added value for all hierarchy levels from the entrepreneur
to the CxO. It is also widely received by consultants, analysts, and head hunters in this field.
Finsearch360° will seamlessly replace Finsights (finsights.value-scope.com) which successfully debuted earlier this year. “I am excited to announce that by the end of November a comprehensive Finsearch360° news intelligence suite will be available, thus complementing the current pure search form”, reveals Markus Stiefel, Head of Marketing and Sales at valuescope. “We listened closely to our customers and are working hard on an improved usability, which will allow users to quickly personalize their daily news. Feedback fortifies that a single point of intelligence, which consolidates several newsletter subscriptions and a couple of relevant industry portals not only saves a significant amount of time, but takes the overall quality of information retrieval, especially for finance professionals, to the next level.”
“valuescope’s mission is “Sales Intelligence to the People!” – For us, living up to this promise means that the new offer will be targeted at the long tail and come as a so called “freemium” product, leaving the actual purchase decision to be a no-brainer”, explains Markus Stiefel. “Free basic access and a highly competitive pricing to access premium sources, content, and features will be of game changing impact for the entire web-based intelligence 2.0 industry.” While the existing providers of media monitoring solutions focus on corporate sales, with accordingly high priced services, top players like LinkedIn® have successfully demonstrated that end consumer driven models do scale in a B2B environment. With Finsearch360°, valuescope empowers professionals, once they are convinced of the added value, to uncomplicatedly pay for it individually, without having to check with a decision maker first.
Source: ValueScope
October 28th, 2009 by Guest Author
Posted in Guest Authors, Image, News, Updates, Verticals, Visual | No Comments »
By Jenny from the Cooliris blog here
We hope you’ve been enjoying Cooliris version 1.11.5! If you haven’t yet gotten it, hurry and get it at cooliris.com, because the performance has been improved up to 30 percent on Windows machines, meaning a faster, slicker Cooliris!
In addition, we know you’ve been writing us about supporting Bing Image search and we’re super excited to announce that it is available now! Simply click in our search toolbar and select Bing as your search engine, or launch Cooliris from any Bing Image search webpage. In light of Halloween coming up in four days, here’s a Wall of some funny Halloween comic strips!
We sincerely hope that you’ve been enjoying our recent performance and usability enhancements to the Cooliris product. In Michele Turner’s words (our very own Executive Vice President of Products), “Supporting platforms, devices, and sites that are important to our users will allow our unique user experience and superior browsing capabilities to spread beyond our immensely happy community. We are thrilled to continue our support of Microsoft’s platforms and innovations through our continued investment in improving their users’ experiences on IE, Windows, and Bing by providing the fastest, most visually compelling, interactive, content browsing experience available.”
Enjoy!
October 28th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Updates, Verticals | 2 Comments »
The year 2009 is a breakout year for digital readers. In fact, one in four men and one in six women intend to buy an e-reader before the end of 2009 (i). The success of Amazon Kindle and other handheld devices with digital reader capability led to the surging demand for e-books. A mass market for e-books has been established and is growing exponentially. Research shown that the total industry revenue from digital-book downloads has risen 149% this year (ii).
AddAll.com, the leading book search and price comparison site that has been committed to help book shoppers locate the best price online, is responding with the introduction of e-book meta search feature, AddAll Ebooks, to make online e-book shopping painless and effortless.
The trend is clear and simple, more and more book lovers are accepting, adopting, and reading e-books. They are quick and easy to download and relatively cheaper than print books. For frequent travelers, they could have more than one book downloaded in their digital reader without the weight. The need for an effective and efficient comparative shopping site for e-book is imminent.
Oftentimes e-books shoppers hop from one online store to another trying to find the best deal. This could be very tiresome and time-consuming. The comparative or Meta search shopping site automatically compares prices among several online bookstores and finds the best offer for the e-book inquired.
Addall Ebooks, http://ebooks.addall.com, is the first ebook meta search engine that searches over 20 major and reputable online e-bookstores’ databases and finds the Internet-wide best offer for e-book shoppers. “Our goal is, as always, to make it easy and painless for online book buyers to find the best deal with one simple click, without the annoying advertisement and pop-ups,” states Hup Chen, the founder of AddAll.com. “With our new AddAll Ebooks feature, e-book shoppers could now easily locate the e-book they want with the best price Internet-wide with just one click.”
Source: AddAll.com
(i) Time: http://tinyurl.com/yf2bhpt
(ii) Forbes: http://tinyurl.com/yzkq2yc
October 28th, 2009 by Steffen Schilke
Posted in Verticals | 1 Comment »
The ticTOCs Journal Tables Of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers. With ticTOCs, it only takes a tick or two to keep up to date.
ticTOCs is a free service where researchers, academics and anyone else can keep up-to-date with scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs).
You can find over 11,000 scholarly journal Tables of Contents from over 350 publishers. You can view the latest TOC for each journal. You can export an individual TOC RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to popular feed readers. You can link to the full text of hundreds of thousands of journal articles (where institutional or personal subscription, or Open Access, allows).
You can export citations to RefWorks. You can save selected TOCs to MyTOCs so that the next time you visit you can see new TOCs, or so that you can export them as an OPML file. You can register with ticTOCs so that your selected MyTOCs will be permanently saved and accessible from any networked PC.
The ticTOCs Consortium consists of: the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.
Source: ticTOCs
ticTOCs has been funded under the JISC Users and Innovations programme.
October 28th, 2009 by Guest Author
Posted in CEO Views, Guest Authors, Social | No Comments »
The Official Zakta Blog
By Sundar Kadayam
Founder & CEO, Zakta
The Personal and Social Web Search Engine
It is hot! So hot that Google legitimized it with their recent update. Buzz is building on social search like never before, as this handy trend graph from BlogPulse indicates:
But what is social search?
According to different industry voices, social search …
“… involves combining social graph information with pure algorithmic search results.“
“… combines traditional algorithm-driven technology with online community filtering.“
“… helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.“
“… is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment.“
These definitions are quite broad and varying, and the result is that so many solutions have come under the banner of “social search”. However, one thing common across these diverse set of tools and services is this: they’ve all used collective intelligence (wisdom of the crowds, if you will) in some way to improve what they present to users in the search process.
Here are some that come to my mind:
- In the early days of the Internet, DirectHit (later acquired by Ask Jeeves) watched which links users clicked through more for a given search and used that data for dynamically ranking search results based on their popularity with the community of users.
- Amazon has been a pioneer in the space of using social/community data to improve the searches for users on Amazon.com – much has been written about their recommendation engine!
- Intelliseek’s ProFusion.com engine ( a product I helped design) used an adaptive search mechanism (community usage driven) to determine what are the best sources to pick for a given query in a distributed / federated search environment.
- Wikia Search used the Wikipedia model of direct, swarm-editing of search result pages for different queries. i.e. Wikia Search users could interactively change the results on any result page, and impact what other users saw directly.
- In reality, Google has always been a social search engine, in a couple of ways. They’ve always tracked what people have liked through who / what they hyperlink to – a core to their famed PageRank algorithm. In the recent years, they’ve also included user and community contributions (in the form of social media) into their search results, with content from Wikipedia and the blogosphere impacting search results in a noticeable way.
- Yahoo has tried integration of Delicious (their social bookmarking system) into the search results.
- Presently, the buzz is all about including social network data and data from popular social tools like Twitter into the search results. Bing did it. Now Google is doing it too!
My company, Zakta, is also a recent entrant in “social search”, and we refer to Zakta as a personal and social Web search engine. Our aim is to improve informational searches on the Web.What prompted me to write this post was the recent Google announcement on social search. Our small community of users felt that Google was encroaching on Zakta’s turf, and I thought I should help clarify where Zakta fits.
First, Zakta has no turf – Google dominates all 
Second, we are trying to add value to the informational search experience of users through a comprehensive solution framework, so we don’t get into feature battles with giants that we don’t have a chance of surviving (as it is, I’ve been called “Nuts!” to start Zakta at this time, and having my tiny company enter into a feature race with the giants should surely bring me the label “Stupid” too – something I’d very much like to avoid!).
Here’s a personal framework that I’ve used to understand the social search space myself and to steer the design and development of Zakta.
On the X-axis, I plot the Personal (focus is on the individual) versus Communal (focus is on the community as a whole) continuum. On the Y-axis, I plot the nature of information that users interact with, in terms of whether it is Disorganized (focus has been on mere collection of information) versus Organized (focus is on curation of digital information).
Using this framework, I’ve mapped a handful of social search services and tools that I’m somewhat familiar with. So, admittedly, both this framework and my characterization of these services in this framework are based on my personal viewpoint. I’d welcome comments for improvement, or other viewpoints. I hope you find this framework a useful tool to make sense of what is happening with this growing space that is simply called “social search”.
Now I can put Zakta into this context. As portrayed in this framework, Zakta is a personal Web search engine because it provides tools to deliver a personal search engine experience that puts the searcher in control.
Zakta is also a social Web search engine in many distinct ways:
- It enables a searcher to collaborate with people they trust to find, collect, organize and share information on topics of interest
- It enables a searcher to connect to others they trust and discover information relevant to their interests from the recommendations made by their trust-network
- It enables a searcher to benefit from the contributions of the community of Web users in the form of published Zakta Guides on topics of interest
- It enables a searcher to gain from the ongoing relevance ranking improvements that happen behind the scenes that take into account the signals of recommendation expressed by not only the user’s trust-network, but also the community as a whole not just on Zakta, but elsewhere on the Web
As you can see, Zakta is not as much about finding what your social network has been saying. Rather it is all about empowering you personally and helping you benefit from your trusted network as well as the community at large to improve your own Web search experience and discover useful information on an ongoing basis on topics of your interest.
As always, I’d love to get your feedback!
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