New benefits and functionality include:

·  In-Stock Search Filters: Shoppers now have the ability to view only in-stock products in the search results and, through an experience comparable to travel site kayak.com, know instantly whether the item they want is currently available at a store near them.

·  Price Alerts: With budgeting on top of everyone’s minds, the new Price Alerts notify shoppers the moment a chosen product at a local store reaches a price they are willing to pay.

·  Hottest Product List: For those who don’t have a specific gift or purchase in mind, Milo.com has highlighted the hottest holiday products on its homepage. A single click will help shoppers check the local availability and prices of the season’s hottest gifts for everyone on their list.

“Reaching one million unique monthly users just one year after launch is no small feat, and the steep growth trajectory of Milo.com speaks to our continued ability to find and solve more shopping problems for our users. We are extremely excited to surpass this major milestone and check off some final boxes on our product development list to bring the product out of beta,” said Jack Abraham, Milo.com founder and CEO. “Our newly developed features will help even more shoppers find local prices and availability for the products they want, which is particularly important this holiday season when money is tight and inventories are lower than normal at many retailers.”

Milo.com offers all the benefits of researching products online, but also provides shoppers the instant gratification of buying in-store. Shoppers avoid the wait for (and cost of) shipping, get to try products before buying them and enjoy easier returns. They also save time and money: since Milo.com searches the inventories of thousands of store shelves in real-time, shoppers don’t have to drive from store to store to find products and compare prices.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce currently accounts for less than 5 percent of U.S. retail sales, with the rest of sales still conducted offline. Milo.com’s accelerated growth reflects its unique position to own the research online/buy offline trend, which accounts for exponentially more sales than true e-commerce. By aggregating research, real-time availability and pricing on more than 1.5 million products in over 42,000 stores across the country, Milo.com makes it easy for shoppers to find the right product at the right price, and to buy the product at a local store now.

In addition to the benefits for shoppers, Milo.com also helps retailers turn the Internet into an asset rather than competitor by driving shoppers with intent to buy into their brick and mortar stores. According to Forrester Research, shoppers who research products online and purchase them in-store account for almost $400 billion of total retail sales. This burgeoning cross-channel shopping trend is expected to result in more than $1 trillion of store sales by 2011. Additionally, nearly half of “research online/buy offline” shoppers say they buy additional products once in the actual store, spending over $150 on average in incremental purchases.*

“The ability to accumulate local stores’ inventories and provide real-time prices and product availability makes Milo.com a win-win for both shoppers and retailers,” added Abraham. “We connect shoppers with the products they want, and retailers with the foot traffic they need. No other company can deliver the same value with the same breadth.”

To take advantage of Milo.com this holiday shopping season, please visit http://www.milo.com

*Forrester Research, June 1, 2007: The Web’s Impact On In-Store Sales: US Cross-Channel Sales Forecast, 2006 to 2012.

Source: Milo.com

Insttant

Sentiment: Insttant presents detailed sentiment analysis for consumer products, websites and companies. This analysis includes the most common positive and negative words used to describe a topic.

User Analysis: We examine a user’s updates to compose a detailed report of each user containing the sites they commonly link to, their interests and most influential updates. Insttant’s suggestion engine utilizes this data to recommend one user to follow another user with similar interests.

Real Time News: The most unique, powerful aspect of Insttant is our ability to successfully convert thousands of real time updates into one, straightforward headline. Insttant actively monitors real time updates for sudden changes. These significant changes are then analyzed and turned into real time news headlines. For example, if a significant amount of people are describing Star Trek with positive keywords, we analyze this data to generate: “84% of Star Trek audiences are enjoying the film.” Users can customize their news to specific geographical locations, keywords, and interest categories.

Search: On Twitter and most third party apps, search results consist of an extensive list of tweets which discuss the desired search term. While this method displays relevant status updates, it requires the user to read hundreds of individual tweets to gather information on the topic. Insttant solves this data overload by providing a summary overview real time activity in the form of simple headlines and visuals.

No other website uses real time data do generate headline news in real time. We provide unfiltered, authentic news in real time created by individuals and not mass media corporations.

Joe Langevin is a 19 year old entrepreneur from Washington State. Source: Insttant

Contact Us: We’re looking for experienced developers and investors!

Collecta,

The “Collecta Results Set” (CRS) API allows for easy integration into existing applications. In fact, developers already working with the Twitter API can hit the ground running with CRS, enabling them to quickly expand the capabilities of their real-time applications to encompass Collecta’s broad base of social media, established news sources, and unique content feeds.

Collecta has been making strong moves to define the concept of real-time search to extend beyond social boundaries to include a wide range of relevant sources on the web. The company is working directly with publishers of news, sports and entertainment information to give the freshest, most reputable stories to users as they’re published. For example, you’ll see stories from established leaders such as Reuters and Examiner.com (soon to include its recent acquisition, Now Public), as well as emerging voices like True/Slant and hyper-local stories via Outside.in. Collecta is currently adding thousands of new sources each week.

This creates a new, unique view of the web. With Collecta, users can track breaking stories — from a hurricane in the Atlantic to the health care reform debate — through a continually-running, live stream that incorporates both social media and established news sources.

The difference is in the depth and breadth of the experience. While other aggregators and search tools simply mashup information on top of feeds from social networks, Collecta has built an entire ecosystem and infrastructure based on the open messaging standard XMPP. As a result, the company is uniquely positioned to share its technology to spark additional user applications — from real-time brand tracking to fantasy sports team apps. There is no limit to the potential.

“The way people interact with content on the Internet is changing. People want the story as it happens, not just the highlights… and they want it where they are — in Twitter, Facebook, MySpace. Everywhere,” explained Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta. “Our open technology platform and wide range of relevant content sources enable companies and developers to build a diverse set of real-time data applications that can be distributed across the Web.”

In conjunction with the API release, Collecta is launching a developer’s challenge with ChallengePost.com.

Dubbed “The AppMaster Challenge,” the contest will help drive the development of creative and powerful applications. From now through October 8th, developers can submit their Collecta-powered plug-in, webapp or application and the Collecta team will select the one that best exemplifies what real-time results can do. The winner will be announced on October 15th, and will receive both a featured spot as AppMaster Champion and a new 15″ MacBook Pro. There will be weekly prizes as well, and developers are encouraged to submit early and often.

This release of the Collecta API is HTTP-based, and in the near future Collecta will also release its XMPP-based Streaming API to power streaming real-time applications.

To learn more about the AppMaster Challenge go to ChallengePost.com

This AppMaster Challenge is an open invitation for developers to create plugins, webapps or applications based on the API.

There is a lot of potential for creativity – for example, you could build a brand-tracker app that shows what’s going on with a company and its products, a firefox plug-in that pulls fresh results into a sidebar based on the content of the browser page, or a fantasy sports team app that stays on top of all of your players news, images and video. Those are just a few ideas – be creative!

The winner of the AppMaster Challenge will be the developer who delivers the most compelling implementation across these three dimensions:

1) Creativity – How unique, unexpected and cool is it?

2) User Adoption Potential – Who does it appeal to and how likely are users to try it our and keep using it?

3) Real-timey-ness – How well does the app exemplify the new world of real-time information?

Submissions will be judged by the Collecta team. The winner will be crowned “Collecta AppMaster” and will win a new 15″ Macbook Pro

There will also be weekly prizes of Collecta-gear each Friday for the best apps of that week, so submit early and often.

Solution Deadline: October 08, 2009

Judging will be performed by Dandee Fleming.

For the Collecta Results Set API, go to docs.collecta.com.

Source: Collecta.com

I was looking for Mark Twain’s travel log of 19th century Palestine, “Innocents Abroad,” so I went to this old bookstore, one of those dusty places that has old newspapers so you can see what happened 70 years ago while bathing in that wafting old-newspaper aroma, which is never gratuitous, at least for people who like strange smells. Though I found a 19th century Russian printing of the Pentateuch, I couldn’t find Twain’s travel book. So I asked this tall guy who seemed to work there, and he told me, besides ordering it at the front desk, to check out Project Gutenberg. So I did.

And, as a southerner would say, well Gahhhh-ly. I typed in “Innocents Abroad” and found many, many versions of this book. Basically, anything that is no longer copyrighted, like older books that you had to read in high school, you can find them here. So no, you can’t exactly go to the Gutenberg project and pick up J.K. Rowling’s 8th installment “Harry Potter Finally Sees a Shrink After Suffering PTSD From Way Too Many Near-Death Experiences,” or any of the other seven, but what you can do is look up Arthur Conan Doyle and start reading up on Sherlock Holmes. As far as I know, the Doyle estate can’t stop the Project.

There are a few options for reading Gutenberg material. You can just browse it online without downloading by following the links, or you can download the actual eBook. You’ll need some supporting programs for some of these, which can be easily downloaded (most browsers search for them automatically). Project Gutenberg could use a more user-friendly interface in terms of making access to that a bit easier, but with the amount of stuff they’ve got in there, I really have no right to complain. With the right funding, this could turn into a serious research and money-saving powerhouse. Now you don’t have to go to the classics section of Borders and whip it $9.95 for another copy of Huckleberry Finn for your 8th grade son who doesn’t even want to read it anyway, that ungrateful brat with no appreciation for American classics by men who didn’t even use their own names—which is how it’s SUPPOSED to be. After all, who needs a name when you can just make up another one free of charge?

And of course, there are many ways to search. Author, title, topic, standard stuff. The only thing you have to worry about, is do you want to read off your computer, or use a lot of ink?

How It Works:

1. Login using your Twitter username/password
2. Start by performing a search using a keyword or phrase.
3. Browse the results and find websites that are related to what you are looking for.
4. Share your Findings by clicking the “Tweet2Tribe” button.
5. Choose people you want to share the information with.
6. See what others have added to the collaboration space

For anyone looking to collaborate with group members, try using Tribescape.

Start using Twitter as an easy way to centralize all of your research and findings between others.

Related Post: Try collaborative search with tribescape

I know, I know, everybody likes video, so here’s a video.

In short, your face is probably everywhere all over facebook. Maybe even in places you don’t want it to be! Is it possible? Yes…but if you’re not tagged, how ever will you find it? Use the friend finder, upload your face, and it will cycle through your friends to find you, or whoever you put in to the finder.

There are 15 billion pictures on Facebook, and about 60% of all photos on the web can be found on Facebook. Now that’s crazy. Here are some amazing quotes from Israel21c:

“In the first month of our alpha test, we scanned some 400 million photos, identifying about 700,000 people, with users confirming the identities of about 150,000 people,” says Gil Hirsch, Face.com’s CEO and co-founder. Hirsch decided to work initially with Facebook because it was a good place to get started, but the technology goes far beyond identifying friends you don’t know.

“Without getting too technical, our technology looks at information that is already known – photos in your Facebook account, for example – and compares them with elements of other photos with unknown elements. Our algorithms compare the photos, and Friend Finder makes an educated guess on the identity of a person. The user is then asked to confirm, and a tag is attached to the identified person, with that photo now added to the recognition database,” he says.

In other words, Face.com’s technology learns as it goes. (Insert Twilight Zone music theme here. *neenee-neenee neenee-neenee*)

This will be a very unscientific, random stroll through science-related and search aspects of Twitter. There is a lot of talk about Twitter replacing this or that technology: Twitter is destroying whatever prospects RSS had for ever gaining traction among the general Web-using public; Twitter is the new Google and so on.

What I would like to do this morning (and I do most of my explorations of search tools in the early morning before I go to my job as a research information technologist—which tends to entail trying to find announcements of grants and scholarships in the health sciences to list on ScanGrants, a free listing for such—and I am about to try to determine how Twitter does when it comes to finding research funding as a case study here) is to try to discourse knowledgeably on using Twitter in science search without writing long, hard to follow sentences like the one you and I are both enmeshed in at this point. That is the thing about Twitter—you can get both absorbed in what you are doing and increasingly scatterbrained and unable to think or express yourself coherently because there is so much fascinating stuff that you bounce along hither and thither sounding increasingly like an exceedingly eccentric person.

For example, I had hoped to simply go to the Search page of Twitter in order to see what I could come up with by searching for terms such as “grants” and “scholarships” and “funding.” But once I opened Twitter, all hopes of sticking to my proposed project vaporized immediately because I made the crucial mistake of glancing down at the tweets on my home page and got immediately distracted by items the titles of which sounded edifying.

For example, one of the most useful things I have found about Twitter is the fact that you learn about industries and fields you knew little about simply because people in them start to follow you and then you follow them and pretty soon you are starting to learn about marketing strategies in pharma and just now I have received an email from Twitter saying that I am being followed by this gentleman, Justin Johnson:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/justinhaywardjohnson

http://twitter.com/BioInfo?utm_source=follow&utm_campaign=twitter20080331162631&utm_medium=email

whom I had already been following on Twitter probably having found him via the Life Sciences room of FriendFeed.

That is one frustrating aspect of Twitter—there is often no record of how I came across a person to follow. I do save the emails from Twitter saying someone is following me. But are such people doing so because I followed them or because they came across my Twitter feed in the same random fashion that I came across theirs? And does it matter how one finds people to follow? To search professionals, marketers and social anthropologists parsing the intricacies of social networking and its societal implications it probably does.

But as someone just trying to learn as much as I can on a very superficial level (no time for depth in Twitterdom) as quickly as possible about such subjects such as search, Science 2.0, Open Science, Big Science and so on I just have to leverage my ability to read quickly and not stop to think these things through lest I find myself entrapped in yet another meandering sentence of own devising.

And what do I read through as quickly as I can in order to find things to read, ideally, a thoughtful, contemplative frame of mind? I read my home page of Twitter, looking for items intriguingly titled such as the item I found this morning, “Ok, say you get a genome. What next?” http://ow.ly/ezGw

See here for what I saw.

That is the greatest danger of Twitter—the power of cleverly titled tweets.

This was one irresistible. It appealed to me as a non-scientist interested in science. In a few simple words, it promised to elucidate an important subject (genomics) in an approachable fashion.

That is what endows Twitter with its power as a tool for public education in science. Would I in the pre-Twitter era have visited something called the OpenHelix Blog or cared that there was a blog with this self-proclaimed mandate, “Here on the OpenHelix blog you will find a genomics resources news portal with daily postings about genomics resources, genomics news and research, science and more. Our goal is to keep you, the researcher, informed about the overwhelming amount of genomics data out there and how to access it through the tools, databases and resources that are publicly available to you.”

Would I have even known that such a blog existed? That is one of the reasons Twitter is a search story—I keep pushing scientist-bloggers to add Twitter buttons to their blogs so as to render their incredibly useful content discoverable. But they cling to RSS and email subscriptions as the primary modes of dissemination of their writings and seem to regard Twitter as beneath them. Major miscalculation. Increasingly, Twitter-generated material is appearing in Google results. Like it or not, if you aren’t in Google you are missing a missing an opportunity to garner readers.

And on the matter of whether material gets read. It is this simple: I scan the homepage on Twitter. I notice a fascinating item such as the one on genomics. I note bits of wording that look significant and worthy of my time to retweet for the benefit of others who might, like me, need a lighting fast glimpse into abstruse matters. (“To get appropriate data to display you need to annotate your genome. You need to curate your genome.”) By retweeting it, I have simultaneously saved it as a social bookmark and thereby create a personal library of useful items for my own use later on. And therein lies a problem—how do I search my own updates in Twitter? There must be a way to do so, but if so I have not found it. There are third-party Twitter-related apps galore (and searching for those would itself entail using such apps to find other apps in a never-ending cycle of appiness). Is there one for organizing one’s updates?

Okay, I have now written a great deal and never did get accomplish my aim of investigating the potential utility of Twitter as a way of finding grants and scholarships. I have spent the past month working on getting ScanGrants Twitterized and that has been much more difficult than I anticipated. I have had it done by a real pro, thank goodness. But listing your own material (in my case grants) is own thing—searching through Twitter is another and I will have to address that another day and one that smart people like the guys at DeepDyve are probably working on even as I prepare to end this sentence.

By in large, it is a very similar Search experience to Google in terms of the display layout and results relevancy which is a good thing. However, Bing has some cool innovations that Google currently does not have and I think not only improves on the Google design but really helps the searcher and I give Microsoft and the Bing Search team for thinking beyond the Google offering.

Sure the Bing search screen has nice interactive background that changes everyday,  but for me, it’s all about the search results page!

Microsoft research apparently identified that one of biggest frustration in search today is in clicking through to a page, only to find it is not the right one so helping searcher identifying the correct page to click through on the results page was identified as a main area of focus for the Bing team.

I am happy to say that the focus on delivering useful information on the results page itself has been a good one and I think has delivered real tangible benefits for the searchers.

Now on to the Bing search results layout…

Please read the rest of this article here:

By Felix

This morning I am taking a test drive in the new user interface of ScienceResearch.com. This search engine has been around since 2005. But I am treating it as brand new in this post, given that I have not written about it before and given its new look. 

The first thing I did was try out the home page search function. Nice and handsome. I tried out my usual search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I decided not to go immediately to the Advanced Search page where I did have the option of limiting my search using a wide range of limiters (such is the amusingly oxymoronic jargon of search!): date, health and science, etc. Everyone interested in science search and attractive, user-friendly Web design should take a look at that page. 

Budding inventors and science journalists and laypeople just curious about what has been written lately on certain scientific subjects should try out the “Patent news” and “Science News” options. Some of the results for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis I got using the Science News options were a little bit on the only slightly related side. But I did get a link to this fascinating article, “Social Networking Sites Embrace Clinical Trials” here which I would not have otherwise seen and it is a mark of a good search engine that it apprises users of treasures so far undiscovered by them. For those laypeople seeking to understand a newly diagnosed condition, the Science News feature of ScienceResearch.com is a nice complement to other sources of medical information such as MedlinePlus.

 For instance, sometimes a simple news story in a local paper can often illustrate what certain conditions entail for patients. Here, for example, is a profile of a very courageous couple coping with ALS: Learning to cope with ALS 

The article contains useful information such as this, “…DynaVox computer system. The system looks like a flat panel television, but has an infrared camera that tracks the movement of Ann’s eyes. Ann is training her eye muscles to “push” buttons on the computer screen, which she can then use to type out messages, email and signal for help. She will also be able to control the television, wireless Internet and telephone with the blink of an eye. 

There were a couple of upgrades the couple added to the system and it can even synthesize a voice for Ann, all through the use of her eye power.”  

Thank you Ann and Howard Hanson for sharing your story. It is really heartening while trying out a search engine to stop and read about loving couples facing adversity courageously. And that is what good search engines like ScienceResearch.com do—they enable users to read about health technologies in real-world situations and make note of specific product names. 

Back on the home page. I tried out the “preferences” button, which enabled me to get 250 items per page—that was nice. The more items on a page, the better as having to click for a new page after only a few results is a bother. 

One definite major plus of ScienceResearch.com, is that it returns recent results of abstracts (though not the article themselves, usually) for Elsevier’s Science Direct such as the article, Managing patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis here.

I just did a search for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in PubMed and that article was not in PubMed yet. So way to go both ScienceResearch.com and Elsevier for rendering the latter’s outstanding content more readily discoverable. It will be interesting to see how Elsevier works with innovative search companies such as Deep Web Technologies (the firm behind ScienceResearch.com), DeepDyve and NextBio—see here  in alerting the research community and an increasingly savvy and search-powered (thanks to these innovative companies) lay public to its articles. Elsevier finally is getting search. Yay! Go, Elsevier, go! Take advantage of the know-how of these search firms. You have the world’s best content—showcase it. 

One thing I found a little confusing in ScienceResearch.com was that sometimes it linked directly to the abstract at the site of the publisher and sometimes to the abstract in PubMed. Although it is useful to be taken to PubMed (as one can make a can save items to its clipboard), I wasn’t quite clear on why I was taken to PubMed in some cases with some of the Springer journals and at other times to the site of the journal at Springer itself. I did like, though, that one of the limiters was Springer. But not, interestingly, ScienceDirect or MD Consult. 

Still, there is a lot to like about ScienceResearch.com and its new look is worth a look. It will be interesting to see what those in hardcore science like mathematics and chemistry think of it.

And they give you a thumbnail of the sight each of these forums is on. Say, if you want to find out what the masses are thinking about Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world, you can type in this:

Then you can click on the forums, and gauge the pulse of the nation.

Type in your topic, and you can see what the people are saying.

Here is a soundless video, like from the 1920’s or something:

If you’re Indian, they have an Indian section, too.

You can check out the Indian Forum Buzz, which would be a good name for a restaurant.

One thing I used Zhift for personally is…homebrewing! Here’s why: I can find any tutorial for brewing beer in a second. But I can’t necessarily find feedback to these things, see what people who’ve tried using the tutorial have to say about it, which one is the best, which one should I stay away from? So a search from Homebrewing through Zhift gives me the feedback through a forum I can also add my own comments through the forum. Make sense? Of course it does.

Zhift me up, Scotty…or something.