Live from Under the Radar Smooth Surfing
Posted March 2, 2006 by Jasmine Antonick
Space:
Companies in this session, Smooth Surfing, are working to develop new paradigm fro surfing the web. They provide products and services which help users to navigate myriad web sites more efficiently.
Panelists:
Dane Glasgow, MSN
Matt Marshall, San Jose Mercury News/Silicon Beat
Matt Mullenweg, Automatic/WordPress
Companies:
Browster (http://www.browster.com)
Browster simplifies search, minimizes clicks and cuts down your Browsing effort by a third. It saves you time and makes your searching more efficient. When you mouse over a link, a “hover” icon appears–this allows you to see a preview of the page to let you determine whether you want to be there without having to click on the icon and open the page. The idea is to maintain the context of the search engine in a way that lets you move through the links rapidly. I like that. The panelists liked that too. But both the panelists and I agree that we don’t want Browster popping ads at us. I don’t like that I have to download it.
Flock (http://www.flock.com)
Flock provides an open source browser that makes the web more social and easier to use. I like that. Flock believes that tools that exist to browse the web should be more intuitive and user friendly so that when you find something you like, and you want to comment on it and share it with your friends, you should be able to easily do so. We’re entering into an age of user experience and that will fundamentally make all of the difference. Everyone should be able to post without having to figure out RSS; there should be a magic star button that sends your stuff directly to the web so that all can post, share, and browse more easily. Although I’m not sure that the “.5″ version that Flock was demo-ing presented a good picture of what they are trying to do, I think they are onto something regarding usability. But perhaps what they are onto is bringing functionality to existing browsers rather than a need to create a new one altogether.
Simpy (http://www.simpy.com)
Simpy is a company that provides social bookmarking services to Internet users. Simpy service allows users to save pages that they deem relevant. They can also tag their pages. Users have the capability to perform full-text search of the tag’s metadata and the text of the pages themselves. User can publish their tags and share them between each other. The web site also provides the capability to create text notes by the user. The company also creates an ecosystem of developer by providing public APIs to their service.
TagCloud (http://www.tagcloud.com)
TagCloud is a mashup company. They utilize Yahoo! Content Analysis web service to enhance user experience. The mashup services picks up the user-defined news RSS feeds and then sends them to the Yahoo! APIs. The Yahoo! Content Analysis returns the set of keywords associated with the given news article. These keywords are used as tags by the TagCloud service. The user can search the resulting tags and get return all the relevant RSS news feeds. The TagCloud service also does an automatic association of the news articles. Some of the question from the audience were focused on making TagCloud service more accessible by the non-technical people as a way to expand the potential market.
Live from Under the Radar Smooth Surfing
Posted March 2, 2006 by Jasmine Antonick
Space:
Companies in this session, Smooth Surfing, are working to develop new paradigm fro surfing the web. They provide products and services which help users to navigate myriad web sites more efficiently.
Panelists:
Dane Glasgow, MSN
Matt Marshall, San Jose Mercury News/Silicon Beat
Matt Mullenweg, Automatic/WordPress
Companies:
Browster (http://www.browster.com)
Browster simplifies search, minimizes clicks and cuts down your Browsing effort by a third. It saves you time and makes your searching more efficient. When you mouse over a link, a “hover” icon appears–this allows you to see a preview of the page to let you determine whether you want to be there without having to click on the icon and open the page. The idea is to maintain the context of the search engine in a way that lets you move through the links rapidly. I like that. The panelists liked that too. But both the panelists and I agree that we don’t want Browster popping ads at us. I don’t like that I have to download it.
Flock (http://www.flock.com)
Flock provides an open source browser that makes the web more social and easier to use. I like that. Flock believes that tools that exist to browse the web should be more intuitive and user friendly so that when you find something you like, and you want to comment on it and share it with your friends, you should be able to easily do so. We’re entering into an age of user experience and that will fundamentally make all of the difference. Everyone should be able to post without having to figure out RSS; there should be a magic star button that sends your stuff directly to the web so that all can post, share, and browse more easily. Although I’m not sure that the “.5″ version that Flock was demo-ing presented a good picture of what they are trying to do, I think they are onto something regarding usability. But perhaps what they are onto is bringing functionality to existing browsers rather than a need to create a new one altogether.
Simpy (http://www.simpy.com)
Simpy is a company that provides social bookmarking services to Internet users. Simpy service allows users to save pages that they deem relevant. They can also tag their pages. Users have the capability to perform full-text search of the tag’s metadata and the text of the pages themselves. User can publish their tags and share them between each other. The web site also provides the capability to create text notes by the user. The company also creates an ecosystem of developer by providing public APIs to their service.
TagCloud (http://www.tagcloud.com)
TagCloud is a mashup company. They utilize Yahoo! Content Analysis web service to enhance user experience. The mashup services picks up the user-defined news RSS feeds and then sends them to the Yahoo! APIs. The Yahoo! Content Analysis returns the set of keywords associated with the given news article. These keywords are used as tags by the TagCloud service. The user can search the resulting tags and get return all the relevant RSS news feeds. The TagCloud service also does an automatic association of the news articles. Some of the question from the audience were focused on making TagCloud service more accessible by the non-technical people as a way to expand the potential market.
