Despite the 800 pound gorilla dominating online search, there are still many ideas and companies percolating to the surface to provide either a new twist on search or a search solution that is solving an unmet need or untapped opportunity.  How can these companies index the web to the degree that Google has already done and provide relevant results that will satisfy users?  Will entrenched players (ie: Google, Amazon, YouTube) respond or maintain their dominance in a favorable way that these startups were anticipating?

Moderator: Jeremy Toeman

Judges:
Chris Pirillo, Lockergnome
Doug MacMillan, Forum Nokia Americas
John Balen, Canaan Partners

ChaCha
Chacha search is a hybrid of technology and humans to provide better answers.  According to the CEO, if you were on the “Who wants to be a millionaire,” program, this is the site you’d go to quickly get your answer.
ChaCha relies on a community of paid skilled search and domain experts who get to choose their areas of interest, expertise and passion.  Judges wanted to know what ChaCha was doing to avoid people from “gaming system.”  Another key question judges posed to the CEO was how the company can manage to support the thousands and thousands of categories for which people will need answers.

Mpire
Aggregates both new and used goods from the largest ecommerce sites and delivers those to users in a single view.  The company’s combines historical data trends to let users see how much they should pay for the items they want and spices up their online shopping experience with driven information and visual photos of products delivered to users in them in the form of widgets. A shopping plug-in also alerts users while their shopping if another merchant is offering the product at a lower price.  Judges wanted to know if Mpire is like a price predictor but while it does show users general drop offs in price it currently cannot predict pricing changes.  Judges also asked about Mpire’s relationship with Amazon and eBay and the possibility of either of these companies shutting Mpire off to their ability to collect data.  To reduce this possibility, with each partnership, Mpire always works to add strategic value with that partner.

Pluggd
This startup provides a search service that looks inside audio and video to let consumers find and navigate to the exact piece of video they were seeking.  They enable video search via speech recognition and semantic analysis.  Pluggd’s offering also doubles as it helps advertisers target ads to audio and video context.  The company can enable a SDK into the manufacturer’s own player or can serve as a contextual ad targeting for video.  Pluggd’s business model comes by matching an ad for an advertiser and taking a percentage of the advertiser’s revenue; it also charges a service fee for ad networks and has signed up several media publishers as customers.  Judges wondered whether and shy Pluggd is tackling both the advertising and search technology.  The CEO believes it can play well in both arenas and also anticipated some percentage of users moving away from the YouTube in the future and that this would help companies such as his.

Polar Rose
Face recognition technology for manipulation and user integration. The startups offering had a strong viral, visual appeal to it.  Polar Rose will run in a browser and others who have the software/plugin can see postings that are embedded into photos.
Judges wanted to know more about the business model which was not disclosed and another did not see the value or problem being solved by Polar Rose’s technology.  They also mentioned that there were other startups with interesting technology that were unable to make a business model success around interesting facial recognition technology. 

-post by Carmen Hughes