Ever come across a lengthy Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker essay that all your unemployed friends will probably be talking about later, but you simply don’t have time in between tweeting working to read?
Well Founder Showcase winner Topicmarks was made for the case of Gladwell and even denser documents like research papers and legal texts, breaking them down into digestible pieces when all you really need to read is an executive summary.
Using semantic text extraction and personalization technologies, Topicmarks extracts text from the .pdf, .doc, .html and .txt documents that you upload, copy/paste, email in or enter the URL of. The service then gives you the option to view the “Overview,”"Facts,”"Summary” and”Keywords” of the document as well as “Properties” where you can see the original source. You can also interact with the “Overview” in a multitude of ways, including searching by key word and adding more or less text to the summary as needed.
Topicmarks is like a more-fleshed out TL;DR, with an “an enormous breadth of possible applications across various use cases and verticals” says co-founder Roland Siebelink. It has the same aspirations as enterprise solutions Autonomy and OpenText but available for free to consumers within a certain usage amount.
When given the criticism that the Topicmarks.com site sure had a lot of text on it for a service that summarized text (specifically, “Maybe you should run Topicmarks through Topicmarks?”) Siebelink told me, “Up to now the site has been geared particularly towards power users who understand how the technology works, now we’re focused on polishing the interface for the general audience who does not want to know how it works.”
Ambitiously, Roland says his future plans are to make the summarization technology readily available across all devices, “wherever people read digital information.” Topicmarks is currently raising a 500K seed round.
Topicmarks has a web service in beta that helps information workers summarize heaps of cloud documents around their own interests. We produce these summaries through a unique combination of meaning-based algorithms with user behavior and human intent. Try it at: http://topicmarks.com Topicmarks will now plug into major cloud storage providers to be able to summarize the documents people already have. The first two major partnerships are in place. Organizing and summarizing information in the cloud is growing into a $5.5b...
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