Walmart is planning to launch several new projects this holiday season based on the technology it acquired from the social media startup Kosmix back in April. Kosmix’s platform previously powered multiple services, including a Twitter search site called TweetBeat, a health vertical called RightHealth and a homepage where users could search the Web by topic.
But the core of what Kosmix was building was something called the “social genome” – a way to organize the content in social networks in order to connect people with the information that mattered to them.
Now, that same technology is in the hands of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. → Read More
Walmart this morning said it is buying Mountain View-based Kosmix, a heavily funded social media technology provider that has built a platform that enables users to filter and organize content in social networks, in order to connect people with information that matters to them, in realtime.
What is the retailing juggernaut doing picking up a social media startup, which has raised $55 million in funding from a slew of investors over the past few years? → Read More
Back in March 2009 I wrote about MeeHive, a service launched by Kosmix that promised to give users custom-built newspapers by piecing together stories from blogs and news sites across the web. At the time I wrote that it seemed to work pretty well, but questioned if people would actually wind up using it given the plethora of RSS aggregators available, not to mention the similar startups have tried (and often failed) to make this work. Alas, it looks like things haven’t worked out for MeeHive after all: Kosmix has emailed users to inform them that it will be shutting down later this month.
Here’s a portion of the email:
We’re planning to retire MeeHive on Oct 19 to focus on Tweetbeat, our new social media filter. This means that, as of Oct 19, the MeeHive site will no longer be available and your MeeHive account will be deleted. → Read More
Back in June we previewed a new product by social media search engine Kosmix called TweetBeat. Essentially, it’s a way to follow news being discussed on Twitter in realtime. Today during our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Kosmix is officially releasing the product.
Kosmix calls TweetBeat “the end of hashtags”. Because they scan all tweets being sent out for all kinds of semantic data, you no longer have to explicitly tag things with hashtag, is their stance. For example, over the past few days there have been almost 64,000 tweets about Disrupt from over 11,000 people — but only a small percentage have used the “#tcdisrupt” tag. TweetBeat found the tweets anyway. → Read More
The problem with Twitter is that it is too noisy. Filtering the signal from the noise is still too burdensome. The founders of search engine Kosmix think they have an answer with a new product called Tweetbeat, which they are unleashing in a preview version designed specifically to filter all the Tweets about the World Cup soccer tournament. Tweetbeat ingests the entire firehose of 65 million Tweets a day, and spits out only those about the World Cup which are it deems to be the most popular and important. It tries to capture everything from news to teams, players and fan shout-outs.
What’s more impressive, though, is that along the left-hand side are flag icons of 32 teams. When you click on a flag, you see Tweets only about that team. You can follow only Brazil, England, Nigeria, or whatever team makes you want to cover yourself with body paint. The name of the team or “World Cup” doesn’t even have to be in the Tweet. Tweetbeat recognizes individual player names such as Cole or Maradona, nicknames, teams, even stadiums, and it delivers all of these Twets in realtime. A slider at the top allows you to adjust the speed at which the stream flows down the page. Next week, Tweetbeat will be available as an iPhone app and desktop widget, and sites like MySpace plan to use the data in their own widgets. → Read More
When it comes to getting access to all the data that flows through Twitter, there are the 50,000 apps that drink from Twitter’s Streaming API, which is subject to various limits. And then there are the chosen few who get the full unlimited firehose of data, the more than 50 million Tweets a day coursing through Twitter.
In the past, only select partners, particularly big search engines such as Google or Bing, got the full firehose. Search engines need it more than others to be able to index and serve up results in realtime. Today, smaller search startups are also getting the firehose. These include Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search (which has not yet launched). → Read More
Kosmix, the reference engine that dynamically generates comprehensive topic pages as soon as you search for them, has just acquired a small startup called Cruxlux. Cruxlux has spent the last two years building an engine that can take any two people, places, or things and tell you how they’re related. Terms of the deals were not disclosed, other than that that it was in both cash and stock.
If you’re a fan of the classic game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon‘, you’ll love the Cruxlux engine. The company has built algorithms that will automatically figure out how various people, places, things, and topics are related through a handful of steps, using sources across the web. Say, for example, I wanted to see how TechCrunch is connected to President Obama: the site first says that TechCrunch was founded by Michael Arrington, who is connected to Stanford Law School (he went there). That in turn is connected to Harvard Law School (they both use non-letter grading systems). Which brings us to Harvard Law School, which Barack Obama attended. With each step, the site has a ‘how’ feature that tells you how the subjects are related. → Read More
Kosmix, the universal search engine that dynamically generates guides to search queries using dozens of different content sources, is quickly gaining momentum. According to today’s latest comScore numbers, the site has jumped up to 3.2 million monthly uniques in March – a 419% growth since February.
Kosmix is meant to serve as a search engine for when you want to get a quick overview of any topic (In some ways, its approach is similar to Mahalo’s). But unlike Mahalo, all ‘guides’ are built using search algorithms rather than human editors. Data is pulled from a variety of sources, including YouTube, Wikipedia, and news sites to generate each guide. This makes the engine very flexible, as it can attempt to build a page for any search query, but it has also can lead to some quirks – occasionally you’ll find items in a Kosmix page that seem out of place, which human editing would presumably avoid. → Read More
MeeHive is a new service launching today that is looking to give users a custom-tailored newspaper composed of stories from sources spanning a vast number of blogs and news sites. The site leverages the power of Kosmix, a universal search engine that pulls data from a variety of sources to produce comprehensive topic pages.
Upon entering the site, new users are invited to enter some of their favorite topics, which range from mainstays like Sports and Technology to more specialized areas, like Stem Cells. Users can also specify certain companies or keywords to monitor. From there, MeeHive builds a digital newspaper, using content from a variety of sources including news sites like CNN as well as a wide selection of blogs (the system uses an authority algorithm to help weed out the best content). The Kosmix algorithm works well, pulling in relevant stories without any false matches (at least for common topics) and ensuring that the same story isn’t shown multiple times. → Read More
Kosmix, a universal search engine that pulls data from a variety of sources including Wikipedia, Yahoo Buzz and our own CrunchBase, has closed a $20 million round led by Time Warner, with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Dag Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round brings Kosmix’s total funding to $55 million. As part of today’s announcement Kosmix revealed that Ed Zander, former Motorola Chairman and CEO, will be joining as a private investor and advisor (other private investors include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Legg Mason’s Bill Miller).
For more information on the service, check out our preview here and the blog of founder Anand Rajaraman here. → Read More
Kosmix, until now a vertical search engine for information about health, automobiles and travel, transformed itself into a universal search engine for all subjects earlier today during a general redesign. The move has been anticipated since at least last September, and was described by co-founder Anand Rajaraman in a Beet.tv interview posted less than a week ago. Now when users conduct keyword searches on Kosmix (much as they would on a traditional search engine like Google or Ask), they are presented with mashups of results from a variety of sources. Unlike Mahalo, Kosmix itself doesn’t publish any of the content it displays. Rather, it pulls it all from services like Flickr, Google, Wikipedia, TheFind, Yahoo Answers, Amazon, Truveo, and YouTube. Results from each of these sources are shown in their own modules, which are packed rather tightly in a three column layout. We hear that there are hundreds of possible modules, although only a small subset of these show up for each query. If you are interested in a particular result type (videos, photos, blogs, etc), you can expand it into its own page for better browsing. Kosmix also suggests related searches in each of these views for when you want to jump around between “topics” as you would on Wikipedia. In his Beet.tv interview, Rajaraman claimed 15 million unique visitors per month for Kosmix. The vast majority of these visitors appears to be heading to RightHealth, Kosmix’s health vertical site that competes with the likes of iMedix, OrganizedWisdom, and others. According to Compete, Kosmix.com attracts only about 50-100 thousand visitors per month. If the Mountain View startup is to succeed at this horizontal strategy, it’ll have to focus on marketing its main property more effectively going forward. Kosmix’s other remaining vertical sites include RightAutos and RightTrips. No word yet on what the company plans to do with them. http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?tabType3=none&tabUrl3=undefined&tabTitle3=undefined&tabType2=none&tabUrl2=undefined&tabTitle2=undefined&tabType1=none&tabUrl1=undefined&tabTitle1=undefined&enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fbeettv%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F1003982%3Freferrer%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ebeet%2Etv%2F2008%2F06%2Fvertical%2Dsearch%2Ehtml%26source%3D3&thumb=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic%2Eblip%2Etv%2FPlesstv%2DAnandRajaramanKosmix405%2Epng&brandlink=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ebeet%2Etv%2F&brandname=Beet%2ETV&showguidebutton=false&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf CrunchBase Information Kosmix Mahalo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Keyword search gets you pretty far when looking for pure information, but doesn’t help much on more qualitative searches like trying to find the hippest restaurant in SOHO. Searches like the latter rely on the opinions of people, not webmasters, which is one of the reasons Circo’s has launched their new qualitative search engine. The engine currently lets users search for hotels and restaurants by qualities like size, ambiance, or other qualities pulled from reviews from around the web. They have plans to expand to other categories in the future. Circos is categorized under the ever expanding umbrella of semantic search engines, which currently includes the likes of Hakia, PowerSet, Kosmix, SemantiNet, Quintura, and TrueKnowledge. However, the engine is most like Kango, which has also taken on the task of categorizing hotels based on user reviews. VibeAgent also has a search engine for its own site that will search hotels based on qualities. While Kango auto-generates tags after pouring through user reviews, Circo lets users search for any qualities they’re interested in. The engine then grades and ranks the results by each quality on an “A” through “F” scale based on how well the description fits for reviewers. For example, a hotel reviewers feel is spacious would rate highly if searching for openness, but poorly if you’re looking for a tiny room. As with most search engines, Circos’ real test will be whether its application draws users away from other hotel and restaurant sites with less sophisticated search engines. Currently there are a bunch competing in the space. However, Circos says their technology can easily be extended to other categories since their algorithm does all the tough work of pulling the most relevant qualities from reviews. If hotels and restaurants don’t appeal, another category may hold their home run. Circos is angel funded, based in San Mateo, and has eight employees (4 in Singapore). http://www.theworldisbeautiful.com/circos/circosintro2.swf → Read More
Kosmix is a vertical search engine that launched in 2006. They also raised a heap of cash – over $25 million from Accel, Lightspeed and Cambrian Ventures as well as private investors including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Bill Miller of Legg Mason Funds. Although Kosmix founders Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan might have gone to school with Sergey Brin, their goal isn’t to take on Google. In a bit of a reshuffle since they first launched search engine, Kosmix now wants to use their search engine to create a “Home Page for Every Topic”. Their strategy is to create a series of targeted topic pages with relevant links, groups, and media. The pages are not only easily indexable by Google, but can easily generate new pages around a topic by typing a phrase into their search engine. It seems part Mahalo, part vertical search engine. Their first such vertical, health search, has been up for some time and currently does around 2.5 million visits and 9 million searches a month. “Neti Pot Facts” is one example of a search in which Kosmix has gained ranking. They have been working on other verticals as well, listing autos, politics, finance, travel, and video games as their other categories. The hope is to scale to ever more verticals and then bind them together under one search box that picks the right vertical for the page. Kosmix can continue to expand because they believe their method of search by category is sufficiently scalable. To add a new category, they’ll simply train the algorithm a bit, then let it to crawl the web on its own. Their category based search differs from Google’s popularity based page rank system by siloing websites into categories, then running searches within those categories. Pages are ranked based on how relevant their linking pages are as well. However, as Kosmix moves horizontally they are placed in competition with a host of new vertical search engines like MedStory and Healthline for Health or Kayak and TripAdvisor for travel. That’s not including the knowledge databases such as Wikipedia and Mayo Health clinic, which high quality edited content. These verticals also offer specialized features such as maps, price comparisons, and symptom search. All things considered it seems a tough road ahead. → Read More
DEMO 2006: 70 companies gather at a hotel in Phoenix, Arizona to compete head on for our attention. $15,000 buys you 5 minutes in front of 700 people, and a chance to make history (which is not recorded real time because the wifi is crushed under the load and no one can get online). At least there is reliable internet access in the press room, along with dozens of free USB drives laying around (this whole “press” gig is pretty damn awesome). A few companies caught my eye today as the ones to watch this year. Here they are: Blurb Blurb will turn your blog or other website into a book. As in, a real, tangible book that you can hold. The service is now in private beta and will be available to the public in March(ish). CEO Eileen Gittins does a great job describing the product and this looks to be an interesting space, especially for ego-type purchases where bloggers buy a copy for themselves.t’ll be about $30 for a four color, 40 page, 8×10 hardcover book with a custom dust jacket. Kaboodle I wrote about Kaboodle, a clip service that is really useful for gathering and sharing information on the web, back in October. They launched some incredible new features this week to normalize data across items: search for items, clone/copy a page, find related items, vote on items, etc. They are also allowing users to create profiles to allow more social aspects. A lot of people are finding Kaboodle to be a very useful shopping tool. Kosmix Mountain View based Kosmix is a structured search engine with three current verticals: health, politics and travel. More are coming soon. Instead of showing linear, Google-like results, Kosmix is categorizing results to create a taxonomy. They claim their engine can be used to create good results over almost any topic area. This is one to watch and I’ll be doing a full profile on them soon. Krugle Fred Wilson wrote about Krugle today as well, saying “It’s a search engine for open source software. Vertical search for open source. Sounds like a good concept. The demo was simple and the proposition was compelling. Not sure how they make money, but the demo isn’t supposed to focus on that.” Knowing how often developers use search engines to find code snippets, this will be an extremely useful. The company is based in → Read More
