Just a few months after Shutterfly bought Tiny Pictures, they’re already busy pumping out new products. The first is Wink, an iPhone app and web app that allows you to easily turn your pictures into photobooth-esque strips of pictures.
They key to this app is that beyond your regular camera phone pictures, it gives you easy access to both your Facebook pictures (via Facebook Connect), and your Flickr pictures. Once you have those, it takes just seconds to tweak them and send them off to Shutterfly to be printed and delivered to you (or friends) in a special photostrip case. And before that arrives, they send you an email preview of what the photostrips will look like. These strips can also be shared on Facebook and Twitter immediately. → Read More
Matt wrote about Wink Glasses a couple of months ago. He was skeptical of their value. I found them on display at CEATEC 2009, and just had to try them out! In the photo above, you can see them in the “active” state, helpfully reminding me that it’s time to blink. Click on through for a thrilling video of Wink Glasses in action! HOT! → Read More
I’m guessing most of us have experienced the sensation of our eyes glossing over and and losing the ability to focus on the computer screen. It feels like your looking at Magic Eye art, almost like you’re looking through the screen. It usually happens after staring at the computer screen for endless hours during an all-nighter LAN party or while sitting in a cubical, mindlessly calling people to refi their mortgage with you. (experience talking there) These Wink Glasses aim to solve that issue by forcing your eye blink. Neat. → Read More
When Reunion.com and Wink announced their merger in early October 2008, the company indicated that it would be relaunching under a different brand name and with a completely overhauled website in early 2009. That day has finally come, and henceforth the merged companies will live on as MyLife.
The website for Reunion.com already redirects to MyLife.com, while dedicated people search engine Wink still has its own web presence. MyLife, however, already integrates Wink’s technology, which means the new hybrid social platform is now a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. On its company presentation page, MyLife boasts that it can locate over 750 million online profiles via its search index today. → Read More
Google may be good at many things, but people search is not one of them. For that you’ll have to use a more specialized search engine. Spock and Wink (merged with Reunion.com) are the people-search destinations most TechCrunch readers could probably name off the top of their head. However, slowly but surely—and mostly, very quietly—a new player has been making serious headway in this search vertical, and it’s name is Pipl.com.
Going by ComScore’s December numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557K unique users to Spock’s 260K, but is trailing internationally with 1.35M uniques to Spock’s 2.38M. How has Pipl pulled this off? Matthew Hertz, the company CEO, tells me it’s mostly word-of-mouth. It’s a simple answer but it rings true. Just take it out for a spin and you’ll see why—it’s just good. In fact it’s so good it’ll probably scare some people’s pants off when they see what information it is able to—legally—drudge up. → Read More
People-search engine Wink has joined forces with Reunion.com, a hybrid people-search/social networking site, to create one giant hub for finding people you once knew but forgot to keep in touch with. The two companies have merged and will be launching a new website (and brandname) in early 2009, which the sites say will feature a total of 700 million user profiles.
Wink allows users to simultaneously search for profiles across social networks including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a number of others. The site originally launched in 2005 as a people-powered search engine, and reinvented itself as a people search in 2006. In September the site reported a search index of over 500 million user profiles, though some of these seem to lead to profile pages that either don’t work or are blank. → Read More
Wink, the search engine that lets you search user profiles across many social networks, has announced that it has indexed a whopping 500 million profiles worldwide – double the number it had twelve months ago. Wink also predicts similar growth in the future, with a projected 1 billion profiles indexed over the next year.
Wink originally launched back in 2005 as a user-enhanced search engine that asked the crowd to help tag and rank search results. The site transitioned to a search engine for people in fall 2006 and went on to partially liquidate, explaining that the company’s new direction was not what investors had originally signed up for. → Read More
Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion – and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia – sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles). New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page. Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome – until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how they’re doing. CrunchBase Information Biographicon Ethan Herdrick Daniel Terhorst Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
New comer to the people search game 123people.com is a Austrian based startup that is looking to provide a new take on the competitive people search market with a European focus. There’s no shortage of wannabes in this space. Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou are a few companies we’ve reviewed previously. 123people.com joins that list, but there are a few differences that are worth mentioning. 123people.com is primarily a data aggregator, but unlike some of its competitors it goes one step further by aggregating publicly available phone numbers and email addresses for every search result. It’s not perfect, and it has better results for European focused searches, but this will improve with time. In addition 123people also aggregates videos, photos, tags and comments from “hundreds of international sites” including Facebook, Hi5, Xing, YouTube, Last.fm and studiVZ. Users can claim, tag, vote and comment on aggregated profiles on 123people.com. We have invites to the private beta of 123people.com to give away to TechCrunch readers. The first 150 people to email privatebeta@123people.com will get an invite code in return, and if you are one of the 150, let us know what you think of 123people.com in the comments. CrunchBase Information spock Wink ZoomInfo WikiYou PeekYou Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
As if the more than 20 billion Web pages out there aren’t enough, a new startup coming out of stealth mode today called Attendi has come up with a new twist on “people search.” This is not to be confused with the type of people search that Facebook is getting into (actually searching for people—see also Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou), or the type of people-powered search results that Mahalo, Wikiasari, and others are exploring (also known as social search). Actually, Attendi could more aptly be called chat search because it wants to search what’s in people’s heads as expressed through online chats. Attendi is launching at DEMO fall. Attendi is half a social network, and half a knowledge database. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Members, known as “Attendis,” will create profiles on the site describing their areas of expertise, hobbies, and interests, as well as adding links to their blogs, social networks, or simply Websites they identify with. The site, which opens in beta today, dynamically creates tags that define what each person knows and cares about (they can also add their own tags). It is built on top of the Lucene open-source search engine, and the Jabber instant-messaging protocol. When someone searches for a topic on Attendi, what comes back as results are profiles of other “Attendis” whose tags match the search request. And if they happen to be online at the moment, even on another IM system, the other person can initiate a chat discussion with one of them to ask questions about that topic. “Attendi will just be a way to broker your availability,” says CEO Drew Rayman. Every chat is archived, indexed, and becomes fodder for future search results. Attendi is based in New York City, and Rayman is also the founder of an interactive ad agency called i33. He plans on selling search ad sponsorships based on Attendi topics, as well as a live chat ad unit that only pops up when a company’s online customer service rep is at the ready to do a hard sell through IM. It’s that kind of in-your-face advertising, though, that might drive people away from an IM-centric search engine and never give it a second chance. Making topic-specific IMs searchable is certainly a novel way to create a knowledge database. But Attendi faces a huge hurdle in getting anybody to actually use its system. What’s → Read More
We’re not sure when it launched, but Fred Wilson has discovered that Seth Godin’s Squidoo has quietly entered the people search field with a new product called Squidwho. Squidwho provides similar features to competitors including Wink, Spock, PeekYou, WikiYou and Zoominfo. Pages include a short biography, Amazon products (where applicable), YouTube videos, Flickr shots, latest news and RSS feed data from appropriate sites. Each page is maintained my Squidoo Lens Guide and offers the same revenue share model as regular Squidoo pages offer. It would be easy to question yet another company targeting people search in what continues to be a hot vertical (even Facebook is now offering public people search), and yet by labelling Squidoo Lens’ under the Squidwho label it’s a logical step for Squidoo. The backend is already in place as are the would-be guides to create the information; in effect the new service is more branding exercise than something completely new. → Read More
Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts. Not much information is included in the results (see image below)- just the name and primary photograph included in the user profile, and users can easily elect to stop search engines from indexing their information by changing their privacy settings. As Om Malik notes, this is yet another competitive threat in the burgeoning people search scene. We’ve recently covered five new people search engines – Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou. All of these services count on the fact that people information is distributed across many different websites and services. To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today. → Read More
PeekYou is a fairly new site that competes in a growingly crowded people search space. The site offers the standard features we’ve come to expect from people focused search sites. A general user profile includes tags, which are divided into three categories (life, work and school) for context, web links including social network profiles, bio and picture. PeekYou was founded by Michael Hussey, the creator of sites including RateMyTeachers.com which were later acquired to MTV. Hussey sees PeekYou as being “the ultimate reindexing of the web and a virtual people pages, spanning the entire web and assigning unique identities to individuals made up of everything from Social Networking pages, blog posts, news stories and known online aliases.” OK, so that is a handful, but he is at least aiming high. The site launched in July 2007. PeekYou competes directly with Spock and in some respect with Wink as well (see our Spock coverage here, others here), so a direct comparison is called for. I like PeekYou in some ways more than Spock. It could be the aesthetics: PeekYou is much nicer to look at and seems to play more nicely as well in terms of editing, where as Spock may provide better links due to its higher user numbers, but it just doesn’t look nearly as nice. The data in PeekYou, at least for the couple of people I checked, also seems to be more accessible (for now). For example, comparing Michael Arrington on PeekYou and Spock (here and here) you get an immediate idea on what Michael is about in PeekYou, where as in Spock there may be more tags and relationships, but they are partially buried and not always immediately clear in terms of context. All up, Spock may be getting all the attention, but PeekYou does offer a decent alternative. → Read More
I moderated a fascinating panel tonight at Google headquarters that included execs from three “people search engines” – the CEO of Wink (Michael Tanne), the CEO of Spock (Jaideep Singh), and the COO of Zoominfo (Bryan Burdick). The panel was very timely. Earlier today the Wall Street Journal published an article called “You’re Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well” that outlined the exact problem these search engines are trying to solve – finding information about people on the web, many of whom have identical names. The article didn’t mention the efforts of these startups, instead focusing entirely on Google, but it did note a few interesting statistics. There are, for example, 158 million results on Google for the name “John Smith” (I actually see 225 million, but who’s counting). Big statistics are thrown around when people talk about people search. Singh says around 30% of searches are people-related. Tanne says 2 billion searches per month are on people (Facebook data tends to suggest this is probably vastly underestimated). Still, it’s not clear that this market is huge. The big advertising dollars tend to come in for product and service-related searches, not for searches on John Smith. Spock, Wink and Zoominfo each have very different products, reflecting their different philosophies on business models, target markets, and control over information. Wink Wink changed course in November 2006 and began providing search results on people from social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo. Users search based on name, geography and other criteria (company, school, whatever) and see results from major social networks. Tanne says they now have over 175 million distinct individuals indexed on their site. Users can claim their Wink profile, proving their ownership of various profiles on social networks by entering in the email they use for those accounts. Wink relies on advertising for revenue, and Tanne says they can get $2 or so in revenue per thousand page impressions. He also hinted at other revenue streams down the road, such as lead generation for other services. Wink raised $7 million in venture capital but did a partial stock buy-back earlier this year. Spock Spock hasn’t launched yet, but the demos we’ve seen show it to be a direct competitor to Wink. The company, which raised $7 million in a Series A round of financing, is in private beta and should launch in the next couple of months. See our overview → Read More
It’s not often we hear about a startup’s venture financing before we see the product, but that is the case with yet-to-launch Spock, located in Silicon Valley. Rumors about their $7 million Series A round of financing from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital Ventures circulated last December, months before the beta service was planned to launch. I met with founders Jaideep Singh (CEO) and Jay Bhatti (VP Product) last week to test the service, which they plan to beta launch next week. People search is a space that went from nowhere to crowded, fast. Wink changed direction and launched a people search product last November. Also in this space is Streakr (yet to launch), ProfileLinker, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Upscoop. Spock’s People Search Engine Unlike the others (for the most part), Spock goes way beyond searching just social networks for people information. They are positioning themselves specifically against Google for web search and Amazon for product search, saying the third important type of search is information about people, and that 30% of Internet searches are people-related. Wink is Spock’s closest competitor among all of the ones listed above. In my testing, Spock did a great job of finding information about different kinds of people – bloggers, celebrities, and even lesser known individuals with some web presence. See last screenshot below for an example search results page. People Profiles and Metadata But part of where Spock really shines is what they do after the search is completed. They are slowly indexing the entire web , which is no small feat, but focusing on important hubs of people information like blogs, wikipedia, photo sites and, of course, social networks. Each person discovered by their search engine is run through a process of de-duping (for people with identical or similar names) and given a permanent profile page (see screenshot of former President Bill Clinton’s profile to right – click for larger view). Spock auto-creates tags for individuals based on the information they find. Prominent tags for Bill Clinton, for example, include “former U.S. President, “Great Leader,” “Womanizer,” “Left Handed,” “Democrat,” and “Saxophonist,” among others. Spock also auto detects other relevant meta data about the individual – age, location and sex. Users can add new tags and vote on whether existing tags are relevant or correct. Also, individuals can claim their own profile (Spock runs your email through the social networks to see if → Read More
Search engine startup Wink has offered to buy back stock from investors with remaining cash at a rate of fifty cents on the dollar, according to sources involved with the company. The company has raised two rounds of financing totaling $7 million to date. Our understanding is that some of the investors have elected to sell their stock back to the company under these terms. Wink’s main investor, Greylock, reduced it’s stake in the company but remains its largest outside shareholder. Wink’s plan will be to consolidate it’s remaining cash and focus on its people search engine, launched last fall. We’re hearing two versions of why this is happening. The first version, coming from disgruntled shareholders, is that the company has failed to execute and it’s time to return what’s left of the capital to investors. The other story, being pushed by the company, is that they simply made a strategic decision to change the direction of the product, and offered investors a way out since it isn’t the story they originally bought into. Both are probably partially true, although it’s clear that a liquidation couldn’t be forced unless Greylock was behind it. And Greylock, even though they’ve sold some of their stock, still seems to be backing the company. Odeo was also recently bought back from investors. In that case, the company was taken completely private and outside shareholders were reimbursed 100% of their initial investment. That looks to be a brilliant decision by founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. While Odeo has since been put up for sale, Twitter has exploded with growth and has hyper buzz. Will Wink also be successful? That’s for users to decide. But organizing the mess of human meta data included in the big social networks could be a smart way to go. → Read More
Vivek, over at Startup Squad, recently discovered a new social network and social networking meta search engine, Streakr. The main URL still says the site is coming soon. The new engine lets you search the profiles on the major networks (MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook) as well at it’s own social network. It appears to be a hook to draw people into their main service, like Wink did when they launched their own profile search and Rapleaf had with UpScoop. Profile management tool ProfileLinker also has a search engine. Streakr’s social network is like Delicious for cool kids and is a less flashy take on Trig. It includes a profiles, a toolbar, and a stumble upon feature that lets you flip through links in a given category. Here’s the one for video. The profiles look a lot like MySpace, consisting of the usual details, about me, photos, and seizure inducing layouts. Xenia is Streakrs’ Tom. However, where MySpace puts a blog and comments, Streakr puts in favorite links and your “thumbs up” rating for each. You can input the links into your profile manually, or use the Streakr toolbar to add links to your profile and vote on them. The toolbar also provides an interface to all the other functionality on the main site, and is currently only for IE, requires the .NET framework, and takes forever and a day to download and install. There are a couple other sites with social networking meta search. Here’s the lowdown on a few: Wink Wink is fast and simple. It searches Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Live Spaces. It also has advanced search features, like location, sex, status, age, and interests. It also lets you narrow your search by those fields after your first search. ProfileLinker ProfileLinker is the most comprehensive search engine, with 84 social networking sites including general, blog, cultural, dating, professional, student, and special interest networks. Unfortunately you have to log in to use it. UpScoop UpScoop comes ahead in ease of use. Unlike the others, UpScoop searches by email based on all the contacts in your address book. It searches Bebo, Classmates, Ecademy, Flickr, Friendster, Hi5, Livejournal, Multiply, MySpace, Ringo, Tickle, Tribe, Yelp, Mog, and LinkedIn. While it finds the vast majority of your friends off the bat, some drawbacks are that it can take UpScoop up to a couple hours to search for the last few and → Read More
Social search site Wink released a new feature called People Search this weekend and I think it’s going to be a big move for the company. Wink People Search searches over the user profiles of MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo. It’s not a mashup of the sites’ own search functions, it’s an original indexing of more than 100 million profiles over these three social networking sites. Wink says it will be adding new social networks to People Search every two weeks, which ones will be voted on by registered Wink users. As niche social networks proliferate, an aggregated people search is so smart. Someone from the Open ID community should buy a big ad on the results page of Wink People Search. The anonymous nature of many social networking sites makes it difficult, though not impossible, to use them to discover old friends. Wink says that the primary use for People Search will be finding people with similar interests across social networks. Results can be filtered by network, gender, age and single/taken status. Will young people want to search across networks by interest? I’m not sure. Will marketers and researchers? I imagine they will. How will these sites feel about Wink’s ads run against search results of their users’ profiles? That could be some concern, but short aggregated excerpts with links back are generally considered fair game to run ads against, I believe. Without knowing how it will be used, People Search strikes me as just plain cool. It’s now integrated with the basic Wink bookmarking and sharing functions; Wink augments Google search by allowing you to search inside other users’ bookmark collections. Our previous coverage of Wink is here. The company raised $6.2 million in funding from Cambrian Ventures, Greylock Partners and angels last year. They tell us they’ve got a good, slow burn rate and that’s great – it allows them time to come up with and implement solid features like People Search. This sort of value proposition is likely to drive a significant number of people to Wink and thus increase the users of it’s basic social search. Social search probably isn’t desirable enough to stand on its own so it’s smart of Wink to start building things like People Search around it. Update: Some people apparently find it distasteful to be able to search multiple social networks simultaneously. That makes no sense to me. If the need → Read More
Social search company Wink just went live with their relaunched site, making better use of collaboratively built collections, offering a Firefox toolbar and other changes we detailed in an early preview. Wink is a smart, well funded company with a useful service in a space that’s got a lot of potential. This relaunch isn’t terribly exciting but it does make one of the major players in social search significantly more usable than they had been. This one’s a company to watch for the long haul. → Read More
Social search engine Wink will launch version 2.0 of its service early next week with changes designed to make make search more social than ever. I’ve described below the information I was able to get out of them prelaunch, but I hope there’s more to come. Social search has a lot of potential and I do like Wink’s approach. Here’s the basics on Wink. It’s a search engine that indexes tagged content from Digg, Yahoo MyWeb, Furl, Slashdot, other social bookmarking services and it’s own users’ archives. Those items are displayed as appropriate on search results pages above results from Google. It’s Google, augmented by peoples’ tags. It’s also a standard social bookmarking service in and of itself. Users can also create collections, or lists of items related to a given topic, a list of pages related to buying a video projector or a list of pages related to the band Weezer. Lists can be subscribed to by other users. Unlike standard tags in typical social bookmarking services, any given list can be added to by another user. All of that could read like standard rhetoric, but it can be interesting to use the FireFox search plug-in and add tag search to the top of your Google results. If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward social bookmarking service this could work for you. Wink also synchs with del.icio.us and lets users change wiki entries inside Wink that were gleaned from Wikipedia. The company received $6.2 million in funding from Cambrian Ventures, Greylock Partners and angels last year. You can see our previous coverage of Wink here. What’s new in Wink 2.0? Users will be able to move search results up and down by vote, including results from Google. The current version of Wink just ranks sites by the number of Wink users who have tagged them. Quick voting could help increase the quality of the results or it could substitute carefully thought out algorithms with the whims of fickle users. It’s a delicate balance, but Wink says for example that spam control will be implemented shortly to prevent antisocial users from gaming the system. The single item that’s received the most thumbs up on that query will be displayed at the top of the page. Collections built by users will play a much more prominent roll in search results as well. While the current version only displays collections with titles → Read More
