Social search engine Delver, which we placed on death watch a month and a half ago has been acquired by Sears in a last minute play right out of left field.
Israeli business media is reporting that as part of the deal, Delver CEO Liad Agmon will move to Chicago where he will hold a title of VP at Sears Holdings. Delver itself will become an R&D center for Sears and will continue to develop its social graph search engine, as well as additional products. It is not clear what Sears wants to do with Delver. Perhaps it will turn it into a social product search engine, or maybe it just likes the idea of buying an Israeli R&D team on the cheap.
The purchase price is unknown but it’s safe to assume it could not be very high considering the company was literally days from being shut down. The bright side of course is that Delver’s remaining 20 employees will not join the unemployed in Israel. → Read More
We’ve contacted the company to confirm, but former engineer of the Israeli startup Aviran Mordo is reporting on his blog that the social search company Delver has failed to secure follow-up financing due to the drought in VC activity and will be closing shop in 30 days unless they find a buyer.
The company has raised $4 million from a single investor, Carmel Ventures, and was – according to Mordo’s blog post – unable to raise a second round between $6 and $8 million from the firm or other venture capitalists.
Update: I just got off a call with Delver’s co-founder CEO Liad Agmon, who confirmed all of the above. → Read More
Israel seems to be the country with the single biggest foreign contingent at TC50 with no less than 6 of the 50 companies presenting on stage. Some more Israeli startups can be found in the demo pit, the exhibition space and just walking around the venue floor shopping for investors, customers and partners.
Here is a round-up of the 6 Israeli companies that presented on stage: → Read More
Delver, which came out of stealth back in January is announcing today that its social graph search engine is open to the public. While the product certainly is intriguing, curb your expectations as Delver has slapped an “Alpha” status on it. The objective behind Delver is to uncover and make accessible knowledge and information that is hidden in users’ social graphs—an area that Google’s Marissa Mayer has indicated to be an essential part of Google’s future search offerings. Delver begins by mapping direct and implicit connections. For example, Delver would discover that Mark Hendrickson, Jason Kincaid and I are all related to each other through TechCrunch. In Mark’s case it would be due to a direct connection with me on Facebook. In Jason’s case it would be an implicit connection because he wrote in his LinkedIn profile that he works for TechCrunch. Once these connections are mapped, Delver lets users leverage their social graph to perform web searches. The results themselves are ranked based on their social relevance. A breadcrumb indicates the results’ origin in respect to the users’ social graph—using the example above: Me >> Mark Hendrickson >> Jason Kincaid. This Alpha launch marks the first time Delver’s search engine has been available to the public. It’s a brave move by Delver because the product is far from perfect. So in order to set the appropriate level of expectations, take the following into consideration if you take it out for a spin: First, there are users who will find limited results because their personal social graphs are incomplete. Delver still has a lot of social graph crawling and parsing to do. That said, the Alpha launch encompasses the profiles of 40 million MySpace users, 30 million Hi5 users, 2.5 million Facebook users, 1.5 million Blogger users, 3 million Flickr users and 300,000 Digg users. Second, if you’re expecting a streamlined user experience à la Google, then prepare yourself for a serious feature over-kill. Liad Agmon, Delver’s CEO, explained to me that the reason for this is the fact that aside from a destination play, Delver is also packaging itself as a white label social graph search engine. The excess in features are options that social networks could theoretically pick-and-choose from in order to customize Delvers’ engine for integration. Delver took upon itself an ambitious challenge and it’s still too early to tell whether it will become a player in → Read More
What if a search engine knew who your friends were and delivered results based on their actions and content across the Web? Today at the DEMO conference, an Israeli startup called Delver (formerly Semingo) is coming out of stealth and announcing its upcoming launch as a semantic social graph search engine. Delver is attempting to solve two key search-related problems. The first is that current search engines do not take into account the identity of the searcher. For example, a teenager and a senior citizen performing the same query will get exactly the same results. The second is that current search engines do not allow users to search for information created and referenced by their own social graph. This is an important point because, let’s face it, social networking doesn’t offer much functional value beyond allowing people to connect with one another. The fact that you have 300 friends on Facebook, 200 on MySpace and 100 connections on LinkedIn doesn’t actually help you locate information. This is where Delver comes in. Search for “New York,” and the results that will pop up will be blog posts from people you know that mention or are about New York, or Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, and the like. The technology, which has been in development since 2005, combines search technologies, semantics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Delver begins by crawling the Web in order to map users’ social connections. The information it finds on social networking profiles, blogs, bookmarks, photo and video-sharing sites is then cross-linked to the searcher’s social graph, which is built on-the-fly. Delver then prioritizes its results based upon the searcher’s social graph, thereby improving the relevancy of the results. Since every person’s social graph is unique—much like a fingerprint—the same Delver query will produce significantly different results for each person—as reflected through the collective experiences of each person’s contacts. Using Delver doesn’t require users to sign-in, they can just enter their names (and some additional identifying details such as city, in the case of a common name). An email address will also allow Delver to leverage the popular social networks to locate users’ social graphs. Registered users can claim their profile and authenticate the sources they want to associate with. This means that if I provide the username and password of my Flickr account, Delver considers this account to be mine and will not allow any other → Read More
