I bet that you don’t know where the Vulcan salute came from? I also bet that you don’t know Leonard Nimoy himself that suggested the hand gesture for Star Trek and that it comes from his religious background. Click through to watch a short clip on the subject. → Read More
People search engine Spock is about to be sold, say multiple sources. Spock was a hot startup back when it launched in 2007, but after an initial spike in traffic, the company has gone sideways and faded into obscurity. People search, it seems, will be dominated by the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook, who are both now being smart about search engine optimization.
Now they’ve burned through much of the cash they raised, which includes an announced $7 million round plus additional undisclosed funding. And they’ve been trying to sell themselves for some time – we’ve confirmed with a couple of buyers who looked at it and passed. Meanwhile, Spock has started charging users to access their data.
But one company may have bitten and are close to buying the company. Sources are saying that the infamous Intelius (founded by the equally infamous Naveen Jain), a people search engine that charges users to access data, may be buying Spocksoon. If these rumors are accurate, God help Spock. Not only is Intelius embroiled in all kinds of legal and ethical disputes, but they also have a shaky history when it comes to acquisitions. See this article, for example, about a 2005 acquisition of addresses.com, which ended up in litigation. Our coverage of Intelius is here and here. → 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
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
People search engine Spock, which we’ve been covering for a few months, has publicly launched. Spock differs from differs from recently launched WikiYou and other people search engines by using algorithms to find and merge the majority of their content into a unified profile. User generated content such (tags, links, photos) then augment the auto-generated content they spider from other sources such as wikipedia, IMDB, or social networking sites. Note that competitor Wink seems to be moving toward a more automated model as well. They recently crossed 200 million people profiles and have been incorporating some of the same data sources as Spock. A key Spock feature is a widget that shows results for a given tag (see embed below). Making the service public makes the widget a lot more useful. You can use it to make any number of lists around a how Spock ranks search terms. See, for example, the results for blogger and tech blogger. Spock is certainly fun, and encourages user interaction by adding and voting on descriptive tags. It could easily become a definitive source of information about people. It will, however, likely take a massive number of page views to properly monetize the product – people searches do not generate the kind of advertising rates that ecommerce and other searches command. → Read More
Anita Hamilton at Time.com does drive-by on people search engine Spock. And while there is plenty to criticize (business model?), Hamilton clearly has no clue about how Spock actually works. The article, titled “Online Snooping Gets Creepy,” suggests that Spock and a few other sites are out to disclose private information: And so, after just a few minutes of clicking around, I had found Sacasa’s MySpace page, her age, home address and what appears to be quite a lot of information about her family in Florida — all without using Google or any other popular search site. She incorrectly lumps Spock, which gathers information about people from places like LinkedIn, Wikipedia and social networks, with the more dubious companies that do serious and sometimes unethical data mining of private information like email and home addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. Spock doesn’t do any of that, but are the featured target of the article anyway. Look for a Spock launch next Wednesday, August 8. If you can’t wait that long, hop over to InviteShare and get a private beta pass. The company is giving out a lot of invites, and there is no waiting list right now. There are already over 100,000 people in the beta. → Read More
A new people-focused content site called WikiYou launches this morning out of beta. Generally speaking it is a “wikipedia for people” with a social network bolted on. The focus is is on biographies and stories about individuals. Much of the content is wiki-like, allowing anyone to edit it. The company, which was started by Bolt.com founders Jay Gould and Aaron Cohen, is very much like the unlaunched Spock, which we profiled here. And while they beat Spock to launch, Spock is in my opinion the better site. And there are lots of other competitors, too. When you join WikiYou, you can create or claim a profile. You then add a picture and biographical data to the profile, and you can add friends. The main area of any profile is reserved for stories about the person (example), which can be revised by others. Stuff written by power users who’ve proven reliable goes on top and is circled in yellow. Everyone else’s content is below. Spock, by comparison, has no story-driven content about people. It’s all metadata from other sites and user uploaded pictures and tags. Also, Spock doesn’t have a social network component. It’s pure people content and search. Still, Spock has already proven to be very interesting, driving people to add and vote on tags for people, add related individuals to create connections, etc. WikiYou doesn’t seem to have these attractions, and I suspect people will largely find the site boring. WikiYou raised a seed round of approximately $500,000 from Mayfield, First Round Capital and Reid Hoffman in December 2006. Bolt.com also owns a percentage of the company in return for services. → Read More
At Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session, 12 young startups (well, 13 if you count the fake one planted to keep the audience on their toes), pitched their products to an audience at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with punditry by Kevin Werbach and Michael Arrington and supporting color from Josh Kopelman, Julia Hanna Farris and Paul Kedrosky. Here’s a look at the 13 companies: adap.tv AdaptiveBlue AggregateKnowledge CastTV Critical Metrics Jangl Pando Networks SodaHead Spock Wize ZapMeals ZenZui Zing Adap.tv – They’re like adsense for video, tying contextual text ads based on the content of a video. When videos play, Adap.tv digs up relevant Amazon products and Looksmart ads to populate an ad bar on the bottom of the video at key moments. They use tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations to find out what the video is about. AdaptiveBlue – Makers of the Blue Organizer, a Firefox bookmarking and tagging add-on that parses web pages, adding contextual information where appropriate. For instance, if you go to a web page about a band, Blue Organizer’s right-click menu will show you more info about the band drawn from sites like Odeo or Wikipedia. The plugin also has smart links that let you easily push the link to services like Digg or LibraryThing. More coverage of the recent feature additions here. Aggregate Knowledge – One of the more established companies at the event, they work with online commerce sites to provide personalized recommendations by looking at user’s collective behavior. They just closed a large round of financing and are rumored to be profitable after a little over a year in operation. CastTV – A video search engine that pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. The service performed well in our earlier review. They recently raised a $3.1 million round of financing from DFJ. Critical Metrics – A music recommendation service that aggregates music reviews from around the web. Each song includes an audio and optional Youtube sample and purchasing options from services like Yahoo Music, iTunes, or Rhapsody. Jangl – They specialize in anonymous phone communication. A Jangl is a real phone number lets people call you with knowing your real number. The first time someone calls you they have to leave a message and request permission → Read More
Spock, the new people search engine, has been getting a lot of buzz the last few weeks. We posted an overview and screen shots last month and I recently moderated a panel that included them, Wink and ZoomInfo (notes are here). but the founders have been very careful to limit beta testers to just a handful of people. Starting today they are beginning to open up a bit in preparation for a summer launch. They’ve given us 100 beta accounts to give away. If you are interested, send an email to techcrunch@corp.spock.com. The first 100 people get in immediately, and everyone after the first 100 will get priority access in the next couple of weeks. Move fast, these spots will be gone in the next 30 minutes or so. Update: the 100 spots were taken in exactly 30 minutes, as of 3:50 pm PST. → 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
