Archive for June, 2009



Visual Search Engine SearchMe: A Pie In The Sky?

June 25th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Innovation is good, especially in this search-crazed Web 2.0 world.

But like a lot of innovative projects, start-ups have their moment in the sun and then they slowly start to fade away.

Such is the case with SearchMe – the visual search engine.

I emphasis the word visual because it does exactly what Google and Bing don’t. It presents search results as a stack of full page previews that you can flip through.

Fun, yes.

Easy on the eyes, no.

While you may get a kick out seeing a page before you click on it, imagine seeing dozens of them at once. Does someone really want to sit there and digest all of that?

Text search results put forth by Google and the rest of the mainstream search engines are quicker to sort through – and take a lot less brain power to consume.

I’m not the only person who feels this way either.

SearchMe’s ad platform- which is really pretty interesting-  is in a slump and the reason is traffic, or lack thereof.

In February, SearchMe had about 3 million monthly visitors in the U.S. In April, the site had grown to 4 million monthly visitors. But in May, the number of U.S. visitors plummeted to around 750,000.

SearchMe says that this drop in numbers is due to the fact that the search engine was spending $500,000 a month in advertising and driving a lot of traffic to the site. The startup is now spending little to no capital on advertising and is in the process of closing distribution deals to place the search bar in browsers and toolbars.

SearchMe maintains that advertisers love the search engine and its unique features. Yet, without visitors there’s no money to be made.

The thing is… SearchMe is in a world all of its own. It really isn’t competing with Google and Bing – because it can’t.

But if you can’t compete, then why bother?

I’m all for blazing a trail, but unfortunately SearchMe is anything but on fire.

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Bypassing Iran Censorship Through Social Media

June 18th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Twitter | 1 Comment »

The face of social media changed this month.

Twitterers. YouTube watchers. Flickr glazers went to their prospective sites not for work or leisure – but to get involved with a powerful, hot-bedded election in Iran.

This election was supposed to ignite – and implement – a revolution. A “green revolution”.

Alas, that did not happen.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad beat Mir-Houssein Mousavi with 63% of the vote.

Mousavi supporters cried fowl, claiming the election results were tampered.

The world watched. Listened. Then got involved.

On June 13, the day after the election and Western journalists were sent packing, Iran saw the writing on the wall and pulled the plug on all Internet traffic. For 45 minutes there was no way to access the web through Iran’s only telecom company – Data Communications of Iran (DCI).  When service did resume, it was at a very low level – and remains so to this day. DCI also tried to cleverly throttle back the total amount of Internet data entering or a leaving the country, installing new filtering systems that block politically sensitive websites.

Twitter. YouTube. Flickr. All of them were unscathed.

And so began this new chapter in the life of social media – a sidestep to censorship.

When enraged Mousavi supporters couldn’t make their voices heard around the world – social networks did the talking for them. Cell phone snapshots, text messages, and incredible videos were uploaded and shared on these Web services  - essentially undoing what the Iranian government thought was an iron-clad spin control plan.

Word of the violence unfolding in Iran, restrained by just 140 characters, spread like wildfire on Twitter. We received minute-by-minute updates and images; an unprecedented turn of events considering the lack of information we were receiving from traditional television news sources.

Now as the dust begins to settle, it’s time for us to step back and take a look – and appreciate – what the Internet has now become: a real time voice for the world.

Imagine how we would have seen 9/11 unfold through today’s social media?

Or how about the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Or when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003?

Now, sit back and think about what we’ll likely see in the future.

Kind of tough to wrap your head around, isn’t it?

This is obviously just the beginning of something big – very big.

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Risks, Probability Revealed In Small Business Success Calculator

June 11th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Small Business | 1 Comment »

Leave it to the little folks to come up with some big, brilliant ideas.

There’s a new small business tool over at StartupNation – one that either budding entrepreneurs will love or hate.

It’s called the “Odds of Success Calculator For Business”. Designed in part by EquityNet, the ‘calculator’ is designed to help entrepreneurs identify and evaluate business risk. It also calculates the probability of whether a small business will succeed or fail.

Part tough love tool, part Magic 8 ball – the small business success calculator lets business owners get a snapshot of their own business risk profiles based on eight key risk factors:

- amount of capital investment

- difficulty in obtaining funds

- quality of financial management

- degree of business planning

- annual industry growth rate

- management experience

- industry experience and timeframe.

One click – free of charge – and the calculator spits out the odds for success within a given timeframe identified by the business ower.

EquityNet says this tool is best suited for companies that are younger than four years. The company also insists that the methodology used to generate the risk assessment is fair and accurate.  The comprehensive version of EquityNet’s Risk Quantification System (RQS) analyzes 30 important business variables including industry sector and enterprise age. It then compares them against hundreds of thousands of data points of companies that have failed or succeeded, thereby computing the probability of success for the individual company.

And there you have it. A hard dose of reality all wrapped up into one tight little tool.

As they say in small business – boom or bust.

Why not let the ‘calculator’ break the news to you first?

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Developers Rave About Google Wave

June 4th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Developers, Technology | No Comments »

Google Wave.

At first I thought: Huh?

One look at the demo and I was completely and utterly confused. But here’s the concept in a nutshell:

Google Wave is a new service that blends email, instant messaging, file sharing, and software collaboration into one giant messaging center.

I lifted this screen shot from Google in an effort to provide a clearer picture of Wave. And in case you haven’t heard – and you probably have- Wave is Google’s answer to the question: “What would e-mail look like if we invented it from scratch today?”

It’s kind of cool in a chaotic sort of way. You can’t help but to sit and take it all in – and that’s precisely what developers and industry observers are doing.

When developers first caught a glimpse of Wave at Google I/O they were giddy. The big reveal was compared to the Apple iPhone unveiling – and it had developers there wondering what Google Wave would allow them to create.  The potential apps are endless.

As for industry observers, well CNet’s Matt Asay bluntly indicated that Google Wave – with all of its promise –  is a shining example of just how poor most enterprise software remains.

Google Wave – It is the wave of our Internet future.

What’s next? The Google Wave app store?

Poor Microsoft Bing. It doesn’t have a prayer.

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