Kosmix Blog

By: Nicky.

In my last blog post, I detailed in a rather cryptic fashion the concept of a ‘Personalized News Dial Tone.’ I explained that in much the same way that your phone instantly connects you to the people in your life, Kosmix is working on a product that instantly connects you to all of your news interests that change around you every moment of the day.

Since it’s Monday morning and I have 2.5 cups of coffee (read: personality) running blissfully through my veins, now seems the perfect time to tell you a bit more about what we’ve been doing with this product - which we’ve named MeeHive.

Why MeeHive? Well, think of a Bee Hive, a place that is so full of frenzied activity that it literally buzzes, and then imagine that we offered you your very own hive where you could collect stories that interest you. That would make you buzz, wouldn’t it?

We debuted MeeHive at last month’s Under the Radar conference held at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, CA. Under the Radar is dedicated to showcasing the industry’s up-and-coming players – the startups who are developing some of the freshest and most creative products out there.

Sesh, our fearless CTO, presented MeeHive as part of the ‘Graduate Circle,’ a forum for established companies like Kosmix to discuss how they got to be where they are and how they are continuing to innovate.

During his well-received presentation, Sesh described how in a world of ‘pull’ models, where you search the web high and low to get the information you want delivered to you, MeeHive is a news ‘push’ model – delivering fresh information to you all the time so that you don’t have to go looking for it.

He noted that with MeeHive’s ability to leverage the Kosmix user base and deliver uber-relevant results, it is well-positioned for success. Of course, we know that getting MeeHive to where we want it is a marathon, not a sprint, so we’ll be spending the summer building the most robust product we can in preparation for a launch not too far down the road. In the meantime, sign up for our beta and we’ll keep you posted on developments.

Before posting an entry exclusively dedicated to beer, we worried about our job security in this tepid environment.

Then we decided that the risk was, well, worth it. The recent news around the purchase of American icon Anheuser Busch by foreign brewer InBev has lots of people worried silly. Personally, we prefer our brew a bit stronger and darker but do appreciate the sentiment.

After all, it takes an exquisitely American company to make those wonderful ads.

We decided to take Kosmix for a spin. You can look at the topic page here.

Our personal favorites are the product search and the "American Heroes" advertising audio clips (powered by TheFind and Seeqpod, respectively) but you make your own decisions!

Oh, we're just kidding, of course. We're too nice to call anyone a dummy, but we do enjoy a mildly jokey headline.

Anand Rajaraman - Kosmix co-founder and, more importantly, ping ponger with a mean backhand - recently wrote a post on his personal blog articulating some of the key details behind our alpha launch. We are cross posting it here without his permission (don't think he'll sue). If you haven't yet tried out our alpha product, you can do so here. You can also find Anand's entire library of musings here.

Searching for a Needle or Exploring the Haystack?

Search engines are great finding the needle in a haystack. And that's perfect when you are looking for a needle. Often though, the main objective is not so much to find a specific needle as to explore the entire haystack.

When we're looking for a single fact, a single definitive web page, or the answer to a specific question, then the needle-in-haystack search engine model works really well. Where it breaks down is when the objective is to learn about, explore, or understand a broad topic. For example:

* Hiking the Continental Divide Trail.
* A loved one recently diagnosed with arthritis.
* You read the Da Vinci code and have an irresistible urge to learn more about the Priory of Sion.
* Saddened by George Carlin's death, you want to reminisce over his career.

The web contains a trove of information on all these topics. Moreover, the information of interest is not just facts (e.g., Wikipedia), but also opinion, community, multimedia, and products. What's missing is a service that organizes all the information on a topic so that you can explore it easily. The Kosmix team has been working for the past year on building just such a service, and we put out an alpha yesterday. You enter a topic, and our algorithms assemble a "topic page" for that topic. Check out the pages for Continental Divide Trail, arthritis, Priory of Sion., and George Carlin.

The problem we're solving is fundamentally different from search, and we've taken a fundamentally different approach. As I've written before, the web has evolved from a collection of documents that neatly fit in a search engine index, to a collection of rich interactive applications. Applications such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Yelp. Instead of serving results from an index, Kosmix builds topic pages by querying these applications and assembling the results on-the-fly into a 2-dimensional grid. We have partnered with many of the services that appear in the results pages, and use publicly available APIs in other cases.

Here are some of the challenging problems that we had to tackle in building this product:

1. Figuring out which which applications are relevant to a topic. For example, Boorah, Yelp, and Google maps are relevant to the topic "restaurants 94041". WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and RightHealth are relevant to "arthritis". If we called each application for every query, the page would look very confusing, and our partners would get unhappy very quickly! I'll write more on how we do this in a separate post by itself, but it's very, very cool indeed.
2. Figuring out related topics in the Related in the Kosmos section on each Topic page. For example, you can start from the Priory of Sion and laterally explore Rosslyn Chapel or the Madonna of the Rocks.
3. Figuring out the placement and space allocation to each element in the 2-dimensional grid. Going from one dimension (linear list) to two dimensions (grid) turns out to be quite a challenge, both from an algorithmic and from a UI design point of view.

In this alpha, we taken a first stab at tackling these challenges. We are still several months from having a product that we feel is ready to launch, but we decided to put this public alpha out there to gather user feedback and tune our service. Many aspects of the product will evolve between now and then: Do we have the right user interaction model for topic exploration? Do we put too much information on the topic page? Should we present it very differently? How do we combine human experts with our algorithms?

Most importantly, the Kosmix approach does not work for every query! Our goal is to organize information around topics, not answer arbitrary search queries. How do we make the distinction clear in the product itself? Can we carve out a separate niche from search engines?

We hope to gain insight into all these and more questions from this alpha. Please use it and provide your feedback!

The Kosmix team has been working around the clock (with mandatory ping pong and beer breaks in between) for several months now. We are thrilled to announce the alpha launch of our horizontal offering, you can give it a whirl here: http://www.kosmix.com. Kosmix's mission in life is to intelligently organize the web for any topic that catches your fancy - easy, right?!

Are you a comedy fan? You might want to check out our topic page on George Carlin: http://kosmix.com/topic/george_carlin?

Astronomical gas prices got you down? Ditch that Hummer and learn all about the Toyota Prius here: http://kosmix.com/topic/toyota_prius?

We'd love to hear your feedback in the comments (you can also come by our offices and we'll offer you a very healthy Odwalla) - please note that this current incarnation is an early alpha version and we expect it to evolve significantly over the next few months. We know there are rough edges and your opinions will help us get to the next level.

We also believe that the new horizontal product will extend the great success we've had with our three vertical sites that reach over 15 million consumers every month as of March 2008: RightHealth,
RightAutos and RightTrips. Here is a fun Hitwise traffic chart that we sometimes gaze lovingly at, to the mild annoyance of our significant others and close friends.

Gotta go now - ping pong beckons - but stay tuned! It's going to be a fun ride getting to the beta version.

By: Nicky

If getting news alerts in your email inbox were a drug, I might qualify as a junkie. On a day-to-day basis, I get messages concerning the weather, the environment, the election, places to travel far and wide, an update on what’s going on in Silicon Valley, and yes, info on my favorite guilty pleasure, MTV’s The Hills (I would like to think that it takes a special kind of woman to admit to this particular interest on her first Kosmix blog post).

I also search the web, proactively seeking out stories that my alerts missed in my quest to get my daily dose of domestic and global news. I dutifully track down the stories that matter to me, day, after day, after day, after…well, you get the gist.

So here’s a question – why does getting my news work this way? Why does it require me to search for my interests online or clutter up my email inbox in the process? Sure, I am willing to go the extra mile for my news right now, spending the time necessary to track down what’s most important to me, but some days I’m too busy and some days, I just don’t feel like doing all that work.

In a perfect world, the latest information would come directly to me in a tidy package comprised of a killer UI and a console that allowed me to manage all of my interests easily. In the same way I pick up the phone and the dial tone signals that it’s ready to connect me to all of the people in my life, there could be a place online that would connect me to all of my news interests. Not just the big headlines, although I would certainly find those there too, but also the niche ‘nano-interests’ that belong solely to me.

I would love to tell you that this idea, a sort of ‘personalized news dial tone,’ was mine, and popped easily into my head one morning as I headed to work. Really it belongs to a team here at Kosmix that is developing a product that will meet all of the needs I have just detailed.

Interested in the concept and how it connects to other Kosmix properties like RightHealth, RightAutos, and RightTrips? Stay tuned – Kosmix is working on bringing your world, to you, just the way you like it (and because we’re nice people, MTV’s The Hills is strictly optional).

By: Venky

Last week, Anand and I decided to play hookey and jet down to Carlsbad, California, for The Wall Street Journal’s premier tech conference: AllThingsD. This is was my first D Conference and I was very impressed by the quality of the attendees and the speakers. The format was Kara Swisher or Walt Mossberg interviewing celebrity CEOs.

The celebrity CEOs interviews we saw: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Michael Dell, Barry Diller (IAC), Jeff Bewkes (TimeWarner), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Rupert Murdoch (News Corp)..

Here are some interesting lines that I recall from the conference:

"You are a public company, you get a 60% premium, you spend 3 months trying to find an alternative, you don't. What do you do? You say yes", both Diller and Murdoch.

"Is Google Voldemort?” – Walt Mossberg to Jerry Yang, since both Jerry and Steve Ballmer kept referring to Google as the “Market Leader”, similar to the “One who must not be named” in Harry Potter.

"Driving a 2 ton vehicle to get your 2 pound package from the store is the worst logistics system invented" -- Jeff Bezos. Walt Mossberg had the perfect comeback -- "doesn't sound like a 60 ton UPS truck delivering that 2 pound package is much better". Of course Jeff came back with the USPS stops at every house.

"We have built a core infrastructure in SEO and SEM, so we can take a new effort, and spin it up very quickly" -- Barry Diller, trying to articulate what connects all those disparate IAC properties.

"We look at any financial option, whether it be IPO, investment, acquisition, and see if it will get us to our vision quicker. It's interesting, if and only if it does. The IPO, investment, acquisition is not interesting in its own right" -- Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest CEO with the clearest answer.

"We didn’t buy Alaska to save two elk” – Rupert Murdoch.

I also chatted on the sidelines with Jeff Bezos, Don Graham (Chairman of the Washington Post), Steve Case (Revolution Health), Adam Lashinsky (Fortune magazine), Jessica V (Wall Street Journal reporter covering Google, Yahoo!), Matt Marshall (Venturebeat), Om Malik (Gigaom) and more...

All in all, a great week in sunny southern California!

By: Tina Nanez

I’ve been working in the Valley for several years and have met some great people and experienced so many different cultures. As most of us know, Silicon Valley is full of diversity. Working in this diverse environment really opened my eyes and inspired me to step out of my own element. There’s so much to learn and experience but so little time. My last great adventure was to that storied Bay Area stomping ground called Burning Man. I had such a wonderful time last year; I’ve been planning my return this year! All of that changed on the evening of April 8th as I watched HBO’s documentary, “The Greatest Silence: Rape in The Congo”. I can’t explain how or why this specific documentary touched me the way it did but I felt a visceral emotion unlike any other.

Continue reading "A Kosmixer's Decision to Forego Burning Man" »

By: Venky Harinarayan

Two months ago, we were at Accel’s CEO summit. It was a fun event with great speakers -- opened with Steve Ballmer and ended with Eric Schmidt!

Also on the agenda: each start-up CEO doing a 30 second elevator-pitch on their company, on the spot. Ambushed thus, Anand and I drew straws – I lost, and had 5 minutes to prepare.

While preparing, I thought of an NPR program, where they discussed describing your life in six words: “Cursed with cancer, blessed by friends”, and “No wife. No kids. No problems”. Hemingway was once challenged to do a story in 6 words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”. That was the origin of the Six Words. Smith Magazine (http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/) recently revived interest in this format. They sought out and published a collection of 6 word memoirs titled “Not Quite What I Was Planning”. It is catching on: the New York Times had articles in the last couple weeks, where healthy eating is: “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. And good investing is: “Index (mostly). Save a ton. Reallocate infrequently”. Seven words, but it is the Times after all.

Why is a thirty-second elevator-pitch interesting? Economy with time forces clarity and focus. You have to pick what’s most important. Economy with words has the same effect. But 6 words? Well, if people can describe their lives with 6 words, surely we can describe a company in 6 words. So let’s do Kosmix in 6. I’ll cheat a little here, since we’re a media company – I’ll use 3 words for the consumer and 3 words for the advertiser. Here it is (I’m sure your six will be different J). Ta-dah!

Kosmix: “Organize the Web. Targeting AND Reach”.

Back to the Accel event, I chickened out and did the traditional 30 second pitch. “I should have gone with six!”

By: Karen Song

Today, we happened to be at a YIPEE mixer with a friend and there was a raffle drawing for business cards that attendees had dropped into the bucket. Alas, neither of us had a business card to drop, but when I opened my purse at least 7 dropped out. 7 business cards I had attained at yesterday’s Web 2.0 Expo without realizing it. I joked that I could have considerably increased my odds of getting the prized manicure by impersonating a few business developers and marketers.

As I sipped my Shirley Temple, it occurred to me how representative this overflowing purse of business cards really was to the world of Web 2.0—how easy it was to make connections and how random the Valley was. In other parts of the world, meeting strangers can mean gleaning through the weirdos of the planet; but in the Valley, everyone is weird, weird in their beliefs about technologically driven social change and obsessed with making a faster, better, smaller world a mere mouse click away.

Lights, camera, action. The stage was set for information overload. In fact the whole Expo was. Keynote speakers compared Web 2.0 to the industrial revolution, encouraging consumers to direct their “cognitive surplus” towards generating content. Crowds of people streamed through the showcase, clapping their hands for the next installment of Web 2.0 rockstars.

I was in geek heaven. And perhaps a tad out of my comfort zone. Buzzwords, phrases teeming with self-aggrandizing ambition thundered in my ears. I needed to be doing more. It was like a religion, a cult. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t go home and watch mindless television, I had to go home and post on wikipedia and obsess about why Pluto wasn’t a planet. I had to go home and be an innovator. The edgy men in their late twenties hunched over their laptops suddenly became the wave of the future. A wave I had to surf.

Disoriented and overwhelmed, I stumbled into a room called the “Blogger’s Lounge,” thinking I could find some kind of solace amongst the writers at the conference. Alas, a haggard looking man in a plaid shirt suddenly leapt out of his seat and made a scene. “NO I AM NOT OKAY!” He screamed before mumbling to himself rather crazily. A security guard kindly suggested I move myself out of the doorway for my own safety instead of standing their open-mouthed and gaping.
While they called in reinforcements, I decided to leave. But before I could…

“Karen Song! Is that really you?!”

A friend from Stanford intercepted me. He was a business developer for Ustream, a site that broadcast live streams alongside user chat, and he happened to be presenting for his company in the lounge. He made room for me at a table where I picked up a copy of “We Are Smarter Than Me,” a book on crowd-sourcing.

It was nice to see a familiar face in the crowd. But I saw several others that day. Another friend happened to be working for TellMe, a blackberry voice service that looked up directions, weather, and restaurants when you asked. He seemed excited and rushed over with a warm hug as soon as he singled me out from the throngs of anonymity flocking to his showcase.

By day’s end, I was more excited than agitated. The exchange of ideas, the exposure to what was out there, was quite refreshing. And ultimately I decided that I was finding more familiar ground in what I had originally perceived to be unfamiliar territory.

Scott Berkun, who spoke on “The Myths of Innovation” conveyed that real innovation wasn’t necessarily about the blue sky territory but solving problems. Edison wasn’t the first to invent the lightbulb, but he was the first to worry about the power supply. Gutenberg wasn’t necessarily looking to “democratize information” but simply to print a better book.

That’s what true innovators are about—not pumping themselves up with fancy terms or allusions of social instigation, but enacting real change through fixing concrete problems. I had to admire that. And I ultimately decided that although I was distracted by the hype, I could admire the larger vision of this convention.

But I had more to smile about. Before I left the Web 2.0 Conference, I met a kindly Indian man named Mukesh Ahuja from Yugma.

“You work at Kosmix!” He exclaimed. “I know Sesh! His son goes to the same school as mine! Tell him and Venky I say hi!” He warmly pressed his business card into my hand.

That’s when I decided to say goodbye.

We've recently seen a notable surge in the number of Kosmix bloggers - its hard to gauge why, but sometimes we do know how to accept a gift without questioning it (a blog is an eternal record of thoughts, opinions and expressions; in other words, we wait patiently until an opportunity arises to make fun of the blog's author).

Here are some posts by Kosmixers that you might enjoy:

If you've tired of the Silicon Valley echo chamber and have a burning desire to learn about commodity corn, look no further. We've got you covered: http://onthejohn.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/open-source-seeds/

If you are like us and can't get enough of what the echo chamber is discussing, here is an interesting take on network effects of cloud computing: http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/04/a-herald-of-rev.html

Okay, we admit it, we love linking to blog posts that link to other blog posts about search. Read about Squidoo versus Hubpages and one Kosmixer's take here: http://rembrance.blogspot.com/2008/04/less-is-more.html

We have a few more to share, but we'll try to keep this format fresh and make you want more.