Archive for May 2009

For the first time ever, TiECon, the flagship event of The Indus Entrepreneurs, announced the TiE50 awards. TiE50 recognizes the hottest and most promising startup compnies across five sectors: Internet Infrastructure, Wireless, Cleantech, Software and Consumer Web.

At Kosmix, we are very excited to have been selected among the TiE50 winners. We want to thank all of you who voted for us, as the competition narrowed down a field of more than 1200 startups to the eventual 50 winners.

A team of us were at TiECon this weekend to receive the award and connect with other startups. Accepting the award, Anand gave the audience an overview of the exciting products we’ve released at Kosmix. He talked about how the Kosmix topic page for Pinot Noir is the next best thing to drinking the wine, and how Meehive was challenging the assumptions around “all the news that is fit to print”.  Also, reflecting the theme of bold entrepreneurship at TiEcon, Anand shared some of the bold decisions in his own life, especially the one around dropping out of the PhD program at Stanford to start his first company.

Our thanks to everyone at TiE for the exciting program they put together over the two days.   And congratulations to our fellow winners.

More and more folks are turning to Kosmix as a starting point for exploring an unfamiliar topic.  A good example is the recent H1N1 influenza A (a.k.a. swine flu) outbreak. Since Saturday when the news of the outbreak started heating up, our two sites, Kosmix and RightHealth, have seen more than 200,000 swine flu related searches.  Top searches?  Swine flu and swine flu symptoms

The swine flu page brings together a diverse set of information which you may not have easily discovered through a basic web search.  The page includes basic facts about the virus, advisories from the Centers for Disease Control, the latest news and blog posts, videos, podcasts, groups and discussions, and an interactive outbreak map.  Also, you can drill down into any of those information types or related topics to deepen your exploration.

By the way, in case you haven’t heard, you can’t catch the swine flu from eating pork products.  So feel free to dig into that tempting platter of ribs.

To learn more about swine flu and keep on top of the latest news, check out the swine flu topic page and the RightHealth DailyDose blog by Dr Steven Chang