Archive for the ‘Press Stuff’ Category

By: Anand Rajaraman

Scootin’

Today I’m delighted to share some fantastic news. Kosmix has raised $20 million in new financing to power our growth. Even more than the amount of financing, I’m especially proud that the lead investor in this round is Time Warner, the world’s largest media company. Our existing investors Lightspeed, Accel, and DAG participated in the round as well. The Kosmix team also is greatly strengthened by the addition of Ed Zander as investor and strategic advisor. In an amazing career that spans Sun Microsystems and Motorola, Ed has repeatedly demonstrated leadership that grew good ideas into great products and businesses. His counsel will be invaluable as we take Kosmix to the next level as a business.

In these perilous economic times, the funding is a big vote of confidence in Kosmix’s product and business. Kosmix web sites attract 11 million visits every month, and we have a proven revenue model with significant revenues and robust growth. RightHealth, the proof-of-concept we launched in 2007, grew with astonishing rapidity to become the #2 health web site in the US. These factors played a big role in helping us close this round of funding with a healthy uptick in valuation from our prior round. Together with the money already in the bank from our prior rounds, we now have more than enough runway to take the company to profitability and beyond.

A few months ago, we put out an alpha version of Kosmix.com. Many people used it and gave us valuable feedback; thank you! We listened, and made changes. Lots of changes. The result is the beta version of Kosmix.com, which we launched today. What’s changed? More information sources (many thousands), huge improvements in our relevance algorithms, a much-improved user interface, and a completely new homepage. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

To those of you new to Kosmix, the easiest way to explain what Kosmix does is by analogy. Google and Yahoo are search engines; Kosmix is an explore engine. Search engines work really well if your goal is to find a specific piece of information — a train schedule, a company website, and so on. In other words, they are great at finding needles in the haystack. When you’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

– Looking to bake a chocolate cake? We have recipes, nutrition information, a dessert burn rate calculator, blog posts from chow.com, even a how-to video from Martha Stewart

– Loved one diagnosed with diabetes? Doctor-reviewed guide, blood sugar and insulin pump slide shows, calculators and risk checkers, quizzes, alternative medications, community

–Traveling to San Francisco? Maps, hotels, events, sports teams, attractions, travel blogs, trip plans, guidebooks, videos!

– Writing an article on Hillary Clinton? Bio, news, CNN videos, personal financial assets and lawmaker stats, Wonkette posts, even satire from The Onion.

– Into Radiohead? Bio, team members, albums, tracks, music player, concert schedule, videos, similar artists, news and gossip from TMZ.

– Follow the San Francisco 49ers? Players, news from Yahoo Sports and other sources, official NFL videos and team profiles, tickets, and the official NFL standings widget.

In the examples above, I’m especially pleased about the way Kosmix picks great niche sources for topics. For example, I hadn’t heard about chow.com or known that Martha Stewart has how-to videos on her website. Other “gems” of this kind include Jambase, TMZ, The Onion, DailyPlate, MamaHerb, and Wonkette. Part of the goal of Kosmix is to bring you such gems: information sources or sites you have either not heard of, or just not thought about in the current context.

In other words: Google = Search + Find. Kosmix = Explore + Browse. Browsing sometimes uncovers surprising connections that you might not even have thought about. The power of the model was brought home to me last week as I was traveling around in England. I’d heard a lot about Stonehenge and wanted to visit; so of course I went to the Kosmix topic page on Stonehenge. In addition to the usual comprehensive overview of Stonehenge, the topic page showed me places to stay in Bath, Somerset (which happens to be the best place to stay when you’re visiting Stonehenge). It also showed me other ancient monuments in the same area I could visit while I was there. Score one for serendipity.

Some of us remember the early days of the World Wide Web: the thrill of just browsing around, following links, and discovering new sites that surprise, entertain, and sometimes even inform. We have lost some of that joy now with our workmanlike use of search engines for precision-guided information finding. We built the new Kosmix homepage to capture some of the pleasure of aimless browsing — exploring for pure pleasure. The homepage shows you the hot news, topics, videos, slide shows, and gossip of the moment. If you find something interesting you can dive right in and start browsing around that topic. We compile this page in the same manner as our topic pages: by aggregating information for many other sources and then applying a healthy dose of algorithms. Dig in; who knows what surprises await?

How does Kosmix work its magic? As I wrote when we put out the alpha, the problem we’re solving is fundamentally different from search, and we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach. 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. The secret sauce is our algorithmic categorization technology. Given a topic, categorization tells us where the topic fits in a really big taxonomy, what the related topics are, and so on. In turn, other algorithms use this information to figure out the right set of information sources for a topic from among the thousands we know about. And then other algorithms figure out how to lay the information on the page in a 2-dimensional grid.

While we are proud of what we have built, we know there is still a long way to go. And we cannot do it without your feedback. So join the USS Kosmix on our maiden voyage. Our mission: to explore strange new topics; to discover surprising new connections; to boldly go where no search engine has gone before!

If you’ve ever been to Kosmix HQ, then you certainly know we’re quite the talkative bunch. As it turns out, we have quite a few speaking engagements lined up, and we want to let you know where you can find us:

SD Forum Search SIG, Oct. 9 –  The Search for Better Health: Empowering Consumer Health
Time: 6:30pm - 9:00pm PT
Panelists - Kosmix, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Healthline

Location: Microsoft Silicon Valley Conference Center, Mountain View, California

–

Healthcare 2.0 Conference, Oct. 22-23

Panel:  Search in the Long Tail & Intelligence in Communities
Time: 1 pm Oct. 22

Panel: Breakout  Technology  Demo Panel - Session C - Search
Time: 2:30 pm Oct. 23

Location: San Francisco Marriott, San Francisco, California

–

Digital Hollywood Los Angeles: Oct. 27 :  The Personalized Web; The Personalized Application; Personalized Television; Personalized Social Experience

Time : 2:30-3:30 pm PT

Location: The Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, Santa Monica, California

See you there!

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.

We’ve been ecstatic over here at our Mountain View office, to see the official launch of three of our beta products:RightAutos, RightTrips, and our flagship product, RightHealth.

This launch represents years of development based on algorithm-based categorization. RightHealth already receives more than 2.5 million visits and serves 9 million searches a month. With the internet increasingly becoming the starting point for information, it comes as no surprise that people with aches, pains, or sniffles increasingly come to RightHealth to get health answers. And with 50 million uninsured Americans, the web has become an invaluable resource for attempts at self-diagnosis.

Without the tireless work and talents of the Kosmix team this launch would have been pretty anticlimactic. Our UI designer, Brian Tharp, provided the intelligent and sophisticated design to bring our topic home pages to the next level. Mohan Gummalam and the rest of the Application Development team ran with the design and made sure it integrated into our architecture. Nagraj Kulkarni, as usual, went the extra mile to see that production cluster made it to the live site. Saumil Mehta, our talented product manager for Health, seemed to live at the office to make sure each and every detail was accounted for in the new RightHealth product. In fact, the entire Kosmix staff really pulled together to insure the launch of our beta products, and it unfortunately would take up multiple blogs to detail each and every person’s important contribution.

With our categorization technology, and goal to create an unofficial homepage for any topic on the web, getting information for travel, autos, and health queries just got easier.

–Matthew Krajewski

We are happy to announce that former AOL Chairman and CEO, Jonathan Miller joined our board of directors. At AOL, Jon was primarily responsible for shifting AOL’s Internet business from the walled garden approach to giving everyone access to free features and content, a move widely hailed as a success in the industry. Our other board members include Theresia Gouw Ranzetta of Accel Partners; Ravi Mhatre of Lightspeed Venture Partners; and Kosmix’s two founders, Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan.

When asked about why Kosmix, Jon said “Kosmix has a vision that is game-changing in the Internet marketplace today. I am impressed with the powerful technology, strong team and the knowledge this company has of its customers and marketplace. Kosmix is where the world is going and I look forward to guiding and building its success.”

I am happy to report that Kosmix has been chosen as one of the top 100 private companies by AlwaysOn (AO) Media. This top 100 is a really cool list of digital media companies that are chosen for innovation, customer adoption, market potential, media buzz and investor value creation. The AO Media 100 was selected from over a 1,000 companies, peer-nominated by leading venture capitalists, investment bankers and industry analysts. The AO Media 100 consists of private companies at all stages of development.

“We scoured hundreds of applications we received to vote on the top emerging private technology companies,” said Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “Selected are the companies we think are demonstrating significant market traction or pursuing game-changing technology. We expect these organizations to have a big impact for both New York and Silicon Valley.”

More information and the full press release can be found here

An article today (Jan 16, 2007) talked about how a doctor had turned to Google Scholar to find a treatment for death-cap mushrooms. This clearly demonstrates how the web can help medical professionals find answers to obscure problems.
However, the doctor could have saved hours of research by using focused Health vertical search engines. Kosmix helped give the answer in about 5 seconds, compared to the several hours the doctor spent on Google Scholar.

(Click on the link below to see Kosmix’s results for “death cap mushrooms”, and then click on “View All Related Topics” to see Silibinin as the first drug displayed)

Death Cap Mushrooms

In the words of David Utter, the author of the article, “Vertical search has been growing in importance, but it hasn’t broken through to the mainstream like Google has. Hopefully more medical professionals will learn of and utilize options like Kosmix”, specially for diagnosing obscure cases.

The full article can be found here:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20070116KosmixHealthlineHadDeathCapCure.html

An interesting new article on the Search space takes up the fact that Search, in general, is so broad and tough a problem, that “Google, or even Yahoo and MSN, can’t do it all—so nimble startups across the world are seizing opportunities in emerging areas of search.”

Kosmix is given as an example of a startup which, through its specialization in verticals, “avoids retrieving the huge number of irrelevant responses that pile up at Google.”, instead giving better results in Health, Video Games, Travel, Finance, Autos and US Politics.

The full article can be read at:
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=20376&hed=What+Google+Can%E2%80%99t+Do