I hope Wolfram Alpha does well ... I really do. I've thought for awhile that Google really needs a viable competitor, which will help drive search forward. However, I'll wait until the site is launched before announcing them as a serious competitor (even then, I'm willing to give them months or years if their product holds promise, AND they demonstrate the ability to roll out improvements on a regular basis). I'd also be interested to see if they have an API, and how easy it would be to tap into their system to create vertical apps. 

So here's the link for today from the popular (non tech press) ... article is a bit too hopeful IMHO: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/an-invention-that-could-change-the-internet-for-ever-1678109.html.

Gotta love these little apps ... TechCrunch now has a database of layoffs at: http://www.techcrunch.com/layoffs/.

Happy Friday to all. Just a few links of interest today while I work on redesigning a directory application I wrote some time ago.

Anyway, while I've been listing a lot of new search startups of late, I haven't paid homage to the pioneers in the search field. So ... here are a few (the "Big Three"):

• Dialog - Strong tools for business and scientific searching.  
• Factiva - Good international coverage (mainly Europe, with some Asian sources).
• LexisNexis - Great source for news monitoring 

Other links:

• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy.

 

Eyealike, a startup in the image recognition and video search area (http://www.eyealike.com/) has several products that could help those looking to find a date based on similarity of looks, manage digital copyrights on CGM sites, as well as serving up ads based on the image on an add. 

The ad technology, which was announced today (http://www.eyealike.com/news.php?spgId=pr_13102008), could help match ads with images or videos on a site ... if I have a picture of my cat on a site, the technology may decide to serve up furball removers or other relevant ads for felines.

This is a pretty cool technology; I'm most interested in the ability of the software to recognize trademarks, and other non-facial images. In addition, I'd be interested to learn if their Eyealike™ Copyright product could also be leveraged to detect duplicate videos posted on CGM sites (how many times do we need to see the same corporate spoof video ... do a youtube search on any popular ad campaign to retreive a flood of duplicate videos). While this it is important to know about these videos, media monitoring apps don't really need 20 copies of the same video in their database, just a link to one video, with metadata telling how many times it was posted on the web. 

As I've noted in earlier posts, video/image search is a good opportunity for startups ... Google doesn't really do it that well (yet).  

I want some of these, especially during the summer months! See: http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/06/solyndra-with-over-600m-in-funding-finally-shows-its-solar-hand/.

See also Where are all of the programmers ... especially the comments. 

Although you should be doing this already ... <G>! Having experienced the death of a dotcom during the 2000 crash, I thought this article from TechCrunch was interesting, as Ron Conway, an angel investor in Silicon Valley provides advice to his portfolio companies on how to weather this financial storm. Read more about this at: http://www.techcrunch.com/.