Red Humpy

Last week, it was announced that a new information site had raised over 9 million dollars in capital to proceed with what is called “an information experience.”

On January 24, Qwiki.com went live with with an Alpha version of the site that is functional, searchable and showcases brilliant examples of what Qwiki.com is all about. From monuments to natural wonders, animals and historic figures, the information presented in each ‘Qwiki’ is not human-generated, but instead gathered from sources on the web.

To understand this concept, imagine searching for a restaurant that you are interested in. To find out details, you would use a search engine, click on links that look reputable, and poke around on several of those sites, including the restaurant’s own pages, to gather information. Now picture what a Qwiki.com search looks like: you are presented with an audio/visual presentation of the restaurant that includes photos, maps and other pertinent information such as years in business, what they are known for, overall review, and a phone number.

Want to know about your hometown or favorite director? Although only in an infancy stage, Qwiki.com is slowly growing a database that will allow you see and hear and one minute mini-documentary about just about any person, place or thing you are searching for. According to a January 21 CrunchBase.com article, ”All Qwikis are created on the fly from web sources (without any human intervention).” 

The Qwikis are embeddable anywhere on the web to enhance your website.  Here is an example of a Qwiki on fly fishing. (I chose the medium size player.)

Facebook billionaire is early investor

A January 20 article at TechCrunch.com reports that Eduardo Saverin, an early Facebook co-founder who was pushed out but made billions from his shares, is the largest investor in Qwiki.com and was involved in the most recent round of fundraising that raised $8 million.

“A lot of the excitement around Qwiki is because of its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos,” reports Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch. The TechCrunch.com article contains a video of the Qwiky.com demo presented by co-founders co-founders Doug Imbruce and Dr. Louis Monier that convinced Saverin to invest in the site.

“In the future, information becomes an experience that I can watch,” explains Imbruce as he introduced Dr. Monier for the demo , “and the future starts right here, right now, in this room.”

Information evolution in progress

Current Qwiki’s have a button to improve themselves by allowing users to suggest pictures or YouTube videos, and improve sound quality by listing any words that are mispronounced. The Parelli Natural Horse Training Qwiki has no picture or images so I suggested two from their official sites. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the system to find and use the information.

Qwiki is described by Imbruce as a platform, and as such, “can produce a Qwiki from any content on any device.”  This cross-device functionality is what may propel the site’s technology to become mainstream in our lives, as is demonstrated in the demo video when Imbruce uses a Qwiki as an alarm clock. He is told the time, temperature, weather forecast including high and low, and his important appointments for the day.

 It seems very sci-fi, but the proclaimed “marriage of art and science” could very soon change the way web searchers find their information. An iPad app is reported to be in development.

To try the information experience yourself, visit www.Qwiki.com. Let me know what you think!

Although I upgraded my laptop in June, I didn’t reinstall my StumbleUpon toolbar in Internet Explorer until late July.

Soon after installing the plugin, I was in need of a guitar tuner. Realizing something was not quite right with the low E string on my guitar, and not having a keyboard around to use for reference, I checked for an online tuner on Google.

Google search results featuring StumbleUpon ratings

When the results appeared, I was pleasantly surprised to see a new star rating next to each link. The StumbleUpon toolbar that I had just installed was integrating with my search. My Google results were now being rated.

I can now quickly scan the page and find the results with the highest star rating next to the StumbleUpon logo, thus using the power of other StumbleUpon users to help with my search. I can click on the star rating to read reviews and see the number of people who have viewed the page.

 I love the brilliant concept.

Not only is Google succeeding in making their results more relevant to my query, they are making it much easier for me to determine the best guitar tuner site that I will probably like.  The page I clicked on was a tuner I had never used before and I did indeed like it better than tuners I was already familiar with.

There was only one link on the first page of search results that had no stars at all.  The link in position one had only a three star rating, even though there were a few five star ratings on the page in lower positions. It appears that the pages with more reviews are getting more stars, and it would be interesting to know if the StumbleUpon star rating is based on simply more positive reviews, more “I like it” ratings, or a combination of both.

My next step will be to use two different computers and conduct a few random searches to see what page I choose to click on, first based on only the title and description without the StumbleUpon toolbar installed, and then with the StumbleUpon ratings being included. I can compare the two experiences to see if I feel my results are more relevant based on either method. My guess is that I’ll be much more satisfied with the quality of the pages I visit when taking user ratings into consideration. I’ll update this post after I have some results to report.

I wonder what other social media plugins  are out there to help searchers easily find the most relevant content? I love how searches using social media plugins are evolving so far…

**Update 1:
Apparently, ‘guitar tuner’ is a highly-rated topic and thus there were many pages that had StumbleUpon ratings and reviews. Many other search queries have no ratings to refer to. I suppose as more people use StumbleUpon, there will be more ratings. Eventually we may see Facebook and Twitter integration to use the power of their users and ratings.

According to a May 20 post on their official blog, Google is developing Google TV, which will combine the internet and television. Google has partnered with companies like Logitech, Sony and Intel to integrate their service into new televisions and Blu-ray players or companion boxes for existing equipment.

Google TV will allow users to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies, combining both online and on-air media and programming. Users can view online photos and websites on their televisions and switch seamlessly between the two media sources.

Advertisers must be drooling over this new technology.

Not too long ago, there were lawsuits between satellite TV providers and local network stations over what programming could be viewed in certain areas. As a resident of the southern-most part of Colorado, I am two hours closer to Albuquerque, New Mexico than Denver, Colorado. When turf wars erupted between satellite TV providers, advertisers were watching out for their interests to make sure the ads they paid for were being seen in their target markets. At the time, I was selling satellite systems at an independent Radio Shack store and was well-aware of the high-stakes involved with advertising money in each market.

Reaching the right viewers with pricey television ads will be a  huge advantage for advertisers. With the advent of Google TV, advertisers will not only be able to target their audience with unbelievable accuracy, viewers will know that the commercials and ads they see will be tailored to their interests.

Through studies and experiments  by large web marketing companies like Hubspot.com, it has become apparent that Google is integrating social media into search engine ranking, meaning your online connections come into play when you do a web search. Joe in Florida and Mary in Oregon can type in the same search term in Google and get different results based on their connections and interests. Custom ad targeting is the future of internet, and now television, marketing.

Advertisers must be waiting with anticipation to see how Google TV evolves and watch how the public reacts to combining internet and television.