June 2007 Archives

Spock has been unleashed to those people who signed up early to be beta testers. I was one of those people having seen a presentation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Spock is a people search engine. It describes itself as "personal search, helping users find and discover people". With over 100 million people indexed it's seems to have fairly good start. I wasn't in the seed list but my friend and fellow co-founder of the Mars Institute, Pascal Lee, was. It seems Spock went out and grabbed all the people from Wikipedia and used that to help seed their own search. However when I searched for another business partner in a different venture I came up with someone who had the same name but was not who I was looking for. To me this shows one of the problems Spock will have. What happens when there X number of matches for the same name? To help solve that problem Spock uses user input to tag people and to confirm if the tag is relevant. Very smart.

Spock is trying to get into a niche market that it thinks there is both a demand and need for. Tim O'Reilly described Spock as "really, really impressive. It's thinking about whether there are other classes of data to which search hasn't really been applied."

There are challenges though, as I know as I'm working on my own vertical search platform, and to address these challenges Spock is trying a unique approach.

It's time for some self promotion. Last Thursday I announced on SpaceRef that we were launching a new service called On Orbit. What On Orbit is, or will comprise is still a company secret. However I can say that it will be a personalized and interactive service.

It will start out as an Alpha service, and will soon become a Beta service open to everyone and then some time later come out of Beta. It's an invitation only service right now. You can request yours from the On Orbit web site. Based on the early numbers I don't think we'll have a problem meeting our target of Alpha testers.

On Orbit will be the first product from SpaceRef where the community has a voice in what the service will become and I'm excited at the opportunity of having the space community involved, whether it's a student or an experienced engineer or an executive. Stay tuned for more teasers as we get closer to our Alpha launch date.

Get your invitation now!

Vertical health search is one area that I see growing fast over the next couple of years. So it comes as no surprise that a vertical search engine like Healia was snapped up by traditional publishing house Meredith yesterday. In fact the vertical health search segment is hot right now and I would not be surprised if more companies in this segment get snapped up including startup Kosmix Health.