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Google to Envelope All Knowledge on November 5th, 2007
Michael Arrington has convinced several high level sources to disclose discussion at a top secret Gogle meeting where the company discussed plans to release on November 5th a new set of APIs that will make access to the data it holds fundamentally open to outside parties. Arrington framed the discussion as aimed at making Google more open than Facebook. There's good reason to feel positive about this move, but there are also a number of reasons to be very concerned.I don't think that a meeting like this was held 6 weeks before launch in order to develop the plans; I think they got industry luminaries together to talk messaging. That's something Google needs some help with.Recall the words of Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a May interview with the Financial Times:We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation...The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as What...

Zync: Making Local Search Personal
Zync, a Massachusetts-based startup, operates a local event recommendation engine based around the city of Boston. The site currently lists 30,000 events across 20,000 venues. And even though it only has 355 users, they have amassed almost 9500 ratings.According to Zync, their recommendation technology uses patent-pending algorithms to recommend events, activities, and restaurants to users based on the input of other, like-minded people. Theoretically, as with any peer recommendation system, this one would get better and more accurate the more people use it.Of course that goes two ways: the more people like you who use the service, the more accurate its recommendations will be, and the more you use the service, the more it will learn about what a person like you is like. The way Zync first gets a handle on you is by asking a round of questions about your interests pertaining to food, music, sports, and other activities. After filling out the quick preferences survey, Zync...

Platform Power - "Show Me The Money!"
As Dilbert knows, everything is a platform today. The trouble is, some very smart people are trying to figure out the definition of what makes a platform. Although a lot of the discussion has been technical, perhaps the best definition of a successful platform is that it makes real money for their community.According to a 2005 survey, close to sixty percent of Americans reported that they dreamed of starting their own business - both to increase their income and their independence. That is an awful lot of people that have no ambition to build the new, new thing; but who do want to put food on the table without having to work for “da man”. Call it a lifestyle business or a “Mom & Pop”, the difference is only about lifestage. This is a critical social and economic issue today. Family farms still exist, but in the world of agribusiness this is definitely a hardscrabble life. Wall Mart is steamrolling all over the traditional Mom &...

MatchMine Raises $10m for RIA Recommendation Engine
MatchMine, a Massachusetts company building a cross-platform media recommendation engine, announced this morning that they have received a $10 million investment from The Kraft Group. The company released an early product called MyMovieMatch in July, but in the bizarre DEMO dance of "now you see us now you don't," the product has gone back under wraps before it launches next week. Hopefully there will be more disclosed than there has been so far. See RIA expert Ryan Stewart's review of the original product for background.According to coverage today in Boston.com (via PaidContent), MatchKey starts by asking for demographic information about a user and asking us to rate a variety of sample media. A desktop application the company calls a "gumball machine", probably built in Adobe's AIR if MyMovieMatch is any indication, then lets users flip through recommended media items and learns from their ratings of each. The company aims to let users port their media preference profiles,...

E-Commerce 2.0: Interview with Salim Ismail, Head of Yahoo! Brickhouse
On our podcast show, Read/WriteTalk, Sean Ammirati sat down with Salim Ismail, the head of Yahoos Brickhouse. In this role, Salim is exposed to hundreds of proposals from Yahoo employees each month for products to be developed. One of the most interesting trends these days is "e-commerce 2.0" and Sean is persistent with his questioning on this. He asked Salim: "whats Yahoo s role in eCommerce 2.0?" Salim responded:"If you look at the walled garden of content today, whether its eBay or Monster.com or Overture, etc. They basically create and get a lot of value from the ownership of the data.As we get to the UGC (user-generated content) world where users own their own data, what happens to a Monster.com if anybody can publish a job announcement off the website? It then gets syndicated and anybody can aggregate that. The value that they believe in ownership of the data will disappear and where you will get value as a service to layer on top of them.So lets look at eBay as an example....