The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘associated content’

Online publishing platform Associated Content has closed a $6 million, Series C financing round funded by SoftBank Capital, Canaan Partners and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. Associated Content secured $10 million in Series B Financing from SoftBank, Canaan, and Armstrong in 2007. The company also closed $5.4 million in Series A funding from SoftBank in 2006.

Founded by Luke Beatty and originally funded by Tim Armstrong in 2005, Associated Content operates a proprietary content publishing platform that enables individuals and media companies to publish content (text, video, audio etc.) on any topic. Associated Content says that it will use the new funds for consumer, platform, publisher, and advertiser growth. The company has an archive of more than one million pieces of content, and is expanding its network of 250,000 professional and amateur content contributors.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Center’d, a local activity guide headed by former Yahoo Local GM Jennifer Dulski, is getting a major upgrade today. Alongside a completely revamped homepage, the site is launching a reworked search engine that it says should outperform the keyword searches found on most other local sites.

Center’d has compiled a database of around 1 million entries for various activities, each of which is categorized into a number of intent-based classifications. To do this, the site has spidered through the web analyzing ‘conversations’ taking place around each entry, taking context into account to determine if a review or comment is positive or negative. It then maps out the results in bar graphs, as seen below. Dulski says that this kind of semantic analysis is better than standard keyword search, and it helps eliminate inaccurate matches - for example it would prevent a review that said “this place is not for kids” from appearing under a query for restaurants “for kids”.

Using this database, the site can also generate city guides for users with a variety of different criteria (for example, you could generate a guide for San Francisco with romance in mind, or you could create one that would take you through the city on the cheap). The site is launching with support for twelve cities intitially, with plans to ramp up to more in the near future. Dulski says that these guides are mostly-automated (which will help it scale), though there is some editor control involved.

Center’d emerged about a year ago from the ashes of Fatdoor, a social network for neighbors. Until now its primary focus has been to serve as a local search engine and event planning site, and now it’s adding a new goal to that list: helping people figure out what to do with their day. Dulski says that many people have been coming to the site to find something to do, without anything in particular in mind. As with the city guides, users can select from a variety of criteria like ‘cheap’ or ‘for kids’, and ask the site to generate a list of possible activities.

In the next few weeks Center’d will also be deploying its suggestion engine to the iPhone, with a mobile application that will allow users to generate a day-long itinerary based on the amount of money they’re able to spend and the type of activities they’d like to persue.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Today was supposed to be a big coming out party for stealthy search engine Wolfram Alpha. Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram gave the first public demonstration of his knowledge mining search engine at Harvard. But to be honest, not too many people were paying attention because A) who wants to sit through a two-hour Webcast and B) Google decided to tease its own efforts at adding structured data to search during the demo.

Not long after that, we received the screenshot above from an anonymous “benefactor” of Wolfram Alpha asking “which one is computing about the future?” The Wolfram screenshot shows a search for “ISS” and the results show the flight path and current position of the International Space Station, along with its altitude, velocity, inclination, orbit type, and other useful stats. Google population search, in contrast, plots basically one data point over time (although, you can easily add others). The suggestion is that Google quickly ginned up its public data search feature to undermine Wolfram’s debut. And it worked. Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast (except Larry Dignan at Cnet—thank you Larry for sitting through it so the rest of us didn’t have to).

To be fair, some people who have seen it are very excited about the Wolfram search engine (Nova Spivack, for one, argues persuasively that it is going to be big). But it is hard to get excited about canned demos and promises of computer science breakthroughs. Google’s structured data search might be relatively simplistic but at least it isn’t vaporware. Google actually launched it. Anyone can try it out. When will Wolfram do the same and let people actually play with his vaunted search engine? It is going to take more than a leaked screenshot to convince anyone that Wolfram has something Google doesn’t or can’t build in a year.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We all know that Facebook is growing like a weed, especially internationally, but which countries are really seeing the most growth? TechCrunch alum Nick Gonzalez has put together a new tool called CheckFacebook designed to help users do exactly that. The site is primarily meant for advertisers, who can use it to gauge where to deploy campaigns, but it also offers an interesting look at each nation’s basic demographic information in an easily digestible format. The site pulls from data that Facebook publicly discloses to advertisers, but isn’t normally readily available because it’s tucked away into the ad signup process.

Each country on the map is shaded according to how popular it is on Facebook, with the darkest shades of green representing the most popular countries (unsurprisingly, the United States is by far the most popular single country, though it only accounts for around 30% of Facebook’s total audience). You can also see some basic demographic information, including gender and age distributions in each nation.

The site is still pretty basic at this point - I’d like to see some more in depth trend analysis and historical data - but it shows potential. Gonzalez says that the data indicates that there’s a youth trend as Facebook first penetrates a country, with the 18-24 and 25-34 demographics stabilizing at around 33% each as the country’s userbase grows.

Also interesting to note is that according to the system, Facebook’s total reach is around 186 million - shy of the 200 million figure it announced earlier this month. This isn’t terribly surprising, as Facebook regards these numbers as ‘estimates’ (which is a bit odd given that they have the exact data). Gonzalez believes that the data could be a few weeks out of date, or that Facebook may not be able to sell ad inventory in some regions which would cut back on the total number of users reported.

Also worth noting are Inside Facebook’s premium reports, which analyze similar demographic data.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.