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Posts Tagged ‘caterina-fake’

Recommendation engine Hunch confirms that they’ve raised a new round of financing – $12 million – led by Khosla Ventures. Partner Gideon Yu, who joined Khosla Ventures last year, was previously the CFO of Facebook. He is now joining Hunch’s board of directors as part of the deal. Hunch was valued at $52 million in the round.

I spoke to cofounder Caterina Fake this evening about the round. Fake says that Hunch, which is less than a year old, now has lots of data to work with in making recommendations. In fact, she says, users have answered nearly 50 million questions on Hunch since launch, and the company can use that data to make better and better recommendations.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined the company’s board of directors in late 2009.

SV Angel, the angel fund founded by super-angel Ron Conway, is losing one of its general partners to a portfolio company. Brian Pokorny is now the CEO of fast-growing Silicon Valley-based Dailybooth.

Dailybooth, the runner up in the “best social app” and winner of the “time sink” categories at this year’s Crunchies Awards, is “your life in pictures.” Some 6 million monthly visitors share pictures and status updates with eachother. “It’s a community for self expression,” says Pokorny.

A typical interaction: a users posts a photo, taken with their webcam, showing what they’re eating, what they’re feeling, or perhaps with friends in the background. Other user then respond via text or photos. Some strings go on for hundreds of responses. Here’s an example.

The company, originally incubated by Y Combinator, has raised just under $1 million from notable investosr such as Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Betaworks, Kevin Rose, Caterina Fake, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schachter, Gary Vaynerchuk and Aydin Senkut.

Founders Jon Wheatley and Ryan Amos will remain in their current roles at Dailybooth.

Pokorny has worked with Conway on his various investments since 2006, and has racked up quite an angel portfolio of his own. He owns stakes in Twitter, Square, Milo, Blippy, Bump, Tweetdeck, OMGPOP and others.

He’s staying close to SV Angel, too. In addition to his new role as CEO of Dailybooth, Pokorny will remain as a Strategic Partner with SV Angel where he will continue to provide key insights into sourcing and evaluating investment opportunities in social media and other sectors.

“I’m excited to have Brian join one of our hottest portfolio startups and lead it to the next level,” said Ron Conway via email. “He will remain part of the core team at SV Angel as a strategic partner, and I look forward to working with him in this new role.”

SV Angel has also been in the new recently – they are reportedly closing a new $10 million fund, the first time the fund will take outside investors to participate in their startup investments.

Earlier today, Google chief economist gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.

Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster. But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media.  For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues.  Newspapers have taken huge hits in classifieds advertising (in blue) and national brand advertising (in red).  The online portion (green) is still too small to make much of a difference.

The collapse in print ad revenues is coming from two places: the overall ad recession of the past couple years and the shift to online news consumption.  Here are some telling stats from Varian’s presentation, which is also embedded below:

• About 40% of internet users say read news on the Web every day.
• Time spent on online news sites is only about 70 seconds per day, compared to 25 minutes spent reading a print edition.
• Online news readers tend to read at work, not for leisure, so they don’t have much time to stick around and are thus worth less to advertisers.
• Overall, less than 5 percent of newspaper ad revenues come from the online editions.
• Search engines account for 35 to 40 percent of “traffic to major U.S. news sites,” according to comScore.
• The cost of printing and distributing print editions, makes up about half the cost, while editorial operations only make up 15 percent.

Varian concludes: “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.”  It sounds like he agrees with Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreessen, who recommends that newspapers “burn the boats” carrying their dying print businesses.

“The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news,” says Varian.  They make money from “special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink,, and so on.”  The problem is that on the Web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local.

So what are they supposed to do?  He doesn’t really have a good answer, but ignoring the realities of consumer shifts in reading behavior and news consumption is not it.

Back in October, Yahoo revealed that Yahoo Answers sees 30 million questions and answers per month, with users contributing 2.4 questions and answers per second. Although Yahoo Answers sees a significant amount of traffic, its design and layout has been outdated. Now Yahoo is rolling out a much-need upgrade and redesign to Answers, which will be implemented over the next few days.

Navigation: The homepage’s navigation bar has four new tabs: Home, Browse Categories, My Activity, and About. Each of the tabs stays on every page you visit in Yahoo Answers. “Home” brings you to the homepage which includes a rotating Best of Answers feature, the link to the Answers Blog and more. “My activity” lets you access your Answers profile, and view your activity on the site. “About” features the Community Guidelines, answers leaderboard, Suggestion Board, and links to the Answers blog.

Browse Categories: Yahoo has redesigned the feature to browse answers by categories. On the previous version of the Answers homepage, all of the categories were displayed on the left hand column, which Yahoo says took up prime landscape on the homepage. Now, Categories is featured in a navigation tab within a hide-away menu. So you can always see the categories on any page via the drop down feature of the “Browse Categories” tab. And you can also lick on the tab j to be taken to the “All Categories” page. From this page, you can access all the questions that are open, resolved or in voting on the site.

Aesthetics: Yahoo has slightly changed the background color of the Answers page; toning down the green and replacing the white background with a light blue palate. Even the smiley icons have received a facelift. With the removal of the categories section, the homepage is a bit more cluttered and roomier. Yahoo says that the backend of the site has been fixed to eliminate a few bugs. Answer category leaderboards will now be updated on a daily basis instead of weekly.

While Yahoo Answers is still one of the leaders in the Q&A space, the site is now facing competition from startups who are innovating in the space, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s Hunch.

Sometimes it takes a while for a site to find its legs. Hunch, which launched last March to much fanfare, is only now in the past few months capturing the attention of consumers. As the comScore chart above shows, Hunch recently hit a growth spurt, jumping from an estimated 130,000 unique U.S. visitors in August, 2009 to 371,000 in November, 2009. While the overall size of the audience is still small, nearly tripling it in three months certainly makes for an eye-catching chart.

Hunch takes a little getting used to. It is not a straightforward Q&A site. Co-founder Caterina Fake compares Hunch to a “Wikipedia for decisions.” Contributors create a series of questions aimed to help visitors make decisions. The more questions you answer about any given topic, the better guidance Hunch is supposed to be able to give you.

Like any crowdsourced service, it is designed to get better the more people use it. So far, people have answered more than 28 million questions to train the Hunch system about themselves. Although it is not necessary to do so to get suggested answers. But the more you put in, the more tailored the answers are to your specific needs. It took time to build a corpus of useful answers and decision trees which help people figure out everything from “What’s my favorite color?” to “What should I eat for lunch?” or “What places should I visit before I die?”

Early on, Hunch asked too much of its users before providing an answer, but now it seems to have enough topics and data to take users straight to its top recommendations. Shortening the cycle between landing on the site with a question and finding an answer may account for part of the jump in Hunch’s popularity. But Hunch is up against a lot of competition, including from social Q&A service Aardvark, which only recently expanded to the Web from an IM platform. My hunch is we’ll see both grow fast next year.

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Back in June of last year, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband/wife team that started Flickr, left Yahoo to pursue other interests. We already know what Fake’s new project is, the just-launched Hunch. Now we know what Butterfield’s new project is. Or, at least, what it’s called: Tiny Speck.

Butterfield sent out a tweet tonight announcing that the new company was hiring. The link he sent goes to a page on a site for the Tiny Speck project. Along the top of the jobs page it reads “We’re a new company, founded by four core members of the original team behind Flickr.” It’s no secret that another of those four core team members is former Flickr head of engineering, Cal Henderson, who left Yahoo in April of this year.

So what is Tiny Speck all about? That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is “We are working on something huge and fun and we need help.”

And the main page doesn’t offer much help either. On it you’ll find the words, “O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!” For the non-English majors, that’s a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is also the passage that inspired the title of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World.

Below that, you’ll find the logo, and below that you’ll find the link stating that Tiny Speck is hiring. And below that it reads, “Other than that, we have nothing in particular to say for ourselves right now.” Mysterious.

So, is there anything to be drawn from this position they’re hiring for? A bit, yes. The position is Creative Production Team Lead. The description says this person will be supporting staff and contractors including “illustrators, along with the occasional writer, animator or sound designer.”

So clearly this is a creative project — it almost sounds like their making an animated movie. As awesome as that would be, with people like Henderson on board, you can bet there’s impressive engineering going on to turn this all into a game of some sort (if that is in fact what this is all about).

Something else that is interesting is that this is being run out of Vancouver, according to the job posting. That is also where Flickr got its start. And guess how Flickr started? As a photo tool for a project called Game Neverending, a massively multiplayer online game.

It eventually became clear that the photo sharing aspect was the idea that would take off for Ludicorp, Butterfield and Fake’s company. So Game Neverending was tabled, and Flickr was born. Yahoo then bought Ludicorp and the rights to Flickr in March of 2005.

Looks like we may be seeing Butterfield returning to his roots.

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In search, nobody wants to go up against Google. Even Microsoft is trying to position Bing as a “decision engine” even though it is really just a search engine. But Hunch, a startup which launched publicly today, is an actual decision engine. The only thing it attempts to do is help you make a decision through a question-and-answer interface.

Hunch is part of a recent flowering of Q&A sites (such as Aardvark and Mahalo Answers) which address a part of search that is orthogonal to what Google does. In part, these startups are responding to the success of Yahoo Answers, but they also push beyond what Yahoo Answers does. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who worked on Yahoo Answers before she left Yahoo and is now running product design at Hunch, says: “Yahoo Answers is not the answer.”

The problem with Yahoo Answers is that most of the answers aren’t very good. As long as one answer is good, that is the one which comes up highest in results. But it doesn’t really learn from all the answers to a particular question come up with a better answer. Fake explains: “The question has been asked and answered thousands of times. Collective knowledge systems don’t work unless they retain knowledge, you can add knowledge to them in a simple and straightforward way, and it gets smarter every time somebody uses it.”

I had a long discussion with Fake about what Hunch is trying to do on Friday. You can search for questions which have already been entered into the system, or add your own. Each question is actually a series of questions with multiple-choice answers which take you down different paths (or, “decision trees’). The questions and answers are contributed by Hunch’s community (so far the site has been seeded by its 40,000 beta users). “Anyone can add a new set of sub-questions to main question, and improve the overall results in the same way that many people can contribute to the same Wikipedia article to make it better or add tags to someone else’s photos on Flickr. It only takes aminimal effort to make each question marginally better.

For instance, the question “Should I get a convertible?” leads to a series of other sub-questions aimed at helping you make that decision: “Are you okay with the possibility that you’ll pay more for a convertible?”; “How’s the weather in your city/country?”; “Do you live somewhere known for car theft or crime?”; “Do you keep a lot of things loosely scattered around the interior of your car?”; “”Do you often wear fancy or personally valuable hats or scarves?” After you answer all the questions, you get an answer. This could be a yes or no answer or s specific recommendation, such as what blogs you should read.

At the end of this process, you tell Hunch or not you agree with the result. Hunch not only has a results algorithm, but also has a question selection algorithm, which it tunes to each person. Theoretically, the more questions you answer on Hunch, the more it knows about you and the better follow-up questions it can present to come up with the best final answer. It sounds complicated, but the user interface is simple and game-like. You are presented with a series of questions, and you click on the answers which apply to you. Then at the end, you get an answer to the original question you were exploring.

Fake estimates that about 40 percent of the topics on Hunch right now are monetizable with ads or affiliate links. If you try to use Hunch to figure out which camera you should buy, for example, and the answer turns out to be the Nikon D80, already you will see a sponsored affiliate link to Amazon. Other business models might emerge in the future.

Other sites will be able to tap into Hunch’s question-selection and answer-selection algorithms to create their own Q&A system. Using Hunch’s API, a developer could create a custom product recommendation app for retail sites. Bob’s Bait And Tackle shop could set up a series of questions and answers to guide shoppers to the perfect fly or fishing tackle. All of these questions and answers would then feed back into Hunch’s core system. The more people who use the system, the smarter it should get.

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Nobody likes to make difficult decisions. And while the web has offered outlets for advice for years, ranging from forums to sites like Yahoo Answers, these are prone to flame wars and grossly incorrect information. Now, some new startups are emerging that are looking to take the community element - or at least the flamewars associated with it - out of the equation. Today sees the launch of LetSimonDecide, a new site that looks to help make decisions easier across a variety of topics, ranging from picking a college major to determining if you should buy or sell your stock.

The obvious competitor here is Hunch the new startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake. And while there are some definite similarities - both startups revolve around decision making - they’re taking very different approaches.

While it is powered by complex algorithms, Hunch’s data comes primarily from the community - you essentially vote on each portion of the decision process to determine how it should impact subsequent users. This means that you’re exposed to new options that you might not have previously been aware of, but it also means that you’ll occasionally get a suggestion that you’d never consider as a viable option. Conversely, Simon is more about helping figure out what’s important to you, and then basing a decision off that. In a way, it’s like an enhanced version of the traditional Pro/Con lists people make when they’re trying to make a decision.

It sounds a bit odd at first, so I’ll try to demonstrate how it works with an example. After logging into Simon, I was prompted to build a personal profile, which asked for some of my overarching life goals (these include moving to England and writing a book, for those who are curious). It also asked a handful of other questions, like my favorite activities and my personality type (there’s a choice from a half dozen categories).

From there, I tried using the site to help me with a decision. The first one I tried was to help me pick a college major - a decision I grappled with years ago that I figured might be a common choice for newcomers to the site. The site first asked me for the options I was considering (Political Science and Biology), and then which attributes about each should factor into my decision (I chose ‘Is It Interesting?’, ‘Work Load’, and ‘Job Potential’). The site then asked me to rate each major in terms of these three attributes, and how each would affect my quest to achieve my life goals. Based on my input, it spat out an answer (Biology).

So rather than look at data input by the community, Simon used data I had previously entered to help make my decision. Because there isn’t a large database of existing questions and responses it feels a little too basic at first - it’s effectively just presenting you with questions that you wrote for yourself. At the same time, I can see why it could be useful. It forces you to figure out exactly what’s important to you, and helps you make your decision accordingly.

And in the end, that’s really the best these services can do. For any genuinely important decision, you probably don’t want to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to land on your ultimate verdict - the average answer isn’t always the best one for all of us. So Simon holds your hand and helps you come to your own conclusions. It’s better than the old fashioned Pro/Con list, but it may still have a hard time attracting many users - unlike Hunch, it isn’t all that fun.

LetSimonDecide is the newest product from Ayax Systems, a consumer research company. Rather than include advertising on the site, Ayax is planning to use aggregate anonymized data to generate reports, which it can then sell to universities and Think-tanks.

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it’s been only three weeks since the launch of Q&A site Hunch, but already it’s amassed answers to 4.3 million questions. By taking visitors through a series of questions to get to know them better, Hunch can begin to make guesses about the right kinds of answers for each individual by making correlations across between people who answer similarly across different topics. It’s sort of like collaborative filtering for information.

Co-founder Caterina Fake of Flickr fame shares some of the correlations Hunch has been able to find so far. Some of her findings:

* People who believe that alien abductions are real are more likely to blame Nancy Pelosi for the financial crisis.

* Fake ID users are more likely to be happy at startups.

Also, people who like sports video games are more likely to have had a broken leg at one point (which would explain why they like to sit on the couch and play football instead of go out and, you know, actually play football).

And on the subject of Facebook versus Twitter, the Hunch data suggests that “Facebook people” are more social than Twitterers in actual social situations like a party. Facebook people mingle with more people, including strangers, whereas Twitterers stick to people they know. Other differences? Facebook people spend more on shampoo and like to drink more. Whereas “Twitterers report that they have oily skin.” In other words, Twitter is for geeks. I knew it! Don’t tell Oprah

Hunch’s data set will become available to researchers next week through a special “researchers API.” Can’t wait to find out what other correlations come out of it.

(Photo by Ira Mejías)

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