Articles in category Software Industry

Good source of articles on pricing strategies, if you're in the software business.

search engine for the largest FAQ database - neat [via]

So it's been blogged for a while, quite for a few times by Fred or Brad

What is it? A search engine that treats your blog and your social network created around it as an ecosystem - my first analogy was "spotlight for the OS".

Does that make it that we officially have an online operating system centered around our social network with the blog as its center? It would make sense actually, our main presence online is not our facebook or myspace or linkedin account even though newbies might give it a primary try in the beginning when they might not be as familiar  with the online medium.

But our online needs evolve and our ego would ultimately require that our own online presence will be a personalized page updated on regularly basis and this is what a blog is for. We put our blog url in our facebook profile so *it is* our most important online spot. And this is from there we start to build our online social circle, be it under the form of a mini-facebook (welcome Ning) or pure and simple placing addons with our flickr, lastfm or linkedin accounts.

And this is where Lijit comes into play -- it is a product that might fly given the hypothesis that we build our network starting with the blog and then adding on. But what if we had toolkit ala wordpress or typepad that would create our social presence exactly mimicking facebook? Yeah, that would include a blog, a photo gallery, an incoroporated music player from our own repository aso. Then its search engine would be a fairly thing to do, methinks. But we don't have such a toolkit. Yet.

The final list of 20 companies is available with a few Germans and French and only three Scandinavian companies (two Swedish and a Norwegian one). There are three Grand Prizes at stake, 200,000 euros each, which will be awarded at Cebit next month.

In the extended list there was also a German company with offices in  Romania (Sibiu).

His keynote speech (90 minutes) and an informal geeky discussion with Scoble et all (approx. 43 min). Not bad, on the contrary, very informative - Billy G's certainly got vision and seems on top of things though a bit patronizing at times.

...is google's new toy (that is made public) designed for experimenting with new ways of search.

Interview with a blind programmer about web usability issues.

...is the new Google Office version 1.0. Om freaked out due to privacy reasons, but I remember we had the whole debate back on 2004, April 1, when Gmail was released. The offer includes IM, mail, web pages and a calendar - the startups toolkit (if we count the Gspreadsheet and writely as well). On the other hand it is true that this gives plenty of room for going after the bigger enterprise clients, though the model is not clear yet (licences versus advertising - perhaps a combination of the two)

Looks like on top of the monthly $1 million bill for hosting fees YouTube now will pay for having the Norwegian search engine for supporting its search capabilities.

Fast is a public company that offers enterprise search tools ("search is the heart of the web 2.0" they say) and which apparently focused its attention in powering with search capabilities some notable clients from the media industry. (i.e NYT, FT) and from finance industry (i.e. Reuters, Citigroup, UBS, etc)

At the beginning of the year the company was in the middle of some local media attacks (see the comments after the post and a FAST representative's response). Nevertheless, looking at this year's Q2 financial reports, the company shows revenues of $38.5m (+60% yoy), EBITDA of $9.6m and profits of about $6m. They currently employ 619 people.

Here's the official press release from FAST, on Youtube there's nothing announcing the deal, as of yet.

straight from the magic 8-ball -- very funny