Ajax Girl

The Times reported earlier today that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, to be called Wikiasari.

He’s clearly aiming for Google. He says:

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

The new company will be the third business division of Wikia, the for profit company that Wales founded in 2005 and is now led by CEO Gil Penchina. The other two business units are the main Wikia wiki site itself, and the recently launched OpenServing product.

Wikia has raised over $4 million in capital, including a recent round by Amazon.

Despite the fact that the original article reported that Amazon is involved in the project, Wikia is making it clear on the site that they are not invovled in any way (other than as a shareholder of Wikia).

Wikiasari

A source tells us that the working name for the project was “WikiSearch” until recently. It’s clear that Wikiasari will be focused on quality first, depth second. Search results will include tag based navigation, the top three results will be wikipedia content, and the remaining results are determined by sites wikipedia considers to be “reputable” because they are external reference links from wikipedia pages.

Since all search results will be tied to wikipedia, either directly by linking to wikipedia content or because the sites are linked to from Wikipedia, real people will eventually be determining all search results and rankings within Wikiasari. The search engine will be opensource, and the index will be available under a GFDL. Wikia will operate the master version of the index, but others are free to take it under the terms of the GFDL.

The engine itself will be built on the Nutch and Lucene open source projects.

We obtained the screenshot from a trusted source outside of Wikipedia - we can’t guarantee it’s not a fake but our belief is that this is a genuine working screenshot of the application. Click on it to see full size version.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/65839951/

There’s a trend emerging on the Internet, and it isn’t pretty. Well, it is pretty, but it’s bad news for those of us with absolutely nothing to add to the conversation. Those of us without a sense of style.

I’m the kind of guy who thinks the protagonist in The Devil Wears Prada looked better before she started dressing in the latest styles and became popular with her coworkers. But apparently there are a lot of people who disagree with me. And based on the popularity of sites like PopSugar and Glam, this trend is making its way to the Internet big time.

Three new companies are testing out a new kind of social network - centered around (mostly) women’s fashion. In particular, the fashion of the users themselves. All of these sites encourage members to take photos of themselves in new outfits and post them on the site. Social networks spring up around and between members, who comment on each other’s outfits, add people as friends, etc.

The oldest startup in this space is Los Angeles-based StyleDiary, which launched in May 2005. CEO Patricia Handschiegel started the company with her co-founder William Kapke after being in the fashion industry for years. StyleDiary has lots of passionate users, and Handshiegel tells me they are rolling out new social networking features in the near future. The only problem with the site is the poor quality of the photographs - users tend to take the photos themselves, with a mirror, often using a camera phone in poor lighting. The results are often less than great. The company says they are working on ways to auto-enhance photographs to increase quality.

ShareYourLook is a more recent entrant. They’ve copied most of the interesting features of StyleDiary and have added more “web 2.0″ features like photo ratings and bios. The result is a more user friendly site, although the image quality issue plagues them as well.

The final site, yet to launch, Shoutfit. This is a Y Combinator company that we first mentioned in November along with a few other’s in the Y Combinator family. There isn’t much information out yet on Shoutfit, but from what we hear it will be similar to StyleDiary and ShareYourLook.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/65514300/

New startup LicketyShip, the Kozmo-like ecommerce service that delivers goods within a couple of hours of ordering, is counting on this holiday season to make a name for itself. The company, which we first noticed back in January, launched in September, but they’ve recently gotten a lot of mainstream press attention and are offering $9.99 delivery up through Christmas Eve. So while the big ecommerce sites can no longer get stuff to you by the big day, Lickety Ship is still running strong. The company is only shipping same day in the Bay Area currently.

They are almost certainly taking a hit on the $9.99 deliver charge - LicketyShip outsources delivery to local couriers with extra capacity to make deliveries, which is costly. While the holiday season is a good time to pick up extra customers for ecommerce companies, Lickety Ship may be sending the wrong signal with the greatly reduced delivery charges.

Kozmo, which offered free deliveries within an hour, flamed out spectacularly in 2001 after burning through $280 million in capital. Real-time deliveries are expensive, and just because there’s lots of demand to have stuff delivered in a couple of hours doesn’t mean there’s a good business model there. LicketyShip needs to prove that people will pay $20 or more (their break even cost) to have something delivered in a couple of hours. The company says that 30% of Amazon orders are for overnight delivery, where the cost of shipment often exceeds the cost of the item itself. If that’s accurate, then there may be a bright future for the company. But Lickety Ship needs to focus their marketing attention on that segment of the market, not last minute Christmas shoppers.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/65464136/