Real Time Discovery Engine

The web has a lot of information on any topic imaginable. All this content could be hidden anywhere from the latest news, blogs, videos to even a 140 character tweet. So, the process to read an article on a given topic of interest become tedious and involves “Searching” and “Filtering” (or jointly discovering) for the right content.

Dan Olsen, the CEO of YourVersion, gave a live demo of the product at the Facebook App Meetup in Palo Alto that lets you “Discover” content based on topics of interest that matter to you. It’s called YourVersion, a real-time discovery engine. He mentioned that the company was bootstrapped since 2007 and they have hardly spent any dollars on coding. The service currently offers a free iPhone App, a Firefox toolbar to check out YourVersion of the web. They will soon be launching an application for Facebook and an IE toolbar.

The service has integration with Facebook using Facebook Connect for authentication. Once you have setup your topics of interest (the service auto-populates the tags for each interest as well), the service will automatically populate the main page with content filtered by categories like news, blogs, webpage’s, twitter, videos, and products.  Each story in the list has an easy to share option via email, twitter, facebook. You can also give a quick thumbs up/down to the story and even bookmark it for future. YourVersion also lets you share your Topics/tags to the world based on privacy settings that can be enabled from the Profile page. The service looks promising and it would be nice to see if they let you integrate RSS feeds as well. Check out the Product Tour on their website.

Screenshot

Do you wanna come shopping with me …. online ?

Plurchase is a brand new service from Ycombinator that will let you do exactly that. It’s currently in private and will be launching in a few days. Tom Saffell of Plurchase gave a sneek preview of the service at the New Tech Meetup at Palo Alto.

Plurchase let’s consumers shop on eCommerce sites like Amazon, Zappos and get feedback, advice from their friends using a sidebar widget.(They actually display the eCommerce site in an iFrame). You can bookmark products, search for products and share them on Facebook using Facebook Connect. They have also integrated a chat system to get real time advice from your friends. It currently supports only 3 eCommerce sites Amazon, Zappos, and Craigslist respectively.

Tom mentioned that they plan to make money via the affiliate program when a user/friend makes a purchase through their system. A typical payment in Amazon’s affiliate program ranges from 4 to 14%.

I am eagerly looking forward  to see the service go live and see it’s impact on online consumer spending. Leveraging the social graph of facebook(and maybe other newtworks) for online shopping seems like a smart move. You can follow them on twitter @plurchase for updates or read their blog here.

I have attached a few screenshots below

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Update: The site is live so go play with it.

PayyAttention – micropatronage for online content

PayyAttention is another service that offers readers the means to support the blogs, sites, etc that provide them with their online content.  Stephen Farrell gave a demo of their service at the SiliconValleyNewTech meet up in July minutes after Cynthia gave a demo of  Kachingle, a similar service.

They have two models for the content providers to use:-

1. Patronage Model – In this model the content owner places a widget on their site so that the patrons (or readers) can donate some money to the site. It’s voluntary for the patron to disburse any sum of money. PayyAttention pays the entire money to the content provider except the transaction fees unlike Kachingle, which takes a 20% cut.

2. Paid Access Model – In this model, the content owner can charge the reader for providing access to exclusive content, or for removing adds from the post. PayyAttention take’s a cut in the model, which also help’s subsidize the cost for the Patronage model.

As an example GigaOm’s main site can use the Patronage Model, whereas the GigaOm Pro Network could use the Paid Access Model.  I can definitely see a lot of content providers having the ability to use the services of PayyAttention for increasing revenue or even cover basic hosting fees.

They also seem to have an integration with Twitter and provide statistics for shared links etc. To get an insight of their service you can request for an invite by email and also follow them on Twitter.

Demo Video from SiliconValleyNewTech Meetup

Screen Cast from PayyAttention

NotableApp – a webdesign feedback tool

Every good product irrespective of their base industry is a result of great feedback. There are tools to review word documents with comments and feedback from each reviewer.  Google Docs makes it even easier as you can share the documents on the web. Similar tools exist for reviewing software code with comments.  However, one was missing for web designing.

I have myself tried to give feedback on website design & layouts or even share my idea visually by using a Photo Editing tool and then emailing the picture to the respective team members.  It did work, but was clumsy and time consuming, and the exchange of feedback via email between multiple members will make it complex to digest the feedback as well. However, in the New Tech Meet up I was delighted to see a the demo of a tool called Notable App, that seems to address most of my issues.

Notable App is a product by Zurb that makes sharing web page design and assimilating feedback really simple.  Hunter from Zurb gave a really good demo of the product. It comes with a firefox plug-in with which you can take a screen shot of the page currently open in the browser and then send/update it to your account in NotableApp.

Some of the notable features:

Screenshot/Annotate: The ability to take a screenshot of the page and then annotate any part of the page with comments.

Workspaces: Create separate workspaces for multiple projects.

Collaborate/Share: The ability to share your workspace with ‘certain’ team members. You can also create a PDF document as well.

Track: You can also track which member has seen the document but is yet to comment on it.

I am sure there are some other features in the tool, but these do the basic job for me. They are currently offering a 2 weeks free preview after which you will have to pay a monthly charge to use their services.

ScreenShots

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Kachingle – support your online content provider.

Kachingle is an upcoming company that is making it easy for readers to contribute and appreciate their gratitude towards the numerous blogs, news sites, etc for the content they provide to them.  Cynthia, the Chief Kachingler calls this crowd funding, which I think is a great idea and huge potential of growth.

I personally read a lot of blogs, ands news site consuming a lot of content everyday.  I am a frequent visitor to a few blogs that are making descent revenue via adds, events. On the contraray there are also single person blogs that provide good content and their perspective on topics. These are some of the blogs that I would want to stay afloat, and Kachingle provides me with an option to  Kachingle (aka donate) them a few dollars.

Kachingle let’s users create an account and deposit some money into it for kachingling it across the web.  So, every time a user goes to a blog or content provider of his choice, he can Kachingle on it using a Widget that the content provider has placed on their site. At the end of the month, Kachingle will distribute your funds (say $5) to the respective content providers based on the number of visits to each of them.  Currently each visit is weighted equally, but they intent to make it more smarter based on certain other parameters as well.

Kachingle will take a 20% cut on the donations in lieu of their service. So, from a $5 monthly budget they will earn $1 and your Kachingled sites will get $4 distributed among themselves.

I definitely see this as a good model for both the content provider and the reader, as the contributions are purely voluntary.  In a way, getting Kachingled is almost equivalent of being Digged but with real money.

Video Demo

Jobs:  Kachingle needs a Ruby on Rails Developer.