Some of you, especially those who were jacked up to get invites to the beta the past couple of days and wanted time to taunt your friends, may be saying, “Hey, what’s the hurry?  Doesn’t beta usually last like 6 months or a year or something?”  Usually, yes.  You can thank our engineering team’s ability to crank for our failure to dawdle.  In addition, one thing that continually surprised us during beta was how much of your feedback was plain old enthusiastic support.  While we know we have months and years of innovation ahead to fulfill our vision for what Clicker can be, this feedback let us know it was time to take off the training wheels.

Now, what’s a public launch without some awesome new features? We’ve got a lot of those, including:

* 33% more content than beta! We now have over 400,000 full episodes of programming from more than 7,000 shows.

* Netflix and Amazon VOD Movies: Clicker now includes Instant Streaming movies and Amazon VOD for-purchase movies. To view Netflix movies, you must have a Netflix account. Amazon VOD movies are available for either purchase, or rent.  (TV coming in the next couple of weeks.  Gotta fit it all into our data format so it’s actually useful before we let it go live!)

* Facebook Connect: You can now connect to Clicker using your Facebook account. This allows you to share content with your Facebook friends, maintain a Playlist, and edit our wiki.

* Revamped Playlist UI, nomenclature, and functionality: Save episodes, music videos, or movies into your playlist. Or subscribe to a show, so when a new episode becomes available it will be added to your Playlist automatically.

* Search Within: Want to find the 60 Minutes interview with President Obama? Just search purely within the 60 Minutes catalog.  Want to find episodes of Charlie Rose where he interviews Warren Buffett?  Do the same!

* Related Search: During beta, we dramatically improved our algorithms for making suggestions related to the shows you’re watching.  It’s a good thing our Playlist has been improved so much because you’re going to be adding a ton of programs you just discovered.

* Editing: We were getting so many people recommending edits to our pages, so we made a number of improvements to make it easier for you to submit changes.

Those are just some highlights.  There have been a lot of improvements, big and small.  The bottom line is that we’re ready to open up and see what the world thinks of Clicker.

And so, in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, we are about to take our first step into a larger world.

The Force will be with you, beta users…always.

Explorys Inc., led by two veterans of the data-management industry, said Wednesday it has raised $1 million to develop its “Population Explorer” search engine.

The service would allow quick analysis of massive databases of patient records.

Uses could include tracking the effectiveness of treatments, following the results of new drug therapies and finding potential participants in clinical studies.

“We’re using the same technique in use by Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon,” said Stephen McHale, chief executive of Explorys, based in University Circle. “We store and process [data] in a way that optimizes it in a very high-speed way.”

The Clinic has a pilot of the technology operating in-house under Dr. Anil Jain.

“What we’ve done is put this internal capability into Explorys’s hands,” said Christopher Coburn, executive director for Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the hospital system’s technology commercialization arm. “Their job is to take that and make into a product.”

The Clinic owns a share of Explorys and will earn royalties, under a licensing deal with the company.

McHale hopes to launch by next summer. The strategy is to sign deals with health-care institutions that would value a high-speed search of patient records.

The technology strips patient identities from the data as it is collected, in compliance with federal privacy laws covering health records, McHale said.

McHale will be joined shortly by Charlie Lougheed, as president and chief technology officer of Explorys. The pair led Everstream Inc., a Solon developer of software that enabled cable companies to gather customer information and troubleshoot technical problems. A Georgia company acquired Everstream Inc. for $14.5 million in stock in 2005.

Much of the $1 million in seed funding for Explorys came from an investment fund managed by McHale. An innovation fund in Austin, Texas, is also investing.

McHale believes the company can grow quickly, with up to 1,000 jobs in seven years.

The Clinic believes the company has a chance to crack the massive market for health care information technology, Coburn said. “There’s no doubt they will have competition,” Coburn said. “If they provide value at a reasonable cost, they have a chance of growing to a fairly good-sized level.”

Source: Explorys.net

Sie können Weine nach den Suchkriterien Wunscharomen, passende Speisen, Süße, Rebsorte, Tannine und Region anzeigen lassen.

You can view wines according to the criteria desired flavorings, suitable food, sweet, grape, tannins and region.

Die Suche erfolgt in tausenden von Weinen aus zahlreichen Onlineshops.

The search takes place in thousands of wines from numerous online stores.

Auf aromicon wird der Geschmack mit einem weltweit einzigartigen und unter wissenschaftlicher Begleitung entwickelten Verfahren, der Virtuellen Weinverkostung in Form von Grafiken und Filmen sichtbar gemacht.

On aromicon the taste with a unique and under scientific supervision procedures developed in the Virtual Wine Tasting in the form of graphics and movies made visible.

Die Geschmacksvisualisierung wurde von den Gründern selbst entwickelt und patentiert.

Taste visualization was developed and patented by the founders themselves.

Mit Hilfe der Virtuellen Weinverkostung können Sie über den Vergleich mit eigenen Erfahrungen den jeweiligen Wein einschätzen und den Geschmack „sehen“.

With the help of virtual wine tasting, you can estimate about the comparison with their own experience each wine and see the taste.

In einem Wein-Wiki werden die wichtigsten Fachbegriffe in kurzer und für Laien verständlicher Form erläutert.

In a wine-Wiki, the most important terms in a brief and understandable way for lay below.

Im aromicon-Blog können sie interessante Beiträge aus der Welt des Weines lesen.

In aromicon blog they can read interesting articles from the world of wine.

Source: aromicon.com

Posted by Courtney Walsh

Today OneRiot officially turned one year old (or shall we say young?).

On Nov. 12, 2008, our realtime search engine burst onto the internets, and a year later we have a lot to celebrate:

From getting bundled into IE8, to predicting American Idol winners, to distributing our search results to lots of partners, to launching the first ad network for the realtime web, to partnering with Taptu to release the first realtime search engine for mobile, it’s been quite a ride!

Brian Solis wrote about the rapid evolution of search (also here) citing the flurry of activity in the search industry around such capabilities as real-time search, social search and semantic search.  In my personal opinion, one big issue that hasn’t received much attention is the one I raise above – what is going to help people with their searches for in-depth information on the Web?

Zakta, our personal and social Web search engine, offers a way that makes Web searching useful, purposeful and fun.  As I’ve written before, Zakta helps with these deeper informational searches, by presenting organized information for your search queries, enabling you to personalize the results, save them for later use and even share the search results you’ve found useful with friends, family, workgroups and the world.

A few weeks ago, Matt Hurst wrote on his Datamining blog that Zakta was a new way to organize Web knowledge and might be part of a set of emerging tools for what he calls “web gardening“.  I wanted to elaborate on this part of Zakta, by introducing Zakta Guides, the social media tool in Zakta that enables organization of resources from the Web on any topic, and all the benefits it brings to people everywhere and to the authors of Guides in particular.

On Zakta, no matter what topic you are searching on, you can collect the best Web sites, news articles, blog posts, products, companies, services, videos, images, whatever is relevant and useful for your search, and organize and share it in the form of a Guide with others.

When other users look for similar information, Zakta presents your Guide (or other matching Guides created by other Zakta users) in their search results.  i.e. Others can benefit from the results of your searching effort, and begin their search with what you have found useful.

In turn, other users can vote and recommend your Guide, share it with others, and even suggest new resources to add to your Guide, so you and everyone else can benefit from what others have discovered. Users who like certain Guides can subscribe to them so they can stay on top of updates and additional search results.

A really powerful capability in Zakta is that you can even invite other people you trust – friends, family members, co-workers, and associates – to collaborate with you and add to and edit your Guide. In this way, a Zakta Guide enables the best information from the Web to be organized in one place for a given topic.

See these interesting Zakta Guides that people have created so far on a diverse range of subjects:

• Niagara Falls
• Lucille Ball
• U.S. political satirists from the 1950s-today
• Financial Aid 101 (part of a collection of Zakta Guides on College Planning Made Easy!)
• Finding a Job in an Economic Downturn
• Chess
• Ivory Soap Advertising History

When you organize and share the best resources from the Web on a topic you are interested in, you make it easy for others to search on that topic. Likewise, you benefit from what others have shared.  Imagine if everyone decided to share what they’ve found useful from their searches on topics they know about using Guides!  Just how much more useful the search experience can be for everyone!

Jason Falls mused about the game changing possibilities this kind of approach to getting curated search results in his recent post on Zakta. And Jason was right in arguing that this will require that people come to Zakta.

I can cite three reasons why Zakta can be very useful to you:

1. Help yourself with a personalized searching experience that saves you time with your deeper searches for information.  Who wouldn’t want to save time in this ever-demanding world we live in!
2. Help others by sharing what you know or have found. You will likewise benefit from others doing the same.  This is a win-win proposition coming from a search framework that lets people help each other!
3. You can offer more value to your current visitors, reach more searchers on the Web, and engage your followers better in social networks!  This is a big, practical benefit for you, and here’s how Zakta enables this:
   • Zakta Guides can be linked from your blog, Web site, or social network page, to offer additional information to new and recurring visitors alike.
   • Here’s the big kicker – If your Guides are good, it will be automatically indexed by other popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others – this means that users searching on the Web using these popular search engines for matching topics will find your Guides in the search engine results page, and benefit from your Guides.

By combining a personalized search engine with a social media tool in the form of Zakta Guides, and a social network to let you connect with people you trust, Zakta makes it possible for people to make a difference in the quality of the search experience for themselves and everyone else.  The overarching benefit for the Web as a whole is that Zakta can help organize the chaos of the Web, one topic at a time!

I invite you to dig deeper into Zakta and experience these benefits for yourself.  As always, we’d love to hear feedback and what we can do to make Zakta better for you.

-The Zakta Team / from their blog here

Get ready for a shocker – the vast majority of online real estate sites are a waste of time for a real life home buyer. If you were buying a home in your town of choice and you knew there were 10 homes that met your criteria – would you use a site that only showed 6 of them?

Sadly the vast majority of consumers have no idea that when they’re on the major Real Estate search sites this is exactly what’s going on.

I’m not going to name names in this post, but the bottom line is that virtually all the real estate vertical search players as well as the real estate sections of the top horizontal search engines get their home listings via broker/agent syndication feeds.  What this mean is that in order for these search engines to have complete coverage, they have to get every agent or broker to upload every new listing, every day. And as a result, no matter how terrific their User Interface (UI) is or how much other information they throw around the properties on their site – they are missing big swaths of current listings that consumers want and need.

They’ll deny it, they’ll tell you that they have “92%” of the listings – but what this really means is:

They know there are x number of active Multiple Listing Services (MLS) listings in the country;

Their database has y # of total properties;

x/y = 0.92;

That is very different from having 92% of the actual MLS listings that are active in any given market!

What it means is that they have a ton of other stuff in the database … foreclosures … homes that were already sold … strange hybrid listings … and so on.

The truth is that only those websites owned by, or operated on behalf of, an actual Real Estate Brokerage or Agent have access to the full MLS data set.  There is one exception, Realtor.com, which by virtue of its relationship with NAR gets access to the vast majority of MLS listings.

So here’s a tip - there are two real estate data acronyms to look for that will help you as a home buyer determine if you’re likely looking at the complete MLS data set.  One is IDX (Internet Data Exchange) and the other is VOW (Virtual Office Website).  These types of data sets typically (although sadly not always, more like 9 out of 10 times) mean you are viewing almost everything available from the local MLS.  Look for them in the home listings themselves or at the footer of the real estate websites you’re using.

“Wait a second,” you say … “isn’t your company Roost.com a vertical search site subject to the same limitations?”

Well I’m glad you asked! If you poke under the hood, Roost is actually a hosted network of individual Broker and Agent websites with a smart search engine on top.  That allows us to do a lot of cool things, but most importantly for this discussion it means that when you’re searching on Roost, you’re actually looking at a Broker or Agent’s website which has access to the good stuff.

Go ahead … give us a try … click here.

Alex Chang
CEO of Roost

The author of the font will always retain the copyright, which refers to the reproduction, distribution, alteration and publication of the font.

Detailed copyright information is available for individual fonts in the readme.txt file, or copyright.txt which are included as a part of the zip font file.

Please note that sometimes these files are missing. However, you can find out Copyright and Author info by looking into the font properties. You can do it by double clicking the unzipped font file, then clicking Properties and selecting the Details tab.

If you are still unsure if you can use a font for a particular task the best action would be to contact the author and request the permission.

*Audio may need some tweaking. -ed.