egoboss_web2.0

VentureBeat | Question-and-Answer Startup, Quora, Valued at $86m

Quora, the question-and-answer site that has become the new obsessive past-time of Silicon Valley insiders, raised funding in a first round led by Benchmark Capital. The company’s co-founders,  Adam D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s chief technology officer and  Charlie Cheever, who was another early Facebook engineer, also invested.  Matt Cohler, another early Facebook executive, joins the board from Benchmark.

D’Angelo confirmed the round through Quora, but didn’t disclose the size. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch says sources are telling him Quora’s valuation is $86 million and the company raised $11 million. We have a Q&A with the pair here. They’re a team of four, with two employees coming on shortly, Cheever said.

The funding marks yet another success for startups from former Facebook employees. Benchmark also backed Asana, the productivity startup from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

At its core, the company’s model is pretty simple. Ask a question. Get an answer from the crowd.

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http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/29/quora-2/

TechCrunch | Google Reader Play - RSS Gets Spiced Up

Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen.

Google Reader Play doesn’t require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it’s very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

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http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/10/google-reader-play/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

GigaOM | Real-Time Search is a Bit of an Oxymoron ...

The major search engines and many upstarts are doing their best to innovate to make search quicker, in part by incorporating Twitter’s full “firehose” of results. Google, in addition to being the biggest search engine on the planet, has the deepest and longest integration of the Twitter firehose, showing tweets and other real-time updates on its main search results page for three months now.

Eye-tracking on this Google search for Etsy showed that users may not look low enough on the page to see real-time results.

Though you can’t find something until it exists, so real-time search is a bit of an oxymoron. An eye-tracking report from OneUpWeb posted by Kara Swisher today rightfully compares the challenge of finding information that’s both relevant and new to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. But the study did find that users are already responding to real-time results, especially when they’re seeking out news. Those seeking products, on the other hand, clicked less and found real-time results less useful.

OneUpWeb found Google searchers seeking current news and information clicked on real-time results 30 percent of the time, while users seeking products clicked 20 percent of the time. It also noticed a bias for Google to display real-time results (when it does, which isn’t for every search) lower for consumer goods than for information, which probably had an effect on whether people looked at them or not.

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http://gigaom.com/2010/03/05/real-time-search-better-for-news-than-products/