Kifi Debuts A “Deep” Search Engine For Twitter Based On Your Own Tweets

Hulu Launches Its Own GIF Search Engine
A startup called Kifi is rolling out a new tool that allows you to automatically save all the links you tweet in order to create a personalized search engine that includes those links as well as others it recommends based on what you’ve already shared. Called “Kifi for Twitter,” the company describes the new feature as something of a deep search engine for Twitter because it’s not only indexing the tweet itself, but also the actual content contained in those links you’ve shared, allowing you to more easily retrieve this information in the future.
Explains Mark Yoshitake, VP of Product at Kifi, “one of the huge problems that we’ve found is that people have a hard time recalling the wealth of information they’ve found and shared on social networks.”
As you probably know, if you’re not regularly engaged on social media and keeping an eye on your many streams, then information often just gets missed. That can leave people feeling stuck in between two extremes – either you stop paying attention to social media entirely and begin to feel like you’re missing out, or you stay tuned in but then have to deal with the pressures of information overload.
In fact, social media’s unfortunate tendency to be biased towards the “recency” of content is what Kifi’s aiming to attack with its product. Kifi for Twitter runs in the background, requiring little effort on your part, but can then pull back the right information when you need it.
With Kifi’s technology, you’re currently able to save the links you tweet and their content, but the company wants to automatically save the content you share on other networks, too, like Facebook and LinkedIn.
However, Kifi is not some glorified, automated alternative to bookmarking links using your web browser. Instead, the idea is to analyze the content found within those links in order to make recommendations of related items you may be interested in. This part is a lot like how YouTube makes suggestions of related videos to watch, for example.
In addition, Kifi also tracks people who collect similar things, so it can analyze and filter that content, as well, in order to improve its recommendations.
“It’s essentially an interest graph plus a people graph and a topic graph all integrated together,” says Yoshitake, referring to the ways it puts all its collected data together. The startup is also filing patents on its engine (dubbed “Cortex”) and its associated algorithm called “HelpRank” (because it’s about how helpful you can be to another person in Kifi’s network.)
To retrieve the content Kifi collects, the company creates a word cloud of suggested searches you can access directly. For instance, here’s Greylock’s Josh Elman’s library of Twitter shares. And here’s one based on TechCrunch tweets.
In addition, Kifi also offers a Chrome browser extension, which will return any link you’ve tweeted before along with other personalized recommendations. When you do a search on Google.com, for instance, Kifi’s extension will inject these links at the top of your search results (see below).
You can also search across Kifi and Google via the company’s mobile apps for iOS and Android.
The Chrome extension has been available for around a year and a half now, as Kifi had earlier been developing its “social network for knowledge” which allows users to save links from around the web to various collections, sort of like a Pinterest for articles. Kifi would then index and analyze all the words on each link so it could be retrieved in future searches.

To date, Kifi has grown to over 60,000 users, but its recommendation engine and full integration with social networks is only a couple of months old.
Meanwhile, the deep search functionality for Twitter has only been live for a few days now, but it’s already gaining a couple of thousand users per day, the company claims. (The feature currently has a waitlist, but TechCrunch readers can gain early access by signing up via this link.)
Kifi’s team includes CEO Dan Blumenfeld, previously the CMO at Check (acquired by Intuit); Eishay Smith, formerly the Director of Engineering at Wealthfront, also previously of IBM, Netflix and LinkedIn; Jared Jacobs, an ex-Googler who co-led Gmail’s frontend team; Mark Yoshitake, the co-founder of Google Cultural Institute who also launched Google Book Search and is the ex-head of Platforms at YouTube; as well as a number of other data science and machine learning Ph.D’s and other ex-Googlers.

Kifi’s technology, while robust, is something that may be hard to scale to a mainstream audience, given that many people aren’t active Twitter users, nor have a burning desire to catalog their many shared links. Instead, Kifi seems to make sense more for Twitter power users – people like those in the media or researchers, for example.
In fact, it would almost be preferable to see Kifi baked into Twitter itself, improving Twitter’s own search functionality by giving it a way to better retrieve the links users tweet by better understanding the content they contain.
The startup is currently backed by $11 million in bridge and Series A funding from Wicklow Capital, SGVC, Oren Zeev (Chegg, Houzz); Audible founder Donald Katz, Richard Sarnoff, Mohan Gyani, Gary Ginsberg, Liron Petrushka, and other angel investors.

By: Unknown On 04:14

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Pinterest Debuts A New “Pin It” Button Designed To Speed Up Bookmarking

HarperCollins Is Taking Aim At Amazon As Contract LapsesLast summer, Pinterest acquired a visual discovery site called Icebergs, and today that team is showing off what it’s been up to, having since relocated from Spain to San Francisco. While over the past several months, Pinterest’s focus has been on improving search and discovery on its site, the former Iceberg team members have been working to improve the process involved with saving pins themselves. Today, they’re rolling out a new “Pin It” button that’s designed to speed up the process of saving content to Pinterest by reducing the number of clicks by half.
Before, using the “Pin It” button on the web required four clicks before the content was saved, as you may recall.
“It was a bit hard,” notes former Icebergs co-founder, now Pinterest Product Manager César Isern López. “But on mobile it was only two taps away. We wanted to translate that mobile experience to the web and make it extremely fast and easy to save anything,” he says.
One of the improvements arriving now in the new button is that it makes it easier to find and create boards from the interface. The window will now display the three boards you’ve been pinning to most recently at the top of the flow, and it includes an improved Pin selector as users pin from around the web. The company has been testing the new button with a small percentage of its user base before today, and claims that early results have shown that the new flow have increased repins by 3 percent.

As you can see in the screenshot above, when the user clicks the new Pin It button on a webpage with a number of images, they’re shown a message that asks them to “Choose a Pin to Save,” then they click on the one they want to share. Afterward, the user is shown the new pop-up window where their top boards are shown to them first, and a search option helps them quickly locate other boards by name, if need be.
While some users have already seen this button in the wild, Pinterest says the rollout will reach 100 percent of its user base today.
Though somewhat of a minor tweak to Pinterest’s user interface, the change is one of several the company has planned, we understand. López and his former co-founder Albert Pereta, now a lead product designer at Pinterest, created a new “Save” team inside the company when they joined. That team is focused on making it easier to Pin content from around the web, including articles, ideas and inspiration, recipes, products and more.
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They’ve also been responsible for building other bulk editing tools that have allowed users to copy, move or delete Pins from a board all at once. And going forward, they’ll be working to improve the process of returning to previously pinned items, they say. That is, making it easier to go back to your Pins, search for them, and then actually use them.
The company says that, to date, it has 50 billion Pins on its service which are saved onto more than 1 billion boards, and it’s now serving up over 1.5 trillion recommendations annually. Already, its users are saving a lot of content onto the site daily, including 2 million product Pins and over 14 million articles, for example. With this small change to the pinning flow, however, the company is hoping to increase those numbers even more.

By: Unknown On 01:39

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Microsoft Debuts Office Lens, A Document-Scanning App For iOS And Android

UK’s myDogBuddy Merges With Spain’s Bibulu To Become Europe’s Largest Dog Sitting MarketplaceMicrosoft today launched Office Lens, a mobile document scanner app that works with OneNote, for iOS and Android smartphones. The app, which allows users to snap photos of paper documents, receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards, sticky notes and more, was first launched a year ago as an application designed only for Windows Phone devices.
But in conjunction with the company’s newer strategy to embrace other platforms outside its own, the app has now arrived on Apple’s App Store and on Android phones, where it will sit alongside dozens of other Microsoft applications, including Office and Outlook.
Office Lens’ core functionality itself is not all that different from a number of document-scanning applications on the mobile app stores today, like Scanner Pro, TinyScan Pro, Scanbot and more. And much like Evernote’s Scannable app, for example, it exists more as an add-on or complement to a larger, more prominent product – in Microsoft’s case, OneNote.
Like most scanner apps, Office Lens identifies the text on the images it captures using optical character recognition (OCR), which allows you to later locate the file in question using keyword search in OneNote or in Microsoft’s cloud storage site, OneDrive. You can also convert the images you scan of paper files and whiteboards into Microsoft Office formats and more, including Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and even PDFs and JPGs. These can be inserted into OneNote as images, the company says.

In addition, Microsoft says that Office Lens offers a business-card scanning function that lets you turn cards into contacts you can add to your smartphone’s address book. That initially sounds similar to the functionality that Evernote Scannable offers, you’ll think. However Evernote also pulls in LinkedIn details, which is handy as it allows you to grow your network. (LinkedIn used to offer its own card-scanning app, but later shut it down and pointed people to Evernote instead.)
But with Office Lens, the process of turning cards into contacts is more involved than with Scannable. As a previous Microsoft blog post explained, it still involves the use of OneNote. That is, OneNote is able to recognize the contact information on the card, then you can open the attached VCF file from the OneNote app to save the contact details to Outlook or your phone’s contact list.
In Scannable, by way of comparison, you simply tap one button to save the scanned card to your phone’s contacts. That makes Scannable the better option for those looking mainly for a business card scanner, while Office Lens is really about catering to the heavy OneNote-using crowd instead.
Also like Evernote Scannable, Microsoft’s app also offers the ability to create an online archive of your scans in its own OneDrive service.
The new Office Lens app is available on the iTunes App Store for iOS users, while Android users are being asked to join the “preview” for the product via Google+. From here, they’ll be able to test the version ahead of its public debut.
The release comes at a time when Microsoft, a historically more closed company that tried to keep customers in its own ecosystem, has been expanding to other platforms besides its own.
Today, the company has extended some of its most popular products and services to competing mobile platforms like iOS and Android, including by launching Office for iOS late last year, as well as Outlook for iOS and Android, various MSN properties, OneDrive and more. In fact, the company now has over 100 iOS and Android applications in total.

By: Unknown On 01:09

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Daum Kakao Debuts Uber Rival KakaoTaxi In South Korea

IBM Launches Major Internet Of Things OffensiveDaum Kakao, the maker of South Korea’s most popular messaging app, launched KakaoTaxi in Korea today. The new service is a potentially strong competitor to Uber and is the beginning of Daum Kakao’s initiative to extend online-to-offline products to the 48 million active monthly users of KakaoTalk.
KakaoTaxi is currently available in Korea for Android, while an iOS version will be released in April. Users can sign up for the service by using their KakaoTalk account.
Like other Asian messaging apps such as WeChat and Line, Daum Kakao is eager to transform KakaoTalk from an SMS replacement into a lifestyle services platform. The company describes KakaoTaxi as its “first attempt at offering online-to-offline connections.”
As an example of the direction KakaoTalk can potentially go if it adds more services, Line also offers food-ordering and music streaming, while WeChat users can pay their utility bills through the app. Both have already entered the taxi-calling business: Line currently offers LineTaxi in Japan, while WeChat lets users call and pay for taxis directly through the app.
KakaoTaxi may have an advantage over Uber because of the latter’s regulatory challenges in Korea. Earlier this month, Uber was forced to suspend its peer-to-peer ride sharing service UberX because it did not comply with local transportation regulations.
Although UberBLACK and UberTAXI are still available in Seoul, the company also faces another major legal headache: several executives, including founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, have been charged with breaking transportation laws, including ones that require all of the company’s drivers to be licensed taxi drivers.
Steps Daum Kakao has taken in order to avoid the same problems as Uber include hiring only licensed taxi operators. It also signed an agreement with the subway card maker Korea Smart Card Corp., which is partially owned by the government. Not only does the deal give KakaoTaxi some measure of government support, but it also lets the service track the flow of commuters in Seoul, which helps it figure out where to deploy cabs, and allows users to pay for rides with their subway passes.
Further more, KakaoTaxi has also signed memorandums of understanding with organizations representing licensed taxi companies and drivers, including the Korean National Joint Conference of Taxi Association, the Seoul Taxi Association, the Federation of Korean Taxi Workers’ Union, and the Korean Taxi Workers’ Union.
Factors that might help KakaoTaxi attract passengers who are already accustomed to using Uber include several very similar features.
As with Uber’s app, KakaoTaxi automatically sets the user’s location as a pick-up spot and finds the fastest available cab based on traffic, distance, and estimated time of arrival. Then it sends the driver’s name, photo, and vehicle description to the passenger, and push notifications about its progress toward them. During the ride, passengers can send notifications to their friends letting them know their current location.
Passengers and drivers are allowed to rank one another, a two-way rating system that Uber also uses.
KakaoTaxi includes some privacy safeguards, including an in-app messaging system for drivers and passengers that automatically deletes chats after a ride is completed and masked numbers so drivers can contact their customers without seeing their phone numbers.
Though Daum Kakao also operates online payment services KakaoPay and BankWalletKakao, neither of those have been integrated with KakaoTaxi. Instead, users can pay with cash or one of the cards used for other transportation services in Korea or add a credit card.
This is supposed to make the service easier to use for people who don’t have KakaoPay or BankWalletKakao accounts. In a FAQ, Daum Kakao says they decided not to add one of their payment services to the app in order to “streamline the KakaoTaxi experience as much as possible for many users.”

By: Unknown On 03:35

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Cloze Debuts A Smart, Personal Assistant App For Managing Your Professional Relationships

That’s A Wrap On The Atlanta And Boston TC Meetups!Cloze today is rolling out a new application aimed at business professionals. It promises a smarter view of your contacts by allowing you to automatically track email messages, phone calls, meetings, notes, social updates and more in a single application on iPhone, iPad and the web. The idea is to offer individuals whose business requires them to maintain relationships an easy way to receive reminders to reach out to those most important to them, before those relationships fade.
The company, as you may recall, had earlier introduced an email management app that worked to sort emails for you, based on the priority of your relationship with the email senders. That app was targeted more at consumers, however.
According to Cloze co-founder Alex Coté, what the company learned over the past couple of years since the original app’s debut was that competing with consumer-facing mobile email apps shouldn’t be its core focus.
“Relationship management was a category that we set out from the beginning to work on,” he says. “It’s something that [Cloze co-founder Dan Foody] and I had, which is why we raised money to solve this problem. Information is really spread all over the place – on emails, on social media, in CRM systems, in phone calls, in notes…how do you get it all together,” he asks.
agenda-6 social-6 company-6 contact-6 reader-6  View Slideshow Previous Next Exit
With the relaunch of Cloze, the app is moving away from being an email client of sorts, and instead is meant to function more as a tool that lets you track your contacts and your interactions in a variety of ways.
It automatically pulls in information from your email accounts, calendar, social media, phone call logs and notes – including those stored on Evernote, as well as documents exchanged and interactions on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Now a freemium application, the free version limits users to three email accounts, and essentially offers the basic “relationship prioritization” functionality of Cloze’s prior version.
But paying users will have access to a host of other features, too, including phone-call logging, unlimited email account support, contextual meeting info and updates, document tracking, Evernote integration, business card scanning, stay-in-touch and follow-up reminders, search and filtering features and more.
Cloze also offers an “Agenda” view where you can see all your meetings, reminders, follow-ups and alerts in one place, and it shoots out a daily briefing email to keep you on top of your upcoming day and to alert you to things you may have missed from the day before.

The company has been testing the premium version for several months with a number of testers, and says that early feedback has been promising. Its users, who include professionals like real estate agents, independent lawyers, wealth managers and other small business owners, were quickly converting from the free to paid version during trials. The company has around 300,000 users who have been using the free version of Cloze, but isn’t offering data on paid users at this point since the app is only becoming available to the public today.
Starting now, Cloze users can subscribe to the premium features in the new app for $19.99 per user per month or $159.99 per user per year – pricing which decidedly moves Cloze out of the consumer space.
Cloze has only raised $1.2 million in seed funding to date, having relied on its other business, a tool for team sharing called Circulate.it, for revenue. That service starts at $9 per month and goes up to $99 per month on the high end, where the company works with several bigger clients including banks and PR firms, for example.
Explains Coté, the company eventually sees the two products coming together a bit more, as Circulate.it could serve as a way to introduce Cloze into the larger enterprise. In fact, Cloze is already thinking about a “team” version of the new Cloze service that would be aimed at bigger businesses and include things like Salesforce integration, he says.
Cloze is available now on iTunes.

By: Unknown On 00:50

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Elemental Path Debuts The First Toys Powered By IBM Watson

A company called Elemental Path is developing a new line of smart toys for children which will be powered by the super computing system IBM Watson, enabling the toys to engage in real and personalized conversations with kids, and evolve with the child as he or she grows. CogniToys, as the toy line is being called, is today introducing its first entry into this space, with a smart dinosaur toy that supports full speech recognition and can chat with kids, tell them jokes and answer a wide variety of 

By: Unknown On 06:35

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