I’ve recently had a chance to present at both the TechCrunch Supernova Conference and the Under the Radar DealMaker Media Conference. These events were both well attended and it was very interesting presenting with a number of the other young “hot” companies in the space. The perspective of what’s hot now versus what is not as hot was very interesting to me…. It’s just incredible how these cool company "waves" flow through the venture capital community too. It seems like there is a hot window where all the firms may fund a particularly type of company, place their bets, and the move on to the next segment of companies. I’ll share some perspective I’ve noticed from the recent trends in the conferences and the space in general
What’s hot in 2007
- Video Advertising Networks
- Wireless Consumer Applications
- Discovery Technology for Products and Music and Media
- Social Commerce and Review Information
There was also a lot of discussion over Search. Was it over? Has Google won? We all know that they are moving with incredible momentum but there has to be more. The only high profile new company really trying to take them on right now was Powerset with a natural language processing capability. There are also a few human powered search engines but it seems like they are running or will run into scalability problems very soon.
There was also some conversation about “Vertical Search” or “A Search Engine that is focused on a Specific Category”. We know of a few companies that have come in and tried to create a search engine incrementally better than Google in serving up links in a specific category. The bottom line as I’ve written before is that if it’s only slightly better it will never get a user’s attention. These vertical search engines have only seen moderate growth.
So can general search get better? From my perspective, the answer is yes but the fruitful space to hunt is not on serving people better links. It’s about using the Web’s Data to answer people’s questions. We are building Wize.com as a Web site that provides unique content and utilities to consumers. Our WizeRank is a product satisfaction score based on what the world is saying about a product. This information is unique and gives people an answer to a question rather than more pages to research. Isn’t that what people want? People want quick answers that improve their lives and give them more time to do other things. Wize is progressing down a path now focusing on improving the online product research process. Online Product Research will impact 1 trillion in commerce over the next 4 years in the US
I believe strongly that a large component of the future of search will be about improvement to the way pages are served up but by adding rich data that answers people’s question on top of the Search Links that you provide. Search should be about doing people’s work for them rather than asking them to do more work
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