Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine

It’s not often we hear about a startup’s venture financing before we see the product, but that is the case with yet-to-launch Spock, located in Silicon Valley. Rumors about their $7 million Series A round of financing from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital Ventures circulated last December, months before the beta service was planned to launch.

I met with founders Jaideep Singh (CEO) and Jay Bhatti (VP Product) last week to test the service, which they plan to beta launch next week.

People search is a space that went from nowhere to crowded, fast. Wink changed direction and launched a people search product last November. Also in this space is Streakr (yet to launch), ProfileLinker, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Upscoop.

Spock’s People Search Engine

Unlike the others (for the most part), Spock goes way beyond searching just social networks for people information. They are positioning themselves specifically against Google for web search and Amazon for product search, saying the third important type of search is information about people, and that 30% of Internet searches are people-related. Wink is Spock’s closest competitor among all of the ones listed above.

In my testing, Spock did a great job of finding information about different kinds of people - bloggers, celebrities, and even lesser known individuals with some web presence. See last screenshot below for an example search results page.

People Profiles and Metadata But part of where Spock really shines is what they do after the search is completed. They are slowly indexing the entire web , which is no small feat, but focusing on important hubs of people information like blogs, wikipedia, photo sites and, of course, social networks. Each person discovered by their search engine is run through a process of de-duping (for people with identical or similar names) and given a permanent profile page (see screenshot of former President Bill Clinton’s profile to right - click for larger view). Spock auto-creates tags for individuals based on the information they find. Prominent tags for Bill Clinton, for example, include “former U.S. President, “Great Leader,” “Womanizer,” “Left Handed,” “Democrat,” and “Saxophonist,” among others. Spock also auto detects other relevant meta data about the individual - age, location and sex.

Users can add new tags and vote on whether existing tags are relevant or correct. Also, individuals can claim their own profile (Spock runs your email through the social networks to see if it is attached to the right profile). Once claimed, that user has additional voting weight with his or her own tags and description. It will be interesting to see prominent individuals fighting the masses as they try to dominate their own identity, and lawsuits will inevitably surface as well.

People Relationships

Spock also finds relationships between people based on an analysis of information obtained in their web index, and based on user added data later on. When looking at a person’s profile, there will be links to others that Spock thinks are related.

Matt Mashall got a very early look at the product last year. See his notes here to see how it has changed since then.

Screenshots (click for larger view):

Viacom Snubs Google Again, Partners With Yahoo On Search Advertising

Viacom hasn’t been gentle with Google this year. In February they slammed Google/YouTube with a massive DMCA take down demand (and an equally massive press outreach). A month later they sued Google for a billion dollars. Between those two events they signed a content deal with Joost, a YouTube competitor in the professional content space. All of this seems to stem from the fact that Google promised Viacom a revenue share deal on YouTube, then failed to table a compelling offer.

Today Viacom snubs Google again, choosing to work with Yahoo on search advertising. There are few details of the deal, but it doesn’t appear that Yahoo is making any revenue guarantees, which are becoming standard in large search advertising deals. Google gave Fox certain guarantees in a $900 million deal announced last year, and Microsoft almost certainly guaranteed revenue to Facebook in order to get access to their search traffic.

In this case at least, YouTube appears to be a liability to Google, and Yahoo gets the benefit of being the next strongest player.

MySpace TrailerPark: Dedicated Movie Trailer Site

I got a chuckle this morning when I saw an email from MySpace that they were launching a new service called “TrailerPark” (I thought perhaps they were targeting an underserved demographic for membership expansion). But their new service has nothing to do with that. Instead, it’s a dedicated site for movie trailers. The service is run through MySpace Video.

Trailers can be found on various websites, but having an easy place to browse and embed them is great. Apple’s is actually one of the best - they include options to download to an iPod or in High Definition format. Other good sites for movie trailers include Yahoo Movies, IMDB, Movie List, iKlipz and the Movie Trailers Blog. YouTube also has many movie trailers, although there is no permanent category for them.

It would be good if MySpace also showed relevant data about the movie as well, such as release date, actors, etc. No word from them if they plan to do that in the future.

Google Takes Partial Ownership Of Maxthon Browser

Multiple sources are confirming that the Chinese/Israeli startup behind the Maxthon Browser has sold a minority stake to Google. The total investment size is rumored to be around $1 million. We are also hearing that this investment is part of a “much larger strategic deal” between the two companies. Maxthon has had over 80 million downloads of its browser, and over half of its users are in China. Maxthon-originated searches may account for up to 25% of total Baidu traffic, according to one source. At the very least we expect the strategic deal to involve replacing the default search option in the browser from the Baidu search engine in China and Yahoo in other countries with Google search. The deal may also go beyond search and involve integration with other Google services directly into the browser. Maxthon would then be promoted on Google as a preferred browser. The deal was apparently done at least two months ago, but the companies have delayed releasing the news. We’ve contacted Netanel Jacobsson at Maxthon about this story, but he has declined to comment. We also have an email into Google PR for comment. Maxthon has raised less than $6 million prior to this investment. Seed financing came from Morten Lund and WI Harper in March 2005, and CRV invested around $5 million in the company in March 2006.

Hearst + Fox = YouTube Killer?

Last month Hearst announced their plans for 12 new online video channels to partner with their magazine websites. Now they are partnering with Fox Television Studios for their CosmoGirl and Popular Mechanics video channels, according to MediaPost.

The current plans entail short (<3>Time Magazine, which recently started its own in house online video production.

Is it a YouTube killer? Far from it. While the webisodes will feature a little bit of user-generated content (visitors can contribute plot ideas), Hearst’s proposal is more analogous to television than YouTube—passive entertainment rather than a community of users sharing funny, personal clips.

I find it particularly interesting that Hearst chose to partner with Fox. Their first announcement said they’d be using Maven Networks‘ Internet TV Platform for their video players. Among Maven’s other clients? Fox. Hm…

Google Desktop Leaves Beta, Adds Quick Search

Google has announced the graduation of Google Desktop from “beta”. With the change comes a new feature called “Quick Search“.

As Tomas Gunnarsson, Google Desktop Software Engineer, describes it…

Three months ago, I came up with an idea that makes it easier for users to find what they’re looking for: a search box in the middle of the desktop. It’s very accessible — all you have to do is press your Ctrl key twice.

Things you didn’t know about Google

1. The name Google is a spelling error. The founders of the site, Larry page and Sergey Brin, thought they were going for 'Googol.' Googol is the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web. Initially, Larry and Sergey Brin called their search engine BackRub, named for its analysis of the of the web's "back links." The search for a new name began in 1997, with Larry and his officemates starting a hunt for a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology.

2.The reason the google page is so bare is because the founder didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just kept sitting staring at the screen, waiting for the rest to appear. To solve the particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as an end of page marker.

3.Google started as a research project by Larry page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 and 23 years respectively. Google's mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The company’s first office was in a garage, in Menlo Park, California. Google’s first employee was Craig Silverstein, now Google's director of technology. The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank that assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that is not why it is called PageRank. It is actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.

4.Google receives about 20 million search queries each day from every part of the world, including Antarctica and Vatican.You can have the Google homepage set up in as many as 116 different languages -- including Urdu, Latin, Cambodia, Tonga, and Yoruba. In fact, Google has the largest network of translators in the world.

5.The Google’s free web mail service Gmail was used internally for nearly two years prior to launch to the public. The researchers found out six types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these six. The free e-mail service recently changed its name for new UK users. Following a trademark dispute with a London-based Independent International Investment Research, the mail account has been renamed Google Mail.

6.It would take 5,707 years for a person to search Google's 3 billion pages. The Google software does it in 0.5 seconds. Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world's largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.

7.The logos that appear on the Google homepage during noteworthy days and dates and important events are called Google Doodle. The company has also created an online museum where it has all the logos it has put on various occasions so far. Dennis Hwang, a Korean computer artist in the United States, is the guy behind these witty Doodles. Hwang has been drawing the face of Google for over two years.

8.You have heard of Google Earth, but not many know there is a site called Google Moon, which maps the Lunar surface. Google Moon is an extension of Google Maps and Google Earth that, courtesy of NASA imagery, enables you to surf the Moon’s surface and check out the exact spots that the Apollo astronauts made their landings