estatecreate blog

The other day I was doing my daily trawl of news using my trusty netvibes when I came across one of those Google killer articles. My initial reaction was to ignore it as I do not need a new search engine. However, for some reason I had a quick read.

The article was about Kosmix. Kosmix is in fact not a search engine, it is a “topic guide”. What it does is group together lots of sources of information from Google, Wikipedia, YouTube etc about something you want to know more about. I would say it is more of a Wikipedia killer…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Kosmix’s new approach to search gets $20M
• Kosmix Raises $20 Million More For Its Universal Search Engine

Back in 1998 I read a lot about First Tuesday, and I finally got there last night 10 years later.

They are still using colour lanyards: Green = entrepreneurs Yellow = Service Providers Red = Investors, however, they were trialing a new web 2.0 mobile networking device provided by xoio.com. The idea sounds like a good one – you can look up who is at an event, connect with them and then arrange to meet them at a meeting point. In reality, the tech was not quite there yet, perhaps more web 3 than web 2.

First Tuesday attracts an interesting mix of people – the original First Tuesday founder Julie Meyer was there as was the founder of Multimap, Sean Phelan. Sean had some great advice on how to build a web business in a downturn, revealing that Multimap focused on its business to business channel in 2001/2002 when web advertising virtually disappeared as a revenue stream. This enabled Multimap to build a client base with little competition from other suppliers and then come out of the downturn in a strong position and build its consumer advertising model.

All in all a great evening and not bad value at £20 with a couple of glasses of wine thrown in.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft Buys Multimap for a Reported $50 Million