Singaporean start-up Widgeo.us announced in their February newsletter that they have launched their first widget – t.widgeo.us. This widget serves the purpose of allowing users to update multiple twitter accounts within a single user interface. The aesthetics are fantastic and, like most twitter applications, have a simple and intuitive interface.
I do question the number of people who has multiple twitter accounts because the purpose which Twitter was created for is to allow friends to keep track of the user’s activities and hence updating on different accounts simply do not make sense. This being said, there are some exceptions like the screen shot above where the user represents several organizations and wishes to separate each account.
Another major deficiency that this widget has is that you can only update your accounts but not read the feeds from them which is a huge part of twitter. This widget will do great if there are options to click the account and the latest messages would appear in the UI. Also, such an application will work even better if it was an Adobe AIR application which you can launch from your desktop.
In their newsletter, Widgeo has also mentioned that they will be launching the beta-version of their platform in the Middle of March even though this would be kept private and not open to the public. According to the company’s blog, this platform would “allow people to build tools which unify multiple communication channels into one central core.” This description sounds rather bold but audacious goals seems to be a common trait amongst successful start-ups.
Filed under: Technology | Tags: Alexa, internet, Singapore, Singaporeans, web
You may think you know technology and hence be able to predict what sites Singaporeans are visiting, but the truth is the more you know, the higher the chances that you will get the order wrong. A point to note is the this top 100 list is provided by Alexa and is by no means the perfect measurement though it is still widely used within the industry.
Shocker Number 1: Yahoo! is number 1 in ranking, beating Google which ranks at number 4. Techies may think that yahoo is an obsolete search engine but the truth is that most of the less technically inclined people within the country still prefers to use Yahoo! due to its “one-stop shop” concept.
Shocker Number 2: Friendster is ranked number 2 while Facebook is number 7. Who the hell uses Friendster anymore? Ha… Apparently it still holds its place as the number 1 social network in Singapore though Facebook is fast catching up.
Interesting Fact 1: Blogger is the number 1 blogging platform followed by Livejournal and then WordPress. WordPress here refers to the commercial version (wordpress.com) and does not include self-hosted wordpress blogs (from wordpress.org).
Interesting Fact 2: About 15 of the top 100 sites are video hosting sites with YouTube leading the pack with 5 of them being porn sites. I have been observing the rankings for quite some time now and there has been a gradual decline in the number of porn sites making the list. A very encouraging sign.
Notable Mention: The most visited local site is HardwareZone which hosts one of the most popular forums in Singapore.
Are the rankings similar to your web surfing patterns?
Filed under: Search, Technology | Tags: patents, patents search, patsnap, Search
Singaporean Start-up Patsnap launched the Alpha-version of their portal last week which aims to bring patent search to a new level of simplicity and enable research to be done more easily. This puts the company in direct competition with Google’s Patent Search functionality that was launched in 2006. Google’s Patent Search, in my opinion, has been the most intuitive search engine within this arena thus far.
In its website, Patsnap mentioned that “coupled with the initial work done on the clustering technology and relevant feedbacks from the users, this search engine can be further improved for enhanced search results.” This is one of the key fundamental differences between their algorithm and Google’s as Google’s depends solely on computational methods to determine the order of search results. This is similar to how Mahalo competes with Google using semantic search.
This Alpha release seems to have only one of the 3 core functionalities that the completed site will eventually provide. The homepage hints that they will subsequently launch a social networking function and perhaps a mechanism that allow users to find all patents associated with a certain device.
After several test runs, I realized that Patsnap, even in its alpha stage, is able to equal Google Patent Searches’ capabilities and produce comparable results. In fact, I actually do prefer the layout that Patsnap provides which places the actual patent documentation on the same screen than Google which requires you to navigate to another page to see it. However, Google does have a functionality that may be more useful which shows the links of other patents that references the one you are viewing. Perhaps for the professional researcher, they may have different opinions on the quality of the search result, but for the average user like a typical college student or ad-hoc researcher, this may very well be what they are looking for.
Google Patent Search has not changed much since its launch other than perhaps its underlying search algorithm, and this makes it highly possible that the completed version of Patsnap would be able to provide a better solution than that of Google’s.
