Highnote Named one of the Top 50 Real-Time Web Companies!

gethighnote — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:40:33 +0000

We are honored to have been included in ReadWriteWeb’s list of Top 50 real-time web companies. To be included in a list with the likes of Google, Jive and TIBCO is heady stuff.

Check out the list and comments here:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_50_real-time_web_companies.php

We’re looking forward to the ReadWriteWeb Real-time Summit in a few weeks!

Introducing Highnote, a “discovery engine”

gethighnote — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:53:34 +0000

Before getting started, I’d like to underscore how excited we are to write this blog post introducing the new Highnote product to you. We’ve been working hard on this system for a while… there is still a long way to go but we believe in “launch early, launch often.”

What is Highnote? We are tackling a really ambitious problem, which we’ve called the “second-order search problem.” You may have experienced this if you have typed something like “mobile phones” or “travel destinations” into a search engine like Google or Bing. Instead of getting a list of mobile phones or travel destinations, as you might expect (or desire), you get usually definitional pages or pages that have been heavily “SEO’d.” These pages aren’t really great user experiences, and we hate landing on them.

We developed Highnote to solve this problem. We noticed that a lot of people have become accustomed to talking about their interests, purchases and plans online through services like Twitter, Identica and Facebook. Highnote’s ability to solve the second order search problem is based on our ability to analyze – essentially “listen in” to this giant real-time conversation going on around us.

When someone types “mobile phones” into Highnote’s search box, we attempt to figure out what the interesting websites are that have to deal with mobile phones, first to give you a set of pages that you can use to start your search. Then, we run an extraction process on that set of pages to determine if there are unique searches that you can perform that might get you closer to your goal.

So if you come to Highnote and type “Radiohead,” instead of giving you www.radiohead.com, which presumably you already know about, we give you not only the most interesting Radiohead content and links, but also searches that are related: “frequency festival,” “fake plastic trees” and other things that you might not have known to even search for without doing extensive research.

In this way, we think of Highnote as a discovery engine, because it helps you discover things that are related to something you already know about.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is a really hard problem, and we are just getting started on it. As we increase the amount of data that we collect, we expect that our approach and algorithms will get better and better. Likewise, the more you use Highnote and give us feedback on what is working and what isn’t, the better our system will get.

Please let us know what you like about Highnote and most importantly, what you don’t like and what we can improve on. Thanks for checking us out!

If you’re interested in incorporating Highnote search results into your website, please send me an email to get access to our API.

Here’s the link to the site: www.gethighnote.com.

Highnote Blog

Highnote Named one of the Top 50 Real-Time Web Companies!

Introducing Highnote, a “discovery engine”