Thoughttrail - A Seedcamp finalist sneak preview Thursday, September 11, 2008

The CEO of Thoughttrail, 21yr old Luke Stanley, got in touch with me after seeing my brief post on the Seedcamp finalists and related links. His venture was included in the list but no information was available at that time.

They have now put a landing page up to capture sign-up requests and to provide a brief intro to the offering. However, he was kind enough to provide me with some additional information on their Seedcamp entry and it was impressive. At the outset, he emphasised that it represents an illustration of technology that Luke and his colleague have been working on for some time. I agree with him that it's easy to see other potential arenas and applications for it.

The fastest way to see what grabbed my attention is with the canned demos accessed here , here and here.

In some ways, the facilities reminded me of Zemanta, a Seedcamp winner last year, which provides blogging authors with relevant links and pictures whilst creating blog posts. It achieves this by scanning the text of the post you are type. In similar fashion, Thoughttrail is providing contextual search facilities, in real-time, that can enhance your IM conversations. Significantly, the development roadmap already foresees drawing source material from personal and universally available repositories with gmail as an example in the former and Wikipedia as an example in the latter category.

Encouragingly, Luke has given thought to a business model and thankfully it isn't Google Ad-words, which seems to be a stock answer from many startups. Presently, he is looking to generate revenues from commissions on transactions made after clicking on links the service identified e.g. links to music and books on Amazon. I am doubtful whether this can generate significant revenues, but I can certainly imagine this offering getting widespread adoption if the underlying technology can scale. Moreover, I can enviage this being appealing to the larger IM network providers, in the same way that Xobni was apparently appealing to Microsoft.

Based on what I was shown, Thoughttrail should be being a strong contender for a place on the Seedcamp podium. It's not presently shown on Sam Sethi's Seedcamp Winner prediction market list here, so perhaps it might be worth a punt on "Other", especially since the Judges have past form of picking this kind of solution.

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First glance at Seedcamp finalists Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Image representing Seedcamp as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase, source unknown Seedcamp has announced it's finalists from 380 companies drawn from 153 cities, 36 countries, across six continents. Jokingly referred to by some as The Accelerator Group's [TAG] annual investment screening process, given it was initiated by Saul Klein, has early sight of many new businesses via this process and TAG has invested in past entrants.

The list is
Warning - I only had a quick look at the sites and so may have completely misunderstood what they are about, but wrote down what I saw [wasn't it something like that on the TV Show Catchphrase - say what you see!]

Having quickly scanned each of the available sites, I think that this is a more impressive set of sites/services than being showcased at either Demo or Techcrunch50. For clarity, I have no involvement with Seedcamp.

My initial favourites are Uniki [for the sales potential], Entrip [for the site look and feel] and Basekit [for apparent ease of use].
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Zemanta - we now do English Thursday, March 27, 2008

Back in September 2007, I wrote about Zemanta who were winners at Seedcamp. Under the headline of "we do your homework", I suggested it was a tool for lazy people to write articles and hence a sure fire winner.

Sadly, at that time it was only available in Slovenian and so of little use to me. I subsequently learnt from Sean Park, who was one of the Seedcamp judges, that they had all nervously laughed when choosing Zemanta as they really had little idea if it worked since it was all in a foreign language!

Well Zemanta has now launched a Firefox add-in version of their service in English which can be used for Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad.

I had some difficulty installing the add-in and had to resort to saving the installation file to my desktop and then dragging it into the Firefox add-in window. Thereafter it has only operated intermittantly, not always appearing when launching the blog post window in Blogger, albeit this is an alpha version.

When operating, it is definitely easy to use and throws up links and tags for common/popular words which can be easily added to a blog post, as evidenced by the liberal sprinkling of links in this post. Similarly it also provides suggested pictures/photos and articles that may be related. In each case you have the option to review a link destination before adding it, albeit I suspect others will be lazy like me and hope that the links are both valid and appropriate - if you hit a porn site by following a link Zemanta suggested, I shall be accountable but shall pass on responsibility!

Do the tool results add to the blog post? - I'm unconvinced but if the explosion of links is helpful to a reader then great.
Does it save me time? - not really, as these are links I wouldn't have otherwise added and those served up appear to be for mainstream brands and phrases, rather than industry specific terms
Will I continue to use it - yes, as there is no downside I'm aware of as yet
Would I pay for it - nope

It is a considerable improvement on their Seedcamp offering and has been well engineered, but to me, it's not a must have app and I wouldn't miss it.

Techcrunch and others seem to like it, each gushing with praise.

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Tablefinder - Odd, thought this was done years ago Monday, September 10, 2007

Tablefinder is another Seedcamp "winner", but unless I am missing something, it appears to be a replica of toptable and 5pm, both of which match diners up with restaurants. Perhaps it's a geographical coverage play though, as maybe some countries don't have this type of service.

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Zemanta - we do your homework

Just looking at one of the "winners" from Seedcamp and I confess that my immediate reaction was "great, a tool for lazy people to write articles". If so, a sure fire winner.

The site is Zemanta which claims to enhance your content by adding smartlinks, images and related content. From their site though, spot the possible limiting factor

Paste any plain text content in the box below and hit the GO! button. Our engine will augment your content with relevant smartlinks, images, keywords and related content. (text should be written in slovenian)


Now, if only I could find a site that will successfully translate my blogpost from English to Slovenian, and perhaps even write it in the first place, I could relax.

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