IdeaScale - Crowdsourcing R&D

The hot idea of the moment for large companies is to outsource their research and development efforts to their customers. Who knows your product better than your most loyal fans? If they can collectively agree on the best way to improve it, it must be good, right? Dell did it with IdeaStorm (our coverage), Starbucks did it with My Starbucks Idea (our coverage), and Salesforce did it with IdeaExchange. Now a new web app called IdeaScale is offering that same basic premise as a packaged service for companies of any size.

What GetSatisfaction does for customer service, IdeaScale is aiming to do for research and development -- though perhaps on a more local, private level. IdeaScale offers a way for companies to solicit ideas and allow customers to rate, discuss, and brainstorm for the company. The app works in more or less the same way as the sites from Dell, Starbucks, and Salesforce. Users submit ideas, rate them via a Digg-style voting mechanism, and discuss them with one another.

The company can go in and mark off which ideas are being implemented or considered, and leave status updates for users curious to see how an idea is progressing from brainstorm to finished product.

IdeaScale is currently in public beta and is a free service right now. Eventually, the company plans to offer both free and paid versions utilizing the "freemium" model that they already use for their Question Pro app. IdeaScale has their own copy of the softare running at http://questionpro.ideascale.com/.

A more public implementation of the same idea is featurelist, which takes the same Digg-style community feedback concept and makes it more public -- similar to GetSatisfaction's approach to customer service.

Wine, Film and Books: Adaptive Blue Offers Open Format to Make the Web Smarter

Semantic web company Adaptive Blue has published what it hopes will become a standard for publishers who want to signal in their header tags when a webpage is primarily about a particular book, film, wine or other type of objects. From search to trend analysis to a richer browsing experience - the developments that could come from adoption such a standard are many.

Called AB Meta, the format was developed in concert with a number of other web companies and is aimed to be part of a larger effort to pick up where existing Semantic Web and microformats markup leaves off. It's simple and extensible.

When the meaning of web pages becomes machine readable - magical things can happen.

Bloggers who want to mark up particular pages or post pages with AB Meta can do so using Dougal Campbell's HeadMeta WordPress plugin. Some post-level meta data editing is possible with Typepad but Blogger users are out of luck. Hopefully someone will build a UI for self-publishers.

For commercial publishers and retail sites, the AB Meta standard should be much easier to implement across their sites. In addition to the new spec drawn up to describe objects, AB Meta also leverages existing Dublin Core markup when available.

Above is a sample of some simple AB Meta, below is an extended version.

AM Meta is based largely on Adaptive Blue's work developing its BlueOrganizer smart browser plug-in and SmartLinks contextual reference tool. Now that the company has come up with a robust, simple and extensible format for designating the primary object of a web page and describing its various characteristics - the next logical step is to open that format up and do some biz dev building adoption in web pages themselves. Though anyone will be able to index AB Meta, Adaptive Blue's products will presumably be the most advanced at first in what it can do with the markup of its own creation.

We're big fans of the semantic web here at RWW and (disclosure) Adaptive Blue CEO Alex Iskold writes some of the smartest posts about it that you'll find here or anywhere.

Ray Ozzie Memo Explains Live Mesh Strategy

Tonight Microsoft is launching a "tech preview" version of its latest platform, Live Mesh. The new platform is all about connecting devices to the Internet via Windows software. From an end user standpoint, it will enable users to sync their data across multiple devices and share with others. As of now, in preview mode, Live Mesh only supports Windows PCs - but Microsoft told us in a briefing earlier today that it will support the Mac and mobile phones by the end of this year. Live Mesh will also launch as an open beta later this year. In the future, Live Mesh will cover "a wide range of devices" such as game consoles, set-top boxes, auto PCs, and more. Josh Catone has a post with more details about Live Mesh. Accompanying the launch of Live Mesh is a new memo from Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie.

It's a kind of sequel to his memo "The Internet Services Disruption" from October 2005, in which Ozzie first laid out Microsoft's software-as-a-service strategy. The new memo, entitled simply "Services Strategy", outlines to Microsoft staff the strategy behind Live Mesh. We can't reveal the whole memo tonight, but we can post a couple of key extracts.

The first key point is that Microsoft sees the Web as "the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh." Ozzie calls this "social mesh" and writes that "in scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View."

On the face of it, this is an acknowledgement from Ray Ozzie that the Web is at the center of software as a service. However, we all know that Windows is really at the center of Microsoft's strategy. This isn't explicitly stated in Ozzie's memo, but he does explain how the Web and the PC are intimately connected in this new world:

"To individuals, the concept of “My Computer” will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices – a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole. After identifying a device as being “yours”, its configuration and personalization settings, its applications and their own settings, and the data it carries will be seamlessly available and synchronized across your mesh of devices. Whether for media, control or access, scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment will be unified and enhanced by the concept of a device mesh."

Ultimately Live Mesh is a product that enables Microsoft to bring their Windows software paradigm fully into the Web age via the concept of the "mesh". This extract, about connected devices, explains:

"We aspire to bring together Windows, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile by creating seamless experiences that span these offerings. Windows Live, for example, enables seamless communications and media experiences across Windows, Windows Mobile, and the Web. Live Mesh, a new services platform technology that will also become part of Windows Live, further extends the Windows / Windows Mobile / Windows Live experience by bringing your devices together to work in concert with one another using the web as a hub [...]"

The full memo will be made public tomorrow morning, after Microsoft staff have seen it. We will publish the memo in its entirely tomorrow on ReadWriteWeb.

UPDATE: here is the full text of Ray Ozzie's memo

Alternative Search Engines Day - Call For Alts to Band Together

I'm at the Alternative Search Engines Day, in San Francisco, an event put on by our network blog AltSearchEngines. We started out with a keynote talk by ASE editor Charles Knight, who noted that alternative search engines only have about 1.7% market share combined. He thinks this is too small, so he wants all of the "alts" - you can see a list of them on our subsite The Search Race - to band together to make a bigger impact on the search market.

Charles discussed current aggregation approaches such as Sputtr, which puts multiple search engines onto one page (see screenshot below), but he also outlined a vision for a Virtual World for alt search engines.

Sputtr

Charles pointed out that although Sputtr is a great app, it is difficult for mainstream users to grok. For one thing ordinary users won't know how to make sense of all the logos. Also people outside the tech industry will not know many of the brands of the smaller search companies. So Charles suggested that a virtual world approach could be the answer, whereby different alt search engines are represented in a 3D world according to the type of search they provide. For example if you are looking for a job, then there will be a virtual representation of this in the 3D world and a number of job search engines available to meet that need.

This "federated search" approach, as someone in the audience termed it, is one way for the hundreds of small search startups to increase their overall market share. Another approach is to create a common platform for alts, using APIs and UI standards (suggested over lunch to me by Morgan Snyder from allth.at).

Also on the opening discussion panel were myself, Nitin Karandikar from The Software Abstractions Blog, and Henrick Kac from BlogDimension. Nitin recently wrote a post entitled Cooperation of Alt Search Engines: A Manifesto (original here), which outlined 5 possibilities for alts to cooperate - e.g. "Search Federations of complementary ASEs".

Opening panel, photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Conclusion

The overarching theme to AltSearchEngines Day is to encourage the alts to band together and help each other reach the mainstream audience. Anyone who regularly reads AltSearchEngines will know that there is a ton of innovation in search, literally hundreds of niche and vertical search startups. So this effort to join together to compete with (or complement) the likes of Google and Microsoft is very commendable - and as I mentioned in the panel, ReadWriteWeb heartily supports it.

Special thanks to Charles Knight for the vision and pulling this day together, and also LA Lassek and the SeeqPod team for organizing the event. Thanks as well to the sponsors of this event: SeeqPod, UpTake, HealthPricer, MatchPoint, GoPubMed, BlogDimension.

When I was doing the intros at the start, I noted that Charles is "the voice of alternative search engines" in this industry. He really is galvinising and leading the alts forward as a group. Be sure to subscribe to AltSearchEngines to track this initiative.