4 posts tagged “leaptag”
Ok, we haven't won anything yet but LeapTag is a finalist in CNET's Webware 100 in the Browsing category and for our little company that is a big honor.
Not content with becoming a finalist, we have our sights set on making it into the top 10.
The other companies in our category are Goliaths: Yahoo, Google, Firefox, NetVibes, StumbleUpon and Flock -- and many respectable others. You can read about the nominated companies in our category here.
To make it into the top 10, we need your help.
And the help of all of your friends. :-)
Spread the word and vote for LeapTag!
Two months ago my CEO pitched our company to a VC in a Palo Alto coffee shop. As he normally does, he did the demo on his laptop. The VC wanted to compare our product LeapTag (that link is also disclosure), against Google Personalized Search and logged into my CEO's computer to do it.
No one noticed that he never logged out.
Two months later my CEO gets an email from the guy, with a list of searches attached. "Are these your searches?" he asked. In fact they were. Search queries for the past two months - including some from just a few minutes before the guy sent the email. Needless to say, my CEO was horrified and wrote about the experience here.
Yesterday I was talking to him about his intended blog post and I opened up my own personal search history as part of the conversation. I'm not into online porn, or anything else I'd be embarrassed about him seeing, so I felt very comfortable doing this. Ten additional seconds of forethought might have changed that.
What was the first thing at the top of the list? "Threesomes."
Yikes. That was for a tongue-in-cheek post I wrote a while back. Next were a bunch of musicals, Oklahoma, Godspell, The Fantasticks, etc. Then some car stuff, the names of parts BMW said were broken and a search for the price of a new M5 (a girl can dream, right?). Where was all the work stuff?
I'm sure my work searches were there, I was just temporarily blinded by my own sense of embarrassment. Now my boss thinks I'm a musical loving, luxury car shopper in search of a good threesome. Great. I start to mumble something about how most of these searches are for blog posts and decide that giving away more information is not actually going to help. So I stopped talking.
It's actually amazing how much your personal search history reveals about yourself. And it's all out of context, building a profile of you (esp. if you used Personalized Search) that you may never see. We think it's private, that as long as we periodically clear the toolbar history the information will be gone.
But it won't.
I think that would make an interesting QOTD: Post your personal search history. Would anybody do it without heavily editing it first? Perhaps. We spend so much time on meme quizzes to provide insight on Who We Are (what Tarot card are you?), posting your history would seems like an interesting next step. Would you do it?
I think we've discovered that this musical loving, luxury car shopper in search of a good threesome would not.
Today we announced the launch of my company, Yoriwa (Yo-ree-wuh) and our product LeapTag.
In a nutshell:
LeapTag is a personalized web discovery tool that learns what you like and then delivers it to you when you want it.
Why is that interesting? Well, imagine you are interested in something, like your competition, or cycling or cooking. It's unlikely that you have time to run searches every day to find out what's new. However you might like to know if there's a new book from the Naked Chef or a previously undiscovered web site that focuses on the Tour de France. LeapTag does this, and we do it through a process we call dynamic tagging.
Dynamic tags are ones that change over time. They are not keywords. You define them by tagging sites you are interested in, and then when LeapTag brings you back results, you vote on what you like and what you don't. The more you use the product, the better it gets to know you and the better your results. Oh, and if you want, you can share your tags with your friends.
Now since this is my personal blog, and not a product site, I'm going to stop here. But I know that some of you were curious to know what all the secrecy was about, and since the cat has been officially jettisoned from the bag, it's time to come out from under the cone of silence.
It's also time to go to bed, since tomorrow we chase press and give demos all day. Our six-minute presentation happens on Wednesday afternoon. While that timing is pretty tough (near the very end of the program) the DEMO folks have proactively made it up to all of us by giving us premier placement for our demo stations - we're right in front of the entrance (completely their idea, how cool is that?).
If all goes well, I'll post something. If it doesn't, well, I'll probably post that too.
