Aggregate Knowledge

The following is a posting of the mail we recently sent to our friends announcing our new company.

We wanted to let you know that we have started a new company: Aggregate Knowledge.

Our goal is to deliver the best content to people based on the aggregate behavior of everyone who has gone before them. We think that the wisdom of crowds can help people get at the best of all the information that’s out there. Our website doesn’t have much information yet, but will soon.

We are still very early in our company’s life cycle. Currently, we are closing a small “friends and family” round of funding and thank those of you who are participating. Our goal is to do an institutional round in the spring.

As many of you know, we previously launched WSFinder, a wiki-based directory of web services and APIs that people are using to create mash-ups. This was the starting point of our analysis of the web services landscape and marked the beginning of our goal to understand what was happening in the Web 2.0 world. The insights gained are driving much of the thinking behind Aggregate Knowledge.

WSRelater is the first web service that we are offering. It is an Amazon style “people who liked this, also liked that” engine that anyone can add to their website with a few hours of work. Since the engine is implemented as a web service, all sites that use the service can contribute to the aggregate knowledge database. We are pursuing direct applications of this technology with companies that are selling goods online and want to incorporate this functionality to their browsing experience.

The WSRelater service is in “Alpha” mode. We will move from Alpha mode once we have good feedback from a few experimenters about the service and move to more production ready hardware. The API for this service and its documentation are online. Please send us any feedback.

There are two things that we are asking our friends for assistance with in the short term:

1. If you know of a great sales / business development person that can help us knock on a few doors we’d love to meet them. Media and/or retail Biz Dev experience is really what we are looking for.
   
   
2. If you have a site and would like to participate in the alpha of the recommendation service please let us know!

We are targeting a January unveiling of our first consumer facing service. This new service will leverage the WSRelater engine to create a compelling user retention solution for media portals. You will hear more about this at the beginning of the year.

We will keep you posted.

Paul Martino and Chris Law

Comments

[Kenley]

back to changing the world I see...well go get 'em Claw!

actually your API looks interesting and is likely applicable in some way to what we're doing. I'll see if I can free up some resources to get someone to play with it a bit.

- kenley

[claw]

Thanks for trying it out Kenley. Drop us a line and let us know what you think!

Chris