TechDisruption

revamping the portal

techdisruption — Mon, 24 May 2010 02:45:41 +0000

coming soon with my next article …

Wolfram Alpha: Search moving from information retrival towards knowledge synthesis

techdisruption — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:53:26 +0000

In Knowledge management courses one learns the evolution of inference: from arbitrary data which is processed to create information which in turn is processed to produce knowledge and knowledge is processed to create wisdom.

Search in its first decade was more of information retrieval, i.e text or keywords based syntactic search using algorithms such as the page rank to retrieve possibly relevant information from random sets of data. I had a chance to watch the live demonstration of wolfram alpha and realized that this would create a whole new era in search engines.

An era of knowledge or semantics based search engines, with high levels of information processing and greater relevance on search results. Alpha could quiet possibly be the first step towards Singularity.

The wolfram alpha demonstration video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TIOH80Qg7Q

Sweden and Norway among top countries in giving aid

techdisruption — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:30:49 +0000

Sweden and Norway are among the top countries in the world to distribute aid (aid as a percentage of GDP) .

More about this article here : Giving more generously

Search engine in a few lines

techdisruption — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:24:10 +0000

A simple search engine written in perl !

#!/bin/sh

echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo

echo '   Results   '

argument=`echo "$QUERY_STRING" | sed "s|q=||"`

cd /

echo ''
grep -i "$argument" *html */*html | sed -e 's|<|\<|g' -e 's|>|\>|g'
echo ''

Now all you do is run this under your web server root directory with appropriate permissions. 

viola ! with the power of the shell and perl you could do magic.

Google owns less than 3% market share in South Korea

techdisruption — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:49:05 +0000

A recent economist article talks about why google and yahoo have less than 3% market share each in the south korean market. Naver, a South Korean search company owns a massive 76% share of the market.

Courtesy the economist

Like Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia, Naver uses heavy localization. It offers a korean search page along side news, stock quotes, videos and other user generated content that users in Korea search for. One of the key features of Naver is a Q & A search engine, where users help each other out via the Naver web interface.

The company is now the most profitable in South Korea and employs “27,000 workers, posted 299 billion won, or $325 million, in profit out of 573 billion won in sales last year. It has a market value of nearly 8 trillion won”.

So google’s model of globalization has yet again failed in south korea. The complete economist article can be found here: Google in Asia

The future of search is mobile

techdisruption — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:28:01 +0000

With over 2.4 billion active users and growing steadily, the world wide mobile phone usage has surpassed PC usage. China is the world’s largest mobile phone market with over 600 million subscribers and India is the fastest growing mobile market with 400 million subscribers. China and India (CHINDIA) put together account for over 40% of all active mobile users in the world.

Due to economies of scale and mushrooming of ODM facilities in India and China, major mobile phone manufacturers have been able to drive the price of handsets down periodically over the years. Disruptive innovations in embedded processor technology coupled with exponential growth in firmware / software has resulted in the availability of low cost high functionality smart phones ( Better functionality with lower cost will be the trend in smart phones over the next couple of years ).

Local mobile search players have already understood the power of the CHINDIA mobile market and its impact in the coming years. asklaila, guruji mobile and yulop in India ; minfo and baidu mobile in China have already begun to tap the potential of the local markets through localized mobile search platforms. Both India and China are investing heavily in 3G infrastructure and wimax across the country, this means faster data rates and quick downloading and sharing of multimedia content for the subscribers.

Baidu has tied up with mobile service provider china mobile (the largest provider in china) to offer mobile search services to its subscribers. Asklaila has tied up with Airtel, India’s largest cell phone provider to deliver mobile search services to its subscribers in India.

New disruptive technologies in Near field communication and hyperlocal search will enable the evolution of disruptive business models in the mobile search arena. A recent research report predicts that the US mobile search advertising market alone will account for 1.3 billion USD . With CHINDIA hosting double that amount of active mobile subscribers and a growth rate many hundred percent more than the growth rate of PC’s, the market potential for mobile search is tremendous and is about to explode in the coming years.

Emergence of social search

techdisruption — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:10:46 +0000

Social networking sites have had an explosion in traffic over the last few years. 6% of all internet traffic in the US is contributed by social networking sites (http://www.cio-today.com/news/Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Doubles/story.xhtml?story_id=10000CBBX1E8&full_skip=1). So with an increase in traffic there is an exponential increase in information in these social networking websites.

Sites such as myspace and facebook started out as places for congregation of internet addicted teenagers. This has now transformed into a platform where people from all age groups and countries keep in touch with friends and communities that they are interested in.

Major search engines such as google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo have ignored indexing and searching social networks. This has led to the evolution of new search engines such as aardvark (vark.com), socialmention, ex.plode.us, search.twitter.com and others.

These search engines offer current relevant information related to the search keyword extracted from live conversations in these social networks. Hence social search is both current and highly relevant.

There is an increasing wealth of information in social networks, which has been ignored by the large players. An efficient way to crawl, index and represent this information will prove to be a disruptive innovation for the search engine industry.

Next gen search engine from BRIC countries

techdisruption — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:23:01 +0000

Google has constantly been on the top of world wide search engine ranks, but this is soon to change. Brazil, Russia, India and China together called the BRIC economies are the worlds largest and fastest growing economies and host roughly 40% of the world’s population.

The BRIC economies put together contain 27% of the worlds total internet users (http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm). That is over 1/4 of all internet users from just 4 countries of the world.

China and India today have the worlds largest and fastest growing cell phone markets. With cell phones getting smarter and cheaper, the largest share of search users will be on the mobile platform a few years from now.

Baidu the chinese search engine owns a whopping 60% market share in China and has been on a steady growth curve (http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSSHA11273420080125) .

Russia’s leading search engine yandex has outrun google with 80% market share in Russia (http://www.searchengineworld.com/seo/3459183.htm)

India has been slow to catch up but has come up with cutting edge localized search engines such as guruji, yauba, ask laila and yulop.

Brazil has also been slow to catch up on the search boom and has a major directory services aonde.

All these local players have built highly localized search engines which are relevant to the local cultures. For example mp3 search in baidu and stock quotes in guruji are relevant traffic drivers to these local search engines.

Non BRIC countries such as UK (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) Germany (http://eyeplorer.com/), france (http://www.wiinek.com/), sweden, denmark and Norway (FAST, Sesam, Kvasir, startsiden) are constantly launching disruptive technology innovation based search engines. These are highly localized recipes that fit the domestic culture and hence will gain significant market share in the respective countries.

Now the question is, how will google’s market share look like 2 years from now ? Will it manage to be the leading search engine in BRIC countries ?

Business model for twitter

techdisruption — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:58:47 +0000

The founders of twitter have successfully gained critical mass but have failed to come up with an innovative business model that would boost their revenue stream.

Twitter has metamorphosed from a simple tool that helps you to keep tabs on interesting people to a human powered real time search engine.

Search engine land has this interesting article that describes the rise of twitter search (http://searchengineland.com/twitter-traffic-rise-of-social-search-16910). Twitter search is the worlds fastest growing real time search engine today. Most news events get first breaks on twitter and news channels such as skynews and CNN have TV correspondents following tweets real time.

So one way of monetizing twitter is to use contextual relevant ads on twitter searches. The world wide search engine ad revenues have been on the downfall, which has led media experts experiment with “promotions based direct ad campaigns on the web” (http://www.clickz.com/3629310). Microsoft search is also coming up with a similar business model that offers cashbacks for people shopping through ads displayed alongside search results.

So in summary twitter search displaying relevant promotions (instead of ads) related to the real time search query with the combination of location specific promotions (hyper local promotions) will be a disruptive business model innovation for twitter. This would increase the revenue stream and in the same time provide customers with a friendly user experience.