Font Choices in designing web

When it comes to fonts on the web, we’re limited. You must design for the most common fonts that are widely available across operating systems. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend time really considering what your options are.

I think about the type of information the site holds, what’s expected along with what’s in vogue right now. I then consider my fonts and mix them carefully. I usually think in terms of headers, secondary fonts, block-quotes, specialty text (like depictingcode), and paragraph page text. You can use any fonts you want as long as you think there’s a really good chance that others will have the same font on their computers. Here is a list of the basic fonts I mix and match from and why:

San-Serif Fonts: These fonts don’t contain ’serifs’ (hence the name san-serif). Serifs are the little ‘feet’ you see on the appendages of type faces. San-Serif fonts are usually considered more new and modern.

Verdana: This font is common on every platform and was specifically designed for web reading at smaller web sizes. When you really want to use a san-serif font for your body text, this is your best bet.

(There was a great article in The New Yorker in 2007 about the designer of this font.)

verdana, sans-serif

Arial and Helvetica: Common on every platform. A little tame. Great for clean headlines, but a bit hard to read at smaller font sizes.

Arial and Helvetica

Trebuchet: Fairly common nowadays, and a pretty popular font on the ‘web 2.0′ styled sites. Clean like Arial with a lot more character. It reads a little better at smaller sizes than Arial. This was originally a Microsoft font, so sometimes it doesn’t appear in older Mac or Linux OSs (Verdana is a MS font too, originally released with IE 3, but its design for screen readability got it opted quickly by other OSs).

Trebuchet

Century Gothic: Fairly common. Clean and round, a nice break from the norm. Reads terribly at small sizes though. Use for headings only.

Century Gothic

Comic Sans Serif: Another MS font, but common on all platforms. Fun and friendly, based on traditional comic book hand lettering. I’ve never been able to use it in a design (I do try from time to time, and feel it’s ‘hokey’), but I always admire when it’s used well in site design (See Chapter 9 for a great example).

Comic Sans Serif

Serif Fonts: These fonts are considered more traditional, or ‘bookish’, as serif fonts were designed specifically to read well in print. The serifs (those ‘little feet’) on the appendages of the letters form subtle lines for your eyes to follow.

Times New Roman and Times: Very common on all platforms; one of the most common serif fonts. Comes off very traditional, professional, and/or serious.

Times New Roman and Times

Georgia: Pretty common, again predominately a Microsoft font. I feel it has a lot of character, nice serifs, and a big and fat body. Like Verdana, Georgia was specifically designed for on-screen reading for any size. Comes off professional, but not quite as serious as Times New Roman.

Georgia

Century Schoolbook: Pretty common. Similar to Georgia, just not as ‘fat’.

Century Schoolbook

Courier New: This is a mono-spaced font, based on the old typewriters and often what your HTML and text editor prefers to display (the point of mono-type is that the characters don’t merge together, so it’s easier to see your syntax). As a result of that association, I usually reserve this font for presenting code snippets or technical definitions within my designs.

Courier New

Adopting Twitter for business use.

Gartner released a report today that highlights the different ways that companies are adopting Twitter for business use. Although Twitter was originally intended for communication among individuals, a number of organizations have begun to actively participate on the platform. However, not all companies are using Twitter in the same way. Some are tweeting, some are just listening, and some really savvy companies are doing both.

Before any company employees start tweeting, it would be a good idea to remind them that the same rules that apply to other web participation (like blogging, for example) also apply to Twitter. “As Twitter is a public forum, employees should understand the limits of what is acceptable and desirable,” says Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner. “If organizations have not defined a public Web participation policy, they should do so as quickly as possible.”

Based on Garnter’s research, they have narrowed down the four different ways that companies are using Twitter today: direct, indirect, internal, and signaling. Here’s what those mean:

Direct

Some companies are using Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel, much like an extension to their corporate blogs. They will post about corporate accomplishments and distribute links that take people back to corporate web pages, press releases, and other promotional sites.

This method probably seems to be the easiest way to get started, but companies need to be aware that using Twitter like this could actually hinder their image in the Twitter community. A whole bunch of self-serving, self-promotional tweets can actually damage their reputation – Twitter folks like a personal touch.

Gartner also warns that responding to comments can be risky when going this route, but, while that’s true to a point, when done right responding on Twitter can be of great benefit to the company. To see some examples of brands that “get” how to tweet and respond, check out what Ford does, or Starbucks, or Dell.

Here are a couple of resources to help your company get familiar with how other businesses do this:

• 16 Examples of Huge Brands Using Twitter for Business
• 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them

Indirect

The second method some companies use on Twitter is to let their employees tweet instead. As the employees use Twitter to enhance their own personal reputations, the company’s reputation is also enhanced by proxy. If this one is hard for you to understand, then perhaps a good example to demonstrate the power of the indirect method is in reverse: imagine what negative tweets about the company would look like. Take the case of the Yahoo employee who twittered throughout the layoffs, for example. How do you think that made Yahoo look at the time?

Now that you understand how employee tweets can affect the company negatively, understand that the reverse is also true. Employees twittering away with excitement about their work, developments in their industry, new products, or other interesting tidbits, even if unrelated to the company itself, can promote positive feelings for whichever business they (indirectly) represent.

Another good reason for having employees tweet instead of the company itself is if the company wants to be seen as employing influential leaders. This list of Forrester analysts on Twitter offers a great example.

Internal

Some companies use Twitter internally to share ideas or communicate about what projects they’re working on. If this information is confidential in nature, employees either need to protect their updates or even better, not use Twitter at all. Gartner doesn’t recommend using Twitter or any other consumer microblogging service in this way because there’s no guarantee of security.

If, however, your company wants to use microblogging at the office, there are tools designed for businesses that let you do just this. Yammer and present.ly are two of the top options for a Twitter-like platform for the workplace.

Inbound Signaling

Some companies aren’t as much Twitter participants as they are Twitter “listeners.” Using search tools like search.twitter.com or desktop applications like TweetDeck are easy ways to keep track of what’s being said about the company, its product names, or even the industry as a whole. Smart companies are tuning in to these micro-conversations to get early warnings of problems and to collect feedback on product issues or ideas.

Recently, Microsoft’s PR agency released their Twitter trend-tracking service to the public. Called Twendz, this tool goes beyond simple Twitter searches to also track sentiment, as well.

Conclusion

If your company is thinking about jumping into the Twitter foray (and who isn’t these days?), it’s best not to do so blindly. Gartner’s breakdown of the four ways companies use Twitter is a good starting point, but, in reality, developing a strategy is much more complex than the examples listed above. You can follow up on the ideas in this article by reading Chris Brogan’s “50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business,” then subscribing to his blog for more insights. You can also contact Gartner directly for access to the full report.

Expert System Brings Semantic Smarts to Advertising

Expert System is a perhaps little known “semantic intelligence” company; but it has 15 years of experience in the tech industry, 115+ employees and is bringing in a very solid $12 Million a year in revenues from over 100 corporate and government clients (at 40% growth over the past two years). The Italian company’s core technology is the Cogito platform, a sophisticated system which searches, extracts and classifies unstructured information and makes it into structured data. Cogito (which translates to “I think” in Latin) is bringing semantic technologies to the mainstream commercial world, including online advertising.

We spoke to Brooke Aker, CEO of the US subsidiary of Expert System, to find out more about the underlying technology of Cogito and its commercial applications. In particular we talked about how Expert System is using semantic technologies to power a new type of advertising.

The basic premise of Cogito is that it transforms unstructured information into structured data. Out of this process comes a “semantic network”, which is much the same thing as what rival company Cognition called a “semantic map” in our September ‘08 interview with them. It’s important to point out that Cogito isn’t necessarily a ‘Semantic Web’ application, but it does use things like natural language processing and other semantic analysis. It can output RDF, but that isn’t a fundamental part of Cogito.

Brooke Aker described the system to us as being like an “electronic dictionary”. There are 350,000 words and 2.8 million “relationships” in Cogito. Cognition claimed 10 million “semantic connections” in its map back in September, but Aker suggested that it wasn’t quite an apples and oranges comparison. According to Aker, Cogito’s semantic network is “richer” than Cognition’s.

Expert System’s new semantic advertising solution, Cogito Semantic Advertiser (CSA), came about because the company saw that traditional contextual keyword advertising is resulting in a lot of inaccuracies and mistakes when matching ads to page content. The classic example is the jaguar one, where a story about a jaguar (the animal) is accompanied by a ‘contextual’ advert for jaguar the car. Expert System told us that this kind of scenario won’t occur with their semantic advertising system.

Expert System claims to have come up with an advertising solution that understands “the real meaning” of words, based on theories of human comprehension. For example, their system analyzes the semantic meaning of words and their context. So in the jaguar example, Expert System would ‘understand’ that jaguar is an animal in the context of the story – and therefore it would not serve up ads about the jaguar car.

One feature of Cogito Semantic Advertiser that stood out for us was the granular categorization, which allows for very fine grained targeting of ads. Brooke Aker told ReadWriteWeb that their product has already created around 2 million niches for advertisers to target, which is something that many Long Tail publishers will find appealing.

We’re impressed by the semantic software that Expert System is producing, not just with advertising but in other commercial and government applications. Let us know in the comments if you’ve come across this company before and if so, what your thoughts are.

Open Knowledge Sharing for the Dynamic Web

The EU-funded OpenKnowledge program is a smart toolkit designed to unlock the hidden resources of the web that can’t be accessed by web sites and browsers alone. With a small, downloadable piece of Java code, users can coordinate and share information with each other more directly than through traditional means. To highlight the potential of the OpenKnowledge system, researchers have put it to work in three different areas: healthcare services, emergency management, and proteomics research.

1) OpenKnowledge Healthcare

The first demonstration of the OpenKnowlege system is aimed to enhance the abilities of those seeking health-related information on the web. Instead of solely relying on a doctor to prescribe a course of treatment, people today tend to seek out medical information on their own using the web. Unfortunately, that data is often inaccurate and misleading. What OpenKnowledge intends to do is provide patients with structured information that has been checked for accuracy. To test this system, OpenKnowledge is working with Cancer Research UK on a project related to treatment methods.

2) Emergency Response

When there’s an emergency situation, there is often a centralized point that disseminates critical information to people in need. But if that system itself breaks down, people are out of luck. OpenKnowledge aims to decentralize those systems so that a “backup” decentralized network of peers could be put into place. There, people could help each other out when the centralized system failed. This is currently being testing with emergency response authorities in Trentino, Italy.

3) Protemoics Research

Protemoics research (the study of the structure and function of proteins) can also benefit from the OpenKnowledge framework. In this area of science, many researchers worldwide rely on a small number of databases, creating a bottleneck of sorts which stresses the infrastructure of the databases themselves as well as those that maintain them. Researchers also find it hard to share data and results directly with other groups. In addition, the quality of the information in those databases is very mixed.

OpenKnowledge aims to solve all three problems by letting the researchers share data with each other directly, peer-to-peer style. This relieves the burden on the databases while the feedback will continually improve the quality of the data shared. This is currently being tested in an existing proteomics network in Spain called ProteoRed.

So…What Is It Exactly?

Understanding how a system like this works is difficult and the Open Knowledge web site doesn’t make the process of comprehension any easier. Even despite the cute, Harry Potter-themed slideshow meant to describe the process, the actual details are hard to grasp. Obviously written by brainy researchers, they can’t even call the slideshow a “slideshow,” instead referring to it as a “simple pictorial introduction.”

Still, if you can wade through the academic speech on the site, what you may find is a creative idea for sharing information. Basically, through open source downloadable code, OpenKnowledge sets up a peer-to-peer network where users can trade in information and data similar to how BitTorrent users trade mp3s and video files.

In the OpenKnowledge system, anyone can easily become a peer or even create their own peer by sharing existing code or writing their own. In order to become an OpenKnowledge user, you simply need to download the OpenKnowledge kernel from here together with some additional components that you might want to use. In addition to users, services, such as WSDL services, can also be made into peers on the OpenKnowledge network.

OpenKnowledge is more of a framework for decentralizing the systems on the web. It’s not so much of a consumer-friendly web app than it is a model for information sharing that can help advance areas of science and research. You may not ever use OpenKnowledge yourself on your home computer, but your life may very well be impacted one day by the innovations it made possible.

The Most Innovative Companies in Web 2.0

1. Google: With Google Docs and the new Chrome browser, the search titan continues to take aim at Microsoft.
2. Facebook: The social network that everyone loves to hate (but secretly loves anyway) overtook MySpace with 150 million active users.
3. Digg: More than 35 million visitors per month submit 20,000 stories a day to the site. A recent $29 million financing round will keep the crowd thumbing through the downturn.
4. Twitter: The microblogging phenom is adding up to 10,000 users a day, with the likes of The New York Times, JetBlue, and Lance Armstrong Tweeting.
5. Meebo: More than 40 million users instant-message and chat across the Web through any format including the iPhone. A new partnership with Universal Music will connect chatters with artists, while a $25 million financing round in 2008 will fuel ‘09 expansion in Asia.
6. FriendFeed: Relatively new to the life-streaming melee, FriendFeed aggregates every comment, posted picture, and status update from 59 Web services.
7. Ning: More than 700,000 custom social networks have popped up on Ning, the platform that lets people make their own facebooks. The site now attracts 2,500 to 3,000 new networks a day.
8. MySpace: Make fun of the chaos, but MySpace is the only social network that has made serious progress with targeted marketing. MyAds generates a reported $140,000 to $180,000 in daily revenue, making it a $50 billion business in theory.
9. Yelp: With 4 million user-submitted reviews of everything from corner cafés to dog groomers, Yelp can make or break local businesses nationwide.
10. Kayak: Already operating in 11 markets including India and China, the travel search engine is aggressively expanding in Europe. The profitable site boosted revenue by 240% last year.

The iPhone Becomes a Web Server

When those Apple advertisements tout “there’s an app for just about anything,” they aren’t kidding. The latest example? A new iPhone application which just debuted in Japan’s App Store transforms the handheld into a full-blown web server. Called “ServersMan@iPhone”, the application allows your iPhone to appear just like any other web server on the internet.

The new application was developed by a Japanese operation called FreeBit, a Tokyo-based venture company known for providing its network platform to many VNO/ISPs (virtual network operator/Internet service providers).

Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit’s VPN software will engage the connection.

The name “ServersMan” is said to be inspired by Sony’s “WalkMan,” and its no coincidence that FreeBit has invited Sony’s former CEO Nobuyuki Idei to be a business advisor for the company.

At the moment, the ServersMan@iPhone is only available in the Japanese App Store, but an English version is coming in March. A port for Windows Mobile devices is also under development.

Beyond Latitude: 4 Innovative Location-Based Apps

Google’s new geo-aware mobile application Latitude which lets you share your location with friends may have received all the hype, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best or the most innovative app out there. We’ve recently come across some smaller, lesser-known services that could give Google a run for their money – that is, if anyone knew they existed.

Google’s Latitude was not the first location-based service on the market by any means. Here at RWW, we’ve been fans of other mobile social networking applications like Loopt and Brightkite as well as location-aware Twitter clients like Twinkle among others. So of course when we ran across some other smaller location-based services, we had to take a look. Each of the services listed below are doing something innovative that goes beyond Google’s current offering. We just wish more people knew about them.

Bliin

Bliin is a Dutch service that combines the location sharing of Google Latitude with the journey recording of Nokia’s viNe application (our coverage). With Bliin, you can explore the world around you, zooming in and out on the map while viewing geo-tagged photos, the last recorded locations of other Bliin users, and even the live movements of anyone sharing their journeys on the network. So why isn’t Bliin catching on? Blogger Martin Bryant theorizes it could be because the network doesn’t integrate with your address book the way viNe or Latitude does. It’s also a much smaller European company without the financial clout of either Google or Nokia.

Toaí

Toaí (Portuguese for “I’m Around”) is actually a new social network which, at first, appears to be just like any other: you sign up, create a profile, etc. However, Toaí also asks you for your mobile phone number which it uses to text you with music, art, and stores that are near where you are. The recommendations it sends are based on you and your friends’ favorites. It also lets you know when your Toaí friends are nearby. Toaí is a great example of how a social network can add in location-based features to take networking beyond the virtual world and into the “real” world. Unfortunately, there is no English-based version of Toaí yet.

Parallel Kingdom

Who cares what your friends are doing when there are dragons to slay, enemies to fight, and weapons to upgrade? The new RPG (role-playing game) Parallel Kingdom for Android and iPhone uses location-based networking to let you see other nearby players on a Google map. Also, when finding monsters to battle, you have to physically move to a new location to do so. The end result is a mashup of traditional gaming and geocaching. (U.S. Only)

Radar

Outside.in’s new iPhone application Radar (not to be confused with the photo-sharing iPhone app also called Radar) delivers location-based content including news, blog posts, and tweets to your iPhone. Once installed, the app will geo-locate you upon being launched to deliver the news within 1000 feet of where you are standing, from your neighborhood, or from the entire city. You can also load up Radar with profiles for various locales, including your home, office, and more. Shake the app to switch from the news listings to the map view. (U.S. only)

10 Semantic Apps to Watch

One of the highlights of October’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was the emergence of ‘Semantic Apps’ as a force. Note that we’re not necessarily talking about the Semantic Web, which is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Semantic Apps may use those technologies, but not necessarily. This was a point made by the founder of one of the Semantic Apps listed below, Danny Hillis of Freebase (who is as much a tech legend as Berners-Lee). The purpose of this post is to highlight 10 Semantic Apps. We’re not touting this as a ‘Top 10′, because there is no way to rank these apps at this point – many are still non-public apps, e.g. in private beta. It reflects the nascent status of this sector, even though people like Hillis and Spivack have been working on their apps for years now.

 

What is a Semantic App?

Firstly let’s define “Semantic App”. A key element is that the apps below all try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users. Another of the founders mentioned below, Nova Spivack of Twine, noted at the Summit that data portability and connectibility are keys to these new semantic apps – i.e. using the Web as platform.

In September Alex Iskold wrote a great primer on this topic, called Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web. In that post, Alex Iskold explained that there are two main approaches to Semantic Apps:

1) Bottom Up – involves embedding semantical annotations (meta-data) right into the data.
2) Top down – relies on analyzing existing information; the ultimate top-down solution would be a fully blown natural language processor, which is able to understand text like people do.

 

Now that we know what Semantic Apps are, let’s take a look at some of the current leading (or promising) products…

 

Freebase

 

Freebase aims to “open up the silos of data and the connections between them”, according to founder Danny Hillis at the Web 2.0 Summit. Freebase is a database that has all kinds of data in it and an API. Because it’s an open database, anyone can enter new data in Freebase. An example page in the Freebase db looks pretty similar to a Wikipedia page. When you enter new data, the app can make suggestions about content. The topics in Freebase are organized by type, and you can connect pages with links, semantic tagging. So in summary, Freebase is all about shared data and what you can do with it.

 

Powerset

Powerset (see our coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. The system relies on semantic technologies that have only become available in the last few years. It can make “semantic connections”, which helps make the semantic database. The idea is that meaning and knowledge gets extracted automatically from Powerset. The product isn’t yet public, but it has been riding a wave of publicity over 2007.

Twine

Twine claims to be the first mainstream Semantic Web app, although it is still in private beta. See our in-depth review. Twine automatically learns about you and your interests as you populate it with content – a “Semantic Graph”. When you put in new data, Twine picks out and tags certain content with semantic tags – e.g. the name of a person. An important point is that Twine creates new semantic and rich data. But it’s not all user-generated. They’ve also done machine learning against Wikipedia to ‘learn’ about new concepts. And they will eventually tie into services like Freebase. At the Web 2.0 Summit, founder Nova Spivack compared Twine to Google, saying it is a “bottom-up, user generated crawl of the Web”.

AdaptiveBlue

AdaptiveBlue are makers of the Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer. They also recently launched a new version of their SmartLinks product, which allows web site publishers to add semantically charged links to their site. SmartLinks are browser ‘in-page overlays’ (similar to popups) that add additional contextual information to certain types of links, including links to books, movies, music, stocks, and wine. AdaptiveBlue supports a large list of top web sites, automatically recognizing and augmenting links to those properties.

SmartLinks works by understanding specific types of information (in this case links) and wrapping them with additional data. SmartLinks takes unstructured information and turns it into structured information by understanding a basic item on the web and adding semantics to it.

[Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold is a regular RWW writer]

Hakia

Hakia is one of the more promising Alt Search Engines around, with a focus on natural language processing methods to try and deliver ‘meaningful’ search results. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Most other major search engines, including Google, analyze keywords. The company told us in a March interview that the future of search engines will go beyond keyword analysis – search engines will talk back to you and in effect become your search assistant. One point worth noting here is that, currently, Hakia has limited post-editing/human interaction for the editing of hakia Galleries, but the rest of the engine is 100% computer powered.

Hakia has two main technologies:

1) QDEX Infrastructure (which stands for Query Detection and Extraction) – this does the heavy lifting of analyzing search queries at a sentence level.

2) SemanticRank Algorithm – this is essentially the science they use, made up of ontological semantics that relate concepts to each other.

Talis

Talis is a 40-year old UK software company which has created a semantic web application platform. They are a bit different from the other 9 companies profiled here, as Talis has released a platform and not a single product. The Talis platform is kind of a mix between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, in that it enables developers to create apps that allow for sharing, remixing and re-using data. Talis believes that Open Data is a crucial component of the Web, yet there is also a need to license data in order to ensure its openness. Talis has developed its own content license, called the Talis Community License, and recently they funded some legal work around the Open Data Commons License.

According to Dr Paul Miller, Technology Evangelist at Talis, the company’s platform emphasizes “the importance of context, role, intention and attention in meaningfully tracking behaviour across the web.” To find out more about Talis, check out their regular podcasts – the most recent one features Kaila Colbin (an occassional AltSearchEngines correspondent) and Branton Kenton-Dau of VortexDNA.

UPDATE: Marshall Kirkpatrick published an interview with Dr Miller the day after this post. Check it out here.

TrueKnowledge

Venture funded UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge unveiled a demo of its private beta earlier this month. It reminded Marshall Kirkpatrick of the still-unlaunched Powerset, but it’s also reminiscent of the very real Ask.com “smart answers”. TrueKnowledge combines natural language analysis, an internal knowledge base and external databases to offer immediate answers to various questions. Instead of just pointing you to web pages where the search engine believes it can find your answer, it will offer you an explicit answer and explain the reasoning patch by which that answer was arrived at. There’s also an interesting looking API at the center of the product. “Direct answers to humans and machine questions” is the company’s tagline.

Founder William Tunstall-Pedoe said he’s been working on the software for the past 10 years, really putting time into it since coming into initial funding in early 2005.

TripIt

Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning. Emre Sokullu reviewed it when it presented at TechCrunch40 in September. With TripIt, you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest. Their patent pending “itinerator” technology is a baby step in the semantic web – it extracts useful infomation from these mails and makes a well structured and organized presentation of your travel plan. It pulls out information from Wikipedia for the places that you visit. It uses microformats – the iCal format, which is well integrated into GCalendar and other calendar software.

The company claimed at TC40 that “instead of dealing with 20 pages of planning, you just print out 3 pages and everything is done for you”. Their future plans include a recommendation engine which will tell you where to go and who to meet.

Clear Forest

ClearForest is one of the companies in the top-down camp. We profiled the product in December ‘06 and at that point ClearForest was applying its core natural language processing technology to facilitate next generation semantic applications. In April 2007 the company was acquired by Reuters. The company has both a Web Service and a Firefox extension that leverages an API to deliver the end-user application.

The Firefox extension is called Gnosis and it enables you to “identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing.” With one click from the menu, a webpage you view via Gnosis is filled with various types of annotations. For example it recognizes Companies, Countries, Industry Terms, Organizations, People, Products and Technologies. Each word that Gnosis recognizes, gets colored according to the category.

Also, ClearForest’s Semantic Web Service offers a SOAP interface for analyzing text, documents and web pages.

Spock

Spock is a people search engine that got a lot of buzz when it launched. Alex Iskold went so far as to call it “one of the best vertical semantic search engines built so far.” According to Alex there are four things that makes their approach special:

• The person-centric perspective of a query
• Rich set of attributes that characterize people (geography, birthday, occupation, etc.)
• Usage of tags as links or relationships between people
• Self-correcting mechanism via user feedback loop

As a vertical engine, Spock knows important attributes that people have: name, gender, age, occupation and location just to name a few. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Spock is its usage of tags – all frequent phrases that Spock extracts via its crawler become tags; and also users can add tags. So Spock leverages a combination of automated tags and people power for tagging.

Got a Business? Get a Prenup

If you don’t work out how to handle your assets ahead of time, a divorce could devastate your company.

By: Nina Kaufman | 01/02/2009

Business owners look forward to “prenups”–whether with a spouse or a business partner–with about as much eagerness as a rectal exam. Sure, it’s necessary, but it’s often unpleasant and something you’d rather skip. Some people do– avoiding the doctor for that reason.

But those exams can uncover serious health situations that, if left untreated, could wreak terrible damage. Same goes for not having a prenuptial agreement. If there’s a divorce and you haven’t worked out how to handle your assets, the damage inflicted on your company could be devastating.

What, Exactly, Is a “Prenup”?
Essentially, a prenuptial agreement (“prenup”) is a contract between prospective spouses that addresses how the financial aspects between them will be handled in the event of a divorce. All 50 states recognize prenuptial agreements. Some states honor “domestic partnership agreements” between unmarried people that cover similar issues. Your company will be among the most important financial assets you’ll want to address.

Why Should You Care?
The statistics aren’t encouraging: Almost half of all marriages end in divorce, and approximately 40 percent of marriages include a spouse who has been married before. This can make for complicated financial issues. Discussing this decidedly unromantic topic with your intended can feel like pouring a bucket of cold water over your wedding plans, or raise concerns about the level of trust or commitment between the partners. In the long run, to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger as a couple. Discussing the terms of a prenup can open up sound pathways for communication about family finances that will serve you well throughout your life together. And in the event of a divorce, it eliminates the time-consuming and costly bickering over assets and money.

Ownership of a business (or the increase in the company’s fortunes since the marriage) is considered an asset acquired during the marriage (“marital property”) unless there’s evidence to the contrary. As a result, absent a prenup, state laws will require that marital property be divided equally, or at least “equitably.” Depending on your state, your entrepreneurial dreams could be cut in half should you divorce.

How Does a Prenup Protect My Business?
Contested divorces rarely bring out the best in people. Some will be ruthless, just to spite the soon-to-be ex-spouse. It’s not unheard of for a spouse to fraudulently claim that he or she has a stake in the other spouse’s business, which could be hard to disprove if you’ve not kept appropriate records. A prenup offers protection against predatory challenges in the following ways:

• It can define your company as an asset acquired before marriage.
• It can provide for who controls the company post-divorce.
• It identifies who owns the stock in the company.
• It can set out a fair method for valuing the business or its stock at the time of divorce (which could refer back to the formula contained in the company’s ownership agreement).
• It can address all present and future property, assets and income, both during the marriage and in the event of divorce.

Like an ideal relationship, a successful prenup has the following qualities:

• It’s fair.
• There’s full disclosure of financial (and other) issues.
• The parties entered into it freely (e.g., you’re not forcing your intended to sign while you’re on your way down the aisle).

It’s also vital that each partner gets his or her own attorney. Yes, it costs money, but think of it as an insurance policy. Isn’t your business worth it? The best that can happen is that you’ll live in married harmony and never need to rely on it. The worst is that you’ll be living in married hell and won’t have a prenup to protect you.

Nina Kaufman has a New York City-based boutique law practice that focuses on women-owned businesses, and is the president of Wise Counsel Press LLC, which produces legal information products for entrepreneurs. She also writes the Making It Legal blog.

How Honda Used An Unlikely Partner to Conquer India

“It is more advantageous to conquer nearby enemies, because of geographical reasons, than those far away. So ally yourself temporarily with your distant enemies in spite of political differences.”

—From The Thirty-Six Stratagems

With the domestic car companies receiving a bailout from Washington, I thought it would be a good time to review a motor company that uses innovation to stay competitive and open up new business fronts – Honda.

Everyone likes to draw clear lines between supporters and competitors, but it is becoming difficult to do so. This stratagem shows that by selecting the right supporters and targeting the right competitors, one can play one off the other and become more powerful.

Honda Befriends a Bicycle Company

Looking from the sidewalk of any major western city into the street, you might assume that the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world must be Suzuki or Kawasaki. However, you would be wrong. The world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer is not BMW, Ducati, or even Harley-Davidson. Almost no one in the United States or Europe has heard of the world’s largest manufacturer of two-wheel vehicles, even though it produces more than 3 million bikes a year, including the world’s most popular motorcycle, the Splendor. The largest two-wheel motor vehicle manufacturer in the world is India’s Hero Honda. It owes its success to an unlikely pairing of two distant enemies: a motor company and a bicycle distributor.

Honda had been waiting for years to sell motorcycles in India because the country’s motorcycle business is extremely profitable. It produces just 15 percent of the company’s revenue yet generates 50 percent of the firm’s operating profit. India, with nearly one billion people, in which 70 percent of motor vehicles are two-wheelers, promised an extraordinary opportunity to expand this profitable business. However, Indian government protection forbade foreign firms from the market.

In the early 1980s, the rules changed. India’s domestic firms, which were enjoying a near-monopoly, could not meet demand. The Indian government responded by allowing foreign companies to enter India through minority joint ventures with local Indian companies. Honda finally had its chance.

To begin selling in India, Honda had to first choose a business partner. It had many well-suited partners to choose from as several domestic motor-scooter companies had established themselves under India’s protective laws. The logical choice would be a company with experience building motors, assembling motorcycles or scooters, and a network established to sell them. Honda could easily plug its brand and motor design expertise into such a partner.

However, one of the Indian companies that courted Honda was a family-owned bicycle firm called Hero. Founded by two brothers in the 1950s, Hero had built a network of independent bicycle dealers and had established one of India’s leading bicycle brands.

While Hero did not initially hit the top of Honda’s potential partner list, Honda was intrigued by two factors. First, Hero had already begun adopting “just in time” (JIT) inventory practices. Pioneered by Honda and other Japanese manufacturers, this practice of minimizing inventory by ensuring parts are only delivered at the time needed was beginning to revolutionize the designs of manufacturing floors throughout the developed world. Honda executives were surprised to see an Indian bicycle company embracing such an innovative practice so early. This signaled that Hero and Honda shared a culture of operating discipline.

Second, through forty years of selling bicycles, Hero had blanketed India with a large network of independent bicycle dealers. It had organized hundreds of suppliers who delivered just in time. By partnering with Hero, Honda could potentially convert bicycle dealers into motorcycle dealers and could source materials through Hero’s vast distributor network.

While Honda’s competition partnered primarily with Indian motor companies to create TVS Suzuki, Bajaj Kawasaki, and other joint ventures, Honda aligned with a bicycle company to create Hero Honda.

Hero Honda launched several innovations in the coming years that established its dominance. It was the first to introduce a four-stroke engine into India. This technology, for which Honda is famous, dramatically increases fuel efficiency and reduces maintenance costs, making Hero’s motorcycles attractive options for price-sensitive Indian riders.

While its competition preferred to run their own dealerships, Hero Honda used Hero’s experience managing independent dealers to establish a powerful network of 5,000 outlets. On the back end, Hero Honda coordinates over 300 suppliers who supply parts and materials just in time.

The innovative strategies needed to build a bicycle business proved an ideal complement to Honda’s motor design and manufacturing capabilities. Had the company partnered with a nearby or domestic enemy, it might have remained in a crowded pack of good motorcycle companies including Suzuki and Yamaha. Instead, by partnering with a distant enemy, Honda became outstanding. It helped create the largest motorcycle company in the world.

We increasingly find allies among competitors, and competitors among seemingly unrelated companies. This creates opportunities. We can look for—even create—“distant” enemies with whom to achieve common goals, such as attacking “nearby” enemies. By avoiding knee-jerk reactions to friend and foe, new opportunities emerge. Ask yourself these questions to see if you can find a new ally or a new enemy.

1. What market do we want to enter and who already seemingly “owns” that market?

2. Is there an out-of-state or overseas company that can complement our future endeavors?

3. Is there a local competitor that we can buy out or overtake?

4. Is there something our local competitor is doing that we can do better?