blog de jonathan

NewsCup presented to the MIT e-club this week. The audience has a diverse MIT affiliated group of entrepreneurs - engineers, scientists, and lawyers.

NewsCup will be integrating VerticaDB into its core systems. Vertica is one of the first ground up database initiatives in years. Scalable, fast, Linux ready, compatible with existing SQL concepts. NewsCup will have a true competitive advantage as it begins to change the landscape of personalized information management.

Features:

• easiest to use - not just for Web 2.0 enthusiasts
• highly innovative revenue model
• brand – easy to remember, own all the domain names for NewsCup, an easy to understand metaphor
• developer buy-in - friendly API and downloads of individual search index databases
• create the opportunity for a new applications and partners

• natural language processing
• multi language
• OpenID enabled
• global market - targeting european markets as well as US
• designed as embeddable and compact code
  

NewsCup was demoed in front of some 30 media folks.

More about WeMedia:
http://ifocos.org/we-media-miami-2008/past-conferences/

From the WeMedia blog:

"Newscup passively organizes bookmarks and searches (enables “search ownership”). It’s not for just web 2.0 enthusiasts.

A unique features allows user to highlight an entire text box and right click to “Newscup It” and save a list of searches based on that text.

Technology: Self Organizing Categories, SQLite, natural language processing (automates tasks), embeddable, multilingual"

Full articles:

NewsCup is just beginning a fundraising effort this week. Until now, only 8 people have seen the latest incarnation of NewsCups' technologies and interfaces. Tomorrow some of the key technologies will be demonstrated, include "SOCS", or Self Organizing Categories.

Represented will be the AP, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Powerset and other industry leaders, including Slashdot, Craigslist and more. See also Jonathan Hendler's first impressions of the WeMedia conference.

Other recent activity:

Change happens fast on the Internet, especially when you are tuned in. The webservice below is sample of what the next generation internet is about:

* natural language processing
* RDF meta data generation
* ubiquitous web services

"Calais: Connect. Everything"
See: http://opencalais.mashery.com/Overview

NewsCup is proud to part of this new generation, aligned with market forces and the future.

Like any start-up, we eye the future with hope for a fair shot to win. Our plans to make it on our own are tempered by the reality of the major players on the internet. NewsCup shares the concerns of Google and Yahoo! employees that the merger may change the innovation climate.

Delver.com brings social network intelligence to search. Based on your public profiles and what they can find out about you through apps like Facebook, they provide a prism for your search results.

A buddy of mine with quite a lot of start up experience recently answered a question I sent him in an email.

What's the startup environment like there? Do you notice people getting nervous about the economy?
From where I sit it looks like it's the start of a recession - not the best time for internet startups.

He mentioned:

1) The venture cycle is pretty long... funds are raised and invested for years. ...

NewsCup is releasing to the public it's software for scalability - NYMRL, which allows the building of scalable RPC over HTTP.

The C based library is simple and primitive, but provides significant performance improvements over using higher level languages for the same task, like Java, PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby.