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BigAdda, Fropper, Indyarocks, DesiMartini, Tagz.in are among that make it to the list
Thursday, May 14, 2009
NEW DELHI: Hot and happening Websites from BigAdda, Fropper, Indyarocks to smaller sites like Tagz.in have made it to Dataquest's list of the 25 Hot Indian Web 2.0 start-ups. The research is part of technology publisher CyberMedia's effort to highlight the fast maturing and growing segment of online business in India.
The list, prepared by Dataquest, with help of Indianweb2.com, that tracks Indian start-ups in the technology space in general and web 2.0 space in particular, is an interesting mix of social networking sites, tool makers, rating sites, and creators of close-knit online communities and collaborative mobile applications.
'India's 25 Hot Web 2.0 Start-ups' is the first such list created in India and is part of the May 15 issue of the 27-year-old magazine.
The final list was prepared by the Dataquest editors, from 54 companies that were shortlisted based on a set of parameters.
"India has the potential to significantly drive the direction in which Web 2.0 is moving. Micro-blogging and video streaming are the future of Web 2.0 along with 'niche' networking, be it on a friendship portal or around communities," says Shyamanuja Das, Editor, Dataquest, who led the project.
"A stronger revenue model and a shift from ad-based framework to an e-commerce based set-up is desirable," he added.
The Web 2.0 hit India only 3 to 4 years ago. The editors of Dataquest have identified a set of reasons for the late adoption of Web 2.0 in India. These include low Internet penetration, limited access devices, low adoption of web-cameras, recorders and high-end phones.
There are many things that have changed from the era of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. One significant change is that all the innovations in web 1.0 era were largely confined to the United States, while web 2.0 is a global phenomenon with India playing a very significant role, probably second only to the US.
Companies are trying innovative ways to woo the users. BigAdda, for example, has roped in Amitabh Bachchan to write his blog in it. Other companies are also creating differentiations based on their overall offering.
The list, in alphabetical order.
Apna Circle (www.apnacircle.com): A niche social networking site focused on careers
AuthorStream (www.authorstream.com): Focused on user-generated content. Users can share online presentations and slideshows
BharatStudent (www.bharatstudent.com): A networking platform addressing education and career related issues of students
BigAdda (www.bigadda.com): A broad-based social networking site on the lines of Facebook and Orkut, offering everything to everyone
Burrp TV (www.burrp.com): Focused on local information from TV channels to restaurants based on user generated content and user ratings
Commonfloor (www.commonfloor.com): An online community of housing societies and apartments owners and residents popular with several large builders
DesiMartini (www.desimartini.com): A broad-based social networking site for Indians across the globe, from the Hindustan Times Media
Fropper (www.fropper.com): India's most well-known dating site with abundant social networking features
Ibibo (www.ibibo.com): A platform to showcase talent and connect with people with similar interests
Indiamarks (www.indianmarks.com). A well-organized user-generated content site that allows users to build guides on anything about India
Indipepal (www.indipepal.com): A site with commentaries from thought leaders offering ways to interact with them
IndyaRocks (www.indyarocks.com): A social networking site focused on entertainment, especially of the Bollywood variety
Kreeo (www.kreeo.com): Development tools to use collective human intelligence to better search and online learning
Kwench (www.kwench.in): A collaboration-driven library initiative targeted at the employees of enterprises
Kwippy (www.kwippy.com): The Indian version of Twitter, it is all about sharing status and engaging in discussion
LifeBlob (www.lifeblob.com): Provides a virtual diary and timeline for the users
LordofOdds (www.lordofodds.com): A site where users can make predictions and engage in money-less betting
Metaaso Mermaid (www.metaaso.com): Large scale online video conferencing application
Minglebox (www.minglebox.com): A networking platform focused on education and careers
Parentree (www.parentree.in): An online community focused on parenting
Mobshare (www.mobshare.in): Allows users to share and access photos and videos via mobile phone
Tagz.in (www.tagz.in): A combination of social news combined with bookmarking, along the lines of delicious and reddit
Tell-A-Friend (tellafriend.socialtwist.com): Provides tools for website owners to share bookmarks
Uhooro (www.uhooro.com): A collaborative platform for music enthusiasts
Zahdoo (www.zahdoo.com): A utility that allows users to locate and engage with people with cognitive traits similar to their own
What is Web 2.0?
Tim O'Reilly, the tech Guru who popularized Web 2.0, describes it as the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better and get more people use them. It means collaboration, user participation, user-generated content.
Based on this definition, Dataquest defined a set of guiding rules and used them as filters before getting to subjective selection of the applications/companies.
The rules may seem a little restrictive but the editors have made attempts to define what the editors meant by Web 2.0, Indian and start-ups. Hot being the subjective part.
Methodology
The Dataquest editors began with a long list of 54 companies, headquartered in India, based on a set of parameters.
Companies with collaboration or Web 2.0 attributes core to their business model were considered. (For example, the photo printing sites such as itasveer, picsquare and zoomin, that have collaborative functions but their core business model is traditional printing services, were excluded.)
Companies that began operations on or after January 1, 2007 were considered.
Start-ups that qualified the above parameters were considered even if their parent companies were established companies, such as Reliance ADAG in case of BigAdda or HT Media in case of DesiMartini.
Then Dataquest editors and Indianweb2.com technologists applied more subjective parameters like reach, impact, innovativeness of offering etc. to create the final list.
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http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4530503.cms
Last few years have seen a big rise in India-centric Web 2.0 sites. From social networks to rating and reviewing to mobile applications to online libraries, these home-bred sites offer all this and much more.
Technology magazine Dataquest, along with Indianweb2.com, which tracks Indian start-ups in the technology space, has released a list of top Internet start-ups. The final 25 entities were picked from among 54 companies that were shortlisted based on a set of parameters. The short-listed companies were also judged on more subjective parameters like reach, impact, and innovativeness of offering to make it to the final list.
Here is a list of top 20 of these websites (in alphabetical order).
Apna Circle 
| AuthorStream 
| |||||
BharatStudent 
| BigAdda 
| |||||
Burrp 
| CommonFloor 
| |||||
DesiMartini 
| Fropper 
| |||||
ibibo 
| Indiamarks 
| |||||
Indipepal 
| IndyaRocks 
| |||||
Kreeo 
| Kwench 
| |||||
Kwippy 
| LifeBlob 
| |||||
Metaaso Mermaid 
| Minglebox 
| |||||
Parentree 
| Mobshare 
| |||||
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/05/01/dancing.parrots/index.html
Alex, an African grey parrot, was one of 14 birds which displayed an ability to keep time with a tune.
YouTube video
Talented Dancing Cockatoo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV6Ty-hrti4
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/05/05/obama_biden_go_out_for_burgers.html
President Obama and Vice President Biden look at the menu while standing in line to order lunch at Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
YouTube video
President Obama & V.P. Biden Go Out For A Burger [Ray's Hell Burger]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84YUhrafQTg
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/science/space/16hubble.html?ref=science
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Thousands evacuate as curfew eased in Swat
Hundreds of vehicles were seen crossing the Shaguna Naka checkpoint at the exit of the conflict zone. — AP
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Refugee crisis in Sri Lanka
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/05/090507_sri_lanka_wt_sl.shtml
Obituary: Velupillai Prabhakaran
Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran is dead, the Sri Lankan military says.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7885473.stm
 Tens of thousands of civilian are believed to be trapped in Sri Lanka’s war zone. |  Sri Lanka war is over-LTTE leader Prabhakaran is killed |
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http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/theDailyArticle/56436.html
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshowpics/4537366.cms
 Doutzen Kroes and Aishwarya Rai at Cannes Film Festival© AFP |  Bollywod actor Hrithik Roshan (left) and Uruguayan actress Barbara Mori at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. (AFP Photo) |
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=atmfAp9JUvz4&refer=home
By Lukanyo Mnyanda
May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Britain may lose its AAA credit rating for the first time as government finances deteriorate in the worst recession since World War II.
Standard & Poor’s lowered its outlook on Britain to “negative” from “stable” and said the nation faces a one in three chance of a ratings cut as debt approaches 100 percent of gross domestic product. The pound fell the most in four weeks against the dollar, the FTSE 100 Index slid as much as 2.8 percent and the cost of insuring U.K. debt against default rose.
Britain needs to sell a record 220 billion pounds ($344 billion) of bonds in the fiscal year through March 2010 as the economy contracts and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling predicts that the budget deficit will reach 175 billion pounds, or 12.4 percent of GDP. The U.K.’s worsening finances parallel the public perception of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose Labour government has trailed the Conservative opposition for more than a year in polls.
“Somebody will have to tackle the finances in the U.K., which has not been done at present,” said David Scammell, a money manager at Schroder Investment Management Ltd. in London, where he helps oversee $158 billion in assets. “The budget that we have is just unacceptable. You need a political will to deal with this enormous problem.”
Gilts Drop
Gilts fell, pushing the yield on the 4.5 percent note due March 2019 up as much as 13 basis points to 3.71 percent, before rebounding to 3.63 percent at 1:58 p.m. in London after the U.K. successfully sold a record 5 billion pounds of five-year notes. The budget deficit increased to 8.5 billion pounds last month, the most for April since records began in 1993, the Office for National Statistics said in London today.
Britain would become the fifth western European Union nation to lose its rating because of the economic slump, following Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. The U.K.’s debt load next year will be 66.9 percent of GDP, exceeding Canada’s 29.1 percent and Germany’s 58.1 percent, according to April 22 forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. will be at 70.4 percent, and the 16-nation euro area at 68 percent, with France at 70.6 percent, according to the IMF.
“The key from a market perspective is whether this is a stand-alone U.K. problem or whether it is the start of a trend where the agencies start to review the ratings of various sovereigns across the developed world,” said Gary Jenkins, head of credit research at Evolution Securities Ltd. in London. “If this is really just a case of the U.K. deteriorating as a credit then it could have a significant impact going forward.”
Unemployment Jumps
Brown’s efforts to patch up the nation’s finances are being hobbled by an economy mired in its first recession since 1991. Unemployment surged to 2.2 million in March, the highest since 1996, and tax income has dropped 10 percent in the past year. The IMF expects gross domestic product to contract 4.1 percent this year, the most since World War II.
British Land Co., the largest office developer in London, reported a record annual loss of 3.9 billion pounds today as property values slumped across the nation’s capital.
There are no U.K. companies with AAA ratings by S&P or Moody’s Investors Service. British Land is rated BBB by Fitch Ratings, its second-lowest investment-grade ranking.
The difference in yield, or spread, between U.K. 10-year bonds and equivalent German securities widened 14 basis points to 29 basis points, the most since May 7. As recently as March 19, gilts yielded less than bunds.
Stocks, Pound Slide
The FTSE index declined the most since March 30. The pound dropped 0.6 percent to $1.5667 and weakened 0.3 percent against the euro to 87.74 pence. Credit-default swaps on U.K. debt rose 6.5 basis points to 79, according to CMA DataVision prices.
European governments are increasing borrowing to bolster ailing economies and bail out banks reeling amid the fallout from the global credit crisis. Ireland had its AAA credit rating removed by S&P on March 30. S&P lowered the ratings of Spain, Portugal and Greece in January.
“We have revised the outlook on the U.K. to negative due to our view that, even assuming additional fiscal tightening, the net general government debt burden could approach 100 percent of gross domestic product and remain near that level in the medium term,” S&P analysts led by David Beers in London, said in the report today.
The British economy, the second largest in Europe, shrank 1.9 percent in the first quarter, the biggest contraction since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, the Office for National Statistics said on April 24. Darling said in his budget the economy will slump about 3.5 percent this year, before expanding in 2010.
Government Support Slumps
Brown needs to increase borrowing to pay for rescuing banks that have reported $121 billion in credit-related losses and writedowns since the start of 2007. The government pledged 40 billion pounds to bail out lenders and hundreds of billions of pounds in loan guarantees.
Labour trailed the Conservatives by as much as 22 points this month, according to a BPIX Ltd. survey completed on May 16. Conservatives had the support of 42 percent of voters, compared with 20 percent for Labour, according to the poll, which didn’t provide a margin of error.
Support for Brown is tumbling in the run-up to European elections on June 4 as a scandal about lawmakers’ expenses engulfs British politicians. House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin resigned two days ago, the first time that has happened since 1695.
Bank of England
The government gave the Bank of England authority to purchase as much as 150 billion pounds of assets with newly printed money in an attempt to lower borrowing costs.
Britain’s “balance sheet is deteriorating rapidly,” Moody’s analysts led by Arnaud Mares in London wrote in a report on April 23. “The government is taking risks with public finances.”
Moody’s and Fitch affirmed the U.K. “stable” outlook today. Moody’s has no plans to review the outlook, Mares said in a statement.
Some reports indicated the economic slump may be easing. Nationwide Building Society said April 30 house prices fell less than forecast in the month, after posting a surprise increase in March. Consumer confidence climbed to the highest level in a year during April, GfK NOP said in a report the same day.
To contact the reporters on this story: Lukanyo Mnyanda in London at lmnyanda@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: May 21, 2009 10:20 EDT
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Writers can sell their work via Scribd, encrypted against piracy.
By BRAD STONE
Published: May 17, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Turning itself into a kind of electronic vanity publisher, Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it.
The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.
In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.
Authors can choose to publish their documents in unprotected PDFs, which would make them readable on the Amazon Kindle and most other mobile devices. Scribd also says it is readying an application for the iPhone from Apple and will introduce it next month.
Scribd hopes its more open and flexible system will give it a leg up on Amazon, which has become the largest player in the burgeoning market for e-books. Amazon sets the retail price for books in its Kindle store and keeps the majority of the revenue on some titles, which has publishers worried that Amazon is amassing too much control over the nascent market. Amazon also allows those books to be read only on its Kindle devices and in Kindle software on the iPhone.
“One reason publishers are excited to work with us is that they worry that publishing channels are contracting as Amazon and Google are gaining control over the e-book space,” said Jared Friedman, chief technology officer and a founder of Scribd.
But Scribd also has some hurdles to overcome itself. Though large publishing firms like Random House have experimented with the site, they also express frustration that copies of some works have been uploaded to Scribd without permission.
Trying to address the piracy problem, Scribd is building a database of copyrighted works and using it to filter its system. If a publisher participates in the Scribd store, its books will be added to that database, the company said.
So far, no major publishing houses have signed on to the store, though the company says it is talking to them. The independent publishers Lonely Planet, O’Reilly Media and Berrett-Koehler will add their entire catalogs.
The Scribd store will also give unpublished authors, or authors who are in a hurry, a well-trafficked Web forum on which to post their books, charge for them and see immediate results.
Kemble Scott, who has released a novel through a conventional publisher, said he would post his topical new political comedy, “The Sower,” to Scribd and charge $2 for it, partly because standard publishing is so slow. “If this is a book that is going to be interesting to people, now is the time that it fits into the national mood,” he said.
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http://www.crn.com/software/217600576;jsessionid=S1P4N4MKPQNS0QSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN
The Channel Wire
May 22, 2009
Google said on Thursday that its Chrome Web browser is now a whole lot faster -- that is, loading JavaScript Web pages through its V8 JavaScript engine happens 30 percent faster than before. Google confirmed as much in posts to the Official Google Blog and the Google Chrome Blog.
"It's been about eight months since we launched Google Chrome," wrote Darin Fisher from the Google Chrome Team. "Aside from exclaiming how fast it is, users have been sending us lots of feedback and and feature requests. We've increased our focus on speed and also added some of the most-requested features."
According to Fisher's post, the updates will be automatically downloaded to Chrome. He also mentioned a number of other changes to Chrome, including what according to Google is the most requested new feature: the ability to remove thumbnail from Chrome's New Tab page. Before, the images would display a user's most visited Web sites.
Google Chrome also now has a full-screen mode for watching presentations and videos, and includes a form autofill function common to most browsers. Fisher also touted increased stability -- including a fix for more than 300 bugs in Chrome -- and increased speed as areas Google Chrome developers would continue to focus on.
Google has had a hard time gaining traction for its Chrome browser and has taken to unusual advertising means, including the airing of a TV ad earlier this month depicting building blocks coming together to form a browser window.
It's too early to tell how effective the TV ads were, but we're guessing better speeds and sleeker performance are going to be what endears Google Chrome to browsers, not its TV presence. It's also going to need the best features if it's going to be a viable competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. If autofill's all you've got, Google, you're still back of the line.
Posted by Chad Berndtson at 8:30 AM
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8021012.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7044606.stm
Optical disc offers 500GB storage
 Optical discs have been a leading storage solution for decades |
A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric.
The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry.
But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players.
Blu-ray discs, which are used to store high definition movies and games, can currently hold between 25GB and 50GB.
Micro-holographic discs can store more data than DVDs or Blu-ray because they store information on the disc in three dimensions, rather than just pits on the surface of the disc
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A single GE disc could be used to package up a library of high definition movies but is there pent-up consumer demand for such an offering? 
The challenge for this area of technology has been to increase the reflectivity of the holograms that are stored on the discs so that players can be used to both read and write to the discs.
Brian Lawrence, who leads GE's Holographic Storage said on the GE Research blog: "Very recently, the team at GE has made dramatic improvements in the materials enabling significant increases in the amount of light that can be reflected by the holograms."
More capacity
The higher reflectivity that can be achieved, the more capacity for the disc. While the technology is still in the laboratory stage, GE believes it will take off because players can be built which are backwards compatible with existing DVD and Blu-ray technologies.
In a statement the firm said: "The hardware and formats are so similar to current optical storage technology that the micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs."
''GE's breakthrough is a huge step toward bringing our next generation holographic storage technology to the everyday consumer,'' said Mr. Lawrence in a statement.
He added: "The day when you can store your entire high definition movie collection on one disc and support high resolution formats like 3D television is closer than you think.''
Micro-holographic technology has been one of the leading areas of research for storage experts for decades. Discs are seen as a reliable and effective form of storage and are both consumer and retail friendly.
However, General Electric will need to work with hardware manufacturers if it is to bring the technology to the consumer market.
The relatively modest adoption of Blu-ray discs sales globally might be an issue with some companies who believe digital distribution and cloud computing is the long-term answer to content delivery and storage.
"This is truly a breakthrough in the development of the materials that are so critical to ultimately bringing holographic storage to the everyday consumer," said Mr. Lawrence.
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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/silverman/6430384.html
By DWIGHT SILVERMAN Copyright 2009 HOUSTON CHRONICLE
May 19, 2009, 8:08AM
In my last two columns, I’ve written about two aspects of Windows 7: Upgrading the new Release Candidate and the software’s ability to run Windows XP virtually on some systems.
Now it’s time to get down to what you really want to know: How good is Windows 7 at this point in its development, and should you get it when it finally comes out, probably this fall?
To answer the first question: Yeah, this latest test release is good. Really good. In fact, it’s good enough that, were Microsoft to call this the finished version and release it formally, it would be a much better product than Windows Vista was when it launched in early 2007.
I’ve been using the beta of Windows 7 since early January, and the Release Candidate since it came out on May 5. I’ve installed it on a variety of systems, ranging from an HP netbook to an Alienware gaming notebook to a powerful desktop system I built myself. I’ve also installed it in several virtual machines on an Apple iMac and a MacBook. In all these cases, problems have been minimal or nonexistent, and Windows 7’s performance has been snappy.
Useful refinements
In my review in January of the Windows 7 beta (see www.chron.com/w7betareview), I detailed the primary changes in Windows 7. The RC mostly refines those. There are only a few truly new features in it, such as Windows XP Mode, which I detailed in last week’s column.
But the refinements are useful. For example, the revamped taskbar and desktop in Windows 7 help make sense of clutter if you have a lot of programs open. If your PC supports Aero — the translucent look first introduced in Windows Vista — then moving your cursor to the lower right corner of the screen turns all the open windows into wire frames, so you can see the desktop below them.
In the beta review, I talked about moving your cursor over taskbar buttons to see dynamic thumbnails of running programs, and even multiple tabs in Internet Explorer. But then hover your cursor over a thumbnail, a full-sized version of the window appears on the desktop, and any other windows become wire frames. If you have a lot of programs running on a notebook computer with a small screen, this feature is a godsend.
Microsoft also has refined the feature that makes it much easier to manage other devices connected to your computer. In the beta, this was called Device Stage but has been renamed simply Devices and Printers. It provides more information about mice, keyboards, printers, monitors, scanners and other peripherals. It’s also where you’ll designate a default printer, download drivers for your components and even access your home network’s router. It’s designed to replace the Device Manager, but purists needn’t worry: The Device Manager is still there.
Network access
Microsoft also has added a feature that lets you stream music and movies easily from one Windows 7 PC to another, as well as to other devices that support it. And get this: It will also allow you to connect to your home PC and stream media files over the Net.
It does this in conjunction with another new feature called Homegroups. When you set up a Windows 7 PC, you’re asked to create a Homegroup, which lets you easily designate what to share with others on your home network. If you have a portable that’s part of your Homegroup, you can then take it to, say, your favorite Wi-Fi coffee shop and connect over the Net to your network. The notebook will be recognized as part of the Homegroup, and you’ll have access to your media.
Overall, Windows 7 is much more polished and, frankly, much less annoying than Windows Vista. If you’re a Vista user who’s at all peeved at your operating system, you’ll want to upgrade posthaste when it comes out. If you’re a Windows XP user who’s happy with the status quo, you’ll at least want to investigate Windows 7. If the quality of the final build is indicated by the Release Candidate, Windows 7 is the improvement over Windows XP that Vista should have been.
dwight.silverman@chron.com http://blogs.chron.com/techblog
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/12/future.search.engine/index.html?iref=t2test_techtues
Updated 8:45 a.m. EDT, Tue May 12, 2009
By John D. Sutter CNN
(CNN) -- We may be coming upon a new era for the Internet search.
Google dominates the search world, but some sites are trying to expand the possibilities.
And, despite what you may think, Google is not the only player.
New search engines that are popping up across the Web strive to make searches faster, smarter, more personal and more visually interesting.
Some sites, like Twine and hakia, will try to personalize searches, separating out results you would find interesting, based on your Web use. Others, like Searchme, offer iTunes-like interfaces that let users shuffle through photos and images instead of the standard list of hyperlinks. Kosmix bundles information by type -- from Twitter, from Facebook, from blogs, from the government -- to make it easier to consume.
Wolfram Alpha, set to launch Monday, is more of an enormous calculator than a search: It crunches data to come up with query answers that may not exist online until you search for them. And sites like Twitter are trying to capitalize on the warp-speed pace of online news today by offering real-time searches of online chatter -- something Google's computers have yet to replicate.
Google, of course, remains the search king. Recent efforts to revolutionize Web searching have failed to unseat the dominant California company, which captures nearly 64 percent of U.S. online searches, according to comScore. Tech start-ups like Cuil, which billed itself as more powerful than Google, and Wikia, which relied on a community to rank search results rather than a math formula, have largely faded away after some initial buzz. 
"The general trend has been relatively clear and consistent for the past five years: Google is growing its market share at the expense of every other engine," said Graham Mudd, vice president for search and social media at comScore, a company that tracks industry trends.
The new class of search engines and data calculators enters the fray with those failures in mind, though. Instead of trying to be Google killers, these sites have more humble aspirations: to be alternatives to the industry giants.
Real-time searches offer the most promise, Mudd said.
If you search Google news, the results will be recent, but not live. That's where Twitter's search comes in. It searches the site's micro-blog posts by the second, allowing users to see what's buzzing on the Web at any instant.
Facebook and FriendFeed also are experimenting with real-time searches, according to news reports. But each of these searches operates only within its own social network. Scoopler is another real-time site that's trying to aggregate info from all of these sites.
And all of these are seeing more competition, as two new sites -- TweetMeme and OneRiot -- launched new or updated real-time searches on Tuesday.
Nova Spivack, a technology developer who writes about search engines, said sites that forecast trendy topics will become more prominent. Knowing what will be trendy tomorrow is becoming valuable to more people, he said. Search trend predictions will be valuable to people interested in news in much the same way as stock forecasts are valuable to financial industry workers.
"The topography of the Web is shifting much faster. Instead of happening kind of glacially, you're on the beach right where the water is coming in and it's constantly changing the way the sand is laid out," he said.
Other search sites are just trying to get smarter, with some acting as giant data crunchers.
The much-talked about Wolfram Alpha, or Alpha for short, harnesses massive computing power to answer users' questions, even if they're never been answered on the Web before. 
"It's not a new Google. It's not supposed to be. It's a new thing. It's very complementary, in a way, to what search engines do," said Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, which created Alpha.
People need to get away from the idea that every 3-inch-long search bar online acts just like Google and Yahoo!, he said.
If you ask Google a question, the search engine's computers scan the Web for matching search terms and come up with answers that make the most sense statistically. Alpha, by contrast, pulls information from existing data sets that have been approved by the site's math-minded staff. The site then computes an answer to your question.
An example will help this make sense.
Say you wanted to find out nutritional information for your favorite recipe. On Google, you would have to search each ingredient individually and then add the calories and fat grams together yourself. With Alpha, you can type in the full recipe and the site produces a completed graphic that looks like it came right off the side of a cereal box. Read about a CNN test of 'Alpha'
Some search sites are trying to get better at understanding what their users want.
Twine, a social site created by Spivack, soon will start incorporating information about its users into a search function, he said. Some of the information comes through a user's search history. The site also will ask users to rank search results by their relevance to your interests.
"Right now, one of the problems with search is that it's really one-size-fits-all. It's not very personalized," Spivack said. "The fact is when I'm searching for certain kinds of things, the way that the results should be ranked might quite be different than if someone with a very different background or interests was searching for those same things."
So if you're someone who is into heavy science, a search about evolution might yield more academic papers. If you're a person whose Web interests lean more toward pop culture, an evolution search might turn up photos and more basic information.
Helping computers understand the information that's online is the next step in making searches more personal, Spivack said.
It's unclear which companies, if any, will be able to accomplish this, but Google appears to be working on that problem as well as others.
At an event on Tuesday, Google announced a new "show options" feature as part of its search. Users can use the function to see new ways search results are linked, such as through timelines or a "Wonder Wheel," which displays visual relationships between search terms.
And in a staff letter published last week on Google's blog, company co-founder Sergey Brin wrote about making searches more intelligent.
"Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant," he wrote. "However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that 'understands' more of the queries and documents than we do today.
"Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google's systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be."
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/18/death.online/index.html?iref=t2test_techmon
Updated 2:50 p.m. EDT, Mon May 18, 2009
By Mallory Simon CNN
(CNN) -- Your husband, an avid gamer and techie, dies of a heart attack, leaving his vast online life -- one you don't know much about -- in limbo.
Eternal Space lets loved ones create customized online gravesites and memorial pages.
His accounts, to which you don't know the passwords, go idle. His e-mails go unanswered, his online multiplayer games go on without him and bidders on his eBay items don't know why they can't get an answer from the seller.
Web site domains that he has purchased, some of which are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, will expire, and you may never know.
It's a scenario that's becoming more likely as we spend more of our lives online. And it's raising more questions about what happens to our online lives after we log off for the final time.
The answer, until recently, was nothing.
But now, as online usage increases and social-media sites soar in popularity, more companies are popping up to try and fill that void created in your digital life after death.
Jeremy Toeman, founder of the site Legacy Locker, recognized that when he was on a plane and wondered what would happen to his online life if it crashed. While his will leaves everything to his wife, including all of his digital assets, Toeman realized how difficult it would be for her to access his accounts.
"My GoDaddy account would belong to her, but it doesn't solve the practical reality of how she would get access to it," he said. He experienced a similar scenario after his grandmother died, and he tried to get the password for her e-mail account -- only to give up because of the hassle.
So Toeman built his company to change all that. Legacy Locker allows users to set up a kind of online will, with beneficiaries that would receive the customer's account information and passwords after they die.
"We know it's a hard thing to think about -- to get people to face mortality. We know it's kind of morbid, but for those who live their entire lives online, it's also very real."
A Legacy Locker account costs $29.99 a year. Users can set up their accounts at www.legacylocker.com to specify who gets access to their posthumous online information, along with "legacy letters," or messages, that can be sent to loved ones.
If someone contacts Legacy Locker to report a client's death, the service will send the customer four e-mails in 48 hours. If there's no response, Legacy Locker will then contact the people the client listed as verifiers in the event of his or her death. Even then, the service would not release digital assets without examining a copy of the customer's death certificate, Toeman said.
Eddie Lopez is the kind of tech-savvy guy for which a service such as Legacy Locker was made. The St. Paul, Minnesota, man has three online banking accounts, a PayPal account, domain names, Web-hosting accounts, multiple e-mail addresses and many social-networking accounts.
"I do think this is something people should be really considering these days," Lopez told CNN when asked about services such as Legacy Locker. He wants to hire a service to handle his digital assets but is concerned about privacy.
"Although I'm glad there's people breaking ground in this area, I don't think I would jump at the first opportunity to sign up," Lopez said. "My concerns are turning over such an exhaustive list of user names and passwords to a single business. That's one-stop shopping for any hacker to get access to just about every detail of my life."
Lopez would prefer to entrust half of his digital-security information to a service such as Legacy Locker and the other half to family members, so that each side's information would be useless without the other's.
"I hope Legacy Locker and similar services can address these privacy-security concerns with some real-world solutions," he said. "I just don't feel comfortable turning over my digital life -- built over 15 years -- to a kind promise."
Legacy Locker isn't the only new company helping techies plan for death in the digital age.
AssetLock (formerly YouDeparted.com) offers a "secure safe deposit box" for digital copies of documents, wishes, letters and e-mails. Deathswitch and Slightly Morbid also offer similar services in a variety of prices and packages, depending on how many accounts are involved.
Not all of these services deal with online assets. There's also a growing trend towards giving all aspects of death -- the grieving process, the funeral, the memorial and even the grave site -- a digital makeover.
FindaGrave.com claims to have cemetery records for 32 million people in its searchable database, while EternalSpace.com offers a new spin on the traditional grave site by offering virtual memorial pages full of videos, pictures and tributes.
On Eternal Space, loved ones can choose from different headstones and bucolic landscape backgrounds -- the mountain lake is a popular option -- to create a customized online grave site. Loved ones can add "tribute gifts" such as roses, candles, stuffed animals and other items, while mourners can access photos and videos in a "Memory Book" and leave remembrances of their own.
Jay Goss, president of Eternal Space president, is trying to bring the funeral experience to anyone who can access the Web. In that way, he hopes to provide a gathering place, and a voice, for mourners who may not be able to attend the real-life memorial service.
"It'd be the equivalent of a funeral where everyone can attend and everyone can spend 30 minutes behind the podium," Goss said. "It gives everyone a chance to put a 360-degree wrapper on the life the person lived and celebrate that life from how every person knew them."
Eternal Space's virtual memorial sites are currently only being offered through select funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoriums. Goss' hope is that the site will help allow the deceased's memory to be "eternally" passed on.
"All of these stories and videos are being left, in essence, to this Eternal Space Web site so that everyone can share, not just that day, not the days after, but the weeks after and years after," he said.
Some funeral-industry professionals believe these online memorials and virtual grave sites provide a valuable service.
"Assuming the site is handled with respect, virtual memorials respond to a basic human need to remember our deceased family, friends and colleagues," said Robert M. Fells, general counsel for the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association.
"Based on our members' feedback, I'd have to say that virtual memorial sites are gaining popularity with the public as a very practical alternative to being present at the grave site," he added. "There's nothing 'weird' about them as far as we have seen."
"There are funeral homes out there that will help families create virtual memorials, but ... we've also seen Facebook and MySpace profiles of deceased persons being turned into memorials," agreed Jessica Koth, spokesperson for the National Funeral Directors Association. "Consumers have become increasingly comfortable with expressing their grief online."
"While not a replacement for a funeral, online memorialization can help people work through their grief after the funeral," she added. "We've all become accustomed to communicating and expressing ourselves electronically -- via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter. Expressing one's grief online is an outgrowth of what's happening in other areas of our lives."
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