Visit Ambiently, originally added to eHub on Apr 07, 09.
Thanks to Ambiently founder and CEO Gordon Wu for this email interview.
eHub: What is your web application/service about?
Ambiently: Ambiently is a web discovery engine. To use it, you only need to put a bookmarklet onto your browser. Then, any time you view a webpage and want related information, just click the bookmarklet to see an “ambient page” that lists “ambient links” of relevant web content.
While a search engine requires you to supply search queries, a discovery engine needs only one click to indicate which webpage you are viewing. This way, the webpage tells Ambiently what you want and it will find the information for you.
eHub: Why did you start this project?
Ambiently:The web is too fragmented. There always exists webpages about anything you can think of, but mostly they are not hyperlinked together. Today, search is the only means to find them.
The situation will be totally different if we link semantically related webpages together. Imagine that related webpages can be seen instantly, from any webpage you are viewing.
eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth? Do you have a day job?
Ambiently:Our team works on this project around the clock, because our team spreads in two continents: North America and Asia.
eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds? (If you’re solo, what is your background?) Please include the full names and roles of team members.
Ambiently:Our core team has six people. Gordon Wu is the founder. Marcel Poisot leads the development team. Oliver Ding directs design and social networking.
We also have two top-notch advisors: Guy Kawasaki is someone your readers know. Walter Barry is an entrepreneur with a lot of experience.
eHub: What is your design philosophy?
Ambiently:KISS (Keep it simple stupid). Today users have many websites to keep an eye on and many web tools to choose. A good tool must be very simple so that it gives users true usage value while not occupying too much of users’ precious online time.
eHub: What technologies are you currently using?
Ambiently:The technology behind our service is automated webpage semantic clustering. We also have an expert system-like database to provide specific rules to the algorithms, based on a webpage’s content and structure. Our site is built with Ruby on Rails.
eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?
Ambiently:At this moment the tool has only one feature: clicking the bookmarklet to see related web links.
eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?
Ambiently:We saw users coming from more than 100 countries. For reasons unknown to us, Europeans are particularly active in using Ambiently. They blogged about it and figured out novel ways of using the tool.
eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?
Ambiently:Within 6 months, Ambiently will be able to help users organize webpages and find information organized by others. We let users weave a new net connecting related webpages together.
Then in 2 years, this connecting net probably will cover a pretty big portion of the web such that it becomes a helper for our daily information needs.
eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?
Ambiently:To let more users know about our tool. Social media like Twitter and Facebook are our best friends to spread the words.
eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?
Ambiently:We are working on a set of new functions that facilitates user participation in connecting related web content. When that is in place, the web will be “re-woven” by both humans and machines, semantically. This will be available to our users soon.
eHub: Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?
Ambiently:Advertising and partnership with vendors.
eHub: How much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?
Ambiently:Our site is very young. We need to let more users come to our site and try our tool.
eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?
Ambiently:We have a “Jump” button next to every web link, letting you directly go to that web link’s ambient page. Users told us that this button is often doing a better job than the “Similar Pages” link on Google’s search results page.
eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?
Ambiently:Right now the web is still like the 19th century countryside, with very few roads linking villages. We should have a counterpart of the highway system: a semantic web connection system.
eHub: What site(s) do you visit or have in your RSS reader other than your own?
Ambiently:AllTop, ReadWriteWeb, SearchEngineJournal, eHub, and many blog RSS in my Google Reader.
eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?
Ambiently:I often jump out of the bed after midnight to monitor the site traffic in Asia and Europe, when it is daytime over there.
Thanks again to Ambiently‘s Gordon Wu for this email interview.
Visit Ambiently
Originally added to eHub on Apr 07, 09
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